THE RELATION OF SOUL AND BODY.
§ 1. THE MODERN GREEK VAMPIRE.
The division of the human entity into the two parts which we call
soul and body has been so universally recognised even among the most
primitive of mankind that the idea of it must have been first suggested
by the observation of some universal phenomenon--most probably the
phenomenon of unconsciousness whether in sleep, in fainting, in
trance, or in death. If it had been man’s lot to pass in this world a
life of activity unbroken by sleep or exhaustion, and thereafter to
be translated like Enoch or Ganymede to another world, so that the
spectacle of a body lying inert and senseless could never have been
forced upon men’s sight, the first impulse to speculation concerning
that impalpable something, the loss of which severs men from converse
with the waking, active world, might never have been given, and the
duality of human nature might never have been conceived. But death
above all overtaking each in turn has forced in turn the mourners for
each to muse on the future condition of these two elements which,
united, make a man, and, disjoined, leave but a corpse. Does neither or
does one or do both of them continue? And, continuing, what degree of
intelligence and of power has either or have both? Are they for ever
separated, or will they be re-united elsewhere? Such are the questions
that must have vexed, as they still vex, the minds of many when their
eyes were confronted by the spectacle of death.
For some indeed a means of answering or of quieting such searchings of
heart has been found in the acceptance of religious dogma. But ancient
Greek religion, the faith or superstition in which the Hellenic people,
defiant alike of destructive and of constructive philosophy, lived
and moved and had their being, was not dogmatic; the very priests
were guardians and exponents of ceremonies rather than preachers of
doctrine; there was no organised hierarchy committed to one set creed
and prepared to assert the divine revelation of a single formulated
answer to these questions. The sum total of orthodoxy amounted to
little more than a belief in gods; and each man was free to believe
what he would, evil as well as good, concerning them, and to find for
himself hope or despair. In determining therefore the views to which
the mass of the common-folk inclined with regard to the relations of
soul and body, little assistance can be obtained in the first instance
from those personal opinions which literature has preserved to us,
opinions emanating from poets and philosophers who were not of the
people but consciously above them, and who set themselves some to
expose, others to reform, the popular religion, but few simply to
maintain it. The conservative force of the ancient religion lay in
the inherited and almost instinctive beliefs of the common-folk; oral
tradition weighed more with them than philosophic reasoning, and their
tenacity of customs as barbarous even as human sacrifice defied the
softening influences of an humaner civilisation.
That these characteristics of the ancient Greek folk are stamped
equally upon the people of to-day is a fact which every page of
this book has confirmed; and it is therefore by analysis of modern
beliefs and customs relative to death that I propose to discover
the fundamental ideas held by the Greek people from the beginning
concerning the relations between soul and body. For I venture to
think that the great teachers of antiquity, whose doctrines dominate
ancient literature, were often more widely removed by their genius,
than are the modern folk by the lapse of centuries, from the peasants
of those early days, and that the oral tradition of a people who have
instinctively clung to every ancient belief and custom is even after
more than two thousand years a safer guide than the contemporary
writings of men who deliberately discarded or arbitrarily modified
tradition in favour of the results of their own personal speculations.
First then the peasants of modern Greece must furnish our clue to the
popular beliefs of antiquity; afterwards we may profitably consider the
use and handling of those beliefs in ancient literature.
To this end I shall examine first and necessarily at some length a
certain abnormal condition of the dead about which very definite ideas
are everywhere held; for the abhorrence and dread with which the
abnormal state is regarded will be an accurate measure of the eagerness
with which the opposite and normal state is desired; and further in
this desire to promote and to secure the normal condition of the
departed will be found the motive of various funeral-customs.
This abnormal condition of the dead is a kind of vampirism. It is
believed that under certain conditions a dead body is withheld from
the normal process of corruption, is re-animated, and revisits the
scenes of its former life, sometimes in a harmless or even kindly mood,
but far more often bent on mischief and on murder. The superstition
as it now stands is by no means wholly Greek or wholly popular. Two
extraneous influences, the one Slavonic and the other ecclesiastical,
have considerably modified it. But in the present section I shall
confine myself to describing the appearance, nature, habits, and proper
treatment of the Greek vampire as he is now conceived; the work of
analysing the superstition and of separating the pure Hellenic metal
from the extraneous alloys with which in its now current form it is
contaminated will occupy the next section; and the two which follow
will be devoted to showing that the native residue of superstition was
in fact well known to the ancient Greeks and was utilised to no small
extent in their literature.
The best accounts of this superstition and of the savage practices to
which it led are furnished by writers of the seventeenth century. At
the present day, though the superstition is far from extinction, the
more violent outbreaks of it are comparatively rare; and, although
stories dealing with it may frequently be heard, it might perhaps be
difficult to piece together any complete and coherent account of the
Greek vampire without a previous knowledge obtained from writers of
two or three centuries ago. In such stories as I myself have heard I
have found nothing new, and have often missed something with which
older narratives had made me familiar. In the seventeenth century some
parts of Greece would seem to have been infested by these vampires.
The island of Santorini (the ancient Thera) acquired so enduring a
notoriety in this respect, that even at the present day ‘to send
vampires to Santorini[959]’ is a proverbial expression synonymous
with ‘owls to Athens’ or ‘coals to Newcastle’; and the inhabitants of
the island enjoyed so wide a reputation as experts in dealing with
them, that two stories recently published[960], one from Myconos and
the other from Sphakiá in Crete, actually end with the despatch of a
vampire’s body to Santorini for effective treatment there. The justice
of this reputation will shortly appear; for one of the best accounts
of the superstition was written by a Jesuit residing in the island, to
whom the resurrection of these vampires seemed an unquestionable, if
also inexplicable, phenomenon of by no means rare occurrence. Nowadays
cases of suspected vampirism are much less common, and I can count
myself very fortunate to have once witnessed the sequel of such a case.
But of that more anon.
The most common form of the Greek name for this species of vampire
is βρυκόλακας[961], and in order to avoid on the one hand continual
qualification of the word ‘vampire’ (which I have used hitherto as the
nearest though not exact equivalent) and on the other hand confusion
of the Greek with the Slavonic species from which in certain traits
it differs, I prefer henceforth to adopt a transliteration of the
Greek word, and, save where I have occasion to speak of the purely
Slavonic form of vampire, to employ the name _vrykólakas_ (plural
_vrykólakes_[962]).
The first of those writers of the seventeenth century whose accounts
deserve attention is one to whose treatise on various Greek
superstitions reference has already frequently been made, Leo Allatius.
‘The _vrykolakas_,’ he writes[963], ‘is the body of a man of evil
and immoral life--very often of one who has been excommunicated by
his bishop. Such bodies do not like those of other dead men suffer
decomposition after burial nor turn to dust, but having, as it
appears, a skin of extreme toughness become swollen and distended
all over, so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin becomes
stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck gives out
the same sound; from this circumstance the _vrykolakas_ has received
the name τυμπανιαῖος (“drumlike”).’ Into such a body, he continues,
the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about, chiefly at
night, knocking at doors and calling one of the household. If such an
one answer, he dies next day; but a _vrykolakas_ never calls twice,
and so the inhabitants of Chios (whence Allatius’ observations and
information were chiefly derived) secure themselves by always waiting
for a second call at night before replying. ‘This monster is said to
be so destructive to men, that appearing actually in the daytime, even
at noon--and that not only in houses but in fields and highroads and
enclosed vineyards--it advances upon them as they walk along, and by
its mere aspect without either speech or touch kills them.’ Hence, when
sudden deaths occur without other assignable cause, they open the tombs
and often find such a body. Thereupon ‘it is taken out of the grave,
the priests recite prayers, and it is thrown on to a burning pyre;
before the supplications are finished the joints of the body gradually
fall apart; and all the remains are burnt to ashes....’ ‘This belief,’
he pursues, ‘is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient
and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions
of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.’
As evidence of this statement he adduces a _nomocanon_, or ordinance of
the Greek Church, of uncertain authorship:
‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which
they call _vrykolakas_.
‘It is impossible that a dead man become a _vrykolakas_, save it be
that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet
and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents, and oft-times
at night causeth men to imagine that the dead man whom they knew
before[964] cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they
see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing
still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.
‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the
remains of the man ... and the dead man--one who has long been dead and
buried--appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ...
and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away
with it altogether....’
Then, after denying the reality of such things, which exist in
imagination (κατὰ φαντασίαν) only, the _nomocanon_ with some
inconsistency continues: ‘But know that when such remains be found,
the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the
priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, ... and to perform
memorial services for the dead with funeral-meats[965].’
Allatius then leaving the _nomocanon_ pronounces his own views. ‘It is
the height of folly to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes
found in the graves incorrupt, and that by use of them the Devil, if
God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race.’
He therefore advocates the burning of them, always accompanied by
prayers.
To the fact of non-decomposition he cites several witnesses--among
them Crusius[966] who narrates the case of a Greek’s body being found
by Turks in this condition after the man had been two years dead and
being burnt by them. Moreover Allatius himself claims to have been an
eye-witness of such a scene when he was at school in Chios. A tomb
having for some reason been opened at the church of St Antony, ‘on the
top of the bones of other men there was found lying a corpse perfectly
whole; it was unusually tall of stature; clothes it had none, time
or moisture having caused them to perish; the skin was distended,
hard, and livid, and so swollen everywhere, that the body had no flat
surfaces but was round like a full sack[967]. The face was covered
with hair dark and curly; on the head there was little hair, as also
on the rest of the body, which appeared smooth all over; the arms by
reason of the swelling of the corpse were stretched out on each side
like the arms of a cross; the hands were open, the eyelids closed, the
mouth gaping, and the teeth white.’ How the body was finally treated or
disposed of is not related.
The next writer whose testimony deserves notice and respect is Father
François Richard, a Jesuit priest of the island of Santorini, to whose
work on that island reference has above been made[968]. Agreeing with
Allatius in his description of the appearance of _vrykolakes_, he
adds thereto many instances of their unpleasantly active habits. His
whole narrative bears the stamp of good faith, but is too long to
translate in full; and I must therefore content myself with a _précis_
of it, indicating by inverted commas such phrases and sentences as are
literally rendered.
The Devil, he says[969], works by means of dead bodies as well as
by living sorcerers. ‘These bodies he animates and preserves for a
long time in their entirety; he appears with the face of the dead,
traversing now the streets and anon the open country; he enters men’s
houses, leaving some horror-stricken, others deprived of speech, and
others again lifeless; here he inflicts violence, there loss, and
everywhere terror.’ At first I believed these apparitions to be merely
the souls of the dead returning to ask help to escape the sooner
from Purgatory; but such souls never commit such excesses--assault,
destruction of property, death, and so forth. It is clearly then a form
of diabolical possession; for indeed the priests with the bishop’s
permission employ forms of exorcism. They assemble on Saturday (the
only day on which _vrykolakes_ rest in the grave and cannot stir
abroad) and exhume the body which is suspected. ‘And when they find
it whole, fresh, and full of blood, they take it as certain that it
was serving as an instrument of the Devil.’ They accordingly continue
their exorcisms until with the departure of the Devil the body begins
to decompose and gradually to lose ‘its colour and its _embonpoint_,
and is left a noisome and ghastly lump.’ So rapid was the decomposition
in the case of a Greek priest’s daughter, Caliste by name, that no one
could remain in the church, and the body was hastily re-interred; from
that time she ceased to appear.
