Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/427

 (4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who in perjuring himself calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.

The dread which a curse, above all a parent's curse, excited in the ancient Greeks is well known. No one can have read Aeschylus' story of the house of Atreus, nor followed with Sophocles the fortunes of Oedipus and his children, without perceiving therein the working of a curse that claims fulfilment and cannot be averted. The idea therefore here involved is purely Hellenic.

(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.

This class is an ecclesiastical variety of the last.

(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate.

The apostate is of course ipso facto excommunicate, even though no formal sentence have been pronounced against him. The unbaptised have probably been included by priestcraft for purposes of intimidation; baptism is commonly held to prevent children from becoming were-wolves, and therefore also vrykolakes at death.

(7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.

Clerical influence is clearly discernible here, but is not, I think, responsible for the whole idea. A story from Zacynthos records how the treacherous murderer of a good man was first smitten by a thunderbolt so that he lost both his sight and his reason, and after his death was turned by God into a vrykolakas as a punishment for his crime, and has so remained for a thousand years. Here, in spite of the word vrykolakas being used, the revenant is represented, like Constantine in the popular ballad, as a sufferer. This idea has been shown to be pre-Slavonic—and incidentally it is not a little curious that the story itself claims to date from a thousand years ago, when this idea was only beginning to be ousted by Slavonic superstition. But if the idea of 'punishment' is old, the idea that the punishment was merited by a crime must be equally old. For this reason, and for others which will be developed later, I hold that the perpetrators of certain deadly sins were from early times regarded as accursed and subject to the, p. 576.]