Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/380

 358 Collectanea.

that in Cyprus they do not use incense, as they do in Greece, for domestic fumigation, because incense is used for the dead. Instead, for domestic spiritual requirements, they use the Palm- Sunday olive leaves. The leaves are taken into the church on Palm Sunday, where they are offered as " palms," and left in the church for forty days. When this period has elapsed they are taken out and used as incense in households.

Folk-Medicine. — Scorpion bites Grigori cures by putting the head of the scorpion that bit you on the wound ("a hair of the dog that bit you ").

Divination. — One evening the conversation turned on divina- tion. At Knossos once, Grigori discovered who had broken his 7iargileh by means of the sieve.

At his home in Cyprus lives an old woman who takes a hand- ful of beans and throws them on the table and divines by means of them. Grigori firmly believes in her powers, and told us that she had correctly informed his wife of his being on the sea on his way back to Cyprus.

Divination by the shoulder-blade of sheep (cr-aAAa or kovtoKo) is ])ractised by shepherds. The men of Sphakia are the experts at this mode of prophecy. I subsequently discussed this topic with the Abbot of the monastery of Arkadhi. He was much interested in such matters, and particularly in pla7ichette, to which a travelling German had once introduced him. On theological grounds he was much distressed at the German's statement that spirits of the dead wrote the answers, and proved to his own satisfaction that it could not be the dead but that it must be evil spirits {uKapdara TTvevfiaTa). He firmly believed in the divina- tion by the speal-bone, and told long stories of the foretelling of the sack of the monastery by the Turks in 1866. He confirmed the reputation of the Sphakiani, but appeared to think that the diviners of these degenerate days were not equal to their pre- decessors, and that in the rest of Crete the art was dying out. There was one shepherd, whose name unfortunately I have for- gotten, from the village of Anogia, of whom he spoke with respect. I heard of the speal-bone also in Thessaly and Pindus, but there the practice was always referred to with contempt as a fast- disappearing shepherd superstition.