When exorcisms fail, they tear the heart out, cut it to pieces, and
then burn the whole body to ashes.
At Stampalia (Astypalaea), he proceeds, a short time before my arrival
(about the middle of the seventeenth century) five bodies were so
treated, those of three married men, a Greek monk, and a girl. In Nio
(Ios) a woman who was confessing to me affirmed that she had seen
her husband again fifty days after burial, though already his grave
had been once changed and the ordinary rites performed to lay him.
He began however again to torment the people, killing actually some
four or five; so his body was exhumed for the second time and was
publicly burnt. Only two years ago they burnt two bodies in the island
of Siphanto for the same reason; ‘and rarely does a year pass in
which people do not speak with dread of these false resuscitations.’
In Santorini a shoemaker named Alexander living at Pyrgos became a
_vrykolakas_; he used to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes,
draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family;
but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he
was seen no more.... In Amorgos these _vrykolakes_ have been seen not
only at night but in open day, five or six together in a field, feeding
apparently on green beans.
I heard, continues the holy father, from the Abbé of the famous
monastery of Amorgos, that a certain merchant of Patmos, having gone
abroad on business, died. His widow sent a boat to bring his body home.
Now it so happened that one of the sailors sat down by accident upon
the coffin and to his horror felt the body move. They opened the coffin
therefore and found the body intact. Their fears being thus confirmed,
they nailed up the coffin again and handed it over to the widow without
a word and it was buried. But soon the dead man began to appear at
night in the houses, violent and turbulent to such a degree that more
than fifteen persons died of fright or of injuries inflicted by it. The
exorcisms of priests and monks proved useless, and they thought best
to send back the body whence it had been brought. The sailors however
unshipped it at the first desert island[970] and burnt it there, after
which it was seen no more.
The Abbé considered this possession by the devil to be a proof of the
truth of the Greek persuasion, alleging that no Mohammedan or Roman
Catholic ever became a _vrykolakas_[971]. This however is not strictly
accurate, for in Santorini a Roman priest, who had apostatized and
turned Mohammedan and who for his many crimes was finally hanged,
appeared after death and was only disposed of by burning.
Another case was that of Iannetis Anapliotis of the same island, an
usurer who about a year before his death repented of his misdeeds
and made what amends he could; he also left his wife an order to pay
anything else justly reclaimed from him. She however though giving
much in charity did not pay his debts. It was just six weeks after
his death when she refused to satisfy some just claim for repayment,
and immediately he began to appear in the streets and to molest above
all his own wife and relatives. Also he woke up priests early in the
morning, telling them it was time for matins, pulled coverlets off
people as they slept, shook their beds, left the taps of wine-barrels
running, and so on. One woman was so frightened in broad day-light
as to lose the power of speech for three days, and another whose
bed he shook suffered a miscarriage. Then at length his name was
published--for as a man of some position he had till then been spared.
Exorcism was tried in vain by the Greek priests. Then by my advice the
widow paid off all her husband’s debts and made due restitution. Also
she had the body exhumed and exorcised a second time. On this occasion
I saw it, but it did not look like a real _vrykolakas_; for, though the
hands were whole and parchment-like, the head and the entrails were
to some extent decomposed. At the end of the ceremony of exorcism the
priests hacked the body to pieces and buried it in a new grave. From
this time the _vrykolakas_ never re-appeared, but this was due, in my
opinion, to the restitution made, not to the treatment of the body.
There are in Greek cemeteries dead bodies of another kind which after
fifteen or sixteen years--sometimes even twenty or thirty--are found
inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or
rolled along, sound like drums; for this reason they have the name
ντουπί[972] (drum).... The common opinion of the Greeks is that this
inflation is a sure sign that the man had suffered excommunication;
and indeed Greek priests and bishops add always to the formula of
excommunication the curse, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος,
‘and after death to remain indissoluble[973].’
In a manuscript from the Church of St Sophia at Thessalonica, he
continues, I found the following:
Ὁποῖος ἔχει ἐντολὴν ἢ κατάραν, κρατοῦσι μόνον τὰ ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ σώματός
του.
Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ ἔχει ἀνάθεμα, φαίνεται κιτρινὸς καὶ ζαρωμένα τὰ δακτύλιά
του.
Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ φαίνεται ἀσπρὸς[974] (_sic_), εἶναι ἀφωρισμένος παρὰ τῶν
θείων νόμων.
Ἐκεῖνος ὁποῦ φαίνεται μαῦρος, εἶναι ἀφωρισμένος ὑπὸ ἀρχιερέως.
‘He who has left a command of his parents unfulfilled or is under
their curse has only the front portions of his body preserved.
‘He who is under an anathema looks yellow and his fingers are wrinkled.
‘He who looks white has been excommunicated by divine laws.
‘He who looks black has been excommunicated by a bishop.’
From this account it is manifest that Father Richard, with the
experience acquired by residence in Santorini, drew a distinction not
known to Leo Allatius between two classes of dead persons. Those, who
though not subject to the natural law of decomposition lay quiescent
in their graves, were merely τυμπανιαῖοι or ‘drum-like’; while
_vrykolakes_ proper were addicted also to periodical resurrection.
And the extract with which he concludes his description shows that
the authorities of the rival Church pretended to powers of even more
subtle discrimination between different species of incorrupt corpses.
The importance of Father Richard’s distinction will appear later; there
was originally a difference in the usage of the two words, although
not precisely the difference which he makes; but by the middle of the
seventeenth century popular speech rarely discriminated between them.
To the common-folk, whose views Leo Allatius fairly presents, any
body which was withheld from decomposition for any cause was at least
a potential _vrykolakas_, even if its power of resurrection was not
known to have been exerted and no act of violence had been traced to it.
For further attestation of the prevalence and the violence of this
superstition it would be easy to quote many graphic accounts by other
writers, such as Robert Sauger[975], another Jesuit of Santorini, or
the traveller Tournefort[976]. But it will suffice to call as witness
Paul Lucas, whose observations concern a part of the Greek world remote
enough from either Chios or Santorini, the island of Corfu. ‘Some
persons,’ he says, ‘who seem possessed of sound good sense speak of a
curious thing which often happens in this place, as also in the island
of Santorini. According to their account dead persons return and show
themselves in open day, going even into the houses and inspiring great
terror in those who see them. In consequence of this, whenever one of
these apparitions is seen, the people go at once to the cemetery to
exhume the corpse, which is then cut in pieces and finally is burnt by
sentence of the Governors and Magistrates. This done, these quasi-dead
return no more. Monsieur Angelo Edme, Warden and Governor of the
island, assured me that he himself had pronounced a sentence of this
kind in a case where upwards of fifty reasonable persons were found to
testify to the occurrence[977].’
The superstition, which had so firm a grip upon the Greeks of two or
three centuries ago, has by no means relaxed its hold at the present
day, in spite of the efforts made by the higher authorities civil
and ecclesiastical, native and foreign, to suppress those savage and
gruesome ceremonies to which it leads. The horrible scenes of old time,
when the suspected body was dragged from its grave and dismembered
by a panic-stricken and desperate mob, when the heart, as sometimes
happened, was torn out and boiled to shreds in vinegar, or when the
ghastly remains were burnt on a public bonfire, have certainly become
rarer. The administrative action of the Venetians in the Ionian
Islands in requiring proof to be furnished of the _vrykolakas’_
resuscitation, and official sanction to be obtained for exhuming and
burning the body; the more vigorous suppression of such acts by the
Turks in the Aegean Islands[978] and probably also on the mainland;
the somewhat half-hearted condemnation of the superstition by the
Greek Church, which, as we shall see later, maintained the belief in
the non-decomposition of excommunicated persons and notorious sinners,
hesitated between denying and explaining the further notion that such
persons were liable to re-animation, but certainly endeavoured to
repress or to mitigate the atrocities to which that notion led; and
at the present day the forces of law and order as represented on the
one hand by the police and on the other by modern education, the chief
fruit of which is a desire to appear ‘civilised’ in the eyes of Europe;
all these influences combined have certainly succeeded in reducing the
proportions of the superstition and curtailing the excesses consequent
upon it. Thus in some places the old practice of burning corpses which
fail to decompose within the normal period--and it must be remembered
that exhumation after three years’ burial is an established rite of the
Church in Greece--has been definitely superseded by milder expedients.
In Scyros the body is carried round to forty churches in turn and is
then re-interred, while in parts of Crete, in Cythnos[979], and, I
believe, in some other Aegean Islands the custom is to transfer the
body to a grave in some uninhabited islet, whence its return is barred
by the intervening salt water.
None the less the superstition itself still holds a firm place among
the traditional beliefs of modern Greece. Witness the following account
of it from a history[980] of the district of Sphakiá in Crete written
by the head of a monastery there and published in 1888:
‘It is popularly believed that most of the dead, those who have
lived bad lives or who have been excommunicated by some priest (or,
worse still, by seven priests together, τὸ ἑπταπάπαδον[981]) become
_vrykolakes_[982]; that is to say, after the separation of the soul
from the body there enters into the latter an evil spirit, which takes
the place of the soul and assumes the shape of the dead man and so is
transformed into a _vrykolakas_ or man-demon.
‘In this guise it keeps the body as its dwelling-place and preserves
it from corruption, and it runs swift as lightning wherever it lists,
and causes men great alarms at night and strikes all with panic. And
the trouble is that it does not remain solitary, but makes everyone,
who dies while it is about, like to itself, so that in a short space
of time it gets together a large and dangerous train of followers. The
common practice of the _vrykolakes_ is to seat themselves upon those
who are asleep and by their enormous weight to cause an agonizing sense
of oppression. There is great danger that the sufferer in such cases
may expire, and himself too be turned into a _vrykolakas_, if there
be not someone at hand who perceives his torment and fires off a gun,
thereby putting the blood-thirsty monster to flight; for fortunately it
is afraid of the report of fire-arms and retreats without effecting its
purpose. Not a few such scenes we have witnessed with our own eyes.
‘This monster, as time goes on, becomes more and more audacious and
blood-thirsty, so that it is able completely to devastate whole
villages. On this account all possible haste is made to annihilate the
first which appears before it enter upon its second period of forty
days[983], because by that time it becomes a merciless and invincible
dealer of death. To this end the villagers call in priests who profess
to know how to annihilate the monster--for a consideration. These
impostors proceed after service to the tomb, and if the monster be not
found there--for it goes to and fro molesting men--they summon it in
authoritative tones to enter its dwelling-place; and, as soon as it is
come, it is imprisoned there by virtue of some prayer and subsequently
breaks up. With its disruption all those who have been turned into
_vrykolakes_ by it, wherever they may be, suffer the same lot as their
leader.
