Chapter II: The Survival of Pagan Deities (1)

§ 1. THE RANGE OF MODERN POLYTHEISM.

Thus far we have considered paganism in its bearing and influence upon modern Greek Christianity. We have seen how the Church, in endeavouring to widen her influence, countenanced many practices and conciliated many prejudices of a people whose temperament needed a multitude of gods and whose piety could pay homage to them all, a people moreover to whom the criterion of divinity was neither moral perfection nor omnipotence. From the ethical standpoint some of the ancient gods were better, some worse than men: in point of power they were superhuman but not almighty. Some indeed claimed that there was no difference in origin between mankind and its deities. ‘One is the race of men’ sang Pindar ‘with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath of life: yet sundered are they by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[107].’ One in origin, they are diverse in might. The test of godhead is power sufficing to defy death. Rightly therefore did Homer make ‘deathless’ and ‘everbeing’ his constant epithets for the gods. Immortality alone is the quality which distinguishes them in kind and not merely in degree from men, and makes them worthy of worship. A people wedded to such conceptions were naturally ready enough to install new immortals of whom they had not known before, but reluctant to depose in their favour those whom they and their forefathers had known and served. Dangers were to be apprehended from neglect; blessings were to be secured by tendance. Greater honour might be paid to one god, less to another; but from no immortal should service be wholly withheld: even unconscious oversights should be remedied by offerings ‘to an unknown god.’ Such in its essence was the popular religion, inconsistent it may be and not deeply intellectual, but in sympathies very broad--broad enough to encompass the worship of all immortals, broad as the earth and the sky and the sea wherein they dwelt and moved.

So vital and so deep-seated in the hearts of the common-folk are these religious tendencies, that even at the present day when the word ‘Christian’ has become a popular synonym for ‘Greek’ in contradistinction not only with ‘Mohammedan,’ but even sometimes with ‘Western’ or ‘Catholic’ or with ‘Protestant,’ and when horror would be excited by any imputation of polytheism, there are yet recognised a large number of superhuman and for the most part immortal beings, whom the Church has been able neither to eradicate from the popular mind nor yet to incorporate under the form of saints or devils in her own theological system. These beings, whether benignant to man or maleficent, are all treated as divine. In ancient times the common people had probably little appreciation of the various grades of divinity; indeed it was one of the seven sages, we are told, who first differentiated God and the lesser deities and the heroes[108]; and at the present day the common-folk are certainly no more subtle of understanding than they were then. God and the Saints and these pagan powers are all feared and worshipped in the several ways traditionally suited to each; but the fact of worship proclaims them all alike to be gods.

The origin of the non-Christian deities, even if we were unable to identify any of them with the gods of classical Greece, would be clearly enough proved by some of the general terms under which all of them are included. Those who use these terms indeed no longer appreciate their significance; for all sense of antagonism between the pagan and Christian elements in the popular religion has, as we have seen, long been lost. But the words themselves are a relic of the early days in which the combat of Christianity with the heathen world was still stern. Among the most widespread of these terms is the word ξωτικά[109] (i.e. ἐξωτικά), the ‘extraneous’ powers, clearly an invention of the early Christians. The phrase ‘those that are without’ (οἱ ἔξω or οἱ ἔξωθεν) was used by S. Paul first[110] and afterwards generally by the Fathers of the Church to denote men of all other persuasions. In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea employed the adjective ἐξωτικός also in a corresponding sense[111]. This word no doubt became popular, and hence τὰ ἐξωτικά, ‘the extraneous ones,’ became a convenient term by which to denote comprehensively all those old divinities whose worship the Church disallowed but even among her own adherents could not wholly suppress. Another comprehensive term equally significant, if not so commonly used, is τὰ παγανά[112], ‘the pagan ones.’ This is in use in the Ionian islands and some parts of the mainland, but I have not met with it nor found it understood in the Peloponnese or in the islands of the Aegean Sea[113]. In Cephalonia it is chiefly, though not exclusively, applied to a species of supernatural beings usually called callicántzari (καλλικάντζαροι) of whom more anon: the reason of this restriction may be either the fact that these monsters--to judge from the folk-stories of the island--so far outnumber there all other kinds of ‘pagan’ beings that this one species has almost appropriated to itself the generic name, or that in old time, when the word παγανά, ‘pagan,’ was still understood in the sense which we attribute to it, these monsters were deemed specially ‘pagan’ because, as we shall see later, they delight in disturbing a season of Christian gladness. But elsewhere the term, still employed in what must have been its original meaning, comprises all kinds of non-Christian deities; and in earlier times ‘the pagan ones’ was probably as frequent an expression as its synonym ‘the extraneous ones.’ To these may perhaps be added the rare appellation recorded by Schmidt[114], τσίνια: for if the derivation from τζίνα, ‘fraud,’ ‘deceit,’ be right, it will mean ‘the false gods.’

Besides these three names, which indicate the pre-Christian origin of these deities, there are several others--some in universal usage, others local and dialectic,--which represent them in various aspects. As a class of ‘divinities’ they are called δαιμόνια: as ‘apparitions,’ whose precise nature often cannot be further determined, φάσματα or φαντάσματα and, in Crete, σφανταχτά[115]: as swift and ‘sudden’ in their coming and going, ξαφνικά[116]: as ghostly and passing like a vision, εἰδωλικά: as denizens, for the most part, of the air, ἀερικά: and from their similarity to angels, ἀγγελικά.

