J. Theodore Bent
March 1885
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NOTES |
The survival of pagan customs in modern times fascinated the imagination of Victorian anthropologists, historians, folkorists, and travelers. J. Theodore Bent, who at times was all of these, visited the Cyclades in the 1880s and traced what he saw as the continued survival of Classical religion in the Greek islands. The material reported in his article "Old Mythology in New Apparel" would form the basis for his 1885 book The Cyclades; Or, Life Among the Insular Greeks. The article appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in March of 1885.
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OLD MYTHOLOGY IN NEW APPAREL.
We are generally accustomed to consider mythology as a bygone episode of juventus mundi; it may seem at first sight strange to realize that what we have read of in Homer exists to-day. But so it is, and the following facts collected during lengthened tours in remote corners of Greece will prove, I hope, that the mystic beings of classical Greece are present now, when the world is supposed to be growing old. All my instances are from the islands of the Ægean Sea, the Cyclades and the Sporades, where communication with the outer world has never been great, and over which the various waves of Goths, Italians, Turks, which in a measure destroyed the identity of continental Greece, had, comparatively speaking, slight influence, and that only in the towns near the coast, whereas up in the mountains of Naxos, Amorgos, &c., pure Greek blood still flows.
Here the mythology of their ancestors is deeply ingrained in the inhabitants, both in the ritual of their Church, and in their manners and customs; the ritual, indeed, of the Eastern Church is but an intellectual adaptation under Christian guidance of the problems propounded by the later philosophers to the popular doctrines of polytheism.
I was in the island of Keos, or Zia, one of the Cyclades, when the idea of forming this collection struck me, and it was on the occasion of being told that here St. Artemidos is considered as the patron saint of weakly children. The church dedicated to this saint is some little way from the town on the hill slopes; thither a mother will take a child afflicted by any mysterious wasting, “struck by the Nereids,” as they say; she then strips off its clothes, and puts on new ones blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite for the church; and then if perchance the child grows strong, she will thank St. Artemidos for the blessing vouchsafed, unconscious that she is perpetuating the archaic worship of Artemis. The Ionian idea of the fructifying and nourishing properties of the Ephesian Artemis has been transferred to her Christian namesake.
About these Nereids, too, we hear much in modern Greece, and they have the properties of many of our mythological friends, those of Keos, for example, are supposed to live on cliffs and in trees; if a man sleeps under the shadow of a cliff or tree, and is taken with a cold sweat, they say “the goddess of the tree has injured him,” and accordingly to appease her they spread on the place a clean white cloth, and put on it newmade bread, a plate with honey, another with sweetmeats, a bottle of good wine, a knife and fork and an empty glass, an unburnt candle, and an incense pot; an old woman utters some mystic words, and then all go away, “that the Nereids may eat and the sufferer regain his health.’’ We have here a ceremony very like that anciently performed at Athens to appease the Eumenides when a banquet was laid near the caves they were supposed to haunt, of which honey and milk were the necessary ingredients.
The Nereids in many cases correspond to the nymphs of antiquity; they preside over healing streams, and they wash in them at night when the waters sleep, and no one at that time dares to approach for fear of becoming frenzied (νυμφόληπτος).
The cloak of Phoebus Apollo has fallen on the prophet Elias. As of old temples on all the highest hills of the islands are dedicated to the sun-god; the reason is obvious. Ἠλιος, the sun deity (the H not being aspirated), at once suggested Elias to the easily accommodating divines, and to all intents and purposes the prophet supplies the place of the sun-god of antiquity. Prophet Elias has power over rain; in times of drought people assemble in crowds in his church to pray for rain, and in this he has the attribute of ὄμβριος or νέτιος Ζεῦς. When it thunders they say the prophet is driving in his chariot in pursuit of demons.
To pass on to another analogy. There is a curious parallel between St. Anarguris, the patron saint in some parts of flocks and herds, and the god Pan of ancient days. On the island of Thermià (Κύθνος), I saw a church dedicated to St. Anarguris built over the mouth of a cavern, as the protecting saint of the place, instead of Pan, the ancient god of grottos. But a still more marked instance of the continuation of Pan worship occurs to-day on Keos at the little church of St. Anarguris, at a remote hamlet called ’στὸ μακρινὸ. Whenever an ox is ailing they take it to this church and pray for its recovery; if the cock crows when they start, or they hear the voice of a man or the grunt of a pig, there is every hope that the animal will be cured; but on the contrary, if they hear a cat, a dog, or a woman, it is looked upon as an evil omen. When at the church of St. Anarguris they solemnly register a vow that if the ox recovers they will present it to the saint when its days of work are over; accordingly, every year on the 1st of July, the day on which they celebrate the feast of St. Anarguris, numbers of aged oxen may be seen on the road to this church, where they are slaughtered on the threshold and the flesh distributed amongst the poor.
