Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/179

 Folklore from the Southern Sporades. 151

Mr. Jacobus Zarraftes, who knows the dialects, poems, stories, and customs of the island as probably no other man does.

In addition to this, I have made use of four manuscripts which lately came into my possession in the same neigh- hourhood. Three of them are bodies of ecclesiastical canon law.' The fourth is a very curious manuscript of charms and incantations, piety and astrology, compiled just a hundred years since by a certain Georgios, who was the great-grandfather of Mr. Zarraftes, whom I have already mentioned.

1 shall first give the extracts from these MSS., which touch upon our subject. Next will come a chapter on hobgoblins, with a batch of notes on times and seasons and other small matters ; and finally a poem which embodies the legend of human sacrifice.

/. — Magic and Divination.

As the Fathers of the Church, and the holy synods, for- tunately for us, denounced the works of the devil in some detail, they have preserved a good deal of information for our benefit. I hope some day to be able to go though the whole of the No/xo/caf oi^e? ; for the present I shall confine myself to my own three MSS. In one of them^ those persons are accused who believe in such things as a witch, or a More, or a Gylou, and love them. The Gyloudes are explained to be "women who suck the blood of babes and kill them." The name and the belief go back as far at

' (i.) One appears to be in a fifteenth-century hand ; (ii.) another is dated, from internal evidence, 1560; (iii.) the third is probably a little later.

2 Nojiioicaj^w J' No. III. fol. 85 b. : e'tTrep eiViv Xeyovres on orTpiyK-Xeet [sk for (T-piyXai] elatv ») /dopij Kal yeXoiibes, Kal tnepyovTai avra. Ibid. : yvyalKes Xeyo/xeve yvXovbes, Kal uvapcKpuiaai to a'ljia riov (ipefibv Kal tiauuTovaiv avTU. In quoting from these MSS. I keep the spelling, but write the accents and aspirates according to rule.