Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/273

 popular belief, though preserving much that is ancient, may have been modified by a superstition, or rather by an actual form of insanity, which was particularly prevalent in the Middle Ages.

Such have been in different districts and periods the various developments of a superstition which originated in the reputation for sorcery enjoyed by a Pelasgian tribe inhabiting Mount Pelion in a prehistoric age; and the complexity of modern traditions concerning the Callicantzari is due to the fact that they do not all date from one epoch but comprise the whole history of the Centaurs.

§14.

The tale of deities is now almost told. There remain only a few miscellaneous beings, identical or, at the least, comparable with the creations of ancient superstition, who may be classed together under the name of [Greek: stoiche[i(]a] (anciently [Greek: stoicheia]) or, to adopt the exact Latin equivalent, genii.

The Greek word, which in classical times served as a fair equivalent for any sense of our word 'elements,' became from Plato's time onward a technical term in physics for those first beginnings of the material world which Empedocles had previously called [Greek: rhizômata] and other philosophers [Greek: archai]. The physical elements however were commonly supposed to be haunted each by its own peculiar spirit, and hence among the later Platonists the term [Greek: stoicheia] became a technicality of demonology rather than of natural science. Every component part of the visible universe was credited with an invisible genius, a spirit whose being was in some way bound up with the existence of its abode; and the term [Greek: stoicheion] was transferred from the material to the spiritual.

But though the Platonists invented and introduced this new sense of the word, its widespread acceptance was probably not their work, but a curious accident resulting from misinterpretation of early Christian writings. In St Paul's Epistles there occurs several times a phrase, [Greek: ta stoicheia tou kosmou], 'worldly principles,', pronounced now as -yá.].]