Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

  APPEASEMENT AND AVERSION

  Whom did the biaiothanatoi persecute? Those who had killed or injured them? Those who should have avenged them but had not? The answer is "both," and again the Oresteia provides the most familiar example: Orestes is driven to matricide by Apollo's threat that Agamemnon's ghost will punish him if he does not kill Clytemnestra, and yet Clytemnestra's ghost seeks to punish him, in turn, for her own murder. This duality of attack should not trouble us: after all, in both cases the ghost's aim is to ensure that he or she does not go unavenged and thus dishonored, and there is more than one way to do this: he can avenge himself or he can drive someone else to avenge him. Antiphon's Tetralogies provide further examples of both instances and also suggest that juries-or even entire cities-who failed to convict the proper person might be pursued by the anger of the dead.106 Surely there is some dramatic exaggeration here, but the concept is clear enough nonetheless. State festivals such as the Anthesteria or those described on Side A of the lex sacra from Selinus might be understood as periodic supplements to any individual rites against biaiothanatoi. These rites aimed to ensure that if there were any disgruntled ghosts lingering about whose anger extended beyond those whom they held immediately responsible for their plight, they might be appeased. The solitary drinking at the Anthesteria, looking back as it does to Orestes' arrival in Athens with the Erinyes in hot pursuit, is particularly telling in this respect, as are some of the rites that we shall examine in chapter 6, in which all the young girls of a polls must be protected against the anger of a single young girl's ghost. In chapter 3, we also discussed the fact that cities could hire experts, variously called goetes or psychagogoi, to deal with biaiothanatoi or other troublesome ghosts on an ad hoc basis, and earlier in this chapter we considered the likelihood that the lesser mysteries at Agrai, and perhaps stages of other mystery initiations as well, included rituals in which the angry dead were appeased or averted.

  Another method of dealing with biaiothanatoi may have been maschalismos. We are not certain exactly what actions are implied by this term, which is built on the word meaning "arm-pit," or how common a practice it was. It is mentioned in only two passages from the classical period, both of which describe Clytemnestra performing it on the corpse of Agamemnon. Aeschylus indicates that it included cutting off some or all of the extremities; Sophocles does not even tell us this much.107 Ancient scholiasts and lexicographers, as well as modern scholars, elabo rate on Aeschylus's information in various ways, but Rohde's analysis, based primarily on the comments of Aristophanes of Byzantium, presents the likeliest scenario: the murderer strung the severed extremities (ta akra or to moria) on a rope and then tied this rope under the armpits and across the chest of the corpse.108 Scholiasts and scholars also disagree on the purpose of this act. Some suggest that it was a cathartic or apotropaic rite, analogous to Jason's licking up and spitting out of his victim's blood three times after the murder of Apsyrtus, or perhaps to Clytemnestra's wiping off of Agamemnon's blood on his own hair, which Sophocles mentions in the same breath as the maschalismos itself. In some manner all of these acts could be understood as turning the pollution or blame of the murder away from the murderer and back toward the victim, or as appeasing the gods who would otherwise punish the murderer. One scholiast, however, tells us that it was intended to rob the ghost of strength, so that he might not avenge himself.109 This makes good sense both within the context of similar corpse-mutilating practices in other cultures, which G. L. Kittredge has surveyed, and within the context of another well-known Greek practice, namely, the binding, piercing, distortion, or other mistreatment of statuettes that represented hostile forces. In some cases, the statuettes had their heads or limbs twisted backwards, as if to completely disable their use. The earliest such statuette is perhaps a late seventh- or sixth-century Arcadian example; an example from Sicily dates from the sixth century, and examples found in Athens and elsewhere date from the late fifth or early fourth centuries on.110 These figurines seem to be intended to hamper the movements of living people whom they represent, but in popular report, a similar technique was used at least once to deal with a ghost: the Orchomeneans brought Actaeon's ghost under control by chaining a statue of Actaeon to a rock. The ritual used by psychagogoi to control Pausanias's ghost in Sparta may have been similar, and the Cyrenean law we examined in chapter z provides a broad parallel, insofar as statuettes are removed to a distant place where the ghosts they represent can do no harm. The stories of Theagenes and Mitys/Bitys discussed above speak to a similar connection between a ghost and his statue.111 The important point to be drawn from all of these examples is that the Greeks believed that it was possible to control a spirit on whom they could not lay their hands by controlling a tangible representation of that spirit; the hobbling of a corpse might therefore have been understood similarly to hamper the ghost associated with it.