It may seem strange that the first and the last of these terms, δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά, should be practically interchangeable; for the Church at any rate did her best in early days to make the former understood in the sense of ‘demons’ or ‘devils’ rather than ‘deities.’ But the attempted change of meaning seems to have failed to make much impression on a people who did not view goodness as an essential of godhead; and in later times the Church herself, or many of her less educated clergy at any rate, surrendered to the popular ideas. Father Richard[117], a Jesuit resident during the seventeenth century in the island of Santorini, mentions the case of an old Greek priest who had long made a speciality of exorcism and was prepared to expel angels and demons alike from the bodies of those who were afflicted by them. The priest when questioned by the Jesuit as to what distinction he drew between demons and angels, replied that the demons came from hell, while the angels were ἀερικόν τι, a species of aërial being; but while he maintained a theoretical difference between them, his practice betrayed a belief that both were equally harmful. Exorcism had to be employed in cases of ‘angelic’ as well as of ‘demoniacal’ possession; and Father Richard details the cruelties and tortures inflicted upon a woman suspected of the former in order to make the pernicious angelic spirit within her confess its name. The characters of δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά are in fact the same, and the subtle theological distinctions which might be drawn between them are naturally lost on a people who see them treated even by the priests as equally baneful.

A few other local or dialectic names remain to be noticed. Two of them, στοιχει̯ά and τελώνια, denote properly two several species of supernatural beings--the former being the _genii_ of fixed places[118], and the latter aërial beings chiefly concerned with the passage of men from this world to the next[119]--and are only loosely and locally employed in a more comprehensive sense. The name σμερδάκια, recorded from Philiatrá in Messenia, is apparently a diminutive form from a root meaning ‘terrible[120].’ A Cretan word καντανικά is of less certain etymology, but if, as has been surmised, it has any relation with the verb καντανεύω, ‘to go down to the underworld,’ and hence ‘to fall into a trance,’ (‘entranced’ spirits being thought temporarily to have departed thither,) it may denote either denizens of the lower world or beings who frighten men into a senseless and trance-like state[121]. Next come the two words ζούμπιρα and ζωντόβολα, of which I believe the interpretation is one and the same. Bernhard Schmidt[122], whose work I have constantly consulted in this and later chapters, would derive the former from a middle-Greek word ζόμβρος[123], equivalent to the ancient τραγέλαφος, a fantastic animal of Aristophanic fame; but it was explained to me in Scyros to be a jocose euphemism as applied to supernatural beings and to denote properly parasitic insects. The implied combination of superstitious awe in avoiding the name of supernatural things with a certain broad humour in substituting what is, to the peasant, one of the lesser annoyances of life is certainly characteristic of the Greek folk; and the accuracy of the explanation given to me is confirmed by the fact that in the island of Cythnos the other word, ζωντόβολα, is recorded to bear also the meaning of ‘insects[124].’ The joke, if such it be, must date from a long time back and in its prime must have enjoyed a widespread popularity; for at Aráchova on the slopes of Parnassus, a place far distant from Scyros, the word ζούμπιρα is employed in the sense of supernatural beings by persons who apparently are quite ignorant of its original meaning[125]. To these difficult terms must be added a few euphemisms of a simple nature--τὰ πίζηλα (i.e. ἐπίζηλα) ‘the enviable ones’ in one village of Tenos[126], and in many places such general terms as οἱ καλοί ‘the noble,’--οἱ ἀδερφοί μας ‘our brothers,’--οἱ καλορίζικοι ‘the fortunate ones,’--οἱ χαρούμενοι ‘the joyful ones.’ These evasions of a more direct nomenclature are very frequent, and, since the choice of epithet is practically at the discretion of the speaker, it would be impossible to compile a complete list of them.

How far each of these names may be applied in general to all the classes of pagan gods and demons and monsters whom I am about to describe is a question which I cannot determine. On the one hand many of the names, as we have seen, are purely local, confined to a few villages or districts or islands and unknown and unintelligible elsewhere: and on the other hand some of these supernatural beings themselves are equally local, and my information concerning them has been gathered from widely separated regions of the Greek world. Hence it follows that while the several terms which I have explained are comprehensive in local usage and include all the supernatural beings locally recognised, it is impossible to say whether the users of them would think fit to extend them to the deities of other districts. Probably they would do so; but only for the most widely current terms, δαιμόνια and ἐξωτικά, can I claim with assurance anything like universal application.

