Mani (29 page)

One of the rowdiest of the pagan exotics which disturb the peace of the Greek world between Christmas and Epiphany, the one of them most often aped by mummers and, perhaps, the best known by name, is the kallikantzaros.

The kallikantzaros, which in the long off-season inhabits a subterranean cavern, is a problem-beast. It is, quite literally, an infernal nuisance and, in some cases, more. Its shape is as perplexing as its name and provenance and subject to as wide an ambit of variation. Physically, the kallikantzaroi are heteroclite and ill-fitting assemblies of elements drawn from various
branches of the animal and human kingdoms, and there are two main types. The large ones can be several yards high. They are black and shaggy, their outsize heads are sometimes bald, and they are armed with outsize pudenda. Their eyes, set in swart faces, blaze red as coals. They have goats' or asses' ears, and scarlet tongues loll from their fierce fangs. Their bodies are thin and their arms are simian, their talons are long and they have goats' or asses' legs—or one is bestial and the other human. They are sometimes bipeds, sometimes quadrupeds, and often, understandably, lames. But they travel at great speed, and the Athenians have nicknamed them “needlebums”
[19]
from the pace they go pricking on their always unnecessary and often harmful errands. They are immensely strong. Very, very rarely they are quadrupeds with no human characteristics; and, equally rarely, ordinary men who may or may not be hooved. But, almost invariably, they possess some anthropoid characteristic. Usually the goat element predominates.

The lesser kallikantzaroi, though more rare, are nevertheless widespread, and, like their larger fellows, they are to be found from the Rhodope mountains to Cyprus and especially (according to Polites) at Oenoe on the southern shore of the Black Sea. These are jet-black human pygmies, not only bald but totally imberb and afflicted with varying blemishes: lameness again, a squint or features and limbs askew. Their leader is sometimes dubbed the Koutsodáimonos or limping demon. Often riding about astride various animals and birds, they are boisterous and interfering but harmless. These hideous little wretches, thinks Lawson, are casual, less ancient, and less grim by-products of their gaunt and gangling congeners. For the larger kind can be dangerous; they have been known, in some places, to prey on human flesh; though normally it is Christmas pork and pancakes and, above all, as much wine as they can get hold
of, that kindles their gluttony. Gregarious creatures, they run wild at night in gangs, rending, bruising and trampling all who stand in their way. They are well known for breaking into water-mills, eating up all the corn and flour they can swallow and trampling and urinating over the rest. (Perhaps the nereids that sometimes frequent mills are an added draw.) Smothered in flour and not fit to be seen, they burst into houses by the door, the window or the chimney and upset and smash the furniture, drink everything in sight, swallow up the pork and foul any food, wine or water that is left over. Lurching into wine shops, they gag the taverner with droppings (an ugly trick), kick, stave in and shatter his casks and amphorae and then, having swilled their bellyful, let the rest run to waste.
[20]
Blundering and clumsy though they are, they have a passion for dancing, and pester not only the graceful nereids but the wives and daughters of mortals, whom they have been known to abduct as brides. Should they come on a benighted traveller, they force him to join their loutish gambolling, leaving him, at cockcrow, battered and groggy. They are thick-witted and prone to quarrels both with strangers and among themselves, usually over girls or dancing-partners. Like the lamiae, they are honest and frank in their dealings and strangers to falsehood; they are also extremely, almost pathetically, gullible. The most transparent device, the most obvious cock-and-bull story can outwit and send them careering off. They are frightened of flames and fires are lit to scare them away. In the Pelion district, a rib of pork or a sausage and a breadflap would be hung on a tree to appease them; or, so easily deluded are they, a bare pig's bone.... They can be driven off by throwing scalding water in their faces or by flourishing firebrands or hot spitted meat. The smaller kallikantzaroi
are very nimble roof-climbers and, to keep them from forcing an entry down the chimney, evil-smelling herbs are thrown on the fire and blazing logs set upright. Baulked and angered by flying sparks, they urinate down the chimney in the hope of putting the fire out. But this does no harm. The ashes are allowed to accumulate in the hearth all through the Twelve Days, husbandmen scatter them on the young crops later on, and they operate like a magical manure.

