Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/404

 quoted above make it abundantly clear that the common-folk had come to suspect all revenants alike of predatory propensities.

This change in popular beliefs placed the Church in an awkward predicament, and was the cause of a marked divergence between the popular and the clerical usages of the word [Greek: tympaniaios]. It had long been claimed that a sentence of excommunication was binding upon a man even beyond death and could arrest the natural process of decomposition; indeed the formula officially employed ended, as Father Richard of Santorini notes, with the phrase, 'and after death to remain indissoluble.' But when the fear of real vampires spread over Greece, the priests would naturally have been unwilling to be held responsible for the resuscitation of such pests, while they were equally unwilling to diminish the terrors of excommunication by omitting the final imprecation. Their only course therefore was to emphasize what seems indeed to have been always the authorised doctrine of the Church, that excommunicated persons remained indeed incorrupt and 'drum-like,' but were not, like vrykolakes, subject to diabolical re-animation. It is Father Richard's acceptance of this clerical view which explains why, writing as he did some few years after Leo Allatius, he distinguished the two words which Leo had treated as synonymous, making resuscitation the criterion of the vrykolakas and stating that the 'drum-like' body, though withheld from natural decay, lay quiet in its grave. But the ecclesiastical doctrine made no impression upon the popular belief; to this very day the common-folk regard any corpse which is found incorrupt as a potential vrykolakas, and excommunication is everywhere numbered among the causes of vampirism.

Thus it has come to pass that any revenants other than the savage vrykolakes are well-nigh forgotten, and in most districts their very name is no longer heard. The word vrykolakes, which first meant were-wolves, came to denote also the vampires into which were-wolves changed, and gradually, as these vampires by exciting men's horror and concentrating on themselves the people's attention became the predominant class of revenants, ousted from the very speech of Greece as a whole the old Greek names for the more harmless sort, and established itself as the regular equivalent of revenant.

Such is my solution of the somewhat complex problem of