St. Nicholas, again, is the lineal descendant of Poseidon; he is the sailor’s god. Wherever in ancient times there existed a temple to the honor of Poseidon we now find an insignificant whitewashed edifice dedicated to St. Nicholas. This is especially noticeable at Tenos, where was in antiquity the famous shrine and feast of Poseidon. On this island the chief town is now called St. Nicholas, and hither yearly assemble to worship thousands of Greeks from all parts of the world before a miracle-working shrine. Modern priestcraft, in short, has cleverly arranged that Tenos should be the modern Delos where the topic of independent panhellenism can be freely discussed.
Everything nautical has to do with St. Nicholas; in Mykenos a little church built on a rock out in the harbor is dedicated to him; another on the sea shore at Paros is dedicated to Ἅγιος Νικόλαος Θαλασσίτης his picture, or εἰκὼν, is painted on the inside of crabs’ backs, which are gilded outside and worshipped. In nautical songs St. Nicholas is always alluded to as the inventor of the rudder, and is represented as seated at the helm, whilst Christ sits at the prow and the Virgin in the middle. In a storm sailors call on him for assistance, as the ancients did on the Dioscouri, whom they thought to have power to allay storms direct from Poseidon himself.
We always find St. Dionysius as the successor of Dionysos in the Christian ritual. The island of Naxos was a chief centre of the worship of the wine-loving god in antiquity; and a fable about St. Dionysius, still told in the islands and on the mainland, clearly points to the continuity of the myth. It is as follows:--
St. Dionysius was on his way one day from his monastery on Mount Olympus to Naxos, and he sat down to rest during the heat of the day. Close to him he saw a pretty plant which he wished to take with him, and, lest it should wither by the way, he put it into the leg bone of a bird, and to his surprise at his next halting-place he found it had sprouted; so, accordingly, he put it into the leg bone of a lion, and the same thing occurred; finally, he put it into the leg of an ass, and in reaching Naxos he found the plant so rooted in the bones that he planted them altogether. And up came a vine, from the fruit of which he made the first wine, a little of which made the saint sing like a bird, a little more made him strong as a lion, and yet a little more made him as foolish as an ass.
At Melos they have a curious feast which recalls a Bacchic revelry. Every landowner who wishes to plant a vineyard calls together, on a certain day, fifty or more men, when church is over; to these he gives a spade apiece, and slaughters some goats and fills skins with wine. Then they all start off together to their work, preceded by a standard-bearer holding a white banner. In the field they eat the food, drink the wine, and plant the vineyard, all in the space of one day, and return home again, most of them in a decided state of intoxication. This is followed by a dance and further revelry in front of the church, which doubtless the village priest will hallow with his presence. The Greeks, taken as a whole, are a sober race, but on certain occasions and festivals it is almost a religious duty to drink heavily. In the island of Paros there actually exists a church dedicated to the drunken St. George, whose feast-day is on the 3rd of November. The priest thereof, in answer to my inquiries about this strange name, remarked that the 3rd of November is the anniversary of St. George’s burial, and then the inhabitants usually tap their new-made wine and get drunk; but why they should on such a solemn occasion speak of Ἅγιος Γέοργιος μεθύστης I could not divine, unless we take into account the hereditary tendency of the Greeks to deify passions.
A curious instance of the survival of the mythical Titans I met at Chios, at the southern point of which island exists a colossal white rock; this the natives told me was a stone which Samson had once hurled against God, and it had fallen here. But of all the myths of antiquity which exist to-day none is more marked than the belief in Charon, the Styx, and Hades. In Thermià. they believe that in Charon’s infernal kingdom are lamps which represent the life of men, and when each man’s lamp is extinguished for want of oil he will die.
A Greek pesant looks upon death quite differently from what a peasant of the western world is taught to believe. To him it is the end of all joy and gladness; the songs over his body (myriologues) speak of the black earth, the end of light and brilliancy. A popular Klephtic song on the death of Zedros, when read by the side of Sophocles’ description of the death of Ajax, shows how curiously alike are the ideas of death as painted in the two poems. Charon is still believed to be a white-haired old man with long and fearful nails, and in myriologues or lamentations, which are still of every-day occurrence in the islands, you actually hear of Charon’s caïque. He is now spoken of as Charos. I had been told that in some parts of Greece they still put money on the mouth of a deceased person to pay the passage (ναὔλον). I sought in vain for instances of it in the islands; but one day, whilst attending a child’s funeral in a mountain village of Naxos, I saw a wax cross put on the child’s mouth by the priest, and on inquiry I was told it was the ναὔλον, i.e., freight money—so completely has the Eastern Church incorporated into itself the ancient ideas.
