Mani (26 page)

Human dominion is never more than barely tolerated by these half-wild flocks. There is protest and anarchy at every step and the wide-hatted herdsmen, knee-deep in the rank turmoil, seem only to control them by the constant whirling of their crooks and a fusillade of stones and un-Theocritan objurgation. A raffish distinction is supplied to the goats' faces by the jut of their southern gentlemen's beards, but the set of their flecked yellow eyes, barred by oblong black pupils, spells only wickedness and cynicism and a kind of off-hand and humorous connivance, as if they were jeeringly abreast of our most carefully hidden secrets. A scattering of black Maniot pigs added
their plebeian hysteria to the stampede. What could they all find to eat in this sun-smitten wilderness? A nimble nanny-goat had settled the problem by leaping into a sycamore tree and rising with lightning bounds from branch to branch till she had reached the top, where, perched precariously like a heraldic emblem, she began swallowing the delicious young leaves. The goatherd was in a frenzy and inappropriate oaths whizzed through the air in the wake of stony missiles. “Pimp!” he shouted, “Catamite!” and “Whore!”; all in vain. Finally, aiming his crook like a javelin, and winging it pleonastically with the cry of “hornwearer!” he caught her a neat blow on the belly. “
Na, Keratá!
” The goat sailed up into the air and over our heads in a wide arc and alighted on the hillside, where, cool as a cucumber, the female cuckold went on munching some gloomy plant. They vanished as quickly as they had come leaving nothing but a rank whiff and a pattern of neat cloven intaglios in the mud round the troughs. The barking and jeering dustclouds diminished and died away in the direction of the towers and vanished towards the sunset in a golden, far-tinkling haze.

* * *

It came as no surprise when our old host, fishing out and uncorking the second bottle as the moon took over from the sun, mentioned that “the old people”—always this disclaimer!—believed this fountain to be haunted by nereids. It was just the place for them. After Charon and a mysterious creature called the kallikantzaros, these beings are the supernatural survivors of the ancient world most often mentioned by name in the Greek countryside. Though some of them
can
be—especially in the Mani—sea-dwellers, on the whole they seem to have moved inland and become freshwater denizens haunting remote streams, springs, fountains, watery grottoes, mountain rivers and torrents and, occasionally, mill-ponds, especially if the mills are in
ruins. It is impossible to say when this migration took place; perhaps it is just a shift of names; but they have usurped the hegemony of the ancient naiads and of the dryads and oreads as well. They have inherited the generic rôle of the nymphs. They dress in white and gold and are of unearthly beauty. Strangely enough, they are not immortal; they live about a thousand years. But they are of a different and rarer essence from ordinary mortals and, in some way, half divine. Their beauty never fades, nor do the charm and seduction of their voices. They are wonderful cooks and skilful spinners of flimsy and diaphanous fabrics. “Cooked by a nereid!” “Spun by a nereid!”—these expressions used to be common praise. There is also a light and airy creeper that festoons the trees in some parts of Greece, known as “nereid-spinning.” It reminds one of the cave where Odysseus landed on his return to Ithaca and the “great looms of stone where the nymphs weave robes of sea purple marvellous to behold.”

These nereids are feminine, volatile and wanton; seldom capable of a lasting passion. But most of the harm they do is involuntary, due to a congenital inaptitude for fidelity and the tamer domestic virtues. Interruption of their revels incurs the penalties of dumbness, blindness or epilepsy. They often fall violently in love with mortals, especially the young and brave, skilful dancers and flute- and
lyra
-players, and carry them off to their waterside haunts and to the threshing floors where they sometimes dance. Lonely young shepherds are particularly exposed to these dangers. “Do not go up to the lonely tree,” an island song runs, “nor down into the lowlands, nor play your flute by the upper reaches of the river, lest the nereids, finding you alone, gather round you in a throng.” There are many tales of shepherds and princes falling in love with them. When it is the other way round the dazed young stranger is carried off to a secret grotto, and wrapped in a passionate embrace, the nereid sailing away on the wind at the third cockcrow. But, with a few
exceptions, their ardour flags before that of their lovers. If a nereid is reluctant to yield to a mortal (according to one legend) the secret of success is to seize her kerchief. She turns into terrifying shapes—into that of a lion, a snake and finally into flames, as in the story of Peleus and Thetis—but she at last resumes her own and surrenders and their secret nuptials are celebrated.