‘This absurd superstition is rife and vigorous throughout Crete and
especially in the mountainous and secluded parts of the island.’
So too another well-informed Greek writer, who has published a series
of monographs upon the Cyclades, says in one of them[984]:
‘The ignorant peasant of Andros believes to this day that the corpse
can rise again and do him hurt; and is not this belief in _vrykolakes_
general throughout Greece?’
To that question I might without hesitation answer ‘yes,’ even on the
grounds of my own experience only; for the places in which I have
heard _vrykolakes_ mentioned, not merely in popular stories[985] such
as are told everywhere, but with a very present and real sense of
dread, include some villages on the west slopes of Mount Pelion, the
village of Leonidi on the east coast of the Peloponnese, Andros, Tenos,
Santorini, and Cephalonia.
The wide range and general prevalence of the superstition in modern
times being thus established, it remains only to record a few recent
cases in which the peasants, in defiance of law and order, have gone
the length of exhuming and burning the suspected body.
Theodore Bent[986] states that a few months before his visit to Andros
(somewhat over twenty years ago) the grave of a suspected _vrykolakas_
was opened by a priest and the body taken out, cut into shreds, and
burnt. In January of 1895 at Mantoúde in Euboea a woman was believed
to have turned _vrykolakas_ and to have caused many deaths, and
the peasants resolved to exhume and burn her--but it is not stated
whether the resolve was actually carried out[987]. In 1899, when I
was in Santorini, I was told that two or three years previously the
inhabitants of Therasia had burnt a _vrykolakas_, and when I visited
that island the incident was not denied but the responsibility for it
was laid upon the people of Santorini. In 1902 there was a similar
case of burning at Gourzoúmisa near Patras[988]. These are certain and
well-attested instances of the continuance of the practice, and, regard
being had to the secrecy which such breaches of the law necessarily
demand, it is not unreasonable to suppose that even now a year seldom
passes in which some village of Greece does not disembarrass itself of
a _vrykolakas_ by the traditional means, cremation[989].
Of the causes by which a man is predisposed to become a _vrykolakas_
some mention has already been made in the passages which have been
cited from various writers above; but before I conclude this account
of the superstition as it now is and has been since the seventeenth
century, and proceed to analyse its composite nature, it may be
convenient to give a complete list of such causes. The majority of
these are recognised all over Greece and are familiar to every student
of modern Greek folklore, and I shall not therefore burden this chapter
with references to previous writers whose observations tally exactly
with my own; for rarer and more local beliefs I shall of course quote
my authority.
The classes of persons who are most liable to become _vrykolakes_ are:
(1) Those who do not receive the full and due rites of burial.
(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including
suicides), or, in Maina[990], where the _vendetta_ is still in vogue,
those who having been murdered remain unavenged.
(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great
Church-festivals[991], and children stillborn[992].
(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or
one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who, in perjuring himself,
calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be
false.
(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say,
excommunicate.
(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate[993].
(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they
have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.
(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a
wolf[994].
(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed[995].
The _provenance_ and the significance of these various beliefs
concerning the causes of vampirism will be discussed in the next
section.
§ 2. THE COMPOSITION OF THE SUPERSTITION. SLAVONIC, ECCLESIASTICAL, AND
HELLENIC CONTRIBUTIONS.
_Vrykolakes_ are not ghosts. Such is the first observation which I am
compelled to make and which the reader of the last chapter might well
consider superfluous. But so many Greek writers, and with them even
Bernhard Schmidt[996], have fallen into the error of comparing ancient
ghost-stories with modern tales about _vrykolakes_, without apparently
recognising the essential and fundamental difference between them, that
some insistence upon the point is necessary. That a definite and close
relation does indeed subsist between the ancient belief in wandering
spirits and the modern belief in wandering corpses, I readily admit,
and with that relation I shall deal later; but the issue before us can
only be kept clear by remembering that _vrykolakes_ are not ghosts.
There is absolute unanimity among the Greek peasants in their belief
that the corpse itself is the _vrykolakas_, and even the work of
re-animating the corpse is generally credited not to the soul which
formerly inhabited it, but to the Devil. Thus it appears that whereas
most peoples believe to some extent in the return of the ghosts or
spirits of the dead, the Greeks fear rather the return of their bodies.
If then we can determine what part, if any, of this superstition is
genuinely Hellenic, we shall have gained a step in our knowledge of the
ideas popularly held in ancient Greece concerning the condition and the
relations of soul and body after death.
The view which I take is briefly this, that though Slavonic influence
is very conspicuous in the modern superstition as I have described it,
yet the whole superstition has not been transplanted root and branch
from Slavonic to Greek soil, but the growth, as we now see it and as
the writers of the seventeenth century saw it, is the result of the
grafting of Slavonic branches upon an Hellenic stock; and further,
that before that process began the old pagan Greek element in the
superstition had been modified in certain respects by ecclesiastical
influence. This is the view which I propose to develop in this section;
and my method will be to work back from the modern superstition,
removing first the Slavonic and then the ecclesiastical elements in it,
and so leaving a residue of purely Hellenic belief.
To Slavonic influence is due first of all the actual word _vrykolakas_,
the derivation of which need not long detain us. Patriotic attempts
have indeed been made by Greeks to deny its Slavonic origin, the most
plausible being that of Coraës[997], who selecting the local form
βορβόλακας sought to identify it with a supposed ancient form μορμόλυξ
(= μορμολύκη, μορμολυκεῖον), a ‘bugbear’ or ‘hobgoblin’ of some kind.
But there need be no hesitation in pronouncing this suggestion wrong
and in asserting the identity of the modern Greek word with a word
which runs through all the Slavonic languages. This word is in form
a compound of which the first half means ‘wolf’ and the second has
been less certainly identified with _dlaka_, the ‘hair’ of a cow or
horse. But, however the meaning of the compound has been obtained,
it is, in the actual usage of all Slavonic languages save one, the
exact equivalent of our ‘were-wolf[998].’ That one exception is the
Serbian language in which it is said to bear rather the sense of
‘vampire[999].’ If this is true, the reason for the transition of
meaning lies probably in the belief current among the Slavonic peoples
in general that a man who has been a were-wolf in his lifetime becomes
a vampire after death[1000]. Yet in general there is no confusion of
nomenclature. Although the depredations of the were-wolf and of the
vampire are similar in character, the line of demarcation between the
living and the dead is kept clear, and the great mass of the Slavonic
peoples apply only to the living that word from which the Greek
_vrykolakas_ comes, and to the dead the word which we have borrowed in
the form ‘vampire[1001].’
Now among the Greeks the latter word is almost unknown; in parts of
Macedonia indeed where the Greek population lives in constant touch
with Slavonic peoples, a form βάμπυρας or βόμπυρας has been adopted and
is used as a synonym of _vrykolakas_ in its ordinary Greek sense[1002];
but in Greece proper and in the Greek islands the word ‘vampire’ is, so
far as I can discover, absolutely non-existent, and it is _vrykolakas_
which ordinarily denotes the resuscitated corpse. In discriminating
therefore between the Slavonic and the Greek elements in the modern
Greek superstition it is of some importance to determine in which
sense the Greeks originally borrowed the word _vrykolakas_ which at
the present day they in general employ in a different sense from that
which both etymology and general Slavonic usage accord to it. Was it
originally borrowed in the sense of ‘were-wolf’ or in the sense of
‘vampire’?
Among Slavonic peoples the only one said to have transferred the
word _vrykolakas_ from its original meaning to that of ‘vampire’ is
the Serbian; and the Greeks therefore, in order to have borrowed the
word in that sense, would have had to borrow direct from the Serbian
language. But linguistic evidence renders that hypothesis untenable.
All the many Greek dialectic forms of the word _vrykolakas_ concur
in showing a liquid (ρ or λ) in the first syllable; while Serbian
is among the two or three Slavonic languages which have discarded
that liquid. It follows therefore that the Greeks borrowed the word
from some Slavonic language other than Serbian, and consequently from
some language which used and still uses that word in the sense of
‘were-wolf.’
Further, there is evidence that in the Greek language itself the
word _vrykolakas_ does even now locally and occasionally bear its
original significance. This usage indeed is flatly denied by Bernhard
Schmidt, who, having accurately distinguished the were-wolf and the
vampire, states that ‘the modern Greek _vrykolakas_ answers only to
the latter[1003].’ This pronouncement however was made in the face
of two strong pieces of independent evidence to the contrary, which
Schmidt notices and dismisses in a footnote[1004]. The first witness
is Hanush[1005], who was plainly told by a Greek of Mytilene that
there were two kinds of _vrykolakes_, the one kind being men already
dead, and the other still living men who were subject to a kind of
somnambulism and were seen abroad particularly on moonlight nights. The
other authority is Cyprien Robert[1006], who describes the _vrykolakes_
of Thessaly and Epirus thus: ‘These are living men mastered by a kind
of somnambulism, who seized by a thirst for blood go forth at night
from their shepherd’s-huts, and scour the country biting and tearing
all that they meet both man and beast.’
To these two pieces of testimony--strong enough, it might be thought,
in their mutual agreement to merit more than passing notice and
arbitrary rejection--I can add confirmation of more recent date. In
Cyprus, during excavations carried out in the spring of 1899 under
the auspices of the British Museum, the directors of the enterprise
heard from their workmen several stories dealing with the detection
of a _vrykolakas_. The outline of these stories (to which Tenos
furnishes many parallels[1007], though in these latter I have not
found the word _vrykolakas_ employed) is as follows. The inhabitants
of a particular village, having suffered from various nocturnal
depredations, determine to keep watch at night for the marauder.
Having duly armed themselves they maintain a strict vigil, and are
rewarded by seeing a _vrykolakas_. Thereupon one of them with gun or
sword succeeds in inflicting a wound upon the monster, which however
for the nonce escapes. But the next day a man of the village, who had
not been among the watchers of the night, is observed to bear a wound
exactly corresponding with that which the assailant of the _vrykolakas_
had dealt; and being taxed with it the man confesses himself to be a
_vrykolakas._
Similarly on the borders of Aetolia and Acarnania, in the neighbourhood
of Agrinion, I myself ascertained that the word _vrykolakas_ was
occasionally applied to living persons in the sense of were-wolf,
although there as elsewhere it more commonly denotes a resuscitated
corpse. Lycanthropy, as has been observed in a previous chapter[1008],
is in Greece often imputed to children. In the district mentioned this
is conspicuously the case. If one or more children in a family die
without evident cause, the mother will often regard the smallest or
weakliest of the survivors--more especially one in any way deformed
or demented--as guilty of the brothers’ or sisters’ deaths, and the
suspect is called a _vrykolakas_. Εἶσαι βρυκόλακας καὶ ’φάγες τὸν
ἀδερφό σου, ‘you are a _vrykolakas_ and have devoured your brother,’ is
the charge hurled at the helpless infant, and ill-treatment to match is
meted out in the hope of deterring it from its bloodthirsty ways.