The surviving pagan deities fall naturally into two classes. There are the solitary and individual figures such as Demeter, and there is the gregarious and generic class to which belong for example the Nymphs. An exceptional case may occur in which some originally single personality has been multiplied into a whole class. The Lesbian maiden Gello, who, according to a superstition known to Sappho[127], in revenge for her untimely death haunted her old abodes preying upon the babes of women whose motherhood she envied, is no longer one but many; the place of a maiden, whom death carried off ere she had known the love of husband and children, has been taken by withered witch-like beings who none the less bear her name and resemble her in that they light, like Harpies, upon young children and suck out their humours[128]. But in the main the division holds; there are single gods and there are groups of gods. Of the former, in several cases, there is very little to record. Such memory of them as still lingers among the people is confined perhaps to a single folk-story out of the many that have been preserved. In such cases I do not feel entire confidence that the reference is a piece of genuine tradition; in spite of the popular form in which the stories are cast, it is always possible that, owing to the spread of education, some scholastic smatterings of ancient mythology have been introduced by the story-teller. There are certainly plenty of tales to be heard about Alexander the Great which are drawn from literary sources; and it is possible that two stories published by Schmidt which contain apparent reminiscences of Poseidon and of Pan are vitiated, from the point of view of folklore, in the same way. Fortunately the cases in which this reserve must be felt are few and in the nature of things unimportant: for, though proof of genuine tradition would be interesting, yet a single modern allusion is not likely to throw any light on the ancient conception of a deity or his cult. Where on the other hand modern folklore is more abundant--and in the case of the groups of lesser deities above all there is ample store of information--it is possible that study of the popular conceptions of to-day may illumine our understanding of ancient religion.

§ 2. ZEUS.

Ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα.

To Zeus, the ancient father of gods and men, belongs precedence; but there is in truth little room for him in the modern scheme of popular religion. His functions have been transferred to the Christian God, and his personality merged in that of the Father whom the Church acknowledges. But though he is no longer a deity, the ancient conception of him has imposed narrow limitations upon the character of his successor. We have noted already that the God now recognised exercises the same general control, as did formerly Zeus, over all the changes and chances of this mortal life, but has, again resembling Zeus, for his special province only the regulation of the more monotonous phases of nature and the weather. The more unusual phenomena, and among them sometimes even the thunder, to which S. Elias has pretensions, are delegated to saints or to non-Christian deities; but for the most part the thunder remains the possession of God, as it was always that of Zeus; and its more important concomitant, the lightning, is never, I think, attributed to S. Elias, but is wielded by God alone.

The very name of this weapon which the Christian God has inherited is suggestive of the Olympian _régime_. Much has been heard lately of the double-headed axe as a religious symbol which seems to have been constantly associated, especially in Crete, with the worship of Zeus. The modern Greek word for what we call the thunderbolt is ἀστροπελέκι (a syncopated form of ἀστραποπελέκι by loss of one of two concurrent syllables beginning with the same consonant), and means literally a ‘lightning-axe.’ The weapon therefore which the supreme God wields is conceived as an axe-shaped missile; and, though in the ancient literature which has come down to us we may nowhere find the word πέλεκυς used of the thunderbolt, there is no reason why the modern word should not be the expression of a conception inherited from antiquity and so furnish a clue to what in itself seems a simple and suitable explanation of the much-canvassed symbol.

Again the divine associations of the thunderbolt now as in the reign of Zeus are attested by the awe in which men and cattle, trees and houses, which have been struck by lightning, are universally held--awe of that primitive kind which does not distinguish between the sacred and the accursed. It is sufficient that particular persons or objects have come into close contact with divine power; that contact sets them apart; they must not do common work or be put to common uses. In old days any place which had been struck was distinguished by the erection of an altar and the performance of sacrifice, but at the same time it was left unoccupied and, save for sacrificial purposes, untrodden[129]; it was both honoured and avoided. In the case of persons however the sense of awe verged on esteem. ‘No one,’ says Artemidorus, ‘who has been struck by lightning is excluded from citizenship; indeed such an one is honoured even as a god[130].’ The same feeling is still exhibited. The peasant makes the sign of the cross as he passes any scorched and blackened tree-trunk; but if a man has the fortune to be struck and not killed, he may indulge a taste for idleness for the rest of his life--his neighbours will support him--and enjoy at the same time the reputation of being something more than human.

But in spite of the reverent awe which the victim of the lightning excites, the thunderbolt is often viewed now, as in old time, as the instrument of divine vengeance. The people of Aráchova, when they see a flash, explain the occurrence in the phrase κάποιον διάβολον ἔκαψε, ‘He has burnt up some devil,’ and the implied subject of the verb, as in most phrases describing the weather, is undoubtedly God[131]. The same idea, in yet more frankly pagan garb, is well exhibited in a story from Zacynthos[132], which is nothing but the old myth of the war of the Titans against Zeus with the names of the actors omitted. The gist of it is as follows.

The giants once rebelled against God. First they climbed a mountain and hurled rocks at him; but he grasped his thunderbolts (τσακώνει τὰ ἀστροπελέκι̯α του) and threw them at the giants, and they all fell down from the mountain and many were killed. Then one whose courage was still unshaken tied reeds together and tried to reach to heaven with them (for what purpose, does not appear in the story; but folk-tales are often somewhat inconsequent, and this vague incident is probably an imperfect reminiscence of the legend of Prometheus); but the lightning burnt him to ashes. Then his remaining companions made a last assault, but the lightning again slew many of them, and the rest were condemned to live all their life long shut in beneath a mountain.

This story is one of those which in themselves might be suspected of scholastic origin or influence; but it so happens that practically the same story has been recorded from Chios also, with the slight addition that there the leader of the giants’ assault has usurped the name of Samson. Such corroboration from the other end of the Greek world goes far to establish the genuine nature of the tradition.