Sometimes, when a mortal keeps the kerchief hidden, nereids remain faithful to their husbands for years, even when the latter are married to mortal wives. Some have helped their husbands with supernatural backing, manœuvring them to the height of worldly success. They hate mortal women and the sentiment is mutual. Both are gnawed by jealousy and women seek protection for their households in amulets, by handing a clove of garlic over the door and by making a cross with paint or lamp-black on the lintel. The forty days between childbirth and churching are a particularly perilous time for women not only from spiteful nereids but from the Evil Eye and the other baleful influences that are loose. There are many families, apart from the Mavromichalis, who are said to be
neraïdogennemenoi
or nereid-born. They are thought to possess more than human graces. The adjective is also in common use to describe girls of especial beauty and charm. Fickle though they are, nereids worship their children by mortals—they are constantly drawn to their cradles. In fact, they have a general passion for the young and often kidnap pretty children, leaving in their stead sickly nereid changelings who usually pine away and die. Children sometimes run away and dance with them for days off their own bat and their petting and spoiling often has fatal results. When this happens the nereids are overcome with sorrow. Young men in love with nereids become melancholy and ill and prone to strokes and seizures. There are “nereid-doctors” who can cure the nereid-struck with potions and charms. One of the best of these remedies is a branch of “nereid-wood,” a
species of tree of which I have not been able to discover the ordinary name. Goats and other livestock fall under their spell; they desert their flocks and waste away. A native of the Aegean islet of Pholegandros attributes the innumerable chapels there to the eagerness of the peasants to have a protecting saint close by. The whole species are sometimes referred to as the “
kalokyrades
”—“the good ladies”—on the same euphemistic principle that prompted the old Greeks to call the Furies the “Eumenides” or “kindly ones.”

Our old host put the remains of our little feast back into his basket. The moon was rising and we prepared to go back to the towers which now shone silver along their eastern flanks.

“We don't have much trouble with them now”—how admirably civilized was the attitude of my rustic host and how much more sensible and balanced than the attitude of a whole class of his compatriots with whom I shall have to do in a paragraph or so.

 

[1]
The poet Seferis—now Ambassador in London—introduced me to another of these stray Persian fragments:
syntrivani
, which is a beautiful demotic word for fountain—indeed for those playing in the imaginary
bhags
evoked by the word
pharsí
....

I
N NOTHING
is the continuity of Ancient Greece clearer than in the superstitions and pagan religious practices (and many of the “Christian” ones) that still prevail in the Greek mountains and islands. I think it is true to say that the educated classes are less and the simple class more superstitious than their English counterparts. The only superstition that really seems to hold its own in the upper reaches of society is the class-defying and pan-Hellenic—indeed, almost world-wide—belief in the Evil Eye. But even in this, the strongest single superstition among the simple, there is a touch of levity. It is considered a bit of a joke among sophisticated people, certainly it holds a less tyrannic sway than it does in grand Italian circles. Nevertheless, nobody who has set even a tentative foot in Athenian high life would need to hesitate a second in naming someone credited with this baleful and perhaps unconscious power.

It is a wry paradox that the newly urban and semi-educated in Greece, whose knowledge of ancient literature is very limited, should be one's prime stumbling block in approaching these matters. (This knowledge—it never seems to vary—is covered by the ability to quote the first line of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, Hector's single-line patriotic injunction about omens to Polydamas, the equally patriotic couplet of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae, the two laconic, and again, patriotic, phrases of Leonidas and the universal tags about self-
knowledge and nothing in excess—forty-two words in all.)
[1]
These are the very people who deplore one's curiosity about such matters and minimize or negate their existence and, in a few cases, try to hinder one's access to them as “backward,” “primitive” and above all “un-European” elements in the modern Greek State. It is odd because these people are usually the very ones to insist most vehemently on the pure and unbroken descent of the modern Greeks from the Greeks of the Periclean age; and if there is one element in Greek life, after the language and the Greek character itself (I think it is true to say that they possess all the faults and many of the qualities of their ancestors), which points to unbroken continuity, not only from Periclean Greece but from a yet remoter past, indeed, from the very cradle of European culture, it is the survival of these ancient beliefs and practices that some seek to patronize out of existence.
[2]
Certainly nothing could more tend to minimize the volume of
Slav and other barbarian invasions, or underline the fact of the invaders' swift absorption in a predominating Greek population. The aversion of some of the higher clergy—though not of the rustic priests, who see nothing anomalous in Christian and pagan co-existence—is based on much more logical grounds.

