Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/560

 wooded hill, the churchyard about it neatly kept and the graves of the recently buried well-tended, but just beyond its precincts a rough hole in the ground open to sun and rain, and 'some two fathoms of bones,' as a peasant said jestingly, lying in neglect and disarray. These pits, which are to be seen throughout Greece, are indeed dignified by the Church with the name of cemeteries ([Greek: koimêtêria] ); but they command no respect on the part of the peasant. He will cross himself as he passes chapel or enters churchyard, but he will jest over the depository of outcast bones. In a word, when it is seen that every trace of the dead body save only the white bones has disappeared, the common-folk exchange their extraordinary devotion to the duties of tending the dead for a total unconcern. And the reason for this can only be that the dead body no longer lies helpless and dependent for its existence upon the sustenance which they from time to time provide, but has vanished to a land where, re-united with the soul, it regains its activity and independence.

Such, I believe, is the trend of religious thought which, almost insensibly, has guided the actions of the Greek people from the Pelasgian age until now in their treatment of the dead; the benefit which they have sought to confer upon the dead by the dissolution of their bodies has been the re-union of body with soul and the resumption of that active bodily life which death had for a time suspended., the place of preliminary interment. But the two terms are often confused.]