Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/451

 re-animation of the body, and thereby creating for itself the difficulty of explaining the soul's interest in the body?

The hypothesis commends itself as providing at the same time an answer to the one question which remained unanswered in the last section. We saw that, through ecclesiastical influence, Christian Greece has long assigned the work of resuscitating the dead to the Devil. But to whom or to what did pagan Greece previously assign it? Surely in the whole range of Greek mythology it were hard to find any supernatural being either specially suited or probably condemned to such a task. The soul is, prima facie, the most appropriate and likely agent.

But there is even stronger evidence than this. The probable becomes proven when we turn back to the only full pagan account of a bodily revenant, the story of Philinnion. What are her words, when she is discovered by her parents? 'Mother and father, it was wrong of you to grudge me three days with this man here in my own home and doing no harm. And so, because of your meddlesomeness, you shall mourn for me anew, and I shall go away to my appointed place. For it is by divine consent that I have done thus.' And how is her threat of going away fulfilled? 'Scarce had she spoken when she became a corpse, and her body lay stretched upon the bed in the sight of all.' The words 'I shall go away' were therefore intended by the writer to mean 'My soul will go away'; for the body remained. Clearly then, in the belief of that age, resuscitation of the dead meant the re-animation of the body by the soul which had been temporarily separated from it.

In the light of this fact Plato's reference to the wandering of the souls of the wicked is found to approximate more nearly to the popular superstition. Such souls, he says, have been seen in the neighbourhood of tombs; and they are visible because they are not cleansed and freed from the visible and material world, but participate therein. What then is the particular material thing in which they participate and which keeps them near the tombs? Evidently the body whose impurities they contracted in life, the body from which they are not cleansed and freed. Plato admits only participation, not re-animation; but in all else he adheres to the genuine popular belief.as opposed to [Greek: tou aeidous te kai Haidou].]