  The fact that Greek ghosts, as we have noted, were most often imagined to work through psychological rather than physical means, or at best through such subtle physical means as the infliction of illness or insomnia, may seem to challenge this interpretation. Why would the ghost need hands and feet to do these things, after all? Indeed, wouldn't the image of a mutilated ghost present an even ghastlier, and thus more psychologically disturbing, appearance? But this is modern logic. As noted before, Greek ghost beliefs generally assume some connection between the state of the body and the state of the ghost. If a dead, and thereby physically impotent, body made for a physically impotent ghost, a body whose hands and feet were severed as well would make for a weaker ghost yet.

  There is a further twist to this, however, which may yet alter our interpretation. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles indicate that maschalismos made Agamemnon further dishonored (atimos) in death. Aeschylus goes into some depth on this point, emphasizing that this dishonor placed an additional burden on Orestes, Agamemnon's avenger.112 The meaning is clear: because maschalismos was an absolute inversion of proper funerary rites, in which the corpse was beautified, it naturally exacerbated the dishonorable state in which the ghost of the unavenged victim entered Hades; making him even more miserable than the average biaiothanatos. This may have been the primary purpose of maschalismos in fact: in the Odyssey, Odysseus performs a similar act on Melanthios, cutting off his hands, feet, genitals, and nose.113 Homer does not apply the term maschalismos to what Odysseus does, but that is what it may have been, for Hesychius says that any or all extremities might be cut off during maschalismos, including the nose and ears. Because the ears, genitals, and nose could scarcely be understood as necessary to any act of revenge that the ghost might later take; their severance could be intended only to humiliate the victim further. (Moreover, as we saw earlier, Homer shows no traces of a belief in the ability of the dead to avenge themselves, making it even more unlikely that hampering Melanthios's ghost was Odysseus's intention.) The two motivations-humiliation of the ghost and disablement of the ghost-can coexist, of course, and it is also possible that the rationale for performing maschalismos changed over time: as the practice of manipulating ghosts, demons, and gods by manipulating their representations took hold in Greece during the orientalizing period, the act of mutilating a corpse may have come to be understood as a means of hampering the ghost as well as dishonoring it.

  Our survey of information about the biaiothanatoi has provided several new insights and confirmed others that were suggested in the first section of the book:

  The restless dead, and particularly the violently dead, were a source of danger at all times, but especially when another soul was undergoing transition, as either during initiation into one of the eschatological mysteries or during the final passage from life into death. This observation, again, confirms that ancient authors who speak of goetes and initiators in the same breath were not simply being flippant or dismissive; the goes and the initiator were in much the same business and must often have been the same person.

  In the beginning, as far as we can tell from the Homeric po
ems and related sources, even the violently dead, like the unburied, were compelled to work through the agency of divinities such as the Erinyes because they themselves were weak and insubstantial. By the classical period, they are portrayed as wreaking their own vengeance on occasion, and yet even then they remained strangely insubstantial: they work by infecting their victims with fear and madness rather than by physically attacking them. This feature reflects the inability of the Greeks to ever completely separate the body from the soul-the state of one influenced the other-and yet in a way, their lack of physicality must have made them more horrible precisely because they worked in these hidden ways. Like the Erinyes who "wandered through the mist," the dead might be lurking anywhere.

  In ancient Greece, as in many other cultures, the society of the dead mirrored that of the living, and what made the dead unhappy were precisely the same things that would have made the living unhappy: failure to fulfill the goals of life that would bring them honor, neglect by those who should care for them, lack of vengeance when a crime had been committed against them. We saw variations of this in chapters z and 3 as well, where we considered the possibility that some dead might need to be "purified" in the same way that the living often were before they could rest easily.