In a popular song I have heard Charon spoken of as a “bird like unto a black swallow,” which compares curiously with the passage in the twenty-second Odyssey, where Athena is represented as sitting on the roof of the palace at Ithaca like a swallow, on the day of vengeance for Penelope’s suitors.
It will be apparent from the above remarks that at the time of the change of religion from paganism to Christianity, names were given to saints to supply wants felt by the abandonment of polytheism. There are many instances of this. For example, St. Eleutherius is the saint called upon by women in childbirth to deliver them; deaf people are recommended to consult St. Jacob (Ἄκονϕος as he is called, κονϕος— deaf), and in Lesbos I was told that St. Therapon could heal all manner of diseases. In the same way young married people who wish for a numerous progeny chose St. Polycarp as their patron saint, so that they may have many teeth in their house, as the saying goes (πολὺ ’δόντια ’στο σπίτι).
St. Charalambos is, however, the Æsculapius of modern days. He used to hold jurisdiction over the plague, and is represented as a hideous wizard, trampling under foot a serpent with smoke issuing out of its mouth; and in fever-stricken, marshy districts St. Charalambos still reigns supreme. In many places it is the custom on the outbreak of a pestilence for forty women to make a garment in one day, which is hung up in the saint’s church. For instance, at Zephyria, the mediaeval capital of the island of Melos, which was abandoned altogether about twenty years ago as unfit to live in, I visited the ruins, and in the centre of them saw still standing the church of St. Charalambos, and an old man, who happened to be picking his olives there at the time, told me the history of the desolation, and the methods they used to resort to when he was young to rid the place of disease; how they used to bury heifers whole; and how they used to fasten up illnesses in a cauldron—that is to say, they wrote down the names of the various maladies on paper, and boiled them in a cauldron with some money and a cock in front of the shrine of the modern Æsculapius. But in vain: the town had to be abandoned, for it had been cursed by a priest, and never could hope to recover salubrity.
It is a very common custom for Greek peasants to pass the night in a church of St. Charalambos with a view to cure an ailment; at festivals too, near miraculous eikons, such as the one at Tenos, the invalids pass whole nights in the church, reminding one forcibly of that ridiculous scene in Aristophanes (Plut. vv. 655) when the priests stole the food from the invalids who were asleep in the temple of Æsculapius, and we can easily see in this custom a mild form of the ancient ἐγκοίμησις, when the sick folks lay down in the skin of a newly killed ram in the churches, and in this luxurious couch awaited the inspiration of the divinity.
The quackeries and incantations common in Greece to-day as specifics for certain diseases are many of them very quaint, being long rhymes and formulas mixing up Christ, the Virgin, and saints with magic words and signs which savour of heathendom. It is the old women only who are supposed to know them, and they are very shy of producing them before a foreign unbeliever. They are just like those women who in ancient Athens practised quackery and secret cures, which were zealously guarded and kept up as specialities in families. Curiously enough these old women in Greece who profess to cure diseases will tell you, arguing from the analogy of plants, that all diseases are worms, which consume the body, and that they are generated by the wrath of the gods. They have arrived at the bacillus theory by much straighter reckoning than our physicians.
On the day of the commemoration of the dead I was in a small village in Amorgos, and there witnessed the quaint ceremony of κόλλυβα. Every house on this occasion sends to the church a plate of boiled corn; tottering old women with one foot in the grave generally bring it, and pour the contents into a large basket placed before the high altar whilst the service is going on, and then into the mass of corn they stick a candle, and if the family is especially grand they have separate plates with sesame seeds, or adorned with patterns of raisins and almonds. After the service is over the boiled corn and other delicacies are distributed amongst the poor outside the church. These offerings are very suggestive of the ancient idea of Demeter and her daughter.
We will now consider another branch of mythology—the fickle goddesses, the Fates (Μοὶρα), whose workings in modern Greece are looked upon with as much superstition as of old. On the island of Sikinos I attended an interesting ceremony called the μοίρισμα of a child, which happens a year after its birth. All the friends and relatives are gathered together to a feast. A tray is brought out, and on it are put various objects—a pen, money, tools, an egg, &c., and whichever the infant first touches with its hands is held to be the indication of the μõιρα as to the most suitable career to be chosen for it. The meaning of the first-mentioned articles is obvious. The demarch of Sikinos told me that his son had touched a pen, consequently he had been sent to the university at Athens, and had there distinguished himself, but the meaning of the egg is not quite so clear, and the egg is the horror of all parents, for if the child touches it he will be fitted for no calling in life—he will be a good-for-nothing, a mere duck’s egg, so to speak, in society.
