Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/408

 as the tenderest blessings among the peasants are prayers, not for him to whom they wish well, but rather for those whom he has loved and lost, so that the beggar's thanks are often 'May God forgive your father and your mother' (which, however it may sound, is not intended otherwise than graciously) or again, prettier still in its vague genderless plural which no translation can adequately render, [Greek: ho theos 'chôres' ta pethammena sou], 'May God forgive your dead,' so the harshest and bitterest of curses are vented, not upon the man who has excited them, but upon those who are nearest and dearest to him. And bitterness in cursing being as much a part of the Greek character as gentleness in blessing, it is almost inconceivable that, if any idea of real vampirism had originally been associated with revenants, the merest novice in malediction could have missed the opportunity of adding to his imprecations of incorruptibility and resuscitation a prayer that his enemy might devastate with horrid carnage the home of those who mourned him. Yet not one of the curses which I have quoted above suggests any savagery to be shown by the resuscitated body; not one of them hints at the blood-thirsty predatory character of the modern vrykolakas; nay, most significant of all, not one of them contains the word vrykolakas, nor have I ever heard or found recorded, so far as I can remember, any form of the curse in which that word appears. Now this is certainly not due to any difficulty of language in using the word, for there is a convenient enough verb formed from it, [Greek: brykolakiazô], 'I turn vampire,' and [Greek: na brykolakiasês], 'May you turn vampire,' should commend itself as both sonorous and compendious. The reason why all mention and all thought of the ordinary vrykolakas are lacking in these curses must rather be that, when they first came into vogue, revenants were not yet credited with the savage character which under Slavonic influence they afterwards acquired; and that, when the word vrykolakas was introduced, the old traditional forms of curse underwent no modification, but were bandied to and fro by boys with the same glib uniformity as by their fathers before them. They had been cast in set forms before the idea of vampirism had been introduced and when men believed only in reasonable and usually harmless revenants.