Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/355

 food, and is, now that Greece is nominally Christian, candles: for religion, ever conservative, keeps up the otherwise obsolete system of barter between men and gods, even though the priests of those gods are enlightened enough to accept of a secular modern currency. But the particular commodities in which the barter is made are of little consequence as compared with the spirit which has always animated such dealings. The substitution of candles for meat is practically the only modification which Christianity has effected in this department of religion.

Even this change in detail does not affect the whole range of such operations; candles are not by any means the only offerings of which the Church takes cognisance. In dealing with the question of divination, we have seen cases in which on some religious occasion, saint's-day or wedding, the priest blesses a genuinely sacrificial victim. We have seen too that at the laying of foundation stones, a religious ceremony conducted by a priest of the Church, some animal is immolated to appease the genius of the site. We have seen again how the Church permits or encourages the dedication of those silver-foil models of various objects—ships and houses, corn-fields and vineyards, eyes and limbs—which serve at once to propitiate the saint to whom they are offered and, on the principle of sympathetic magic, to place the object, thus represented as it were by proxy, under the saint's special care; and how also the same kind of models are frequently dedicated as thank-offerings ; so that indeed, in default of an inscription announcing the motive of the offerer, no one can decide how any given offerings of this kind should be classified.

Then too in those religious rites which have survived without ecclesiastical sanction the use and the purpose of food-offerings remain unchanged. The favour of the Fates is bought by offerings of cakes in order that they may bestow upon the women who thus propitiate them the blessing of children. Nereids who have 'seized' children are known to withdraw their oft-times baneful influence when the mother takes a present of food to the