Thus though Zeus has been generally superseded by the Christian God, his character and mythic attributes have left a strong and indelible mark upon the religion of to-day. The present conception of God is practically identical with the ancient conception of the deity who was indeed one among many gods and yet in thought and often also in speech the god _par excellence_. Christianity has effected little here beyond the suppression of the personal name Zeus.

All this, no doubt, illustrates the fusion of paganism with Christianity rather than the independent co-existence of deities of the separate systems. But there are two small facts in virtue of which I have given to Zeus a place among the pagan deities whose distinct personality is not yet wholly sunk in oblivion. The men of Aráchova, as we have noticed above, still swear by the ‘god of Crete,’ who can be no other than Zeus; and in Crete itself there was recently, and may still be, in use the invocation ἠκοῦτε μου Ζῶνε θεέ, ‘Hearken to me, O god Zeus[133].’ Such expressions, though their original force is no longer known by those who use them, are none the less indications that perhaps not many generations ago Zeus was still locally recognised and reverenced as a deity distinct from the Christian God, to whom indeed everywhere he can only gradually have ceded his position and his attributes.

§ 3. POSEIDON.

For the survival of any god of the sea in the imagination of the Greek people I cannot personally vouch. Though I have been among the seafaring population in many parts, I have never heard mention of other than female deities. That which I here set down rests entirely on the authority of Bernhard Schmidt.

In his collection of folk-stories there is one from Zacynthos, entitled ‘Captain Thirteen,’ which runs as follows[134]:--A king who was the strongest man of his time made war on a neighbour. His strength lay in three hairs on his breast. He was on the point of crushing his foes when his wife was bribed to cut off the hairs, and he with thirteen companions was taken prisoner. But the hairs began to grow again, and so his enemies threw him and his companions into a pit. The others were killed by the fall, but he being thrown in last, fell upon them and was unhurt. Over the pit his enemies then raised a mound. He found however in the pit a dead bird, and having fastened its wings to his hands flew up and carried away mound and all with him. Then he soared high in the air until a storm of rain washed away the clay that held the feathers to his hands, and he fell into the sea. ‘Then from out the sea came the god thereof (ὁ δαίμονας τῆς θάλασσας) and struck him with a three-pronged fork (μία πειροῦνα μὲ τρία διχάλια)’ and changed him into a dolphin until such time as he should find a maiden ready to be his wife. The dolphin after some time saved a ship-wrecked king and his daughter, and the princess by way of reward took him for her husband and the spell was broken.

Other characteristics of this trident-bearing sea-god are, according to the same authority[135], that he is in form half human and half fish; that his wealth, consisting of all treasures lost in the sea, is so great that he sleeps on a couch of gold; and that he rides upon dolphins. Thus Poseidon, it appears, (or it may be Nereus,) has survived locally in the remembrance of the Greek people as a deity unconnected with Christianity. Far more generally however his functions have been transferred to S. Nicolas, whose aid is invariably invoked by seamen in time of peril, and who has acquired the byname of ‘sailor’ (ναύτης)[136].

The allusion to the sea-god and his trident in the story which I have repeated must, I think, be accepted with some reserve as being possibly a scholastic interpolation. I cannot find confirmation of it in any other folk-story, and moreover the latter part of the tale is familiar to me in another form. The hero is usually a young prince who goes out to seek adventures in the world, not a king who has already a wife at home; and his transformation into a dolphin is effected by some malicious witch into whose toils he falls. But while for these reasons I do not put the story forward as certain evidence of the survival of Poseidon in the popular memory, I have recounted it at some length because it is an excellent type of current folk-tales, and from a study of it, if we may now leave Poseidon and make a brief digression, we may appreciate the relation existing between such stories and the myths of antiquity.

The king who was the strongest man of his time has a classical prototype in the Messenian leader Aristomenes. He too was thrown with his comrades into a pit by his enemies, the Spartans, and alone escaped death from the fall, being borne up on the wings of eagles. Again, the idea of a man’s strength residing in a certain hair or hairs is well known in ancient mythology; and although it is by no means peculiar to the Greeks, but is common to many peoples of the world, we may fairly suppose that the modern Greek has not borrowed it from outside, but has inherited it from those ancestors among whose myths was the story of Scylla and Nisus. Lastly, in the incident of the hero fastening wings to his arms with clay and his subsequent fall into the sea there are all the essentials of the legend of Icarus.