Some ceremony such as this must have been the one alluded to by Apollodorus when he tells us that seven days after the birth of Meleager the Fates told the horologue of the child, and the torch was lighted on the hearth. In some places still the seventh day is chosen as the one for this important ceremony, and it is called ἐϕτὰ. When it is dark and the lamps lighted a table is put in the middle of the house, a basin full of honey in the centre of the table, and all round quantities of food. Numerous oil lamps are then lighted; one dedicated to Christ, another to the Virgin, another to the Baptist, and so forth. A symbol of faith is then read and deep silence prevails, and the saint whose lamp is first extinguished is chosen as the protector of the infant. At this moment they say the Fates come in and “καλομοιράζονσι” the child, and take some of the food from the table.
The Fates are in some places supposed to write on the forehead of a man his destiny. Pimples on the nose and forehead are called γραψίματα τῶν Μοίρων. The decrees of the Fates are unalterable. According to various legends, attempts have been made to change them, but without avail. Only once, a girl of Naxos, so I was told, up in a mountain village, who was excessively ugly, managed to learn from a magician where the Fates lived, and that if she could get them to eat salt they would go blind and change her fate. She contrived to bring this about, and became lovely, married a prince, but had no children; “showing,” continued the legend by way of moral, “that the Fates never consent to a person being altogether happy.”
This changing from ugliness to beauty is a common subject for legends and beliefs. The first woman to see a child after birth must be lovely, so as to impart to it her beauty, and the first man must be of great strength, so as to impart his vigor. This reminds one of one of Herodotus’s stories (vi. 61), when ne seriously tells us of the change of an ugly child into the fairest woman of Sparta by her nurse taking her daily to the temple of the heroine Helen to pray. One day the heroine met the nurse and predicted that the child would become fair, which accordingly, says Herodotus, came to pass.
In Melos the Fates are greatly consulted in matrimonial concerns. The 25th of November, St. Catharine’s day, is considered the most suitable, and St. Catharine is accordingly prayed to by unmarried maidens to intercede on their behalf. On the vigil of her feast they make cakes with a good deal of salt in, which they eat before going to bed. As a natural result of eating so much salt and thinking about matrimony their dreams often take the turn of water and a kindly man offering them to drink. If this is so they are sure to marry that man.
Many of our mythological personages and legends have their parallel to-day. There are the Lamiæ, for instance, evil-working women who live in desert places, ill-formed like their ancestors, daughters of Belus and Sibyl; utterly unfit are they for household duties, for they cannot sweep, so an untidy woman to-day is said to have made the sweepings of a Lamia (Τῆς Λαμίας τὰ σαρώματα); they cannot bake, for they put bread into the oven before heating it; they have dogs and horses, but give bones to their horses and straw to their dogs. They are very gluttonous, so much so that in Byzantine and modern Greek the verb λαμιώνω is used to express over-eating. They have a special predilection for baby’s flesh, and a Greek mother of today will frighten her child by saying that a Lamia will come if it is naughty, just as was said to naughty children in ancient in ancient days; for the legend used to run that Zeus loved Lamia too well, untidy though she was, and Hera, out of jealousy, killed her children, whereat Lamia was so grieved that she took to eating the children of others. Some Lamiæ are like the Sirens, and by taking the form of lovely nymphs, beguile luckless men to their destruction; for example, an ecclesiastical legend, savoring strongly of Boccaccio, tells us how a Lamia charmed a monk as he sat by the side of a lake one evening; dawn came, and the monk was seen no more, but some children swore to having seen his hoary beard floating on the waters of the lake.
Dragons are common now in every weird place, especially where those large stoned Hellenic walls are standing, and stories like those of Perseus, the Centaurs, the Cyclops, &c., are common among the peasants who speak of these old remains as Τοῦ Δράκον τὸ οπίτι, the Dragon’s house. In one fable we have the exact story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. One Spanos is the traveller, ὁ Δράκος is Polyphemus, and the facts are the same.
The witches (στρίγλαι) of modern folk-lore are supposed to be over a hundred, and to be able to turn into birds at will like the harpies of old; they love the flesh of unbaptised babies, and for this reason children wear charms, as they do also against the evil eye (βασκανεὶα). My host on the island of Pholygandros most solemnly told me how a person with the evil eye could wither a fruit-tree by admiring it, and on my looking sceptical, he quoted several instances which had come under his immediate notice. This is the ὀφθαλμὸς βάσκανος of antiquity, the god Fascinus of Latin mythology, whom Pliny tells us was worshipped so strangely by the Vestal Virgins.