  We shall further see, in the next chapter, that the world of the dead might serve not as a normal mirror but rather as an "inverted mirror" for the world of the living, when we study a type of ghost who represented the absolute opposite of what the living wished to become, and how ghosts might be blamed for crimes that no human wished to believe another human might commit.

  I am grateful to the Associated Press for permission to reprint this excerpt.

  MANILA, Philippines (AP)-Filipinos will choose a new president and thousands of elected officials next week. But in the squalid barrios of the capital, the big news is there's a vampire on the loose.

  For weeks, the slums of Manila's Tondo district have been abuzz with rumors a "manananggal," a supernatural creature, has been terrorizing the area. According to Filipino folklore, a manananggal appears as a woman who can cut her body in two. The top half flies around at night searching for babies to devour. The top half must return before daybreak to rejoin the lower half.

  On Wednesday, about a dozen young men, accompanied by a television crew, barged into the home of Teresita Beronqui to investigate rumors that she was the manananggal. ABS-CBN television showed a terrified elderly woman trying to explain that she was not the manananggal.

  To resolve the mystery, the reporter, Cesar Soriano, produced a dried tail of a stingray and asked the woman to touch it on camera. Manananggals, or so the experts say, are repulsed by stingray's tails.

  The woman touched it to the satisfaction of all concerned.

  Excerpted from a story that ran in U.S. newspapers in May, 1992

  Students of folklore will recognize the manananggal as the Filipino version of a very common supernatural creature, the ghost or demon who specializes in killing babies.' This type is represented in ancient Mediter ranean cultures by such creatures as the Semitic Lilith and her antecedents, the Mesopotamian lilitu and the Babylonian Lamashtu. She is alive and well even today, as the Associated Press story and reports of folklorists throughout the world attest. The prevalence of belief in such a creature does not seem hard to explain: all over the world, particularly in cultures where modern medical techniques are unavailable, infants and young children are apt to die suddenly, inexplicably, to the grief of their parents. Belief in creatures such as the Filipino manananggal or the Mesopotamian lilitu not only provides an explanation for such deaths, it also, indirectly, provides some feeling of control. Once the cause has been isolated and described, a stingray tail or some other aversion technique can be employed against it. Parents are able to reassure themselves that they have done everything possible to protect their child.

  Ancient Greeks feared such creatures, too. Although the Filipino manananggal was identified with an old woman in the neighborhood where the deaths were occurring, in ancient Greece and many other cultures such creatures were understood as a special type of restless dead: the unhappy souls of women who had died prematurely. Thus, study of this phenomenon will add to our knowledge of Greek beliefs concerning the dead and enrich our understanding of how they can affect the living. In particular, as we shall see, it will demonstrate the ways in which beliefs about the dead could reinforce societal mores and prevent or defuse societal tensions among the living.

  There is no single, all-inclusive term that folklorists and anthropologists use to refer to such creatures. When possible, they adopt a culture's own term (e.g., lilitu or manananggal). This will not work for us, however, because the Greeks had no such term. In such a case, scholars frequently use the phrase "child-killing demon," but I want to avoid this for two reasons. The first is that the Greek variety killed not only children but also women, either just before they were married and began their careers as mothers, during pregnancy, during labor, or during the postpartum period; thus the term "child-killing" is too circumscribed.

