Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/479

 their breath is deadly to approach ; the smell of blood is a joy to them ; they follow like hounds upon their victim's trail ; they torment him both body and soul ; they fasten upon his living limbs and gorge themselves with his blood ; and if any would harbour him from their pursuit, the venom of their wrath falls like a plague upon the land, and devastates it ; they are monsters, [Greek: knôdala] —and the recurrence of this word is significant—abhorrent alike to gods and to men. The description is surely not that which Aeschylus would himself have invented for beings who should come afterwards to be worshipped as 'revered goddesses,' [Greek: semnai theai]. The difficulty of that transition in the play itself cannot but arrest the attention of every reader; it is a difficulty which even the genius of Aeschylus could not remove. Why then did he draw so loathsome a portrait of the Erinyes in the earlier part of the play? Why did he create that difficulty? The reason, I suggest, was that he followed once more, and this time almost too faithfully, the popular traditions, and, while he would not represent a real revenant on the stage, transferred to those demonic agents, by whom the work of vengeance was vicariously performed, all the attributes popularly associated with the prototypes of the modern vrykolakas.

Thus then the history of the modern belief in vrykolakes has been fully traced. The ancients also believed that for certain causes—the same causes in the main as are still assigned—men were doomed to remain incorruptible after death and to rise again in bodily form from their graves, and that one class of these revenants, those namely who had wrongs of their own to avenge, inflicted upon their enemies (and upon any who shielded or harboured them) the same sufferings as are now generally believed to be inflicted in an unreasoning manner by all classes of vrykolakes alike upon mankind at large, with no justification, such as a natural desire for vengeance might afford, in the case of those whose resuscitation is not the outcome of any injury or neglect at the hands of other men, and with no discrimination between friend and foe on the part of those who have real wrongs to avenge. Remove the unreasoning element in the character of the