I witnessed a very sad case on the island of Kimolos of a sailor who, in a storm, as he rounded the dreaded Cape Malea on his return home, had been struck, as they told me, by that mysterious ghost-demon the Τελώνια; he was kept in the village church all day, and had been in there all night, whilst his relatives were praying vehemently around him for the return of his shattered intellect. This τελώνια is a species of electricity, and appears during storms on the mastheads, which the Greek sailors personify as birds of evil omen, which settle on the masts with a view to destroy the ship and drown the sailors. They have words expressly for exorcising this phantom, and sometimes they try to drive it away by beating brass or shooting. In Italy this is called the fire of St. Elmo, and is evidently the same idea which in ancient times was connected with the Dioscouri.
From these points it will be easily seen how much that is old lives to-day. In manners and customs and daily life the peasant Greeks reproduce even more that can be identified as ancient, but this is apart from my present subject.
Here the mythology of their ancestors is deeply ingrained in the inhabitants, both in the ritual of their Church, and in their manners and customs; the ritual, indeed, of the Eastern Church is but an intellectual adaptation under Christian guidance of the problems propounded by the later philosophers to the popular doctrines of polytheism.
I was in the island of Keos, or Zia, one of the Cyclades, when the idea of forming this collection struck me, and it was on the occasion of being told that here St. Artemidos is considered as the patron saint of weakly children. The church dedicated to this saint is some little way from the town on the hill slopes; thither a mother will take a child afflicted by any mysterious wasting, “struck by the Nereids,” as they say; she then strips off its clothes, and puts on new ones blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite for the church; and then if perchance the child grows strong, she will thank St. Artemidos for the blessing vouchsafed, unconscious that she is perpetuating the archaic worship of Artemis. The Ionian idea of the fructifying and nourishing properties of the Ephesian Artemis has been transferred to her Christian namesake.
About these Nereids, too, we hear much in modern Greece, and they have the properties of many of our mythological friends, those of Keos, for example, are supposed to live on cliffs and in trees; if a man sleeps under the shadow of a cliff or tree, and is taken with a cold sweat, they say “the goddess of the tree has injured him,” and accordingly to appease her they spread on the place a clean white cloth, and put on it newmade bread, a plate with honey, another with sweetmeats, a bottle of good wine, a knife and fork and an empty glass, an unburnt candle, and an incense pot; an old woman utters some mystic words, and then all go away, “that the Nereids may eat and the sufferer regain his health.’’ We have here a ceremony very like that anciently performed at Athens to appease the Eumenides when a banquet was laid near the caves they were supposed to haunt, of which honey and milk were the necessary ingredients.
The Nereids in many cases correspond to the nymphs of antiquity; they preside over healing streams, and they wash in them at night when the waters sleep, and no one at that time dares to approach for fear of becoming frenzied (νυμφόληπτος).
The cloak of Phoebus Apollo has fallen on the prophet Elias. As of old temples on all the highest hills of the islands are dedicated to the sun-god; the reason is obvious. Ἠλιος, the sun deity (the H not being aspirated), at once suggested Elias to the easily accommodating divines, and to all intents and purposes the prophet supplies the place of the sun-god of antiquity. Prophet Elias has power over rain; in times of drought people assemble in crowds in his church to pray for rain, and in this he has the attribute of ὄμβριος or νέτιος Ζεῦς. When it thunders they say the prophet is driving in his chariot in pursuit of demons.
To pass on to another analogy. There is a curious parallel between St. Anarguris, the patron saint in some parts of flocks and herds, and the god Pan of ancient days. On the island of Thermià (Κύθνος), I saw a church dedicated to St. Anarguris built over the mouth of a cavern, as the protecting saint of the place, instead of Pan, the ancient god of grottos. But a still more marked instance of the continuation of Pan worship occurs to-day on Keos at the little church of St. Anarguris, at a remote hamlet called ’στὸ μακρινὸ. Whenever an ox is ailing they take it to this church and pray for its recovery; if the cock crows when they start, or they hear the voice of a man or the grunt of a pig, there is every hope that the animal will be cured; but on the contrary, if they hear a cat, a dog, or a woman, it is looked upon as an evil omen. When at the church of St. Anarguris they solemnly register a vow that if the ox recovers they will present it to the saint when its days of work are over; accordingly, every year on the 1st of July, the day on which they celebrate the feast of St. Anarguris, numbers of aged oxen may be seen on the road to this church, where they are slaughtered on the threshold and the flesh distributed amongst the poor.
St. Nicholas, again, is the lineal descendant of Poseidon; he is the sailor’s god. Wherever in ancient times there existed a temple to the honor of Poseidon we now find an insignificant whitewashed edifice dedicated to St. Nicholas. This is especially noticeable at Tenos, where was in antiquity the famous shrine and feast of Poseidon. On this island the chief town is now called St. Nicholas, and hither yearly assemble to worship thousands of Greeks from all parts of the world before a miracle-working shrine. Modern priestcraft, in short, has cleverly arranged that Tenos should be the modern Delos where the topic of independent panhellenism can be freely discussed.