In effect from four widely separated parts of the Greek
world--Mytilene, Cyprus, the neighbourhood of Agrinion, and the
district of Thessaly and Epirus--comes one and the same statement, that
to the word _vrykolakas_ is still, or has recently been, attached its
etymologically correct meaning ‘were-wolf’; and, since these isolated
local usages cannot be explained otherwise than as survivals of an
usage which was once general, they constitute a second proof that the
Greeks originally adopted the word in the sense in which the vast
majority of the Slavonic races continue down to this day to employ it.
But while it is thus certain that the Greeks first learnt and acquired
the word _vrykolakas_ in the sense of ‘were-wolf,’ it is equally
certain that the main characteristics of the monster to which that name
is now applied are those of the Slavonic ‘vampire.’ The appearance and
the habits of the re-animated corpse according to Slavonic superstition
differ hardly at all from those described in the last chapter. Indeed
the question is not so much whether the Greeks are indebted to the
Slavs in respect of this belief, as what is the extent of their
indebtedness. Is the whole superstition a foreign importation, or is it
only partly alien and partly native?
The former alternative is rendered improbable in the first place by
the fact that the Greeks have not adopted the word ‘vampire.’ If the
whole idea of dead men remaining under certain conditions incorrupt
and emerging from their graves to work havoc among living men had been
first communicated to them by the Slavs, they must almost inevitably
have borrowed the name by which the Slavs described those men. But
since in fact they did not adopt the Slavonic name ‘vampire,’ it is
probable that they already possessed in their own language some word
adequate to express that idea, and therefore possessed also some native
superstition concerning resuscitation of the dead which Slavonic
influence merely modified.
Further, there is positive evidence that such a word or words existed;
for there have been, and still are, dialects which employ a word of
Greek formation in preference not merely to the word ‘vampire,’ which
seems to be unknown in Greece proper, but even to the misapplied
Slavonic word _vrykolakas_. Thus Leo Allatius was familiar with the
word τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drum-like,’ but whether in his day it belonged
especially to his native island Chios[1009] or was still in general
usage, he does not record. At the present day it survives only, so
far as I know, in Cythnos, where also ἄλυτος, ‘incorrupt,’ is used
as another synonym[1010]. From Cythera are reported three names,
ἀνάρραχο, λάμπασμα, and λάμπαστρο[1011], evidently Greek in formation
but to me, I must confess, unintelligible. In Cyprus (where, as
we have seen, the word _vrykolakas_ may still bear its old sense
‘were-wolf’) the _revenant_ is named σαρκωμένος[1012], because his
swollen appearance suggests that he has ‘put on flesh,’ or more rarely
στοιχειωμένος[1013], perhaps with the idea that he has become the
‘genius’ (στοιχειό)[1014] of some particular locality. Again, from the
village of Pyrgos in Tenos is reported the word ἀναικαθούμενος[1015]
meaning apparently one who ‘sits up’ in his grave. Finally, in Crete
the name popularly employed is καταχανᾶς[1016], the origin of which is
not certain. Bernhard Schmidt[1017], following Koraës[1018], derives
it from κατὰ and χάνω (= ancient Greek χαόω), ‘lose,’ ‘destroy,’ and
would have it mean accordingly ‘destroyer.’ I would suggest that
derivation from κατὰ and the root χαν-, ‘gape,’ ‘yawn,’ is at least
equally probable, inasmuch as other local names such as τυμπανιαῖος,
‘drumlike,’ and σαρκωμένος, ‘fleshy,’ have reference to the monster’s
personal appearance, and the ‘gaper’ in like manner would be a name
eminently suitable to a creature among whose features are numbered
by Leo Allatius ‘a gaping mouth and gleaming teeth[1019].’ The same
name was some forty years ago[1020], and probably still is, used in
Rhodes, and in a Rhodian poem of the fifteenth century occurs both
in its literal sense and as a term of abuse[1021]. This secondary
usage however is in no way a proof that the word meant originally
‘destroyer’ rather than ‘gaper’; for by the fifteenth century there
can be little doubt that the _revenant_ was everywhere an object of
horror, and therefore his name, whatever it originally meant, furnished
a convenient term of vituperation. But one thing at least is clear,
that καταχανᾶς, whichever interpretation of it be right, is certainly
a word of Greek origin no less than the others which I have enumerated.
Now all these dialectic Greek names are found, it will have been
observed, only in certain of the Greek islands, while on the mainland
_vrykolakas_ has come to be universally employed. But it was the
mainland which was particularly exposed to Slavonic immigration and
influence, while islands like Crete and Cyprus were practically immune.
Hence, while the mainland gradually adopted a Slavonic word, it was
likely enough that some of the islands should retain their own Greek
terms, even though in the course of their relations with the mainland
they became acquainted also with the new Slavonic word. These insular
names for the _vrykolakas_ may therefore be regarded as survivals from
a pre-Slavonic period, and, though they are now merely dialectic, it is
reasonable to suppose that one or more of them formerly held a place
in the language of mainlanders and islanders alike. But the existence
of such words presupposes the existence of a belief in some kind of
resuscitated beings denoted by them. In other words, the Greeks when
first brought into contact with the Slavs already possessed a belief
in the re-animation and activity of certain dead persons, which so
far resembled the Slavonic belief in vampirism, that the Slavonic
vampire could be adequately denoted by some Greek word or words already
existing and there was no need to adopt the Slavonic name.
I claim then to have established two important points: first, that
the word _vrykolakas_ was originally borrowed by the Greeks from the
Slavs in the sense of ‘were-wolf,’ though now it is almost universally
employed in the sense of ‘vampire’; secondly, that, whatever ideas
concerning vampires the Greeks may have learnt from the Slavs, they did
not adopt the Slavonic word ‘vampire’ but employed one of those native
Greek words, such as τυμπανιαῖος or καταχανᾶς, which are still in local
usage; whence it follows that some superstition anent re-animated
corpses existed in Greece before the coming of the Slavs.
These points being established, I am now in a position to trace the
development of the superstition in Greece from the time of the Slavonic
immigrations onward, and to show how it came to pass that, whereas
in the tenth century, let us say, when the Greeks had had ample time
to imbibe Slavonic superstitions, _vrykolakas_ meant a ‘were-wolf,’
and a ‘vampire’ was denoted by τυμπανιαῖος or some other Greek word,
nowadays _vrykolakas_ almost always means a ‘vampire’ and τυμπανιαῖος
is well-nigh obsolete.
The Slavs brought with them into Greece two superstitions, the
one concerning were-wolves and the other concerning vampires. The
old Hellenic belief in lycanthropy was apparently at that time
weak--confined perhaps to a few districts only--for the Greeks borrowed
from the invaders their word _vrykolakas_ in the place of the old
λυκάνθρωπος[1022], by which to express the idea of a ‘were-wolf.’ They
also learnt the Slavonic superstition concerning vampires, but in
this case did not borrow the word ‘vampire’ but expressed the notion
adequately by means of one of those words which now survive only in
insular dialects--adequately, I say, but not exactly. For--and here
I must anticipate what will be proved later--the Greeks denoted by
those words a _revenant_ but not a vampire. They believed in the
incorruptibility and the re-animation of certain classes of dead men,
but they did not impute to these _revenants_ the savagery which is
implied by the name ‘vampire.’ The dead who returned from their graves
acted, it was held, as reasonable men, not as ferocious brutes. This
did not of course exclude the idea that a _revenant_ might return to
seek revenge where vengeance was due; he was not necessarily peaceable;
but if he exacted even the life of one who had wronged him, the act of
vengeance was reasonable. To the proof of this, as I have said, I shall
come later on; here I will only point out that the names which survive
in the island-dialects are perfectly consistent with my view. Of the
words τυμπανιαῖος, ‘drumlike,’ σαρκωμένος, ‘fleshy,’ στοιχειωμένος,
‘_genius_,’ ἀναικαθούμενος, ‘sitting up’ in the grave, and, if my
interpretation is right, καταχανᾶς, ‘gaper,’ not one suggests any
inherent ferocity in the resuscitated dead.
Nevertheless, when the Greeks first heard of the Slavonic ‘vampire,’
they naturally regarded it merely as a new and particularly vicious
species of the genus _revenant_. Their own words for the genus
implied no idea beyond that of the resuscitation of the dead, and
were therefore no less applicable to the uniformly ferocious Slavonic
variety than to the more reasonable and human type with which they
themselves were familiar. They therefore did not require the word
‘vampire,’ but were content at first to comprise all _revenants_,
whatever their character, under one or other of the existing Greek
names.
Subsequently however, it appears, a change took place. The Slavonic
superstition concerning were-wolves included then, we may suppose, as
it includes now[1023], the idea that were-wolves become after death
vampires. The Greeks, who borrowed from the Slavs the very name of
the were-wolf, must therewith have learnt that these _vrykolakes_ as
they then called them were among the classes of men who were liable
to vampirism; and in this particular case it would surely have seemed
natural to them that the _revenant_ should be conspicuous for ferocity.
The conduct of a reasonable being could not be expected after death
from one who in his lifetime had suffered from lycanthropic mania;
or rather, if there could be any reason in his conduct, the most
reasonable and consistent thing would be for him to turn vampire.
Thus one class of _revenants_ came to be distinguished in the now
composite Greek superstition by its wanton and blood-thirsty character;
and in order to mark this distinction in speech also the Greeks, it
would seem, began to call one who from a were-wolf had become a genuine
vampire by the same name after as before death, _vrykolakas_, while to
the more reasonable and human _revenants_ they still applied some such
term as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike.’
By the seventeenth century the superstition had undergone a further
change, which is reflected in the usage of the word τυμπανιαῖος. In
proportion as the horror of real _vrykolakes_ had grown and spread, the
very memory of the more innocent kind of _revenants_ had faded, until
the genus _revenant_ was represented only by the species _vrykolakas_.
The word τυμπανιαῖος was indeed still known, but Leo Allatius was
undoubtedly following the popular usage of his time when he made it
synonymous with _vrykolakas_; for those narratives of the seventeenth
century from which I have quoted above make it abundantly clear that
the common-folk had come to suspect all _revenants_ alike of predatory
propensities.
This change in popular beliefs placed the Church in an awkward
predicament, and was the cause of a marked divergence between the
popular and the clerical usages of the word τυμπανιαῖος. It had long
been claimed that a sentence of excommunication was binding upon
a man even beyond death and could arrest the natural process of
decomposition; indeed the formula officially employed ended, as Father
Richard of Santorini notes, with the phrase, ‘and after death to remain
indissoluble.’ But when the fear of real vampires spread over Greece,
the priests would naturally have been unwilling to be held responsible
for the resuscitation of such pests, while they were equally unwilling
to diminish the terrors of excommunication by omitting the final
imprecation. Their only course therefore was to emphasize what seems
indeed to have been always the authorised doctrine of the Church, that
excommunicated persons remained indeed incorrupt and ‘drum-like,’ but
were not, like _vrykolakes_, subject to diabolical re-animation. It is
Father Richard’s acceptance of this clerical view which explains why,
writing as he did some few years after Leo Allatius, he distinguished
the two words which Leo had treated as synonymous, making resuscitation
the criterion of the _vrykolakas_ and stating that the ‘drum-like’
body, though withheld from natural decay, lay quiet in its grave.
