GREEK RELIGION AND MODERN FOLK-LORE.* Mn. LAWSON has written a
book which, whether we accept his conclusions or not, is a remarkable and stimulating con- tribution to the study of Hellenic life. He is deeply read in classical literature, and is also well acquainted with the works of the Church fathers and others which shed light upon mediaeval Greece. He has an extraordinarily fertile and ingenious mind, and a style which is only too rare in books of scholarship. Some ten years ago he spent a couple of years in various parts of Greece, and, talking and understanding Romaic, studied the customs and beliefs of the peasantry with a thoroughness to which few Englishmen can attain. He conceived the idea that the folk-lore of the Greek peasant of to-day might cast some light upon the popular beliefs and customs of ancient Hellas, which the great Greek writers, writing for a cultured audience, have necessarily touched upon but lightly. In his introductory chapter he meets and answers some of the more obvious objections. Popular customs are, as a rule, hoar-ancient, and date back to an antiquity at least as great as the fifth century B.C. Though the modern Greeks are not Hellenes, they have large Hellenic elements in their ancestry, and they have been singularly tenacious of their Hellenic nationality. In racial character and in many of their customs they reproduce exactly the Hellenes of the classical age. They have become Christian without, in one sense, ceasing to be polytheistic. The stories of S. Dionysius are an expurgated form of the doings of Dionysus ; Artemis has become S. Artemidos ; and S. Elias is the Christian successor of Helios. The Church has never suppressed the worship of Ta warwd, and when these deities were not fused with Christian saints they lingered in folk-tales and country legends. Is it not possible to get from these country tales of to-day some light on the old popular Hellenic mind, the beliefs of peasants con- temporary with Plato and the tragedians, which Greek literature, as the work of the elect for the elect, would be slow to reveal to us ?
In theory there is a great deal to be said for this thesis. It is a task, however, of immense complexity which Mr. Lawson has set himself. The problem is bow to get cross- bearings. We may trace in a modern custom the germ of a classical belief, but if it differs from or amplifies the classical belief, how are we to be certain that the difference is classical too ? It would be necessary to show that the difference does not come from any of the other race traditions which constitute the modern Greek ; and to make assurance double sure there should be some cross-bearing either from classical literature or archaeology upon the point. To pursue this scientific method would have meant not one volume but a
Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion a Study in Suroisats. By John Cuthbert Lawson, Cambridge : at the University Press, [12,. net library, and there is no objection to Mr. Lawson limiting the nature of his proof in order to keep wide the area of his observation. But the result is that few of his conclusions can be regarded as more than probable, and in many of them we think be claims a higher degree of probability than the method warrants. He admits that he is no folk-lorist, and so the negative proof from comparative folk- lore is wanting. He does not claim to be an archaeolo- gist, and so one possible source of cross-bearings is cut off. Further, he appears to be unfamiliar with some modern works which closely affect his subject. He uses the word " Pelasgic " very loosely for all non-Achaean stock, and he does not seem to accept the view of recent scholars as to the ethnological history of the Aegean. On some points, such as the prevalence of human sacrifice in Greek religion, he seems to us to fall into overstatements from which he would have been saved by the knowledge of certain modern develop- ments in other lines of classical scholarship than his own. We make these remarks not so much in criticism of the book as to show that its scope is limited and its results rather suggestions for future inquiry than ascertained truths. For the rest, it is a brilliant compendium of modern Greek beliefs, drawn not merely from the author's own- travels, but from a host of other workers in the same field. This in itself is an admirable piece of work, and we have nothing but praise for the boldness of Mr. Lawson's speculations, and the vigour and ingenuity with which he reconstructs his picture. The book is not only a real contribution to scholarship, but a piece of good literature. The description in the last chapter of the Easter ceremonies in a Greek village reveals high gifts of imagination and style.