  My second objection leads us into a more complex issue. The word "demon" has different connotations in different contexts, scholarly and popular, and is therefore liable to be misleading in some circumstances and completely inappropriate in others. It is an especially problematic term to use in connection with Greek beliefs because for the Greeks, daimon, the root of our word "demon," could mean a divine being of any kind. Zeus could be called a daimon, and so could any number of far less powerful entities, including, as early as Hesiod, special souls of the dead who had been elevated to positions of power as a reward for their good behavior while alive. In these uses we already see two differences between daimon and "demon" as it is used in contemporary English (and also as its cognates, "Damon," "demon," "demone" and "demo- nio," for example, are used in contemporary German, French, Italian, and Spanish respectively). "Demons" are typically more powerful than ordinary, living mortals but far less powerful than any gods with whom they interact, especially the Judaeo-Christian god. Greek "daimones" could be either beneficent or maleficent whereas "demons" are almost always maleficent, either because of personal grudges they bear their victims or because they are the factotums of evil powers such as Satan. Another important difference between daimones and demons lies in their iconography. In many cultures, demons are represented as partially or fully theriomorphic, for reasons discussed below; Greek daimones, when visualized at all, are typically as anthropomorphic as the Greek gods. Indeed, when theriomorphic traits become permanently attached to Greek gods or daimones, we begin to suspect that they are sliding into what we would call the demonic realm; they are being conceived of as primarily maleficent.

  There were creatures of the Greek imagination to whom we could apply the modern term "demon," as they fit all of these criteria. The harpies, for example, were maleficent creatures, half-birds, half-women, less powerful than the gods but powerful enough to pose problems for humans. We could also, in fact, fairly apply the term "demon" to the Greek version of the creature whom we are discussing in this chapter, for as we shall see, she was certainly maleficent, she often manifested herself in animal form, and she was less powerful than the Greek gods but more powerful than the mortals who combated her. Indeed, I shall show that to understand this creature fully, we need to examine her within theoretical models that scholars have developed for studying the demonological beliefs of other cultures. Nevertheless, I still prefer not to use the term "demon" to refer to our creature for one further reason. As already noted, the Greek version of our creature begins her existence as a living woman; her career as a killer of children and women begins only after she has died prematurely. In this she is quite different from the harpies, the keres, or other Greek creatures to whom we would apply the term "demon" with little hesitation: they all began as immortal creatures. Remembering that our creature was imagined as the ghost of a once-living, ordinary woman will be important for our interpretation of the roles she played
in Greek culture, as well as for our broader understanding of the Greek view of the dead.

  The Greeks sometimes did refer to certain types of these ghosts who attacked women and babies by specific terms derived from their own language. The most common were gello, lamia, mormo, mormoluke, and strix (plural: gelloudes, lamiai, mormones, mormolukai, striges). The first three of these, when used in the singular, often refer to a mythic character, a crystallized representative of the group to whom specific traits and a story have been attached: Gello, Lamia, and Mormo, whose mythic histories are discussed below. In other cases, these ghosts were not called by any special name, but we can recognize them from the context in which they appear, particularly when a transparently adjectival term or phrase is used to refer to them: the horrida mulier, or "horrible female," who attacks babies according to a spell from the Cyranides, is a good example.2

  For the sake of convenience, however, we still need to choose a single term for the type of ghost on which this chapter focuses, under which the subtypes gello, lamia, mormo, mormoluke, and strix can be subsumed. This is particularly important given that, as I just mentioned, some of the ghosts who attacked women and children were not called by any specific name. As noted, the salient characteristic shared by all of these types was premature death-indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration, as we shall see, to say that any woman of reproductive age who died was expected to become the sort of ghost who attacked children and other women during pregnancy and labor. Thus, some term that emphasizes the prematurity of death would serve nicely as an inclusive term. The Greeks had just such a word for the soul of one who had died prematurely: aoros (literally "untimely") an adjective that frequently was used predicatively as well as descriptively. Throughout most of antiquity, the adjective had only two terminations: masculine /feminine (aoros, plural aoroi) and neuter (a(5ron, plural aora). Thus aoros, in the absence of further modification, could indicate either a male or female ghost; I use aoros in that way myself in this book, without any implication as to gender. In later antiquity, however, a specifically feminine form of the adjective developed: aore (plural aorai ). Although the word aore did not exist during the periods from which most of the evidence examined in this chapter is derived, the word so perfectly combines the two essential traits of all the ghosts discussed-femaleness and prematurity of deaththat I shall adopt it as a concise means of referring to them, except when directly quoting an ancient source that uses the form a6ros.3