Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/423

 varied according as they personally believed that revenants (including vrykolakes) were a figment of the people's imagination or a real work of the Devil.

Now of these two ecclesiastical views, which are really alternative and incompatible although attempts were made to combine them, the former has clearly had little or no effect upon the people; in spite of the efforts of the 'men of piety who received the confessions of Christians ' to extirpate the superstition, it remains vigorous, as we have seen, down to this day. But the explanation of the phenomenon as a work of the Devil was readily entertained; even educated men were convinced of it. 'It is the height of folly,' says Leo Allatius, speaking for himself, 'to deny altogether that such bodies are sometimes found incorrupt in the graves, and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the human race'; and similarly Father Richard opens his account of vrykolakes with the statement that the Devil sometimes works by means of dead bodies which he preserves in their entirety and re-animates. As for the common-folk, the explanation accorded so well with the diabolical characteristics of the vrykolakas that they could hardly have failed to accept it.

The popularisation of this view is well illustrated by a local interpretation set upon a custom which I have already discussed, the so-called custom of 'Charon's obol.' I have shown that the practice of placing a coin or other object in the mouth of the dead continues down to the present day; that the classical notion, that the coin was intended as payment for the ferryman of the Styx, was only a temporary and probably local misinterpretation of the custom; and that the coin or other object employed was really a charm designed to prevent any evil spirit from entering (or possibly the soul from re-entering) the dead body. Now in Chios and in Rhodes this original intention has not been forgotten, and is combined with the belief in vrykolakes. In the former island the woman who prepares the corpse for burial places on its lips a cross of wax or cotton-stuff, and the priest also during the funeral service prepares a fragment of pottery to be laid in the same, as they were called, the more discreet and 'spiritual' priests who alone were authorised by their bishops to discharge this function. Cf. Christophorus Angelus, op. cit. cap. 22.]