Here then combined in one modern folk-story we find the _motifs_ of three separate ancient myths. And from it and others of like nature--for in the collection from which I have borrowed it there are several stories in which such figures as Midas, the Sphinx, and the Cyclopes are easily recognised--an inference may be drawn as to the real relation of ancient mythology to modern folk-stories. Certain themes must have existed from time immemorial, and these have been worked up into tales by successive generations of _raconteurs_ with ever-varying settings. Fresh combinations of _motifs_ have been and are still being tried; fresh embroidery of detail may be added by each artist; only the theme in its plainest form, the mere groundwork of story, remains immutable. This at the same time explains the wide variations of the same myth even among the ancients themselves, and warns us not to judge of the value of a modern folk-story or folk-song by the closeness of its resemblance to any ancient myth which may have been preserved to us in literature. It was naturally the most finished and artistic presentment of the story which appealed to the taste of educated men and thus became the orthodox classical version; but there is every likelihood that before the story reached the stage of acknowledged perfection much that was primitive had been suppressed as inartistic, and much that was not traditional had been added by the poet’s imagination. The unlettered story-teller, endowed with less fancy and ignorant of the conventions of art, is a far trustier vehicle of pure tradition; for though he feels himself at liberty to compose variations of the original theme, he certainly has less power and generally less inclination to do so; for it is on exactness of memory and even verbal fidelity to the traditional form of the story that the modern story-teller chiefly prides himself. Hence the modern folk-story, straight from the peasant’s lips in a form almost verbally identical with that in which successive generations of peasants before him narrated it, may contain more genuinely primitive material than a literary version of it which dates from perhaps two thousand years or more ago.

§ 4. PAN.

A story, again from the same collection[137], runs in brief as follows:--Once upon a time a priest had a good son who tended goats. One day ‘Panos’ gave him a kid with a skin of gold. He at once offered it as a burnt-offering to God, and in answer an angel promised him whatsoever he should ask. He chose a magic pipe which should make all hearers dance. So no enemy could come near to touch him. The king however sent for him, and the goatherd, after making the envoys dance more than once, voluntarily let himself be taken. The king then threw him into prison, but he had his flute still with him, and when he played even houses and rocks danced, and fell and crushed all save him and his. ‘The whole business,’ concludes the story, ‘was arranged by Panos to cleanse the world somewhat of evil men.’

Here the pastoral scene and the gift of the magic pipe (not by Panos himself, it is true, but indirectly thanks to him) suggest a genuine remembrance of Pan. It was from him that ‘bonus Daphnis’ learnt the art of music. The form which the name has assumed is the chief difficulty. The modern nominative, if formed in the same way as in other words of the same declension, would naturally be Panas (Πάνας), and the unusual termination arouses some suspicion that the narrator of the story had heard of Pan from some literary source and, as often happens in such cases, had got the name a little wrong. But if the tale be a piece of genuine tradition, the conclusion of it is remarkable. The moral purpose ascribed to the deity seems to indicate a loftier conception of him than that which is commonly found in ancient art and literature. But the popular tradition embodied in the legend is not therefore necessarily at fault; indeed it may be more true to the conception of Pan which prevailed among the common-folk in old days than were the portraits drawn and handed down by the more educated of their contemporaries. The patron-god of Arcadian shepherd-life would naturally have seemed a rude being to the cultured Athenians of the fifth century, who but for his miraculous intervention in the battle of Marathon would never have honoured him with a temple. But among his original worshippers it may well be that, besides presiding over the increase of their flocks, as did Demeter over the increase of their fields, he was deemed to resemble her also in the possession of more exalted attributes, so that there was cause indeed for lamentation over that strange message ‘Great Pan is dead[138].’

But perchance Pan is not dead yet, or if dead not forgotten. And as this solitary modern story, if it be genuine, testifies to a longlived remembrance of his better qualities, so in the demonology of the middle ages a sterner aspect of his ancient character still secured to him men’s awe. Theocritus[139] gave voice to a well-known superstition when he made the goat-herd say: ‘Nay, shepherd, it may not be; in the noontide we may not pipe; ’tis Pan that we fear’; for in his rage if roused from his midday slumber he was believed to strike the intruder with ‘panic’ terror: and it was this superstition which influenced the translators of the Septuagint when they rendered the phrase, which in our Bible version of the Psalms[140] appears as ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday,’ by the words σύμπτωμα καὶ δαιμόνιον μεσημβρινόν. By the latter half of this phrase the memory of Pan was undoubtedly perpetuated; for in certain forms of prayer quoted by Leo Allatius[141] in the seventeenth century, among the perils from which divine deliverance is sought is mentioned more than once this ‘midday demon’; and a corresponding ‘daemon meridianus[142]’ found a place of equal dignity among the ghostly enemies of Roman Catholics.

Perhaps even yet in the pastoral uplands of Greece some traveller will hear news of Pan.

§ 5. DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE.

Of few ancient deities has popular memory been more tenacious than of Demeter; but in different districts the reminiscences take very different forms. There are many traces of her name and cult, and of the legends concerning both her and her daughter; but in one place they have been Christianised, in another they have remained pagan.

In so far as she has affected the traditions of the Church, a male deity, S. Demetrius, has in general superseded her. Under the title of στερεανός, ‘belonging to the dry land,’ he has in most districts taken over the patronage of agriculture; while his inherited interest in marriage receives testimony from the number of weddings celebrated, especially in the agricultural districts, on his day. But at Eleusis, the old home of Demeter’s most sacred rites, the people, it seems, would not brook the substitution of a male saint for their goddess, and yielded to ecclesiastical influence only so far as to create for themselves a saint Demetra (ἡ ἁγία Δήμητρα) entirely unknown elsewhere and never canonised. Further, in open defiance of an iconoclastic Church, they retained an old statue of Demeter, and merely prefixing the title ‘saint’ to the name of their cherished goddess, continued to worship her as before. The statue was regularly crowned with garlands of flowers in the avowed hope of obtaining good harvests, and without doubt prayer was made before it as now before the pictures of canonical saints. This state of things continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, in 1801, two Englishmen, named Clarke and Cripps, armed by the Turkish authorities with a license to plunder, perpetrated an act unenviably like that of Verres at Enna, and in spite of a riot among the peasants of Eleusis removed by force the venerable marble; and that which was the visible form of the great goddess on whose presence and goodwill had depended from immemorial ages the fertility of the Thriasian plain is now a little-regarded object catalogued as ‘No. XIV, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, (much mutilated)[143].’