Everything nautical has to do with St. Nicholas; in Mykenos a little church built on a rock out in the harbor is dedicated to him; another on the sea shore at Paros is dedicated to Ἅγιος Νικόλαος Θαλασσίτης his picture, or εἰκὼν, is painted on the inside of crabs’ backs, which are gilded outside and worshipped. In nautical songs St. Nicholas is always alluded to as the inventor of the rudder, and is represented as seated at the helm, whilst Christ sits at the prow and the Virgin in the middle. In a storm sailors call on him for assistance, as the ancients did on the Dioscouri, whom they thought to have power to allay storms direct from Poseidon himself.
We always find St. Dionysius as the successor of Dionysos in the Christian ritual. The island of Naxos was a chief centre of the worship of the wine-loving god in antiquity; and a fable about St. Dionysius, still told in the islands and on the mainland, clearly points to the continuity of the myth. It is as follows:--
St. Dionysius was on his way one day from his monastery on Mount Olympus to Naxos, and he sat down to rest during the heat of the day. Close to him he saw a pretty plant which he wished to take with him, and, lest it should wither by the way, he put it into the leg bone of a bird, and to his surprise at his next halting-place he found it had sprouted; so, accordingly, he put it into the leg bone of a lion, and the same thing occurred; finally, he put it into the leg of an ass, and in reaching Naxos he found the plant so rooted in the bones that he planted them altogether. And up came a vine, from the fruit of which he made the first wine, a little of which made the saint sing like a bird, a little more made him strong as a lion, and yet a little more made him as foolish as an ass.
At Melos they have a curious feast which recalls a Bacchic revelry. Every landowner who wishes to plant a vineyard calls together, on a certain day, fifty or more men, when church is over; to these he gives a spade apiece, and slaughters some goats and fills skins with wine. Then they all start off together to their work, preceded by a standard-bearer holding a white banner. In the field they eat the food, drink the wine, and plant the vineyard, all in the space of one day, and return home again, most of them in a decided state of intoxication. This is followed by a dance and further revelry in front of the church, which doubtless the village priest will hallow with his presence. The Greeks, taken as a whole, are a sober race, but on certain occasions and festivals it is almost a religious duty to drink heavily. In the island of Paros there actually exists a church dedicated to the drunken St. George, whose feast-day is on the 3rd of November. The priest thereof, in answer to my inquiries about this strange name, remarked that the 3rd of November is the anniversary of St. George’s burial, and then the inhabitants usually tap their new-made wine and get drunk; but why they should on such a solemn occasion speak of Ἅγιος Γέοργιος μεθύστης I could not divine, unless we take into account the hereditary tendency of the Greeks to deify passions.
A curious instance of the survival of the mythical Titans I met at Chios, at the southern point of which island exists a colossal white rock; this the natives told me was a stone which Samson had once hurled against God, and it had fallen here. But of all the myths of antiquity which exist to-day none is more marked than the belief in Charon, the Styx, and Hades. In Thermià. they believe that in Charon’s infernal kingdom are lamps which represent the life of men, and when each man’s lamp is extinguished for want of oil he will die.
A Greek pesant looks upon death quite differently from what a peasant of the western world is taught to believe. To him it is the end of all joy and gladness; the songs over his body (myriologues) speak of the black earth, the end of light and brilliancy. A popular Klephtic song on the death of Zedros, when read by the side of Sophocles’ description of the death of Ajax, shows how curiously alike are the ideas of death as painted in the two poems. Charon is still believed to be a white-haired old man with long and fearful nails, and in myriologues or lamentations, which are still of every-day occurrence in the islands, you actually hear of Charon’s caïque. He is now spoken of as Charos. I had been told that in some parts of Greece they still put money on the mouth of a deceased person to pay the passage (ναὔλον). I sought in vain for instances of it in the islands; but one day, whilst attending a child’s funeral in a mountain village of Naxos, I saw a wax cross put on the child’s mouth by the priest, and on inquiry I was told it was the ναὔλον, i.e., freight money—so completely has the Eastern Church incorporated into itself the ancient ideas.
In a popular song I have heard Charon spoken of as a “bird like unto a black swallow,” which compares curiously with the passage in the twenty-second Odyssey, where Athena is represented as sitting on the roof of the palace at Ithaca like a swallow, on the day of vengeance for Penelope’s suitors.
It will be apparent from the above remarks that at the time of the change of religion from paganism to Christianity, names were given to saints to supply wants felt by the abandonment of polytheism. There are many instances of this. For example, St. Eleutherius is the saint called upon by women in childbirth to deliver them; deaf people are recommended to consult St. Jacob (Ἄκονϕος as he is called, κονϕος— deaf), and in Lesbos I was told that St. Therapon could heal all manner of diseases. In the same way young married people who wish for a numerous progeny chose St. Polycarp as their patron saint, so that they may have many teeth in their house, as the saying goes (πολὺ ’δόντια ’στο σπίτι).