We have only space to select a few of the beliefs which Mr. Lawson claims to be relics of Hellenism. Demeter has been superseded by a male S. Demetrius, but in her old home of Eleusis she is still female. In country places they still talk of her as " The Mistress " or " The Mistress of the World," a saint with no Church, who has been occasionally won in marriage by a mortal lover. Charon has become a saint too, the messenger of God,—Death, who, often regretfully, conquers mortals and takes them from the world. The Nymphs, on the other hand, are pure creatures of folk-lore, the " Nereids " or fairy- folk, whose name is on the lips of every Greek peasant. They are not immortal, though they are cleverer and more beautiful than mortals, and they may become wives to mortals who do not mind a somewhat unsettled domestic life. They can turn themselves into awful shapes ; they are very mischievous, and cast strange spells over men and women and children, and even animals ; and certain lonely places are sacred to them, and are to be visited with great circumspection. Altogether, the Nereids have all the traits of those nymphs of the mountain of whom Aphrodite told Anchises in one of the Homeric hymns. There is too a certain Queen of the Nymphs, called by the country-folk " The Great Lady " or " The Lady Beautiful," in whom Mr. Lawson sees traces of Artemis. But his most ingenious interpretation is reserved for those bugbears of all Greek peasants, the Callicantzari. Into the natural history of these portents he enters with the precision of a zoologist. They are specially rampant during the twelve days following Christmas, and in the mumming still carried on during this period he sees a survival of a festival of Dionysus. He derives the name of the monsters from the word dv.raupos, and argues that now, as in ancient Hellas, the " centaur " was a genus which included other species than the " horse " kind. A " centaur " is not so much a special creature as a creature capable of transforming itself, like the Callicantzari, into different shapes. Birds, as of old, are still recognised as intermediaries between earth and heaven; and to-day omens are taken from the pig's spleen, just as in the old graa-rxy00-koirfa. Then comes a remark- able story of a human sacrifice in the island of Santorini during the Greek War of Independence which was told to Mr. Lawson by an eyewitness. If the story is to be believed, the victim was sent as a messenger to the gods. On the basis of this tale he argues for a new conception of the victim in the tales of human sacrifice which we find in classical litera- ture. In succeeding chapters he investigates the modern idea of revenants, of vampires, and of the rites of burial. Much of the argument is merely on the interpretation of the modern beliefs, but when he comes to the conception of dissolution and the fate of the spirit after death he pro- pounds theories which have a direct reference to ancient
Hellenic religion. The dissolution of the body, which the dead so eagerly desired, far from being regarded as a com- plete severance of soul and body, was in the Pelasgian religion the means of their re-union in another world." The body could only pass to the other aide to join the soul when its dissolution, in the real or in the ritual sense, was complete. The final chapter on "The Union of Gods and Men" is in many ways the most remarkable in the volume. Death, Mr. Lawson argues, was in the old Greek religion con- ceived of as a wedding, the means whereby men attained to union with the gods. It is an idea still familiar in the ballads of the Greek peasant to-day. It was the teaching of the Mysteries, which he endeavours to reconstruct from the hostile account of Clement of Alexandria. The legend of Kore, acted before the initiate, taught " that not only was there physical life beyond death, but a life of wedded happiness with the gods." " Blessed I call Iasioi3," sang the shepherd in Theocritus, " whom such things befell as ye that are uninitiate shall never come to know." We think that in his reliance on evidence from modern ballads of this belief Mr. Lawson is straining a metaphor too far; but there is power and truth, it seems to us, in his speculations on this aspect of the older religion. At the same time, we are on slippery ground. This conception of death as a bride-chamber was used sometimes in classical Greek without any sense of divine nuptials. Take the epitaph of Apollonides in the Anthology, when Heliodorus and Diogeneia are said to "rejoice in their common tomb as in a bride-chamber."
The new light on Hellenic beliefs which Mr. Lawson draws from his inquiry is limited to a few matters. Such are especially the conception of Demeter; the view of Charon, not as the ferry- man of Hades, but as Death himself ; the view of the Centaurs as originally a tribe of reputed sorcerers who were able by magic to transform themselves into wild beasts ; and the teaching of the Mysteries that death was a mystic marriage with the immortals. Much of the evidence may seem to us slight and fantastic, but much is striking and curious ; and the whole book from its imaginative power is in the highest degree fascinating and suggestive. We congratulate Mr. Lawson on having made one of the most original contribu- tions to Greek scholarship which have appeared for many days.
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