Saint Demetra however, though lost to sight, was yet dear to the memory of the village-folk; and in spite of the devastation of old beliefs and legends which the much-vaunted progress and education of Greece have committed in the more civilised districts without conferring any sensible compensation, the antiquarian Lenormant found in 1860 an old Albanian[144] priest who when once reassured that no ridicule was intended, recited to him the following remarkable legend[145]: ‘S. Demetra was an old woman of Athens, kind and good, who devoted all her little means to feeding the poor. She had a daughter who was beautiful past all imagining; since “lady Aphrodite” (κυρὰ ’φροδίτη) none had been seen so lovely. A Turkish lord of the neighbourhood of Souli, who was a wicked man and versed in magic, saw her one day combing her hair, which was of golden hue and reached to the very ground, and became passionately enamoured of her. He bided his time, and having found his chance of speaking with her tried to seduce her. But she being as prudent as she was beautiful, repulsed all the miscreant’s advances. Thereupon he resolved to carry her off and put her in his harem. One Christmas night, while Demetra was at church, the Turk (ὁ ἀγᾶς) forced the door of her house, seized the girl who was at home alone, carried her off in spite of her cries of distress, and holding her in his arms leapt upon his horse. The horse was a wonderful one; it was black in colour; from its nostrils it breathed out flames, and in one bound could pass from the East unto the West. In an instant it had carried ravisher and victim right to the mountains of Epirus.

When the aged Demetra came back from church, she found her house broken into and her daughter gone; great was her despair. She asked her neighbours if they knew what had become of her daughter; but they dared not tell her aught, for they feared the Turks and their vengeance. She turned her enquiries to the tree that grew before her house; but the tree could tell her nothing. She asked the sun, but the sun could give her no help; she asked the moon and the stars, but from them too she learnt nothing. Finally the stork that nested on the house-top said to her: “Long time now we have lived side by side; thou art as old as I. Listen; thou hast always been good to me, thou hast never disturbed my nest, and once thou didst help me to drive away the bird of prey that would have carried off my nestlings. In recompense I will tell thee what I know of the fate of thy daughter; she was carried off by a Turk mounted on a black horse, who took her towards the West. Come, I will set out with thee and we will search for her together.”

Accompanied by the stork, Demetra started; the time was winter; it was cold, and snow covered the mountains. The poor old woman was frozen and could hardly walk; she kept asking of all those whom she met, whether they had seen her daughter, but they laughed at her or did not answer; doors were shut in her face and entrance denied her, for men love not misery; and she went weeping and lamenting. In this manner however she dragged her limbs as far as Lepsína (the modern form of the name Eleusis); but, arriving there, she succumbed to cold and weariness and threw herself down by the roadside. There she would have died, but that by good luck there passed by the wife of the _khodja-bachi_ (or head man of the village), who had been to look after her flocks and was returning. Marigo--such was her name--took pity on the old woman, helped her to rise and brought her to her husband, who was named Nicolas[146]. The _khodja-bachi_ was as kind as his wife; both welcomed as best they could the poor sorrow-stricken woman, tended her and sought to console her. To reward them S. Demetra blessed their fields and gave them fertility.

Nicolas, the _khodja-bachi_, had a son handsome, strong, brave, and practised, in a word the finest _pallikar_ of all the country side. Seeing that Demetra was in no condition to continue her journey, he offered to set to work to recover her daughter, asking only her hand in recompense. The offer was accepted, and he set out accompanied by the faithful stork who would not abandon the undertaking.

The young man walked for many days without finding anything. At last one night, when he was in a forest right among the mountains, he caught sight of a great bright light at some distance. Towards this he hastily bent his steps, but the point from which the light came was much further off than he had at first imagined; the darkness had deceived him. Eventually however he arrived there, and to his great astonishment found forty dragons lying on the ground and watching an enormous cauldron that was boiling on the fire. Undismayed by the sight, he lifted the cauldron with one hand, lit a torch, and replaced the vessel on the fire. Astounded by such a display of strength, the dragons crowded round him and said to him, “You who can lift with one hand a cauldron which we by our united efforts can scarcely carry, you alone are capable of carrying off a maiden whom we have long been trying to lay our hands on, and whom we cannot seize because of the height of the tower wherein a magician keeps her shut up.” The son of the _khodja-bachi_ of Lepsína perceived the impossibility of escape from these monsters. Accompanied by the forty dragons, he approached the tower, and after having examined it, he asked for some large nails, which he took and drove into the wall, so as to form a kind of ladder, and which he kept pulling out again as he ascended to prevent the dragons from following him. Having arrived at the top and with some difficulty entered at a small window there, he invited the dragons to ascend as he had done, one by one, which they did, thus giving him time to kill each as it arrived while the next was climbing up, and to throw it over the other side of the tower, where there were a large court, a splendid garden, and a fine castle. Thus rid of his dangerous guardians, he went down into the interior of the tower and found there S. Demetra’s daughter, whose beauty at once inspired him with the most ardent love.

