Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/197

 the third [Greek: Byzou] or 'blood-sucker'; the fourth [Greek: Marmarou], probably 'stony-hearted'; the fifth [Greek: Petasia], for she can fly as a bird in the air; the sixth [Greek: Pelagia], for she can swim as a fish in the sea; the seventh [Greek: Bordona], probably meaning 'stooping like a kite on her prey'; the eighth [Greek: Apletou], 'insatiable'; the ninth [Greek: Chamodrakaina], for she can lurk like a snake in the earth; the tenth [Greek: Anabardalaia], possibly 'soaring like a lark in the air'; the eleventh [Greek: Psychanaspastria], 'snatcher of souls'; the twelfth [Greek: Paidopniktria], 'strangler of children'; and the half-name [Greek: Strigla], the kind of witch whereof the next section treats.

Whether these names are anywhere still remembered as a mystic incantation, or all the qualities which they imply still imputed to the Gelloudes, I cannot say. But a modern cure for such of the demon's injuries as are not immediately fatal has been recorded from Amorgos. 'If a child has been afflicted by it, the mother first sends for the priest to curse the demon, and scratches her child with her nails; if these plans do not succeed, she has to go down at sunset to the shore, and select forty round stones brought up by forty different waves; these she must take home and boil in vinegar, and when the cock crows the evil phantom will disappear and leave the child whole .'

The Striges, though often confused with Lamiae and with Gelloudes, are essentially different from them. The two classes with which I have dealt are demons; the Striges, in the modern acceptation of the term, are women who possess the power to transform themselves into birds of prey or other animals; and it is only the taste for blood, shared by them with those demons, which has created the confusion.

The Striges moreover cannot, like the Lamiae or Gelloudes, be claimed either as an original product of the Greek imagination or as the exclusive property of Greek superstition at the presentoccurs in a similar list of names cited by Dr Rouse from a MS. on magic. See Folklore, l.c. p. 162. The names said to have been extorted by the Archangel Michael begin there with [Greek: strigla, gilou], and belong clearly to a similar female demon.].]