Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/480

 vrykolakas, and the revenant in which the folk of ancient Greece believed remains.

But, if they believed in him, they must have called him by some name. Aeschylus' phrase [Greek: knôdala brotophthora], 'monsters that destroy mankind,' is a description rather than a name. What were the reasonable vrykolakes of ancient Greece called? That is now the one question which must be answered in order to make our enquiry complete.

Briefly my answer is this, that the particular class of revenants with which the present section has mainly dealt, the Avengers of blood, were known by three several names, [Greek: miastôr], [Greek: alastôr], and [Greek: prostropaios], but that literature contains no word which could serve as a collective designation for all classes alike. I hope however to show that the Greek language was not originally defective in this respect, but that the term [Greek: alastôr], although regularly used from the fifth century onwards in the narrow sense of an Avenger, had originally a wider application and denoted simply a revenant.

Now the interpretation which I give to these three words is not that which is commonly accepted. Anyone who will turn to a lexicon will find that to each of the three is assigned a double signification in connexion with blood-guilt. All three are said to denote either a god who punishes the blood-guilty or the blood-guilty man who is punished. Thus a god, it is alleged, may be called [Greek: miastôr] (literally a 'polluter') because he punishes the polluted—a somewhat obvious misnomer; or again [Greek: alastôr], because he 'does not forget' but punishes the sinner—a derivation which, as I shall show later, cannot be accepted; or thirdly [Greek: prostropaios], as the being who was 'turned to' by the murdered man and was besought to avenge his cause—a somewhat circuitous way for the word to arrive at its active sense of 'Avenger.' And, secondly, a man, it is said, was called [Greek: miastôr] when, being himself polluted, he was liable to be 'a polluter' of other men with whom he came in contact—a view which is certainly defensible; [Greek: alastôr] as one whose sin 'could not be forgotten'—an interpretation almost beyond the pale of serious discussion; and [Greek: prostropaios] because, being blood-guilty, he 'turned towards' some god for purification—an explanation which may be right—whence the word came to denote in general a polluted person who still needed purification.