He was kneeling at her feet when suddenly the magician appeared, and in a fury of anger threw himself upon the young man, who met him bravely. The former was of superhuman strength, but Nicolas’ son was not inferior to him. The magician had the power to transform himself into any thing he might choose; he changed successively into a lion, into a serpent, into a bird of prey, into fire--hoping under some one of these forms to wear his adversary out; but nothing could shake the courage of the young man. For three days the combat continued. The first day the magician seemed beaten, but the next he regained his advantage; at the end of the day’s struggle he killed his young opponent, and cut his body into four quarters, which he hung on the four sides of the tower. Then elated by his victory, he did violence to Demetra’s daughter, whose chastity he had hitherto respected. But in the night the stork flew away to a great distance to fetch a magic herb which it knew, brought it back in its beak, and rubbed with it the young man’s lips. At once the pieces of his body came together again and he revived. Great was his despair when he learnt what had taken place after his defeat; but he only threw himself upon the magician with the greater fury the third day, to punish him for his crime.

Once again the young man, it seemed, was on the point of being vanquished, when suddenly he conceived the happy idea of invoking the Panagia, vowing that if victorious he would become a monk at the monastery of Phaneroméne[147]. The divine protection which he had invoked gave him strength and he succeeded in throwing his adversary: the stork, who had aided him so much, at once attacked the fallen magician and picked out his eyes; then with its beak pulled out a white hair noticeable among the black curls that covered his head. On this hair depended the life of the Turkish magician, who immediately expired. His conqueror, taking with him the girl, brought her back to Lepsína, just at the season when spring was coming and the flowers were beginning to appear in the fields. Then he went, as he had vowed, and shut himself up in the monastery. S. Demetra, having received back her daughter, went away with her. What became of them afterwards, no one knows; but since that time the fields of Lepsína, thanks to the blessing of the Saint, have not ceased to be fertile.’

It would be superfluous to point out the numerous details of this legend which accord explicitly with the account of the rape of Persephone in the Homeric hymn. The interspersion of Christian ideas and reminiscences of Turkish domination and stories of fabulous monsters may strike oddly on the ear unacquainted with the vagaries of Greek folk-stories. Yet the most sceptical could not doubt that the tradition which forms the groundwork of the legend is none other than the old myth, or that the four chief actors in the drama are none other than Demeter and Core, Pluto and Triptolemus. Pluto, masked as a Turkish _agha_, is perhaps the least readily recognisable; yet in one way as a relic of ancient tradition the part he plays is the most remarkable in the whole legend. It is to Souli in Epirus that he carries off the maiden. Now this is the district of the ancient Cocytus and Acheron; here was one of the descents to the lower world; here Aidoneus held sway; and here, in one version of the myth[148], was laid the scene of the rape of Persephone by that god. Hence the claims of two separate localities to the same mythological distinction seem by some means to have become incorporated in the single modern legend.

In the same part of Epirus, according to Lenormant, a similar story to that which he heard at Eleusis concerning S. Demetra’s daughter, is told, _mutatis mutandis_, of S. Demetrius: but since either a sense of propriety or a want of knowledge prevented him from publishing the details of it, the mere statement that it existed is of no great value. But the legend which he narrates in full may I think be accepted as genuine without corroboration on the grounds of its own structure. Lenormant has indeed been accused of _mala fides_ in his own department of archaeology and of tampering with some of the inscriptions which he published; but even if this charge could be substantiated, I should doubt whether he had either the inclination to invent a legend which he only mentions in a cumbrous foot-note, or the ability to fuse ancient and modern ideas into so good an imitation of the genuine folk-story. In my judgement the construction of the legend is practically proof of its genuinely popular origin.

Thus Eleusis and, in a lesser degree, the many places where S. Demetrius has succeeded to the chief functions of Demeter have hardly yet lost touch with the ancient worship of the goddess, Christianised in form though it may be. But Arcadia too, where alone of all the Peloponnese the indigenous population were secure from the Achaean and Dorian immigrations and maintained in seclusion the holiest of Pelasgian cults, preserves to the present day in story and in custom some vestiges of the old religion; and here they are less tinged with Christian colour.

