Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/168

 136 The Ctirsing of Venizelos.

in Athens, and he will doubtless complete the parallel by- treating with the same magnanimous disdain the con- temptible ecclesiastic who has cursed and stoned him.

The ritual by which the Metropolitan of Athens has disgraced his cloth and his Church, without inflicting the smallest harm on the object of his impotent wrath, is unquestionably of heathen origin, and, set off by the gor- geous habiliments of the officiating clergy, must have presented the same sort of ludicrous medley which is some- times displayed by the untutored savage, who struts and flaunts in a grotesque combination of native paint and foreign velvet. In Europe such mummeries only contri- bute to the public hilarity, and bring the Church which parades them into contempt.

The combination of stones and curses directed at a person who, for one reason or another, is out of reach, seems to be not uncommon ; ignorance and malignity apparently trust to one or other, if not both, of these missiles hitting their mark in some manner unexplained. The poet Pro- pertius ungallantly invited all lovers to pelt with stones and curses the grave of a certain lady whose reputation, by a stretch of charity, might perhaps be described as dubious.*

A writer on Syrian folklore has described " the customs with regard to casting curses or prayers with stones from the hand. All tourists to Jerusalem have seen Absalom's tomb, and the hole in the base of its pinnacle through which generations of Jews have conveyed thus their imprecations on an ungrateful and impious son. ... At Biskinta, on the Lebanon, is the tomb of a Druze who, tradition says, was buried alive to obtain merit in the next stage of his existence ; for the Druzes believe in the transmigration of souls. Greek Orthodox Christians in the village — and they only — cast stones on this grave with muttered curses as they pass." ^

■* Properlius, v. 5, 77 sqq.

= Fr. Sessions, "Some Syrian Folklore Notes," Folk-Lore, ix. (1898) p. 15.