According to some local theories, they can assume the shape of many animals—wolves, dogs, hares, horses, goats, and in Cyprus, where they have the additional name (though both are in use) of
Planetaroi
, or “the Roving Ones,” even camels; and in Epirus, they are sometimes as small as squirrels. But, as a general rule, they are hybrids with, invariably, some anthropoid feature. Some sources declare them demons, others, transformed men subjugated to the sway of beast-like passions. The southern Euboeans were once considered kallikantzaroi.
[21]
It certainly seems to be a destiny which lies in wait for some unlucky mortals. Little boys—never girls, the female is almost unknown—who are born in the Christmas octave are at once suspect. Their toe-nails grow abnormally fast and to counter this their small feet used to be held over a fire to singe and hold them in check; and a violent temper, akin to madness, was said to afflict them, driving them to unruly and untameable conduct and even to laying fatal hands on their brothers and sisters. The taint, once implanted, is congenital. Indeed, all the sources point to a human origin.

If the layout of the data on these deplorable creatures has worked as I intend, the reader will have concluded long ago that they are either satyrs or centaurs or a mixture of both. And (here I lean on Lawson again) he will be right. For all the best
authorities—Polites and Schmidt and Lawson—though they fall out on some smaller points, are agreed that they are related to satyrs. Lawson goes further. Basing his theory on Polites' magnificent array of research, but at variance on the derivation of the word, he reaches different conclusions.
Kali
—the affix deriving from the modern
kalos
, good (the ancient “beautiful”)—can precede many words, changing little in the sense beyond giving it, like “goodman” and “goodwife,” a faintly benevolent and rustic flavour. This is in accord with the Greek mythological practice, both ancient and modern, of calling a bad thing good from precaution. The change from
kentauros
to
kantzaros
, to anyone acquainted with the dialect variations of demotic Greek, is not at all far-fetched; and Lawson traces its mutation with scholarly logic and regard to likelihood and precedent. If he is right, and I feel sure he is, the kallikantzaroi are “good-centaurs.” The centaur as we think of him—the exclusive combination of a horse's body with a human trunk and torso growing from its breast, the denizen of the Parthenon metopes and poetical literature—was a late classical reduction and idealization of a much wider and more inclusive and variable range of hybrids. On coins and in archaic art, if not in literature, other types of centaur were commoner than the more correctly named hippo-centaur we all know. (I must have been obsessed by these creatures at school. My Greek grammar was smothered with scrawled and inky processions of centaurs, always bearded like Navy Cut bluejackets and often wearing bowler-hats and smoking cherry-wood pipes. If, by this, I meant to indicate that they lived near the sea and, though essentially rural, occasionally paid urban visits, it showed remarkable insight.) There were ono-centaurs, ichthyo-centaurs and trago-centaurs; ass-, fish- (or triton) and goat-centaurs, and even combinations of two or more.
[22]

The word “centaur,” in fact, has nothing to do with a horse: it is the human part of a hybrid, and both the hippo-centaur and the trago-centaur—the centaur we all know and the satyr—were subspecies of a single species whose only constant was its human part. They could be either bipeds or quadrupeds. The plastic rule which confined satyrs to two legs while it allotted four to the centaurs, became inflexible only in classical times. In archaic art the ass-centaur seems to be the oldest of the tribe and it is probably the ancestor of both. “Satyr” is itself a fairly late word. Nonnus stated clearly that the satyrs were of centaur stock and awareness of this belief probably lingered on in the chthonian underworld of consciousness and rustic gathering while the grander, neatly-classified livestock, with their stipulated attributes and invariable sum of legs, paraded through the smart golden age of literature and sculpture.

