Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/434

 subject as follows : 'Devils, though incorporeal and spiritual, can take to themselves the bodies of dead men and in such bodies can have intercourse with women, as commonly with striges and witches, and by such union can even beget children.' This statement would be a fair ecclesiastical summary of modern Greek belief. In Thessaly I myself was told of a family in the neighbourhood of Domoko, who reckoned a vrykolakas among their ancestors of the second or third generation back, and by virtue of such lineage inherited a special skill (such as is more commonly ascribed to [Greek: sabbatogennêmenoi], 'men born on a Saturday,' when vrykolakes usually rest in their graves, or to [Greek: alaphrostoiche[i(]ôtoi] , those who are in close touch with a 'familiar spirit,') in dealing with those vrykolakes which from time to time troubled the country-side; indeed they had been summoned, I was assured, even to remote districts for consultation as specialists.

The story of Philinnion was not overlooked by Bernhard Schmidt, but he does not appear to have recognised in it anything more relevant than in the ancient ghost-stories (gespenstergeschichten) among which he reckons it. Most emphatically this is no ghost-story. The distinction between ghosts and Greek revenants is of a primary and universal nature, patent to all who can discriminate between soul and body. In this story Philinnion acts as a revenant and is treated as a revenant; the inspection of the vault in which her body had been laid and the purpose of her nocturnal visits to Machates furnish conclusive evidence of her corporeal resuscitation; and the method of disposing of her corpse is the method generally approved and employed in the case of revenants—cremation. In effect all that remains of the story is in complete accord with what I have claimed on other grounds as the Hellenic element in the modern superstition; only one detail is wanting—the cause of Philinnion's resuscitation—and if we had the first part of the story, it is not unlikely that in it we should find that her early death had been also sudden or violent. Clearly then the belief in revenants was known in Greece in the age of Hadrian.