But the ecclesiastical doctrine made no impression upon the popular
belief; to this very day the common-folk regard any corpse which is
found incorrupt as a potential _vrykolakas_, and excommunication is
everywhere numbered among the causes of vampirism.
Thus it has come to pass that any _revenants_ other than the savage
_vrykolakes_ are well-nigh forgotten, and in most districts their very
name is no longer heard. The word _vrykolakes_, which first meant
were-wolves, came to denote also the vampires into which were-wolves
changed, and gradually, as these vampires by exciting men’s horror
and concentrating on themselves the people’s attention became the
predominant class of _revenants_, ousted from the very speech of
Greece as a whole the old Greek names for the more harmless sort, and
established itself as the regular equivalent of _revenant_.
Such is my solution of the somewhat complex problem of nomenclature;
and in presenting it I have incidentally stated my view that the
genuinely Greek element in the modern superstition is a belief in
the incorruptibility and re-appearance of dead persons under certain
special conditions, and that the imported and now dominant element is
the Slavonic belief that the resuscitation of the dead renders them
necessarily predatory vampires. This I now have to prove.
It is a well-established characteristic of the Slavonic vampire that
his violence is directed first and foremost against his nearest of kin.
The same trait is so pronounced too in the modern Greek _vrykolakas_
that it has given rise to the proverb, ὁ βρυκόλακας ἀρχίζει ἀπὸ τὰ
γένειά του, ‘the _vrykolakas_ begins with his own beard’--a saying
which carries a double meaning, so a peasant told me. It may be taken
literally, inasmuch as the _vrykolakas_ usually appears bald and
beardless; but the words τὰ γένειά του, ‘his beard,’ are popularly
understood as a substitute, half jocose and half euphemistic, for τὴ
γενεά του, ‘his family.’ In other words, this most deadly of pagan
pests, like the most lively of Christian virtues, begins at home.
Such being the acknowledged and even proverbial habits of the
_vrykolakas_, nothing, it might be supposed, could be more repugnant
and fearful to the near relations of a dead man than the possibility
that he would turn _vrykolakas_ and return straightway to devour
them. The first sufferers from such an eventuality would be the
man’s own kinsfolk, the next his acquaintances and fellow-villagers,
but he himself would appear to be aggressor rather than sufferer.
Nevertheless, in face of this consideration, there is no more
commodious form of curse in popular usage than the ejaculation of
a prayer that the person who has incurred one’s displeasure may be
withheld from corruption after death and return from his grave. I have
heard it extended even to a recalcitrant mule; but it is also used
gravely by parents as an imprecation of punishment hereafter upon
undutiful children. A few samples of this curse will not be out of
place, as showing at once its frequency and its range[1024].
Νὰ μήν τον δεχτῇ ἡ γῆς, ‘May the earth not receive him’: νὰ μήν
τον φάγῃ τὸ χῶμα, ‘May the ground not consume him’: ἡ γῆ νὰ μή σε
χωνέψῃ[1025], ‘May the earth not digest thee’: ἡ μαύρη γῆ νά σ’
ἀναξεράσῃ[1026], ‘May the black earth spew thee up’: νὰ μείνῃς
ἄλυ̯ωτος, ‘Mayest thou remain incorrupt’: νὰ μή σε λυώσῃ ἡ γῆ, ‘May the
earth not loose thee’ (i.e. not let thy body decompose): νά σε βγάλῃ
τὸ χῶμα, ‘May the ground reject thee’: κουτοῦκι νὰ βγῇς[1027], ‘Mayest
thou become (after death) like a log (in solidity)’: τὸ χῶμα ’ξεράσ’
τόνε, ‘May the ground spew him out’--this last phrase being made more
terrible by being a parody, as it were, of the prayer uttered by the
mourners at every Greek funeral ὁ θεὸς ’χωρέσ’ τόνε, ‘May God forgive
him.’ Such are the popular forms of the curse; and akin to them are the
ecclesiastical imprecations, with which the formula of excommunication
used to end: καὶ ἔσῃ μετὰ θάνατον ἄλυτος αἰωνίως, ὡς αἱ πέτραι καὶ τὰ
σίδηρα[1028], ‘And after death thou shalt be bound (i.e. incorrupt)
eternally, even as stone and iron’; or, in a shorter form, καὶ μετὰ
τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος[1029], ‘And after death bound and
indissoluble.’ Here, it will be observed, the Church spoke only of
incorruptibility, but several of the popular expressions contain
explicit mention of resuscitation as well; and the very forms of the
curse which I have quoted show how closely knit together, how almost
identical, are these two notions in the mind of the peasants. That
which the earth will not ‘receive,’ she necessarily ‘rejects’; that
which she does not ‘consume’ or ‘digest,’ she necessarily ‘spews up.’
The man whose body does not decompose is necessarily a _revenant_.
Now curses, it must be remembered, among a primitive people are
considered as operative, and not merely expletive; each bullet of
malediction deliberately aimed is expected to find its billet; each
imprecation seriously uttered has a magical power of fulfilling itself.
That this belief is firmly held by the Greek folk is sufficiently
proved by certain quaint solemnities enacted beside the deathbed. It is
a common custom[1030] for a dying man to put a handful of salt into a
vessel of water, and when it is dissolved to sprinkle with the liquid
all those who are present, saying, ὡς λυ̯ώνει τ’ ἀλάτι, νὰ λυ̯ώσουν
ᾑ κατάραις μου, ‘As the salt dissolves, so may my curses dissolve.’
By this ceremony all persons whom he has cursed are released from the
bonds of an imprecation which after death he would no longer be able
to revoke or annul. Then in turn the relations and friends formally
pronounce their forgiveness of aught that the dying man has done to
their hurt. Thus pardoning and pardoned the sick man may expect a short
and easy passing; and, if the death-struggle be prolonged, it is taken
as a sign that some one whom he has injured has not forgiven him.
Accordingly the friends and kinsmen, having decided among themselves
who the delinquent must be, send to fetch him, if he be still living,
in order that he too may pronounce his forgiveness and so smooth the
passage of the parting soul. If however he be dead, a portion of his
shroud or of his ashes is brought and burnt, and the sick man, who
needs his forgiveness ere he can die in peace, is fumigated with the
smoke therefrom.
Since then curses in general are regarded by the Greek folk no less
than by other primitive peoples as effective instruments of wrath which
work out their own fulfilment, the particular curses which we are
considering, when they are gravely uttered, do seriously contemplate
the possibility of the person cursed becoming after death a _revenant_
and are designed to bring about that future state.
But, if already at the time when such imprecations first became popular
it had been believed that their effect was to render the corpse, whose
decay was arrested and whose resuscitation was assured, a wanton and
blood-thirsty monster, preying first of all upon his nearest of kin,
the question of relationship or no relationship between the curser and
the cursed would necessarily have been taken into account.
On the one hand, where a man was in no degree akin to the object of his
wrath, he would have welcomed the opportunity of including his enemy’s
whole family in his vengeance by causing him to return and devour them.
For in Greece recrimination is wholly unsparing, and no man pretending
to any elegance or taste in the matter of abuse could neglect to
level his taunts and threats and curses at least as much against the
relatives--especially the female relatives--of his enemy as against
the man himself. Just as the tenderest blessings among the peasants
are prayers, not for him to whom they wish well, but rather for those
whom he has loved and lost, so that the beggar’s thanks are often ‘May
God forgive your father and your mother’ (which, however it may sound,
is not intended otherwise than graciously) or again, prettier still in
its vague genderless plural which no translation can adequately render,
ὁ θεὸς ’χωρέσ’ τὰ πεθαμμένα σου, ‘May God forgive your dead,’ so the
harshest and bitterest of curses are vented, not upon the man who has
excited them, but upon those who are nearest and dearest to him. And
bitterness in cursing being as much a part of the Greek character as
gentleness in blessing, it is almost inconceivable that, if any idea
of real vampirism had originally been associated with _revenants_,
the merest novice in malediction could have missed the opportunity
of adding to his imprecations of incorruptibility and resuscitation
a prayer that his enemy might devastate with horrid carnage the home
of those who mourned him. Yet not one of the curses which I have
quoted above suggests any savagery to be shown by the resuscitated
body; not one of them hints at the blood-thirsty predatory character
of the modern _vrykolakas_; nay, most significant of all, not one of
them contains the word _vrykolakas_, nor have I ever heard or found
recorded, so far as I can remember, any form of the curse in which that
word appears[1031]. Now this is certainly not due to any difficulty
of language in using the word, for there is a convenient enough verb
formed from it, βρυκολακιάζω, ‘I turn vampire,’ and νὰ βρυκολακιάσης,
‘May you turn vampire,’ should commend itself as both sonorous and
compendious. The reason why all mention and all thought of the ordinary
_vrykolakas_ are lacking in these curses must rather be that, when
they first came into vogue, _revenants_ were not yet credited with
the savage character which under Slavonic influence they afterwards
acquired; and that, when the word _vrykolakas_ was introduced, the
old traditional forms of curse underwent no modification, but were
bandied to and fro by boys with the same glib uniformity as by their
fathers before them. They had been cast in set forms before the idea of
vampirism had been introduced and when men believed only in reasonable
and usually harmless _revenants_.
On the other hand, where the curser was akin to the cursed, the nearer
the tie of blood the more incomprehensible would be the attitude of
one who by an imprecation should recall from the grave so malignant
a thing as the modern _vrykolakas_, only to fall himself perhaps the
first victim to its blood-thirstiness. If the phrase ‘May the earth
reject thee’ had suggested anything beyond simple resuscitation,
if there had been any resemblance in character between the Greek
_revenant_ and the Slavonic vampire, such an imprecation would have
been impossible where close kinship existed; it would at once recoil
with fatal force upon the curser’s own head; above all, that most
solemn curse, the curse of parent upon child, would have been the first
to ‘come home to roost’; and yet the use of such parental imprecations
is both celebrated in ballad and not unknown, I am told, in actual
experience. Once more then the use of these curses is explicable only
on the hypothesis that the original Greek _revenants_ were not the
formidable monsters now known as _vrykolakes_, and that, when under
Slavonic influence the popular conception of them changed, the old
set phrases of commination--coins, as it were, of speech, struck in
the mint of the original superstition--continued current in spite of
their inconsistency with the new ideas. These colloquial survivals of
the original Greek superstition are at once a proof and a measure of
its later contamination. The Greeks had believed in reasonable human
_revenants_; the Slavs taught them to believe in brutish inhuman
vampires.
This conclusion is confirmed by the ballad to which I have just
referred; in it a mother’s imprecation recalls her son from the grave;
the _revenant_, who is the protagonist in a most dramatic story, is, as
will be seen, of the type which I claim to have been the original Greek
type and exhibits no Slavonic traits.
