Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/428

 same punishment as befell those on whom a curse had actually been called down. The Church, I think, merely added to the number of those sins, and at the same time undertook the task of pronouncing in many cases the curse which they had earned.

(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.

This class is purely Slavonic in origin. To become a were-wolf in consequence of having eaten flesh which a wolf's fangs have infected with madness is to a simple mind rational enough; and a were-wolf becomes after death a vampire. Further the belief, so far as I know, belongs only to Elis, one of the districts where Slavonic ascendancy was most complete and continued longest.

(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed.

This class also is Slavonic. The jumping of a cat over a dead body is still believed by some Slavonic peoples to be a cause of vampirism, while in Greece the idea is rare and local only.

Thus out of the many conditions by which, in modern belief, a man is predisposed to turn vrykolakas, only three can be genuinely Hellenic: first, lack of burial; second, a sudden or violent death; and third, a parental or other curse, or such sin as renders a man accursed. The revenant therefore was regarded, as we inferred also from the story of Constantine and Areté, as a sufferer. His suffering might be the result of pure mischance, as in the case of sudden death, or of neglect on the part of those whose duty it was to lament and to bury him, or again of some sin of his own which had merited a curse. But whether he was the victim of sheer misfortune or of punishment, he was still a sufferer, an object to excite the pity of mankind in general, although in special cases, as when he had been murdered or had not received the last offices of love at the hands of his kinsfolk, he might reasonably be feared by those who had injured him as an avenger.

Since then in the pre-Slavonic period the general feeling towards revenants was a feeling of pity, the treatment of them in that period requires investigation.

Starting once more from the modern superstition, we find that the treatment of vrykolakes by the Greeks differs widely from that accorded by the Slavs to vampires. The Slavonic method is