Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/530

 *ment of that process of dissolution, which, though it mean the cessation of all intercourse with this upper world, is yet earnestly desired. Here in fact are plain words of popular poetry which recognise the connexion of the 'unsleeping lamp' with the dissolution of the body, and make the quenching of the one signify the completion of the other. It is going but a short step further to suppose that the presence of the lamp's flame at the grave was originally intended to advance the process of dissolution—or, in other words, that the maintenance of the 'unsleeping lamp' at the grave until the body is finally dissolved is an act of ceremonial cremation.

This supposition gains yet more in probability when we compare with the custom of the 'unsleeping lamp' another not dissimilar custom which obtains in Zacynthos. There, as elsewhere, candles or lamps are lighted about the dead body while it is lying in state, and fire from them is carried to the grave. But, arrived there, instead of lighting an 'unsleeping lamp,' the bearers of the candles drop them into the grave beside the corpse. In this we have a close parallel to the ancient custom of putting a lamp, probably enough, as I have suggested, a lighted lamp, into the grave; and at the same time it cannot but be intimately connected with the custom of the 'unsleeping lamp,' the purpose of which is now known to concern the dissolution of the dead body. I claim then that the series of customs which we have reviewed, exhibiting as they do an intention to associate fire in some close way with the buried body and, as in the modern form of the custom, to associate it therewith until the process of dissolution is complete, find a common explanation in the continuance of a practice already exemplified in earlier ages, the practice of ceremonial cremation in conjunction with the full burial rite.

Nor is this explanation open to attack on the ground that a mere lamp lighted near the dead body bears so little outward resemblance to real cremation. To the outside observer the ceremonial act may seem a mere travesty of that for which it is substituted; but to the persons concerned the presence of fire, in however small a volume, may have seemed sufficient; for in all ritual it is not the act, but the intention, which has value. I have already pointed out how interment was occasionally reduced to an equally ineffective minimum; but I may perhaps cite a still closer