Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/33

 Presidential Address. 21

tasius and Gervasius, SS. Florus and Laurus.^ It is greatly to be desired that a full list could be compiled of the little chapels by the wayside or in deserted spots, called e^coKXrjcrta, which are often at least as old as Byzantine days, and might turn out to be commonly on the sites of ancient hero-shrines, as some of them cer- tainly are. Nor are the more popular figures of super- stition lacking. Everyone has heard of the Nereids, who bear still their ancient name, and are described much as they were believed in two thousand years ago ; only the name now includes land-nymphs as well as water-nymphs. Milk, honey, and cakes are offered to them as to the Eumenides of old. Besides these we find in one place or another Lamia, the demon woman, Strigla, the goblin, Empousa and Mormo, the bogeys, Gillou and Gorgona, Pytho, the witch, the lame devil who perhaps represents Hephaistos, the Kalikazari, who resemble the ancient Is-tjpeg, or sprites of m.ischief and disease, both in their acts and in the time when they range abroad. Charon, under the name Charos, still summons the dead to the nether world, and the whole popular conception of this figure is taken from the heathen world. The only borrowed element in popular mythology is, I believe, the Vampire, or Vourkolakas, whose name appears to be Slavonic, although I am not sure that his nature is wholly so.

In the folk-tales, which have never been exhaustively examined from this standpoint, we find quite a large number of echoes of mythology proper. In Crete we find the tale of Peleus and Thetis.^ A young peasant fell in love with a Nereid, and was advised by a witch that when the cocks crew he should seize her by the hair, and hold fast until the cocks ceased from crowing. He did

^ The Dioscuri in the Christian Legends, by J. Rendel Harris : Clay & Sons, 1903- "Chourmonouzis, KpriTiKd, p. 69; Schmidt, p. 115.