The ballad[1032], which as an important document I translate at length,
runs as follows:
Mother with children richly blest, nine sons and one dear daughter,
The darling of thy heart was she, and fondly did’st thou tend her;
For full twelve years thou guardedst her, and the sun looked not on her,
But in the dusk thou bathedst her, by moonlight trim’dst her tresses,
By evening-star and morning-star her curls in order settest.
And lo! a message brought to thee, from Babylon a message,
Bidding thee wed thy child afar, afar in a strange country;
Eight of her brethren will it not, but Constantine doth hearken:
--‘Nay, mother, send thine Areté, send her to that strange country,
That country whither I too fare, that land wherein I wander,
That I may find me comfort there, that I may find me lodging.’
--‘Prudent art thou, my Constantine, yet ill-conceived thy counsel:
If there o’ertake me death, my son, if there o’ertake me sickness,
If there hap bitterness or joy, who shall go bring her to me?’
He made the Saints his witnesses, he gave her God for surety,
If peradventure there come death, if haply there come sickness,
If there hap bitterness or joy, himself would go and bring her.
Now when they had sent Areté to wed in the strange country,
There came a year of heaviness, a month of God’s displeasure,
And there befell the Pestilence, that the nine brethren perished;
Lone as a willow in the plain, lone, desolate their mother.
Over eight graves she beats her breast, o’er eight makes lamentation,
But from the tomb of Constantine she tears the very grave-stones:
--‘Rise, I adjure thee, Constantine, ’tis Areté I long for;
Thou madest the Saints thy witnesses, thou gavest me God for surety,
If there hap bitterness or joy, thyself would’st go and bring her.’
Forth from the mound that covered him the stern adjuring drave him;
He takes the clouds to be his steed, the stars to be his bridle,
The moon for escort on his road, and goes his way to bring her.
He leaves the mountains in his wake, he gains the heights before him,
He finds her ’neath the moonlight fair combing her golden tresses.
E’en from afar he bids her hail, cries from afar his message:
--‘Up, Aretoúla, up and come, for lo! our mother needs thee.’
--‘Alack, alack, dear brother mine, what chance hath then befallen?
If haply ’tis an hour of joy, let me go don my jewels,
If bitterness, speak, I will come and tarry not for robing.’
--‘Up, Aretoúla, up and come, and tarry not for robing.’
Beside the way whereon they passed, beside the road they travelled,
They heard the singing of the birds, they heard the birds a-saying:
--‘Who hath e’er seen a maiden fair by a dead man escorted?’
--‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying?
“Who hath e’er seen a maiden fair by a dead man escorted?”’
--‘Nay, foolish birds, let them sing on, nor heed their idle chatter.’
Anon as they went faring on, yet other birds were calling:
--‘What woeful sight is this we see, so piteous and so plaintive,
That lo! as comrades on their way, the dead escort the living?’
--‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying?
“That lo! as comrades on their way, the dead escort the living.”’
--‘Nay, what are birds? let them sing on, nor heed their idle chatter.’
--‘Ah, but I fear thee, brother mine, thou savourest of censing.’
--‘Nay, at the chapel of Saint John we gathered yester even,
And the good father hallowed us with incense beyond measure.’
And yet again as they fared on, yet other birds were crying:
--‘O God, great God omnipotent, great wonders art thou working;
So gracious and so fair a maid with a dead man consorting!’
--‘Didst hear, my brother Constantine, what thing the birds are saying?
Tell me, where are those locks of thine, thy trimly-set mustachio?’
--’Twas a sore sickness fell on me, nigh unto death it brought me,
And spoiled me of my golden locks, my trimly-set mustachio.’
Lo! they are come; but locked their home, the door fast barred and bolted,
And all the windows of their home in spider-webs enshrouded.
--‘Op’n, prithee, open, mother mine, ’tis Areté thy daughter.’
--‘An thou art Charon, go thy way, for I have no more children;
My one, my little Areté, bides far in the strange country.’
--‘Op’n, prithee, open, mother mine, ’tis Constantine that calls thee;
I made the Saints my witnesses, I gave thee God for surety,
If there hap bitterness or joy, myself would go and bring her.’
Scarce had she passed to ope the door, and lo! her soul passed from her.
The versions of this ballad which have been collected are very
numerous[1033], and some of them differ so widely from others in
language as not to have a single line in common. That which I have
selected for translation is one of the most complete, presenting fairly
all the essential points of the story, and free from the eccentricities
which some versions have developed. At the same time it must be allowed
that here the mother’s curse is only implied by her action of tearing
up the gravestones and adjuring Constantine to rise, whereas in one or
two versions, otherwise inferior, it is clearly and forcibly expressed.
Thus in one[1034] her words run:
πέτρα νὰ γίνῃ ὁ Κωσταντής, λιθάρι νὰ μὴ λει̯ώσῃ,
πώστειλε τὴν Ἀρέτω μου, τὴν Ἀρετὼ ’στὰ ξένα.
‘May Constantine become as rock, yea even as stone, and have no
loosing (i.e. dissolution), for that he sent my Areto to a strange
land.’
And in another[1035]:
Ὅλοι μου οἱ γυιοὶ νὰ λυώσουνε κῂ ὁ Κώστας νὰ μὴ λυώσῃ,
Ὅπ’ ἔδωκε τὴν Ἀρετὴ πολὺ μακρυὰ ’στὰ ξένα.
‘May all my other sons have “loosing” and Constantine be not “loosed,”
for that he let my Areté be taken afar to a strange country.’
Again, another version[1036] ends, not with the arrival of Areté in
time to close her dying mother’s eyes, but with the revoking of the
curse upon Constantine in gratitude for the fulfilment of his oath:
‘νὰ σὲ λυώσῃ τὸ χῶμα σου καὶ νὰ σὲ φάγ’ ἡ πλάκα σ’.’
ὅσο νὰ σώσ’ τὸ λόγο της χοῦφτα χῶμα γενότον.
‘May the earth where thou liest loose thee and thy tomb consume thee.’
Scarce had she finished her speech and he became but a handful of
earth.
Clearly then the curse, which in this story is conceived as binding
Constantine’s body and driving him forth from the grave and which must
be revoked before his body can be loosed by natural decay, is one of
that class which we have been considering; but the story confers
the further advantage of letting us see such a curse in operation.
Constantine is presented as a revenant, but not of the modern type;
for what turn must the story have taken if he had been a normal
_vrykolakas_? His first act would have been to devour his nearest of
kin--his mother, who was tearing up his grave-stones and cursing him:
and his next, if he had troubled to go as far as Babylon, to make a
like end of Areté. And what do we actually find? Constantine acts not
only as a reasonable man in seeking to allay his sister’s suspicions,
but also as a good man in keeping his oath. He is driven forth from the
grave on a quest which (in most versions of the story) earns him no
thanks from those whom he benefits; he does his weary mission and (in
most versions) goes back again to the cold grave from which the curse
had raised him. Our sympathy is engaged by Constantine no less than by
his mother. He too is a sufferer, first stricken down in his youth by
pestilence, and then cursed because his oath remained unfulfilled. He
claims our pity, and in this differs fundamentally from the ordinary
_vrykolakas_ which could only excite our horror.
Furthermore it is noteworthy that in the many versions of this
poem, just as in the popular curses which I have quoted, the word
_vrykolakas_ is nowhere found[1037].
Hence I am inclined to believe that the original poem, from which
have come so many modern versions, differing widely in many respects,
but agreeing completely in the exclusion both of the Slavonic word
_vrykolakas_ and of all the suggestions of horror which surround it,
was composed in a period anterior to the intrusion of Slavonic ideas;
and that the modern versions therefore, which prove their fidelity
to the spirit of the original precisely by having refused admittance
to anything Slavonic, furnish that which we are seeking, the purely
and genuinely Greek element in the now composite superstition. That
Greek element then is the conception of the _revenant_ as a sufferer
deserving even of pity, the very antithesis in character of the
Slavonic vampire, an aggressor exciting only loathing and horror.
In the composite modern Greek superstition, as described in the
last chapter, the Slavonic element is clearly predominant. But the
conclusion to which my analysis of the superstition has now led,
explains what would otherwise have been almost inexplicable, the
existence of a few stories in which the _revenant_, though called
_vrykolakas_, is none the less represented as harmless or even amiable.
One such case is mentioned in Father Richard’s narrative[1038]--the
case of a shoemaker in Santorini, who having turned _vrykolakas_
continued to frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water
at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; and though
it is added that the people became frightened and exhumed and burned
him, this was only a measure of precaution dictated by their experience
of other _vrykolakes_; no charge was brought against this particular
_revenant_. It might also be supposed that the _vrykolakes_ of Amorgos,
mentioned next in the same narrative, who were seen in open day five or
six together in a field feeding apparently on green beans, were of the
less noxious kind; but they may of course have been carnivorous also.
Another story, recently published[1039], records how a native of Maina,
also a shoemaker by trade, having turned _vrykolakas_ issued from his
grave every night except Saturday, resumed his work, and continued to
live with his wife, whose pregnancy forced her to reveal the truth
to her neighbours. When once this was known, many accusations, it is
true, were brought against the _vrykolakas_; but the story at least
recognises some domestic and human traits in his character.
But a much more remarkable tale[1040] is told of a field-labourer of
Samos who was so devoted to the farmer for whom he worked, that when
he died he became a _vrykolakas_ and continued secretly to give his
services. At night he would go to the farm-buildings, take out the oxen
from their stall, yoke them, and plough three acres while his master
slept; in the daytime an equal piece of work was done by the master--so
that incidentally the oxen were nearly killed. The neighbours however
having had their suspicions aroused by the rapidity of the work, which
the farmer himself could in no wise explain, kept watch one night, and
having detected the _vrykolakas_ opened his grave, found him, as would
be expected, whole and incorrupt, and burned him.
Such stories as these testify that the old and purely Greek conception
of _revenants_ is not quite extinct even in places where the only name
for them is the Slavonic word _vrykolakes_.
* * * * *
The Slavonic element in the modern superstition having been now
removed, it remains to consider what was the attitude of the Church
towards the Greek belief in _revenants_ and what effect her teaching
had upon it.
I have already pointed out that the Jesuit, Father Richard,
discriminated between _vrykolakes_ and certain bodies called ‘drums,’
which were found incorrupt after many years of burial. This distinction
he had no doubt learnt from clergy of the Greek Church; for, while the
common-folk held that those whom the earth did not receive and consume
were necessarily ejected by her, or, in other words, that a dead man
whose body did not decay was necessarily also a _revenant_, the Church
distinguished, as we shall see, between belief in incorruptibility and
belief in resuscitation, inculcating the former, and varying between
condonation and condemnation of the latter. These two ideas must
therefore be handled separately.
