Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/295

 feeling still existed there in favour of sacrificing a Mohammedan or a Jew at the foundation of important bridges and other buildings ; and there is a legend of a black man having been actually immured in the bridge of an aqueduct near Lebadea in Boeotia. Lastly, I heard from a shepherd belonging to Chios the story of a house in that island haunted by beings whom he called indifferently Arabs and vrykólakes. He himself had been mad for eight months from the shock of seeing them, and four of his friends who visited the house to discover the cause of his disaster were similarly afflicted. The demons were finally laid to rest by an old man driving a flock of goats through the house. Now vrykólakes, with whom I shall deal at length later on, are persons resuscitated after death who issue from their graves; and among those who are predisposed to such reappearance are men who have met with a violent death. The identification therefore of Arabs with vrykólakes in this story suggests that an Arab victim sacrificed at the foundation of some building might become the genius of it—not in this case the beneficent guardian of it, but owing to his violent death a malicious and hurtful monster. On this evidence I incline to the view that the Arabs who now form a class of genii were originally the human victims preferred at the sinking of wells—a piece of engineering, it must be remembered, of first-rate importance in a country as dry as Greece—and that, when once these genii had become associated with water, the popular imagination soon assigned them to rivers and natural springs no less than to wells.

The genii of rivers sometimes appear also in the shape of bulls, though as I have already remarked this type of genius is far more commonly associated with churches. Possibly in some cases the fact that the church was built in the neighbourhood of some sacred spring, whose miraculous virtue was of older date and repute than Christianity, first caused the transference; but at any rate some rivers still retain this type of genius, the type under which river gods were regularly represented in ancient times. In this, which I have not found elsewhere.]([Greek: Paradoseis], 580). In this case a wizard 'took three calves born at one birth and drove them three times round the churchyard, saying some magic words.']