Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/544

 what of the ordinary Greek? His gods were not invisible or spiritual. Pelasgian and Achaean deities alike were beings of flesh and blood, robust, active, sensuous; they ate and drank, they waked and slept, they married, they begot or bore children. Such was the Greek's conception of godhead, such his ideal of blessedness. How then should he look forward to the annihilation of the body with any feeling but dismay? How could his hopes of future bliss not involve of necessity a belief in the survival of both body and soul?

I suggest then that the dissolution of the body, which the dead so eagerly desired, far from being regarded as a final and complete severance of soul and body, was in the Pelasgian religion the means of their re-union in another world. Death was only a temporary severance of the two entities which together form a living man capable of enjoying physical pleasures. The soul at the moment of death went down to the nether world in advance, or, it may be, as is sometimes held by the peasants of modern Greece, hovered about the body until its dissolution was complete. But the dead body certainly remained in this world, at the place where it lay evident to men's eyes; it could not pass to the other world at once; it could not ever pass thither without the assistance of friends still living; it was too gross and too impotent, bereft of the soul, to make its own way to the home of the dead. Therefore upon the survivors was imposed the sacred charge of resolving it into elements more refined, and of enabling it thus to pass out of human touch and sight to a home which the soul could reach unaided. When this process was effected by inhumation, the period of forty days required for complete dissolution was the critical period in the dead man's existence; if the body was 'bound' and indissoluble for any cause and the soul re-entered it before the proper time, the revenant was a pitiable wanderer, sharing in the joys neither of this world nor of the next; the mourners therefore took such measures as they could to prevent that calamity, by entertaining the acquaintances of the dead man and prevailing upon them to revoke any curses wherewith he was bound, and by laying in the dead man's mouth a charm which should bar the soul's re-entry. When cremation was employed, the dissolution of the body was more speedy and more sure; and it is not therefore, p. 341.]