Mani (28 page)

St. Artemidos, by usurping the name of Artemis (and her incidental gift of curing nymph-struck children), has forced her for the last sixteen hundred years to roam the woods under various pseudonyms. She is “the Queen of the Mountains” in eastern Greece, “the Great Lady” in Zante, the “Chief of the Nereids” in Cephalonia and Parnassus; in Aetolia, Lawson discovered her under the name of the Lady Kálo—akin, surely, to the totally uncanonical, churchless (and now vanished) St. Kali of the humble Athenians. Both Psellus and Leo Allatius expatiated on the Lady Kálo, calling her “The Fair One of the Mountains.” Larger and more beautiful than the other nereids, fiercely virginal, a dweller of the mountains and woods, and given to dancing with her nereids and to bathing in streams and pools, she is merciless to men that come upon her by chance. The usual penalties of those that surprise the nereids visit them, only with greater severity.

She has sometimes been confused with the Lamia of the Sea, a beautiful sea-nymph who lures young sailors and—yet again—lonely shepherds pasturing flocks by the shore, down to her underwater alcove; to their destruction. She spins along luminously in the form of a whirlwind or a waterspout, and when one of the latter goes twisting past over the waves, sailors cross themselves and say “the Lamia of the Sea is passing” and stick a black-handled knife into the caique's mast as a counter-spell. Her beguiling songs, which beckon seamen to their undoing, she seems to have borrowed from the Sirens. Of the ancient Lamiae, however, who are more closely related generically to the plural “lamiae” of the next paragraph, only one, who was the mother of Scylla mentioned by Stesichorus, is linked with the sea. But this lonely marine Lamia, who rules the sea-nymphs, has inherited in full the lasciviousness of the ancient Lamiae; of which fault, with all their gross demerits, the more easily traceable
land
-lamiae seem to be guiltless.

The plural lamiae are one of three sets of female monsters; two of them are not only monsters, but demons; they are of most ancient descent, and all three have a hideous passion for devouring babies. Babies and women after childbirth, it will be noticed, seem to share with shepherds and sailors the main onslaught of the supernatural world.

The progenitrix of the lamiae was a single Lamia, a Libyan queen who became a victim of Hera's jealousy for the usual reasons. Robbed of her children by the spiteful goddess, she took to a lonely and morose cave-life and, her mind twisted by despair, she degenerated into a wicked fiend who preyed on the offspring of luckier mothers. Along with Empusa and Mormo, she became, even in the time of Apuleius, a bogey to frighten children with. This is still part of her rôle, but she has since expanded into a species; and typical lamiae are now filthy, bloated, slovenly creatures, dragons' brides and abominable housekeepers, and so foolish that they attempt to bake bread in
cold ovens, feed their dogs on hay and throw bones to their horses and are then surprised when they die off. They live in wildernesses and, though spendthrifts, they are often rich, owing to their link with dragons who “guard” treasure. They are, however, generous and honest and never break their word once given. Were it not for their cannibalistic passion for newborn babies, they would seem more pitiable than wicked. “The lamia has strangled it” is a peasant phrase which accounts for the sudden death of a baby.

The second category of these dangerous demons descends from a maiden called Gello whom authorities in classical times derive from a mention, now lost, in Sappho. Dying young, she haunted Lesbos and took grievous toll of the infants there. The archipelago is still her hunting ground. St. John Damascene, Psellus and the Chiot Leo Allatius mention her, and, like Lamia, she has multiplied and her offspring are called “gelloudes.” They sometimes cast spells on infants before eating them. This can be cured
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by the mother summoning a priest to exorcize the child, whose cheeks she solemnly scratches. If this fails, she must choose forty pebbles washed up on the shore at sunset by forty different waves and boil them in vinegar. At cockcrow the Gello will then take wing for ever.

The third group of these baby-eaters differs from the demonic lamiae and gelloudes. For the
striges
are women with the power to turn themselves into fierce birds and animals to assuage this baleful hunger. They are of Graeco-Roman descent from the Latin
strix
, the screech owl.
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The bird has a sinister mention in Strabo, and Ovid tells us clearly that they had the character of cannibal witch-birds among the Marsi of the
Abbruzzi. Derivatives of the word—chiefly
stregá
—exist in Albania, and of course in Italy, Corsica and Sardinia. (I remember hearing the word
strigoi
, meaning a kind of witch, in Transylvania; it is probably inherited from the Roman legionaries and convicts who settled in Dacia in the reign of Trajan.) The modern Greek
stringla
, which we have met earlier on, is surely from a low Latin diminutive—
strigula
—of strix. It is in universal use to-day to describe a hag, crone or witch. They are as old women with a gift for flight, though their knack for transformation has dropped out of currency. Their cannibal bent was not always limited to babies, but, according to terrible tales told quite recently in Messenia, it wrought havoc among grown-ups of both sexes as well. Sometimes, according to Allatius, they were just poor old women in league with the devil; and sometimes they are little girls afflicted with a werewolf tendency. There is an old tale from Tenos which treats of a horse-devouring princess. They are always nocturnal.

