Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/418

 then again kept for a few days under the Sultan's seal, and when finally the coffin was opened the body was found 'dissolved and decomposed, having at last obtained mercy.' And the Sultan was so impressed by the miracle that he is recorded to have exclaimed, 'Certainly the Christian religion is true beyond all question.'

Suchlike stories, together with the formula of excommunication and the nomocanon above quoted, prove conclusively that the Church did not merely acquiesce in one part of the popular superstition but authoritatively sanctioned it and utilised it for her own ends. The incorruptibility of the dead body under certain conditions was made an article of faith and an instrument of terrorism, which, as will appear later, the ill-educated peasant-priests did not scruple to wield widely as an incentive to baptism, a deterrent from apostasy, and a challenge to repentance.

The name by which ecclesiastical writers designated a person whose body was thus 'bound' by excommunication, was one which has already been explained, [Greek: tympaniaios] or, in another form, [Greek: tympanitês] —swollen until the skin is as tight as a drum. This word, which now survives, so far as I know, only in one island, and in the seventeenth century, to judge by Leo Allatius' reference to it, was certainly less common than the word vrykolakas, had probably at one time, before Slavonic influence was felt, belonged to the popular as well as to the ecclesiastical vocabulary; and it was, I suspect, borrowed by the Church from popular speech at the same time as she borrowed from popular superstition the idea of dead bodies being 'bound' and withheld from corruption by a curse.

At what date this appropriation took place I cannot determine; but it must certainly have been before Slavonic influence was widely felt; for, when once the Greek revenant had acquired the baneful characteristics of the Slavonic vampire, the clergy would surely never have claimed as a new thing the power to 'bind' the dead by excommunication, when the laity (and indeed many of their own calling too) believed that persons so 'bound' became. I cannot identify this author.].]