St. Charalambos is, however, the Æsculapius of modern days. He used to hold jurisdiction over the plague, and is represented as a hideous wizard, trampling under foot a serpent with smoke issuing out of its mouth; and in fever-stricken, marshy districts St. Charalambos still reigns supreme. In many places it is the custom on the outbreak of a pestilence for forty women to make a garment in one day, which is hung up in the saint’s church. For instance, at Zephyria, the mediaeval capital of the island of Melos, which was abandoned altogether about twenty years ago as unfit to live in, I visited the ruins, and in the centre of them saw still standing the church of St. Charalambos, and an old man, who happened to be picking his olives there at the time, told me the history of the desolation, and the methods they used to resort to when he was young to rid the place of disease; how they used to bury heifers whole; and how they used to fasten up illnesses in a cauldron—that is to say, they wrote down the names of the various maladies on paper, and boiled them in a cauldron with some money and a cock in front of the shrine of the modern Æsculapius. But in vain: the town had to be abandoned, for it had been cursed by a priest, and never could hope to recover salubrity.
It is a very common custom for Greek peasants to pass the night in a church of St. Charalambos with a view to cure an ailment; at festivals too, near miraculous eikons, such as the one at Tenos, the invalids pass whole nights in the church, reminding one forcibly of that ridiculous scene in Aristophanes (Plut. vv. 655) when the priests stole the food from the invalids who were asleep in the temple of Æsculapius, and we can easily see in this custom a mild form of the ancient ἐγκοίμησις, when the sick folks lay down in the skin of a newly killed ram in the churches, and in this luxurious couch awaited the inspiration of the divinity.
The quackeries and incantations common in Greece to-day as specifics for certain diseases are many of them very quaint, being long rhymes and formulas mixing up Christ, the Virgin, and saints with magic words and signs which savour of heathendom. It is the old women only who are supposed to know them, and they are very shy of producing them before a foreign unbeliever. They are just like those women who in ancient Athens practised quackery and secret cures, which were zealously guarded and kept up as specialities in families. Curiously enough these old women in Greece who profess to cure diseases will tell you, arguing from the analogy of plants, that all diseases are worms, which consume the body, and that they are generated by the wrath of the gods. They have arrived at the bacillus theory by much straighter reckoning than our physicians.
On the day of the commemoration of the dead I was in a small village in Amorgos, and there witnessed the quaint ceremony of κόλλυβα. Every house on this occasion sends to the church a plate of boiled corn; tottering old women with one foot in the grave generally bring it, and pour the contents into a large basket placed before the high altar whilst the service is going on, and then into the mass of corn they stick a candle, and if the family is especially grand they have separate plates with sesame seeds, or adorned with patterns of raisins and almonds. After the service is over the boiled corn and other delicacies are distributed amongst the poor outside the church. These offerings are very suggestive of the ancient idea of Demeter and her daughter.
We will now consider another branch of mythology—the fickle goddesses, the Fates (Μοὶρα), whose workings in modern Greece are looked upon with as much superstition as of old. On the island of Sikinos I attended an interesting ceremony called the μοίρισμα of a child, which happens a year after its birth. All the friends and relatives are gathered together to a feast. A tray is brought out, and on it are put various objects—a pen, money, tools, an egg, &c., and whichever the infant first touches with its hands is held to be the indication of the μõιρα as to the most suitable career to be chosen for it. The meaning of the first-mentioned articles is obvious. The demarch of Sikinos told me that his son had touched a pen, consequently he had been sent to the university at Athens, and had there distinguished himself, but the meaning of the egg is not quite so clear, and the egg is the horror of all parents, for if the child touches it he will be fitted for no calling in life—he will be a good-for-nothing, a mere duck’s egg, so to speak, in society.
Some ceremony such as this must have been the one alluded to by Apollodorus when he tells us that seven days after the birth of Meleager the Fates told the horologue of the child, and the torch was lighted on the hearth. In some places still the seventh day is chosen as the one for this important ceremony, and it is called ἐϕτὰ. When it is dark and the lamps lighted a table is put in the middle of the house, a basin full of honey in the centre of the table, and all round quantities of food. Numerous oil lamps are then lighted; one dedicated to Christ, another to the Virgin, another to the Baptist, and so forth. A symbol of faith is then read and deep silence prevails, and the saint whose lamp is first extinguished is chosen as the protector of the infant. At this moment they say the Fates come in and “καλομοιράζονσι” the child, and take some of the food from the table.