This side of Greek country life, which evokes the scorn and hatred of some Greeks but few foreigners, has attracted, during the last hundred years, the interest and devoted study of a number of Greek and foreign scholars. The most profitable sources in Greece are Kambouroglou and the magnificent and monumental work of Polites. There is Bernhard Schmidt and there is Lawson. My own favourites are the Athenian Professor Alexander Polites and John Cuthbert Lawson, the Cambridge don. They usually agree but not always; and between them they cover a wide field. Both refer back to ancient sources with a scholarly fairness. Both of them have studied the works of St. John Damascene (whose condemnation of certain pagan practices, though ineffective—for many of them still exist—is very revealing in showing how little they have changed since he anathematized them), the great Byzantine scholar Psellus and that strange seventeenth-century figure Leo Allatius of Chios. Lawson is the one from whom I plan, in later pages, to crib most freely; perhaps because Professor Dawkins used to talk of his early travels with such amused affection. I can still hear him
speak with a chuckle about the “dear fellow”; also because his work
[3]
—a rare book, now long out of print—is a real triumph of scholarship and detailed reasoning. Lastly, because he knew much more about it than I do.

It is impossible to wander about in Greece or live for long with peasant families without striking this supernatural back-ground. But it is steadily losing its grip. The industrial age, that impartial exterminator of gods and demons, is succeeding where the Fathers failed. Among country people there is seldom any bashfulness in discussing these matters, except when the semieducated have intimidated them into reticence. Old women are the richest repositories of knowledge and sometimes—through keeping company with their elders at the laundry-trough, the loom and the spindle—young girls. The attitude of peasant men and women alike outwardly resembles the upper class attitude towards the Eye; it is one of amused tolerance coupled with veneration; because, true or not, these beliefs are old and they are heirlooms.

What happened was this. Since they issued from the haze of pre-history in which a primordial Great Mother may have held universal sway, the Greeks have always been polytheists; and one of the marks of polytheism is that it keeps open house: all gods are welcome. Swarms of Asiatics moved into the company of the native Greek gods and made themselves at home; and, when Christ appeared on the Graeco-Roman scene, there was plenty of room for Him. Tiberius, according to Tertullian, suggested the apotheosis of Christ; and Hadrian (writes Lampridius) reared temples in His honour. His statue, with that of Orpheus and Abraham, was set up in the private shrine of Alexander Severus, and St. Augustine tells of Him keeping similar company with Homer, Pythagoras and St. Paul. This
tendency was even more widespread and elastic among the common people. But monotheism, by its very nature, cannot reciprocate this easy-going welcome and when Christianity became the State religion of the Empire, the expulsion of the old gods, after thousands of years of happy tenure and the reduction of the Pantheon to a private cell, was a serious task. There was not much difficulty among the educated: Plato and his successors had prepared the ground; and when Julian the Apostate attempted to re-install the rites of Apollo in the groves outside Antioch, the sophisticated citizens deemed it not only a bad joke, but a rather vulgar one. But what was to be done about the unlettered and conservative masses? How to focus the wide scope of their veneration on a single point? It could not be done and a compromise was found. Temples and shrines and holy sites were rededicated to Christian saints and converted to basilicas. Columns and blocks from ancient fanes, hallowed by centuries of worship, were built into new churches and, to ease the changeover, saints were inducted to these old haunts with characteristics or names which corresponded with those of the former incumbents; sometimes both. Dionysus became St. Dionysios and still retains his link with Naxos and his Bacchic patronage of wine. Artemis of the Ephesians became a male St. Artemidos and, like Artemis, his help is sought in the cure of wasting and nymph-struck children, as it was before he changed clothes, when the handmaids of Artemis had wrought mischief among the offspring of mortals. Demeter suffered a similar operation and became St. Demetrius, who, under the additional epithet of “Stereanos”—“He of the land”—is a patron of crops and fruitfulness. In one place the metamorphosis was actually repudiated—she still continues to be worshipped as “St. Demetra,” a saint unknown in the Orthodox synaxary. Helios the sun-god became the prophet Elijah (the Greek form is Elias and, as the hard breathing had probably already fallen into disuse at the time of the changeover, the disguise was very
thin). The name of this Hebrew prophet is now very common in Greece, but rare in Italy, where this name for Apollo was unknown. His shrine is always on mountains and hilltops where Helios, the heaven-born flaming charioteer, was worshipped. They symbolize, says the Church, Elijah's whirlwind assumption to heaven in a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire; and hundreds of lofty peaks all over the Greek world still commemorate this personification of Apollo. Hermes became the Archangel Michael; his helmet changed its shape and his wings their position and the writhing snakes and the feathers of his wand became a flaming sword. We have seen that it is his inherited duty to guide the souls of the Maniot dead through the cavern of Taenarus and down the Herculean path to Hades. The Church of the Blessed Virgin—Panayiá, the All-Holy-One—sprung up in the temple of the Virgin Goddess Athene on the Acropolis and the warlike St. George stepped into the shoes of Hephaestos (the armourer?) in the Theseum. Much earlier, Poseidon in Tenos had usurped the healing powers of Asklepios and presided over a magic spring of healing; both have since been usurped in their turn by the Blessed Virgin.