Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/195

 information transposes cause and effect. Elsewhere in Greece there are known certain beings called [Greek: Gelloudes] or [Greek: Gilloudes], female demons with a propensity to carry off young children and to devour them; and it is strange that so careful an authority on Greek folk-lore as Bernhard Schmidt should not have recognised that the name [Greek: agieloudes] employed in some of the Cyclades is only a dialectic form of the commoner [Greek: gelloudes] with an euphonetic [Greek: a] prefixed as in the case of [Greek: neraïdes] and [Greek: aneraïdes]. Enquiry in Tenos revealed to me the fact, not mentioned, though perhaps implied, in the statement of Bent, that the [Greek: agieloudes] are there believed to feed upon the children whom they carry off. This trait at once confirms their identity with the [Greek: gelloudes], and renders it impossible to class them as a form of nymph. It is of course believed that nymphs of the sea or of rivers, when they carry off human children to their watery habitations, do incidentally drown them, but by an oversight and not of malice prepense. But savagely to prey upon human flesh—for all the nymphs' wantonness and cruelty, that is a thing abhorrent from their nature and inconceivable in them. This horrid propensity proves the [Greek: gelloudes] or [Greek: agieloudes] to be a separate class of female demons.

The chief authority on these malignant beings is Leo Allatius , who both quotes a series of passages which enable us to trace the development of the belief in them, and also tells a story which is the only source of evidence concerning other of their characteristics than their appetite for the flesh of infants.

Their prototype, mentioned, we are told, by Sappho, was the maiden Gello, whose spectre after her untimely end was said by the people of Lesbos to beset children and to be chargeable with the early deaths of infants.

The individuality of this Gello continued to be recognised to some extent as late as the tenth century ; for Ignatius, a deacon of Constantinople, in his life of the Patriarch Tarasius named her as a single demon, though he added that the crime of killingand [Greek: g] before [Greek: e], and between [Greek: l] and [Greek: ll], are negligible. In many words and dialects there are none.](a proverb). Hesych. s.v. [Greek: Gellô].]