The incorruptibility of the body of any person bound by a curse was
made a definite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. In an ecclesiastical
manuscript, seen by Father Richard, were specifications of the
discoloration and other unpleasant symptoms by which the precise
quality of that curse--parental, episcopal, and so forth--which had
arrested the decay of a corpse might be diagnosed; and in one of the
forms of absolution which may be read over any corpse found in such
a condition there is a clause which provides for all possible cases
without requiring expert diagnosis: ‘Yea, O Lord our God, let Thy great
mercy and marvellous compassion prevail; and, whether this Thy servant
lieth under curse of father or mother, or under his own imprecation,
or did provoke one of Thy holy ministers and sustained at his hands
a bond that hath not been loosed, or did incur the most grievous ban
of excommunication by a bishop, and through heedlessness and sloth
obtained not pardon, pardon Thou him by the hand of me Thy sinful and
unworthy servant; resolve Thou his body into that from which it was
made; and stablish his soul in the tabernacle of saints[1041].’ But the
curse to which the Church naturally gave most prominence and attached
most weight was the ban of excommunication; and therefore, consistently
with the accepted doctrine, the formula of excommunication ended by
sentencing the offender to remain whole and undissolved after death--a
condition from which the body was not freed unless and until absolution
was read over it and the decree of excommunication thereby rescinded.
This doctrine was held to have the authority of Christ’s own
teaching[1042]. The power which was conferred upon the apostles in
the words, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in
heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in
heaven[1043],’ was believed to have been so transmitted to their
successors, the bishops[1044] of the Church, that they too had the
faculty of binding and loosing men’s bodies--that is, of arresting
or promoting their decomposition after death. Such an interpretation
of the text was facilitated by the very simplicity of its wording;
for λύω, in modern Greek λυόνω, ‘loose,’ expresses equally well the
ideas of dissolution and of absolution, while δέω, in modern Greek
δένω, ‘bind,’ embraces their respective opposites. A _nomocanon de
excommunicatis_[1045], promulgated in explanation of the fact that
excommunication sometimes failed to produce its expected result,
presents clearly the authorised doctrine and at the same time
illustrates effectively the twofold usage of the words ‘loosing’ and
‘binding.’
‘Concerning excommunicated persons, the which suffer excommunication by
their bishops and after death are found with their bodies “not loosed”
(ἄλυτα).
‘Certain persons have been justly, reasonably, and lawfully
excommunicated by their bishops, as transgressors of the divine law,
and have died in the state of excommunication without amending their
ways and receiving forgiveness, and have been buried, and in a short
time their bodies have been found “loosed” (λελυμένα) and sundered bone
from bone....
‘Now this is exceeding marvellous that he who hath been lawfully
excommunicated should after his death be found with his body “loosed”
(λελυμένος τὸ σῶμα) and the joints thereof sundered....’
This ‘exceeding marvellous’ occurrence was therefore submitted to the
consideration of learned divines, whose verdict was to the effect that
any excommunicated person whose body did not remain whole had no more
hope of salvation, because he was no longer in a state to be ‘loosed’
and forgiven by the bishop who had excommunicated him[1046], but had
become already ‘an inheritor of everlasting torment.’
‘But,’ continues the _nomocanon_ formulated by these theologians,
‘they that are found excommunicate, to wit, with their bodies whole
and “not loosed” (ἄλυτα), these stand in need of forgiveness, in order
that the body may attain unto freedom from the “bond” (δεσμόν) of
excommunication. For even as the body is found “bound” (δεδεμένον)
in the earth, so is the soul “bound” (δεδεμένη) and tormented in the
hands of the Devil. And whensoever the body receive forgiveness and be
“loosed” (λυθῇ) from excommunication, by power of God the soul likewise
is freed from the hands of the Devil, and receiveth the life eternal,
the light that hath no evening, and the joy ineffable.’
The whole doctrine of the physical results both of excommunication
and of absolution appeared to Leo Allatius to be indisputable, and
he mentions[1047] several notable cases in which the truth of it
was demonstrated. Athanasius, Metropolitan of Imbros, is quoted
as recording how at the request of citizens of Thasos he read the
absolution over several incorrupt bodies, ‘and before the absolution
was even finished all the corpses were dissolved into dust.’ A similar
case was that of a converted Turk who was subsequently excommunicated
at Naples, and had been dead some years before he obtained absolution
and dissolution at the hands of two Metropolitans. More remarkable
still was a case in which a priest, who had pronounced a sentence of
excommunication, afterwards turned Mohammedan, while the victim of his
curse, though he had died in the Christian faith, remained ‘bound.’ The
matter was reported to the Patriarch Raphael, and at his instance the
Turk, though after much demur, read the absolution over the Christian’s
body, and towards the end of the reading, ‘the swelling of the body
went down, and it turned completely to dust.’ The Turk thereupon
embraced Christianity once more, and was put to death for doing so.
Most graphic of all is a story attributed to one Malaxus[1048]. The
Sultan having been informed--among other evidences of the power of
Christianity--that the bodies of the excommunicated never obtained
dissolution till absolution was read over them, bade seek out such
an one and absolve him. The Patriarch of the time accordingly made
enquiries, which resulted in his hearing of a priest’s widow who had
been excommunicated by a predecessor, the Patriarch Gennadius. Her
story was that having been rebuked by him for prostitution she publicly
charged him with an attempt to seduce her. Gennadius had answered
the charge by praying aloud one Sunday in the presence of all the
clergy, that, if her accusation were true, God would pardon her all
her sins and give her happiness hereafter and let her body, when she
died, dissolve; but, if the charge were slander and calumny against
himself, then by the will and judgement of Almighty God he exercised
his power of severing her from the communion of the faithful, to remain
unpardoned and incorruptible. Forty days afterwards she had died of
dysentery and having been buried remained incorrupt.
Exhumed at the Sultan’s instance the body was found to be still sound
and whole, of a dark colour and with the skin stretched like the
parchment of a drum. It was then removed and kept for a certain time
under the Sultan’s seal, until the Patriarch decided to absolve it. As
he read the absolution the crackling of the body as it broke up could
be heard from within the coffin. It was then again kept for a few
days under the Sultan’s seal, and when finally the coffin was opened
the body was found ‘dissolved and decomposed, having at last obtained
mercy.’ And the Sultan was so impressed by the miracle that he is
recorded to have exclaimed, ‘Certainly the Christian religion is true
beyond all question.’
Suchlike stories, together with the formula of excommunication and
the _nomocanon_ above quoted, prove conclusively that the Church did
not merely acquiesce in one part of the popular superstition but
authoritatively sanctioned it and utilised it for her own ends. The
incorruptibility of the dead body under certain conditions was made an
article of faith and an instrument of terrorism, which, as will appear
later[1049], the ill-educated peasant-priests did not scruple to wield
widely as an incentive to baptism, a deterrent from apostasy, and a
challenge to repentance.
The name by which ecclesiastical writers designated a person
whose body was thus ‘bound’ by excommunication, was one which has
already been explained, τυμπανιαῖος[1050] or, in another form,
τυμπανίτης[1051]--swollen until the skin is as tight as a drum. This
word, which now survives, so far as I know, only in one island, and in
the seventeenth century, to judge by Leo Allatius’ reference to it,
was certainly less common than the word _vrykolakas_, had probably at
one time, before Slavonic influence was felt, belonged to the popular
as well as to the ecclesiastical vocabulary; and it was, I suspect,
borrowed by the Church from popular speech at the same time as she
borrowed from popular superstition the idea of dead bodies being
‘bound’ and withheld from corruption by a curse.
At what date this appropriation took place I cannot determine; but
it must certainly have been before Slavonic influence was widely
felt; for, when once the Greek _revenant_ had acquired the baneful
characteristics of the Slavonic vampire, the clergy would surely
never have claimed as a new thing the power to ‘bind’ the dead by
excommunication, when the laity (and indeed many of their own calling
too) believed that persons so ‘bound’ became rampant and ravening
_vrykolakes_. The belief must therefore have been incorporated in
ecclesiastical doctrine at a time when the Greek people spoke of the
incorrupt dead as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ and conceived of them as
reasonable _revenants_.
The process by which the belief came to obtain the sanction of the
Church is not hard to guess. The ambiguity of the words λύω, ‘loose,’
and δέω, ‘bind,’ may well have been the starting-point. If, on the
one hand, the apostles, or the bishops who succeeded them, treated
certain sins as ‘having no forgiveness neither in this world nor the
world to come,’ and in the exercise of their power to bind and to loose
included in their formula of excommunication some such phrase as Leo
Allatius records, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and
after death never to be “loosed”’ (meaning thereby ‘absolved’); while,
on the other hand, the Greek people were hereditarily familiar with
a pagan belief that the dead bodies of persons who lay under a curse
were not ‘loosed’ (in the sense of ‘dissolved’); then the common-folk
for their part would necessarily have understood the ecclesiastical
curse as a sentence of ‘non-dissolution’; while the clergy would have
been less than Greek if they had not seen, and more than Greek if they
had not seized, the handle which popular superstition gave them, and
by adding to their accustomed formula (μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος, ‘after
death never to be “loosed”’) such apparently innocent words as ὥσπερ αἱ
πέτραι καὶ τὰ σίδηρα[1052], ‘even as stone and iron,’ substituted the
idea of ‘dissolution’ for that of ‘absolution’ and definitely committed
the Church to the old pagan doctrine.
If this conjecture as to the process by which the popular belief became
an article of the Orthodox faith be correct, a further suggestion
may be made as to the date at which the process began. If the word
‘loosing’ was misunderstood by the Greeks when used in the formula
of excommunication, it would equally have been misunderstood in the
words of Christ, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound
in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in
heaven[1053].’ Was it then the knowledge that these words were commonly
misinterpreted by the Greeks which led the author of the fourth Gospel
to reproduce them in a less equivocal form: “Whosesoever sins ye remit,
they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are
retained[1054]”? This would indicate an early date indeed. Yet the date
matters little as compared with the main fact that the ecclesiastical
doctrine of the incorruptibility of excommunicated persons was at some
time borrowed from paganism.
The other half of the popular superstition, namely that those whose
bodies were ‘bound’ by excommunication or otherwise, and whom the earth
did not ‘receive,’ were ejected by her and re-appeared as _revenants_,
caused the Church some embarrassment. Sometimes the alleged
resuscitation of such persons was condemned as a mere hallucination of
timorous and superstitious minds; at other times it was accepted as a
fact and explained as a work of the Devil designed to lead men astray,
and acting upon this idea the clergy often lent their services to
absolve and to dissolve the suspected corpse.
Leo Allatius[1055] reflects both these views and shows their effect
upon the conduct of the clergy. After describing the actual appearance
of such bodies, which gained for them the name τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’
he introduces the second half of the superstition by saying that into
such bodies the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about
working all manner of destruction; and he adds that when the body is
exhumed, ‘the priests recite prayers, and the body is thrown on a
burning pyre; before the supplications are finished, the joints of the
body gradually fall apart, and all the remains are burnt to ashes.’ Yet
shortly afterwards he states, ‘This belief is not of fresh and recent
growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who
have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out
of the popular mind.’ There is a clear contrast between the conduct
of ‘the priests’ in one passage and that of the ‘men of piety’ in the
other. The clergy did not as a body adopt a single and consistent
attitude towards the popular superstition.
