Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/398

 Thereupon one of them with gun or sword succeeds in inflicting a wound upon the monster, which however for the nonce escapes. But the next day a man of the village, who had not been among the watchers of the night, is observed to bear a wound exactly corresponding with that which the assailant of the vrykolakas had dealt; and being taxed with it the man confesses himself to be a vrykolakas.

Similarly on the borders of Aetolia and Acarnania, in the neighbourhood of Agrinion, I myself ascertained that the word vrykolakas was occasionally applied to living persons in the sense of were-wolf, although there as elsewhere it more commonly denotes a resuscitated corpse. Lycanthropy, as has been observed in a previous chapter, is in Greece often imputed to children. In the district mentioned this is conspicuously the case. If one or more children in a family die without evident cause, the mother will often regard the smallest or weakliest of the survivors—more especially one in any way deformed or demented—as guilty of the brothers' or sisters' deaths, and the suspect is called a vrykolakas. [Greek: Eisai brykólakas kai 'pháges ton aderphó sou], 'you are a vrykolakas and have devoured your brother,' is the charge hurled at the helpless infant, and ill-treatment to match is meted out in the hope of deterring it from its blood-*thirsty ways.

In effect from four widely separated parts of the Greek world—Mytilene, Cyprus, the neighbourhood of Agrinion, and the district of Thessaly and Epirus—comes one and the same statement, that to the word vrykolakas is still, or has recently been, attached its etymologically correct meaning 'were-wolf'; and, since these isolated local usages cannot be explained otherwise than as survivals of an usage which was once general, they constitute a second proof that the Greeks originally adopted the word in the sense in which the vast majority of the Slavonic races continue down to this day to employ it.

But while it is thus certain that the Greeks first learnt and acquired the word vrykolakas in the sense of 'were-wolf,' it is equally certain that the main characteristics of the monster to which that name is now applied are those of the Slavonic 'vampire.'