Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/394

 (8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.

(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed.

The provenance and the significance of these various beliefs concerning the causes of vampirism will be discussed in the next section.

§ 2.

Vrykolakes are not ghosts. Such is the first observation which I am compelled to make and which the reader of the last chapter might well consider superfluous. But so many Greek writers, and with them even Bernhard Schmidt, have fallen into the error of comparing ancient ghost-stories with modern tales about vrykolakes, without apparently recognising the essential and fundamental difference between them, that some insistence upon the point is necessary. That a definite and close relation does indeed subsist between the ancient belief in wandering spirits and the modern belief in wandering corpses, I readily admit, and with that relation I shall deal later; but the issue before us can only be kept clear by remembering that vrykolakes are not ghosts. There is absolute unanimity among the Greek peasants in their belief that the corpse itself is the vrykolakas, and even the work of re-animating the corpse is generally credited not to the soul which formerly inhabited it, but to the Devil. Thus it appears that whereas most peoples believe to some extent in the return of the ghosts or spirits of the dead, the Greeks fear rather the return of their bodies. If then we can determine what part, if any, of this superstition is genuinely Hellenic, we shall have gained a step in our knowledge of the ideas popularly held in ancient Greece concerning the condition and the relations of soul and body after death.

The view which I take is briefly this, that though Slavonic, 578 (Calávryta).]