The Fates are in some places supposed to write on the forehead of a man his destiny. Pimples on the nose and forehead are called γραψίματα τῶν Μοίρων. The decrees of the Fates are unalterable. According to various legends, attempts have been made to change them, but without avail. Only once, a girl of Naxos, so I was told, up in a mountain village, who was excessively ugly, managed to learn from a magician where the Fates lived, and that if she could get them to eat salt they would go blind and change her fate. She contrived to bring this about, and became lovely, married a prince, but had no children; “showing,” continued the legend by way of moral, “that the Fates never consent to a person being altogether happy.”
This changing from ugliness to beauty is a common subject for legends and beliefs. The first woman to see a child after birth must be lovely, so as to impart to it her beauty, and the first man must be of great strength, so as to impart his vigor. This reminds one of one of Herodotus’s stories (vi. 61), when ne seriously tells us of the change of an ugly child into the fairest woman of Sparta by her nurse taking her daily to the temple of the heroine Helen to pray. One day the heroine met the nurse and predicted that the child would become fair, which accordingly, says Herodotus, came to pass.
In Melos the Fates are greatly consulted in matrimonial concerns. The 25th of November, St. Catharine’s day, is considered the most suitable, and St. Catharine is accordingly prayed to by unmarried maidens to intercede on their behalf. On the vigil of her feast they make cakes with a good deal of salt in, which they eat before going to bed. As a natural result of eating so much salt and thinking about matrimony their dreams often take the turn of water and a kindly man offering them to drink. If this is so they are sure to marry that man.
Many of our mythological personages and legends have their parallel to-day. There are the Lamiæ, for instance, evil-working women who live in desert places, ill-formed like their ancestors, daughters of Belus and Sibyl; utterly unfit are they for household duties, for they cannot sweep, so an untidy woman to-day is said to have made the sweepings of a Lamia (Τῆς Λαμίας τὰ σαρώματα); they cannot bake, for they put bread into the oven before heating it; they have dogs and horses, but give bones to their horses and straw to their dogs. They are very gluttonous, so much so that in Byzantine and modern Greek the verb λαμιώνω is used to express over-eating. They have a special predilection for baby’s flesh, and a Greek mother of today will frighten her child by saying that a Lamia will come if it is naughty, just as was said to naughty children in ancient in ancient days; for the legend used to run that Zeus loved Lamia too well, untidy though she was, and Hera, out of jealousy, killed her children, whereat Lamia was so grieved that she took to eating the children of others. Some Lamiæ are like the Sirens, and by taking the form of lovely nymphs, beguile luckless men to their destruction; for example, an ecclesiastical legend, savoring strongly of Boccaccio, tells us how a Lamia charmed a monk as he sat by the side of a lake one evening; dawn came, and the monk was seen no more, but some children swore to having seen his hoary beard floating on the waters of the lake.
Dragons are common now in every weird place, especially where those large stoned Hellenic walls are standing, and stories like those of Perseus, the Centaurs, the Cyclops, &c., are common among the peasants who speak of these old remains as Τοῦ Δράκον τὸ οπίτι, the Dragon’s house. In one fable we have the exact story of Ulysses and Polyphemus. One Spanos is the traveller, ὁ Δράκος is Polyphemus, and the facts are the same.
The witches (στρίγλαι) of modern folk-lore are supposed to be over a hundred, and to be able to turn into birds at will like the harpies of old; they love the flesh of unbaptised babies, and for this reason children wear charms, as they do also against the evil eye (βασκανεὶα). My host on the island of Pholygandros most solemnly told me how a person with the evil eye could wither a fruit-tree by admiring it, and on my looking sceptical, he quoted several instances which had come under his immediate notice. This is the ὀφθαλμὸς βάσκανος of antiquity, the god Fascinus of Latin mythology, whom Pliny tells us was worshipped so strangely by the Vestal Virgins.
I witnessed a very sad case on the island of Kimolos of a sailor who, in a storm, as he rounded the dreaded Cape Malea on his return home, had been struck, as they told me, by that mysterious ghost-demon the Τελώνια; he was kept in the village church all day, and had been in there all night, whilst his relatives were praying vehemently around him for the return of his shattered intellect. This τελώνια is a species of electricity, and appears during storms on the mastheads, which the Greek sailors personify as birds of evil omen, which settle on the masts with a view to destroy the ship and drown the sailors. They have words expressly for exorcising this phantom, and sometimes they try to drive it away by beating brass or shooting. In Italy this is called the fire of St. Elmo, and is evidently the same idea which in ancient times was connected with the Dioscouri.
From these points it will be easily seen how much that is old lives to-day. In manners and customs and daily life the peasant Greeks reproduce even more that can be identified as ancient, but this is apart from my present subject.
Source: J. Theodore Bent, “Old Mythology in New Apparel,” Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1885, 366-371.