Near the city of Pheneos, which according to Pausanias[149] was the scene of mysteries similar to those enacted at Eleusis, there are some underground channels by which the waters of Lake Pheneos are carried off, soon to reappear as the river Ladon. These channels were believed by Pausanias himself to be artificial--the work of Heracles, it was said, who also constructed a canal close by, traces of which are still visible: but according to another authority[150] they were the passage by which Pluto carried off Persephone to the infernal regions. Some memory of the latter belief seems still to linger among the people of Phoniá (the modern form of Pheneós), who call these subterranean vents ἡ τρούπαις τοῦ διαβόλου, ‘the holes of the devil,’ and who further believe that it is through them that the spirits of the dead pass to the lower world. My guide informed me also that the rise or fall of the waters of the lake--the level varies to an extraordinary degree--furnishes an augury as to what rate of mortality may be expected in the village. If the water is high, the lower world is for the time being congested and requires no more inhabitants; if it sinks, the lower world is empty, and thirsts for fresh victims. The connexion of such beliefs with the cult of Persephone, though vague, is probably real; but how general they may be among the present villagers I cannot say; Dodwell[151] apparently heard nothing of them except the name of ‘the devil’s holes,’ and the explanation of this name which was given to him took the form of a story about a conflict between the devil and a king of Phoniá, in which the former hurled explosive balls of grease at his adversary, one of which set him on fire and drove his body right through the base of the mountain which rises from the lake’s edge, leaving thereafter an escape for the waters. There is certainly nothing in common between this story, which Leake also heard in a slightly different version[152], and the beliefs communicated to me; and I suspect that it is a comparatively modern aetiological fable designed perhaps to satisfy the curiosity of children concerning the name. The belief that the subterranean channel is a descent to the lower world is more clearly a vestige of the old local cult of Kore.

Again in the neighbourhood of Phigalia there is current among the peasantry a curious story which I tried in vain to hear recited in full, but only obtained in outline at second-hand. I cannot consequently vouch for its accuracy, but such as it is I give it. There once were a brother and sister, of whom the former was very wicked and a magician, while the latter was very virtuous and beautiful. Her beauty was indeed so wonderful, that her brother became enamoured of her. In her distress she fled to a cave near Phigalia, hoping to elude his pursuit; but the magician straightway discovered her. Then being at her wits’ end how to save herself from the unholy passion which her beauty inspired, she prayed to be turned into some beast. Her prayer was straightway granted, but the wicked magician had power to change himself likewise. So when they had both been changed into several shapes he at length overcame her. But no sooner was the infamous deed done, than the Panagia caused an earthquake, and the roof of the cave fell and destroyed both brother and sister together.

A story of incest necessarily ends at the present day among the highly moral countryfolk of Greece with punishment inflicted by some Christian deity: but for the rest the story is practically the same as that which Pausanias heard concerning Poseidon and his sister Demeter in the same district[153]. In the old version, which Pausanias gives very briefly, there is only one transformation mentioned, that of Demeter into a mare and of Poseidon into a horse; but it is at least noteworthy that the statue of horse-headed Demeter which commemorated this incident is said to have had ‘figures of snakes and other wild animals’ fixed on its head; and possibly, if Pausanias had given a fuller version of the myth, we should find that these figures related to other transformations which Demeter had tried in vain before in equine form she was finally forced to yield. The mention of the cave in the modern story is also significant; for though the cave in the ancient version is not the scene of the rape, it was there that Demeter hid herself in her anger afterwards and there too that the statue of horse-headed Demeter was set up. It would be interesting to know whether the horse is one of the forms assumed in the modern story; perhaps some other traveller will be fortunate enough to hear the tale in full.

In northern Arcadia I also learnt that the flesh of the pig, in respect of which the ordinary _Graeculus_ fully deserves the epithet _esuriens_, is taboo; and the result of eating it is believed to be leprosy. It might be supposed that this superstition has resulted from contact with Mohammedans; but such an explanation would not account for the confinement of it to one locality--and that a mountainous and unprofitable district where intercourse with the Turks must have been small; and further the Greek would surely have found a malicious pleasure, the most piquant of sauces, in eating that which offended the two peoples whom he most abhors, Turks and Jews. On the other hand, if we suppose this fear of swine’s flesh to be a piece of native tradition, its origin may well be sought in the ritual observances of the old cult of Demeter and her daughter, to whom the pig was sacred and in whose honour it was sacrificed once only in each year, at the festival of the Thesmophoria[154]. There are many instances among different peoples of the belief that skin diseases, especially leprosy, are the punishment visited upon those who eat of the sacred or unclean animal; for the distinction between sacred and unclean is not made until a primitive sense of awe is inclined by conscious reasoning in the direction either of reverence or of abhorrence[155]. Thus in Egypt, the land from which the Pelasgians, if Herodotus[156] might be believed, derived the worship of Demeter, it was held that the drinker of pig’s milk incurred leprosy[157]; and we may reasonably suppose that the same punishment threatened those Egyptians who tasted of pig’s flesh save at their one annual festival when this was enjoined[158]. Now the Thesmophoria resembled this Egyptian festival in that it was an annual occasion for sacrificing pigs and for partaking therefore of their flesh; if then the worshippers of Demeter, like the Egyptians, were forbidden to use the pig for food at other times, and if the penalty for disobedience in Greece too was believed to be leprosy, the present case of taboo in Arcadia--the only one known to me in modern Greece--may be a survival from the ancient cult.

But apart from these traces of the worship of Demeter and Kore in Christian worship, in folk-story, and in custom, traces which constitute in themselves cogent proof of the firm hold on the popular mind which the goddesses twain must long have kept, there exists in the belief of the Greek peasantry a personal Power, a living non-Christian deity, who still inspires awe in many simple hearts and who may reasonably be identified with one or rather perhaps with both of them.