It was only in Graeco-Roman times that the formal hippocentaur fell in step beside the formal satyr in the Bacchic troop. These were, essentially, sophisticated pets; and when the big change came and the Dionysian zoo was broken up, both were impressed into Christian demonology and their natures re-adjusted for the torment of hermits. The satyr was supplied with a pitchfork and turned into a stoker in Hell and the centaur trotted away north-westwards, perhaps to start life again as a unicorn, unaware that biblical translators would muddle him with the hippopotamus.
[23]
At home meanwhile their matted, telluric and unfashionable poor relations floundered into the void and have wrought havoc ever since. The kallikantzaros now possesses—in his abandoned habits, his bibulousness,
gluttony, turbulence, clumsiness and naïvety, his mania for dancing and horseplay—the attributes of both; and his baldness probably commemorates the Sileni. It is remarkable that though the creature is pan-Hellenic, the most abounding source of his legend by far, the region that he infests most thickly, is still his ancient stamping ground, the steep and beautiful villages and the Magnesian chestnut woods of Pelion. It is well known that an illiterate peasant, confronted in a museum by either a centaur or a satyr in marble, quite correctly recognizes it without a second's hesitation by its pagan-exotic name—“Look! A kallikantzaros!”—and behind his back the semi-literate attendants exchange collusive winks of pity. I have had an instance of this. Some time ago, Joan and I were gazing at the bas-relief of the magnificent ithyphallic satyr in Thasos.
[24]
He is undoubtedly a satyr by his horns and cloven hoofs, but the phallic attributes and the stallion's tail cascading from his rump are much more equine than goatish. When we turned to leave, a shepherd leaning on his crook under the olives pointed to him with a friendly and possessive smile and said: “Our kallikantzaros.”

But a question remains: were the original centaurs demonic or mortal? Our modern doubt existed even in Pindar's time. He turns the wise, the scholarly and lyre-playing Chiron, tutor of Asklepios, Achilles and Jason, into a scion of Kronos, no less. In another place he mates Ixion with a cloud and the cloud, as part of his sentence of punishment for lusting after Hera—not a very heavy part of it—bore him a perverse and far from nebulous monster-son called Kentauros who fled to the dales of Pelion and sired the race of hippo-centaurs on the Magnesian mares. But further back, in Hesiod's account of their drunken
brawl with the Lapiths, they are human; and they are human, including Chiron—with no equine or hybrid suggestions—in the
Iliad
. Their other name, the Pheres (an Aeolian version of the word for “wild” or “fierce”), suggests to Lawson that they were a warlike Pelasgian tribe that withdrew to Mount Pelion when the Thessalian and Magnesian plains were swamped by the invading Achaeans. There, in impregnable mountain haunts, growing fiercer and shaggier as their siege wore on, these Pelasgian “centaurs” seemed to the newly-arrived strangers to be the guardians of all the old wisdom, knowledge and magic of the country; a brood of fierce mountain-dwelling wizards, in fact; with the same mysterious aura as that of the stubborn retreating Celts, at bay in the Welsh crags and the wilds of Cornwall, for the first uneasy Saxons. Hence the omniscient Chiron and perhaps the ruse of Nessus' shirt; hence, above all, the possible Achaean belief in their ability to transform themselves into all kinds of animals, like the Pelasgian Demeter at Phiga-leia. Had they (this is my idea, not Lawson's) herded up droves of horses and asses on their retreat? Flat Thessaly, from which Pelion springs, is ideal horse-country, almost the only one in Greece. (It is here, not in horse-taming Argos, that the Greek cavalry is based; and Larissa, the capital, is the most famous donkey-breeding centre and the seat of the greatest yearly donkey-fair in all Greece.) Did they, when the myth of their powers had taken root, sally down on horseback from the Pelion caves on the credulous pedestrian Achaeans? Their dwellings could have started the idea of the troglodytic habitat common to the centaurs and their modern epigones. Did they, uncouth and shaggy as archaic art portrays them, wield great branches—a centaur's most usual weapon—broken from the Magnesian forests? Again, at some feast for a truce or a peacemaking—perhaps a wedding breakfast—did these rough Pelasgian cave-dwellers from the grapeless crags, already half-horse by hearsay, shock the urbane Achaeans (tamed now by
long sojourn in the rich Thessalian champaign) by bolting their food, by getting roaring drunk and, finally by laying hands on the bride and starting a fight?

Yes
, perhaps, to the whole of this rhetorical questionnaire; and again, perhaps,
no
. How enjoyable, how very enjoyable and luxurious it is, suddenly to emerge from the stern labyrinth of fact onto these dawn-lit uplands of surmise! Movement is free and the air is supernaturally bracing. Bright with unclassified flora, the dewy turf underfoot has a special spring. Choirs of birds break into song, groves beckon umbrageously in all directions and it is hard to discern what catches the charmed eye in the half dim, half brilliant haze at the end of the offered vistas: a sundial or a fountain, a delegation of Chinamen, a sedan-chair or a mammoth grazing.... Alien and unseen hands under the armpits lift us in easy parabolas to strange and sparkling destinations....