Similar inconsistency marks the _nomocanon_ concerning _vrykolakes_,
from which I have given selections along with the rest of Leo’s account
in the last section; these passages, for convenience of reference, are
here repeated:
‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which
they call _vrykolakas_...
‘It is impossible that a dead man become a _vrykolakas_ save it be
that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet
and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents and oft-times at
night _causeth men to imagine_ that the dead man whom they knew before
cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see
visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing
still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.
‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the
remains of the man ... and the dead man--one who has long been dead and
buried--_appears to them_ to have flesh and blood and nails and hair
... and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do
away with it altogether....’
Then, after denying again the reality of such things which exist κατὰ
φαντασίαν, _in imagination only_, the _nomocanon_ continues:
‘But know that _when such remains be found_, the which, as we have
said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an
invocation of the Mother of God, ... and _to perform memorial services
for the dead_ with funeral meats.’
The self-contradiction of the pronouncement is exposed in the phrases
which I have italicised. Clearly if such remains are found and the
dead man is so affected by the work of the Devil that special services
for his repose[1056] are required, the theory of hallucination is
untenable. But this very inconsistency of the _nomocanon_, though
according to Allatius it is of uncertain authorship, proves it, as
I will show, a very valuable document of the Church’s traditional
teaching on this matter.
S. Anastasius Sinaita, who became bishop of Antioch in 561 and died
in 599, refers to _revenants_ in a passage which, literally rendered,
runs as follows[1057]: ‘Again it appears that devils, by means of false
prophets who obey them and with their aid work signs and heal bodily
diseases to the delusion of themselves and others, present even a
dead man as risen again, and (in his person) talk with the living, in
imagination (ἐν φαντασίᾳ). For a devil enters into the dead body of the
man, and moves it, presenting the dead man risen again as it were in
answer to the foolish prayer of the deceiver. And the evil spirit talks
as it were in the person of the dead man with him whom he is deluding,
telling him such things as he himself wishes to tell and answering also
further questions....’
In this passage Anastasius is clearly thinking of _revenants_ called
up by sorcerers; in his time, when the first Slavonic invaders had
only just entered Greece and anything like friendly intercourse
between the two races was still a thing of the future, the conception
of a real vampire was not yet known to the Greeks of Greece proper,
much less to those of Antioch; and it is easy therefore to believe
that the calling up of harmless _revenants_ was then a recognised
department of witchcraft, which afterwards lost its attractions. The
particular circumstances however to which Anastasius refers are of
minor importance; the interest of the passage lies in its inconsistency
of thought, which results indeed in a certain confusion of language;
for to say that ‘it appears that devils ... present even a dead man as
risen again, and talk with the living in imagination,’ would be not a
little obscure, if the context did not throw light upon the meaning.
More lucidly expressed the ideas are these: men see a dead person
apparently risen from his grave and able to talk with them; the raising
of the dead is the work of a devil (whose _modus operandi_ is described
in the second sentence); the talking is also done by the devil (as
explained in the third sentence); and finally the whole thing is an
hallucination.
Here then are the same contradictory doctrines as in the _nomocanon_;
the resuscitation of the dead man is the work of a devil who enters
into the corpse and moves it and raises it from the grave; and yet it
is the ‘imagination’ of the men who see it which is at fault. But it
can be no casual coincidence that S. Anastasius in the sixth century
and a _nomocanon_ which was quoted as authoritative in the seventeenth
attempted to combine two incompatible doctrines concerning the
re-appearance of the dead. Rather is it proof that from a very early
age the Church remained halting between two opinions; and the attitude
adopted towards the superstition by the clergy, some of whom, according
to Leo Allatius, had long tried to root it out of the popular mind,
while others rendered aid in absolving suspected corpses, naturally
varied according as they personally believed that _revenants_
(including _vrykolakes_) were a figment of the people’s imagination or
a real work of the Devil.
Now of these two ecclesiastical views, which are really alternative
and incompatible although attempts were made to combine them, the
former has clearly had little or no effect upon the people; in spite
of the efforts of the ‘men of piety who received the confessions
of Christians[1058]’ to extirpate the superstition, it remains
vigorous, as we have seen, down to this day. But the explanation of
the phenomenon as a work of the Devil was readily entertained; even
educated men were convinced of it. ‘It is the height of folly,’ says
Leo Allatius, speaking for himself, ‘to deny altogether that such
bodies are sometimes found incorrupt in the graves, and that by use of
them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt
of the human race’; and similarly Father Richard opens his account of
_vrykolakes_ with the statement that the Devil sometimes works by means
of dead bodies which he preserves in their entirety and re-animates.
As for the common-folk, the explanation accorded so well with the
diabolical characteristics of the _vrykolakas_ that they could hardly
have failed to accept it.
The popularisation of this view is well illustrated by a local
interpretation set upon a custom which I have already discussed, the
so-called custom of ‘Charon’s obol.’ I have shown that the practice
of placing a coin or other object in the mouth of the dead continues
down to the present day; that the classical notion, that the coin was
intended as payment for the ferryman of the Styx, was only a temporary
and probably local misinterpretation of the custom; and that the coin
or other object employed was really a charm designed to prevent any
evil spirit from entering (or possibly the soul from re-entering) the
dead body. Now in Chios and in Rhodes this original intention has not
been forgotten, and is combined with the belief in _vrykolakes_. In
the former island the woman who prepares the corpse for burial places
on its lips a cross of wax or cotton-stuff, and the priest also during
the funeral service prepares a fragment of pottery to be laid in the
same place by marking on it the sign of the cross and the letters I.
X. N. K. (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς νικᾷ, ‘Jesus Christ conquers’), both of them
with the avowed purpose of preventing any evil spirit from entering
the dead body and making of it a _vrykolakas_[1059]. In Rhodes a piece
of ancient pottery, inscribed with the same words but marked with the
pentacle[1060] instead of the cross, is placed in the mouth of the
dead for the same purpose[1061]. Clearly then in these two islands
this ecclesiastical view has been fully accepted by the people; and
what I can illustrate by customs in these cases I know to be equally
true of Greece in general. Whenever an explanation is sought of the
resuscitation of the dead, the answer, if any be forthcoming, lays the
responsibility for it on the Devil.
This opinion, as I have said, is abundantly justified by the conduct
of modern _vrykolakes_; but I am inclined to think that it was
held also, by the Church at any rate, in the pre-Slavonic age when
_revenants_ were of a less diabolical character. The actual practice of
excommunication was thought to have been instituted by St Paul[1062],
who twice speaks of ‘delivering persons unto Satan[1063].’ The early
ecclesiastical interpretation of this phrase is clearly given by
Theodoretus[1064]; commenting upon the sentence, “To deliver such an
one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may
be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus,” he draws special attention
to the fact that the body, and not the soul, is to be subjected to
diabolic affliction, and then adds, ‘We are taught by this, that those
who are excommunicated, that is to say, severed from the body of the
Church, will be assailed by the devil when he finds them void of
grace.’ In other words, the bodily punishment inflicted by the act of
excommunication was ‘possession’ by the devil.
Now Theodoretus, it is true, says nothing in this passage as to the
continuance of the punishment after death. But clearly if demoniacal
possession was the effect of excommunication, and if also, as we have
seen, the sentence of excommunication remained valid after death, it
must have followed that the dead body no less than the living body was
possessed of the devil; and if the devil in possession of the corpse
chose to agitate it and drive it out of the grave, the dead demoniac
was at once a _revenant_.
There is therefore some probability that, though the Church never
threatened the excommunicated with resuscitation but only with
incorruptibility, she may at a very early date have offered this
explanation of their alleged re-appearance; and the theory of
diabolical agency may have gained popular approval from the first; for
resuscitation was originally viewed by the Greek people as a calamity
befalling the dead man, not as a source of danger to the living;
and therefore an ecclesiastical doctrine, that it was by delivering
an offender unto Satan that the curse of the Church rendered him a
_revenant_, would have been felt to be a perfectly satisfactory, if
novel, explanation of the process by which a known cause, imprecation,
produced its known effect, resuscitation.
But, whatever the date at which the theory of diabolical possession
was first developed and disseminated, the Church, and the Church only,
was responsible for it. The Devil is a Christian conception, just as
the vampire is Slavonic. Both must go, if the modern superstition is
to be stripped of its accretions, and the genuinely Hellenic elements
discovered. What then remains? Simply the belief that the bodies of
certain classes of persons did not decay away in their graves but
returned therefrom, and the feeling that such persons were sufferers
deserving of pity. What then were the classes of persons so affected,
according to the original Greek superstition?
The classes now regarded as liable to become _vrykolakes_ were
enumerated at the end of the last section. But both Slavonic and
Christian influences have been felt here, as in the rest of the
superstition. I must therefore take those classes one by one, and
indicate the origin of each. None of them will require long discussion;
their _provenance_ is in many cases self-evident.
(1) Those who have not received the full and due rites of burial.
Here there can be no reason for supposing any alien influence; on
the contrary, the high importance attached by the ancient Greeks to
funeral-rites is everywhere apparent. It was these which Patroclus’
spirit returned to implore; these which Antigone risked her life to
give. The sin of Clytemnestra culminated in that she ‘dared to bury
her husband without mourning or lamentation[1065]’--an essential part
of the Greek funeral; and again in historical times Lysander’s honour
was tarnished not so much because he put to death some prisoners
of war, but because ‘he did not throw earth even upon their dead
bodies[1066].’ What effect such neglect was anciently believed to have
upon the dead is a question to be considered later; but the general
idea is plainly Hellenic.
(2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including
suicides), or, in Maina, where the vendetta is still in vogue, those
who having been murdered remain unavenged.
The most important element in this class is formed by those who
have been murdered, especially when, as in Maina, they are believed
to return from the grave with the purpose of seeking revenge upon
their murderers. Such an idea, as will be shown later, is thoroughly
consonant with ancient views of bloodguilt. But it appears also from
a passage of Lucian[1067] that any ‘violent’ or ‘sudden,’ as opposed
to ‘natural,’ death was commonly held to debar the victim from rest no
less effectually than actual murder. The whole class may therefore be
accepted as Hellenic, and may probably be considered to have always
comprised all persons whose lives were cut short suddenly before their
proper hour had come.
(3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church-festivals,
and children still-born.
The first division of this class may be variously explained; either
the child may be supposed to suffer for the sin committed by its
parents on a day when the Church enjoins continence, or else the
notion, that children born between Christmas and Epiphany are subject
to lycanthropy[1068] and therefore also, according to Slavonic views,
to vampirism, has become associated with other church-festivals
also. Children still-born are probably to be numbered among victims
of ‘sudden’ death. Thus the first division, being of ecclesiastical
or Slavonic origin, is to be set aside; the second may probably be
included in a larger Hellenic class already considered; neither
therefore requires any further discussion.
(4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent,
or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who in perjuring himself
calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be
false.