Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/419

 rampant and ravening vrykolakes. The belief must therefore have been incorporated in ecclesiastical doctrine at a time when the Greek people spoke of the incorrupt dead as [Greek: tympaniaioi], 'drumlike,' and conceived of them as reasonable revenants.

The process by which the belief came to obtain the sanction of the Church is not hard to guess. The ambiguity of the words [Greek: lyô], 'loose,' and [Greek: deô], 'bind,' may well have been the starting-point. If, on the one hand, the apostles, or the bishops who succeeded them, treated certain sins as 'having no forgiveness neither in this world nor the world to come,' and in the exercise of their power to bind and to loose included in their formula of excommunication some such phrase as Leo Allatius records, [Greek: kai meta ton thanaton alytos kai aparalytos], 'and after death never to be "loosed"' (meaning thereby 'absolved'); while, on the other hand, the Greek people were hereditarily familiar with a pagan belief that the dead bodies of persons who lay under a curse were not 'loosed' (in the sense of 'dissolved'); then the common-folk for their part would necessarily have understood the ecclesiastical curse as a sentence of 'non-dissolution'; while the clergy would have been less than Greek if they had not seen, and more than Greek if they had not seized, the handle which popular superstition gave them, and by adding to their accustomed formula ([Greek: meta ton thanaton alytos], 'after death never to be "loosed"') such apparently innocent words as [Greek: hôsper hai petrai kai ta sidêra], 'even as stone and iron,' substituted the idea of 'dissolution' for that of 'absolution' and definitely committed the Church to the old pagan doctrine.

If this conjecture as to the process by which the popular belief became an article of the Orthodox faith be correct, a further suggestion may be made as to the date at which the process began. If the word 'loosing' was misunderstood by the Greeks when used in the formula of excommunication, it would equally have been misunderstood in the words of Christ, 'Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven .' Was it then the knowledge that these words were commonly misinterpreted by the Greeks which led the author of the fourth Gospel to reproduce them in a less equivocal form: "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they