Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/357

 A sinus in Tegulis. 49

not. Much of Vv-hat I am going to bring forward has already been well handled by Sir J. G. Frazer ; but it so happens that the works in which he treats of this point deal chiefly with the tendance of the dead, so that a hasty reader would be apt to think that only ghosts, and out-going ones at that, use the roof. As a matter of fact^and this goes far to explain the bad repute of the roof, already insisted upon — all manner of things of ill omen make it their road for coming and going.

Before entering upon this subject, it is well to consider for an instant how uncommon it is for anything desirable to come in that way. Even Father Christmas, in some at least of his Protean shapes, is very apt to choose other lines of approach, e.g. the door. A friendly spirit now and then casuajly inhabits the roof or part of it,^ but I think he never regularly does so. Child-spirits, i.e. generally, purified ghosts ready to be reincarnated and no longer terrible, normally come out of the ground or floor ; and ordinary material blessings naturally come in by the obvious and ordinary means of entrance. Even the window, the successor or supplementer of the roof-hole, is apt to let in such things as death-warnings in bird-form, or vampires.

I have so far had little to say of Greek customs. This is due to scantiness of material, brought about I fancy by the fact that from very early times a common form of Greek house was that with the flat roof, sometimes used as a bedroom, like Kirke's palace in the Odyssey (x. 556), though the gabled roof was also known, since Athena in bird-form manages to perch on a beam of Odysseus' palace {xxii. 239), indoors ; and in later times both kinds seem to have been in use.- Hence a certain number of their houses were of the kind whose roofs gather but little bad

1 E.g. the Teutonic house-spirit, see Mogk in Hastings, E.R.E., art. " Demons and Spirits (Teutonic)," p. 6336.

The Greek House (Camb. 1916), especially p. 130 ff. D
 * Archaeology throws little light on the point ; see B. C. Rider,