Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/323

 neither this nor the former part as described by Magnoncourt is generally practised now. The usual procedure is either for the boy who fetched the water or for the girls in rotation to plunge the hand in and draw out the first object touched, improvising or reciting at the same time some couplet favourable or adverse to the love or matrimonial prospects of her who shall be found to own the forthcoming object; and so in turn, until each girl has received back her token and learnt the presage of her fate.

The recitation of possibly prepared distichs by those who are taking part in the ceremony is certainly a less pure method of divination than the earlier practice described by Magnoncourt. The prediction is deliberately provided, and the element of chance or of divine guidance is confined to the drawing of the token. The older method exhibits more clearly the relation of the modern custom to the superstitious observation of [Greek: klêdones] from the time of the Odyssey onwards. Thus when Odysseus heard the suitors threaten to take the beggar Irus to Epirus, 'even to the tyrant Echetus the destroyer of all men,' he hailed the chance words as a divine ratification of his hope that soon the suitors should take their own journey to another destroyer of all men, even the tyrant of the nether world, and 'he rejoiced in the presage' ([Greek: chairen de kleêdoni]).

The same method of divination was frequently employed in the classical age also, and that too not only privately but even by public oracles. It was thus that Hermes Agoraeus at Pherae made response to his worshippers. The enquirer presented himself towards evening before the statue of the god, burnt incense on the hearth, filled with oil and lighted some bronze lamps that stood there, placed a certain bronze coin of the local currency upon the altar, whispered his question into the ear of the statue, and then at once holding his hands over his ears made his way out of the agora. Once outside, he removed his hands, and the first words which greeted his ears were accepted as the god's response to his question. A primitive statue of Hermes withis in some of these passages used in the sense of [Greek: klêdôn].]