Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/350

 masses which will secure the fulfilment of their wishes than for oracular responses which may run counter to them. Still even so oracles have not yet entirely ceased; and in discussing those which survive we shall find once more a coincidence both in form and spirit between ancient and modern Greek religion.

An oracle, it must be remembered, is simply a place set apart for the practice of divination; the method of obtaining responses has always varied in different places, and the mediation of a professional diviner, though usual, cannot be regarded as essential. Those caves therefore where women make offerings of honey-cakes to the Fates and pray for the fulfilment of their conjugal hopes are really oracles, provided that there is some means of learning there whether the prayer is accepted or rejected. And this is often the case; most commonly the answer is inferred—on what principle of interpretation, I do not know—from the dripping of water or the detachment and fall from the roof of a particle of stone; and in Aetolia I was told of a cave in the neighbourhood of Agrinion in which the nature of the response is determined by the behaviour of the bats which frequent it. If they remain hanging quiescent from the roof and walls, the suppliant's hopes will be realised; but if they be disturbed by his or, more often, her intrusion and flutter round confusedly, the Fates are inexorably adverse.

But besides these modest and unpretentious oracles there still survives in the island of Amorgos an oracle of a higher order ensconced in a church and served by a priest. The saint under whose patronage this pagan institution has continued to flourish is St George, here surnamed Balsamites. To the right on entering the church is seen a large squared block of marble hollowed out so as to have the form of an urn inside, and highly polished. It stands apparently on the natural rock, and is roofed over with a dome-shaped lid capable of being locked. At the present day the mouth of the urn is also covered by a marble slab with a hole pierced through it and fitted with a plug; but this was not observed by travellers of the seventeenth century and is probably