Gorgons (to whom Polites is the best guide), while retaining their ancient name, have suffered a sea change: just below the waistline the flesh gradually laminates into scales and, like mermaids, they swell at the hips and then shelve away in long fishtails; sometimes, in lieu of legs, into twin sets of squamous and tapering coils. They are represented thus, holding up in one hand a ship and the other an anchor, on the walls of taverns, on the figureheads of old caiques and tattooed on the bronzed and brine-caked forearms of seamen.
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Their chief habitat seems to
be the eastern Aegean and the Black Sea. In these waters, beautiful solitary gorgons suddenly surface in the hurly-burly of a Cycladic or Euxine storm—especially, for some reason, on Saturday nights; they grasp the bowsprit of a pitching caique and ask the captain in ringing tones: “
Where is Alexander the Great?
” He must answer at the top of his voice, “
Alexander the Great lives and reigns!
” perhaps adding, “
and keeps the world at peace!
” At this the Gorgon vanishes and the waves subside to a flat calm. If the wrong answer is given, the tempest boils up to a deafening roar, the Gorgon tilts the bowsprit towards the sea's bottom and the caique plunges to its destruction with all hands. This strange legend, which is widespread among seafaring men of the Greek world, has a strong hold on the imagination. It appears off the shores of Mitylene as a memory from his Asia Minor childhood, in Venezis' book
Aeolia
, in Seferis' beautiful poem
the Argonauts
, also in a book of Mirivilís, and even in a poem of Flecker,
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whose wife was a Greek. It is remarkable that Alexander the Great should be the one Greek hero to survive in popular minds. He is the only one of them to appear, in splendid plumed silhouette, on the lighted screen of the Karaghiozi shadow play.
O Megaléxandros
is a household word. I think Lawson is wrong to attribute this to late demotic translations of his life by the Pseudo-Callisthenes, for his many legends, under the name of the Lord Iskander, in Arabic, Persian and several other languages, dominate Islam as far as the Himalayas; with how much greater reason, then, should he live and reign in the minds of his countrymen.

The human part of a gorgon is represented as a beautiful woman; but, in common speech,
gorgona
is often applied to women with hideous or frightening faces. In Rhodes, it means a virago, and in Cephalonia, where the name Medusa is also used, she is a scowling beldame. In Kythnos the word means a depraved woman or harlot, which tallies with another aspect of gorgons in a thirteenth-century Byzantine bestiary, whose author wrote under the name of “
O Physiologos
.” Here she is “a harlot-like beast with a beautiful white body and auburn locks ending in snakes' heads and a glance that brings death.” She is both polyglot and gifted with knowledge of the language of beasts; tormented by wantonness and lusting after lions and dragons and other beasts, she woos them in their various tongues. Spurned by this wary fauna, she melodiously courts the embrace of mankind.
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Men with sense are no less cautious than the animal kingdom. Aware of her terrible glance, they pretend, from a safe distance, to consent to her lures—on the condition that she digs a pit and buries her death-dealing head in it. This, guilelessly, she does, leaving her naked body exposed; “so she remains and awaits the pains of lewdness.” But, instead of drawing near with a lover's step, the beloved rushes up and slices off her head with a sword; he then hustles it with averted eyes into a pot, in case he should need to display it for the destruction of dragons, lions or leopards (but lately his putative rivals). So much for the Physiologist. Again, there is something pathetic as well as ludicrous, in the fate of these medieval gorgons.

Modern gorgons have mixed attributes. Their faces are dangerous either from their hideousness or their fell beauty. Their gift of sweet song (suggesting, like that of the Sea-Lamia, a loan from the Sirens), they use, like the mermaids of the West they so closely resemble, for luring sailors. Medusa's snake locks,
originally an infliction of Athena (incurred by the love of Poseidon, to whom Medusa bore, according to Hesiod, the Winged Pegasus), seem to have disappeared. They were always, as they are to-day, sea creatures. Ancient vases display them in the company of dolphins, sometimes—like many female supernaturals—in groups of three. There is a modern story of one infesting some straits like Scylla and taking toll of a sailor from each ship; not as a lover, but to eat. They are always to be feared.

I had some news of a gorgon three years ago, the greatest of them, in the rocky little island of Seriphos, windiest of the Cyclades. An intelligent boy of nine took me under his wing the moment I landed, and turned himself into a most instructive guide. After explaining the windmills and the churches, he led the way, half on our hands and knees, up a steep rock face to a chapel jutting from the cliff. Once we were inside, he pointed to a spot between his feet on the floor, which was half irregular slabs and half excavated rock, and said with a broad smile: “Guess what's down there!” I gave up. “The head of Medusa the Gorgon!” he said, “they buried it there out of harm's way—fathoms and fathoms down. Her hair was all snakes!” He flourished his hands in the penumbra overhead, hissing and mimicking with his fingers the dart of forked tongues. “It was in case it should sting people....” It was in Seriphos that Perseus, with a flourish of his dripping and petrifying trophy, turned the tyrant Polydectes to a statue along with all his toadies at the banquet. This gesticulating boy made it seem as though it had all occurred last week.

