Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/158

 148 Char 111 against the Child-stealing Witch.

mother's milk, return thou unto me now the seven children of Melitena.' She at once brought up the seven children of Melitena, and said, ' Ye saints of the Lord, I pray of you that ye no further molest me, and I promise that wherever this amulet (Phylacterium) be found I will not go, and wherever this will be read I will not enter, but run away a distance of sixty miles. Whoever will write down my twelve names, his house will I not hurt, nor will I enter his abode, nor harm his cattle, nor have power over his house- hold.' The holy Sisynnios then adjured her, saying, ' I adjure thee by the name of the Lord, which the stone heard and split, by the holy Mamantios, the holy Polycarp, &c. (Here follows a long list of saints whose name is in- voked, finishing with the Holy Virgin, all the saints, Amen.)"

In this shorter recension the names of the Gelu are missing and the legend is much curtailed, but in the general outlines the two represent one and the same legend.

Whatever the original meaning of " Gelu " may be, men- tioned already by Hesychius, and translated as " bugbear," it is undoubtedly a female spirit killing children immediately after their birth. I connect it with the Arabic-Persian " ghoul." In the first Greek text we have thus now the real counterpart of Avestitza, the female child-stealing demon, with the mysterious names. These names are very transparent in their Greek form and easily understood. (B. Schmidt, Volksleben der Neugriechen, 139-40, and especially note 4.) The composite character of the first version makes me believe that the portion with the names has been introduced from the Avestitza type. Of this latter, which is of special interest to us in connection with the charm, there are a number of parallels in other literatures much older than the Slavonic and even the Greek versions. In the Hebrew literature we have at least two distinct forms. In both the demon that kills the children is the same, viz. " Lilith " the first wife of Adam and the