* * *

The supernatural
ancien régime
presented a conundrum to the Early Fathers. When the Fathers came into their own after long persecution in the name of the old gods, they adopted, as we
have seen, bold and sweeping tactics. The gods and the more presentable figures were captured, baptized and camouflaged; their headquarters were either wrecked or re-garrisoned by the winners and up fluttered, as it were, the new victorious flag. Some of the dispossessed managed to keep a leg in both camps. Others—insignificant as possible leaders of counter-revolution or totally ineligible—were (as supernatural beings can only be burnt or smashed in effigy)
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outlawed
en bloc
. A banished mythology was left to skulk and roam in the mountains, eventually, it was hoped, to die of neglect. But from a mixture of ancient awe and, perhaps, Christian charity, the country people befriended them, and they are with us still.

These mythic moss-troops, then, included not only the lesser gods, but the rag-tag and bobtail of the sea and the woods—nymphs, nereids, dryads, oreads, gorgons, tritons, satyrs, centaurs and the like—and they are known collectively by a variety of revealing names.
Ta paganá
—“the pagan ones”—has a nuance of fairyland about it, suggesting the smaller, more mischievous supernaturals;
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as
daimonia
they are divinities and demons, as
phantasmata
, or
phasmata
, apparitions—those phantasms of the night that are routed by the Compline hymn; as
ta' xaphnika
they are “the sudden ones,” as
eidolika
, passing visions, as
ta angelika
, like angels, as
aerika
, denizens of the air, and as
Tzinia
, cheats or false gods. Perhaps their most significant style is
ta' xotiká
, the exotic, extraneous, “outside” ones; indeed, “they that are without” the church—a narrowing and
sharpening of St. Paul's phrase in
Corinthians
I v. 12 and a shifting of it from the world of men to that of gods and demons. St. Basil also applies the same word to human pagans. This sense assumes added point at certain seasons, notably at Christmas. Then the pagan crew—usually known in this context as
pagana
and
xotiká
—are represented as an active nuisance but not a dangerous one. They are always trying to break in from “outside,” to start a row or to steal the roast pork which is the Greek Christmas fare; behaving, in fact, in an embarrassingly Nordic and trollish way. They are not, however, bent so much on trying to break up this
Christian feast; they are trying to join in the festivities of the season, though in a different cause. In many places they are humorously tolerated and placated with left offerings. The invariable time for this yearly outburst is the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. This span included the great winter feasts of the Dionysia and the Kronia and, after the Roman Conquest, the imported Latin
fasti
(which were accepted and completely Hellenized by the Greeks) of the Brumalia and the Kalendae. The last celebrations, the New Year feast, became those horse marines of the almanack, the Greek Kalends.
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All of them were occasions for rejoicing and excess but by far the most unbridled were the Dionysia; it was one of the great seasonal feasts where the supernatural riff-raff came into their own. The rejoicings among mortals in early days, especially at Ephesus, seem to have been as wild as the corybantic stampedes of Cybele. They were mixed with group ecstasy, orgy, maenadic frenzy and destruction not unlike those of Moharram and of the Rufai and other dervish sects to-day: bloodshed and even human sacrifice were not unknown. After Christian proscription, the four Graeco-Roman feasts merged into twelve days of underground pagan kermesse, and not always underground. Bishop Timothy, before Christianity became official, met his death trying to suppress one of these orgiastic swarms; the Kalendae called down the ire of St. John Chrysostom and Amasios in the fifth century; in the seventh, the pagan winter festivals were forbidden by the sixth Oecumenical Council; a tenth-century writer inveighed against the celebration, in the old pagan way, of the Kronia and the Kalendae; and Balsamon echoed him in the twelfth, when drunken masquers even appeared in the nave of the church. It was the pagan, more than the indecent aspect—improper disguise and travestitism—which had become the chief target of ecclesiastical anathema: men in women's clothes, women in men's, and “mad drunkards” dressed and horned as devils, their faces darkened or masqued, their bodies clad in goat-skins and simulating quadrupeds. It was mimicry, in fact (on the same principle as that on which Spanish penitents reproduce the slow and solemn stages of the Passion), of the entire dionysiac rout: rites which the
pagana
were simultaneously enacting in their aerial sphere. They were different in no detail from the mummers who career through the streets of many Greek towns and villages to-day, both at the identical magic period of the Twelve Days and during the Carnival that precedes Lent.