Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

  The term aore is an attractive choice for one further reason, amply illustrated shortly below: not only does it express the most important quality shared by all of our ghosts, it also expresses the quality shared by all of their victims. By killing women of reproductive age and their babies, aorai created new aorai, or, to look at it the other way around, aorai became what they were at the hands of other, preexistent aorai. This double connotation, which echoes within each use of aore, should help us to remember a point that will be crucial for understanding the creature we are examining here: like Lilith, the lilitu, and most of their other sisters around the world, aorai were thought to return to the upper world in order to deprive others of what they themselves had missed.

  One final comment is necessary before we proceed. Despite my avoidance of the term "demon" to describe the creature on whom this chapter focuses, I nonetheless use some cognates of this word, such as "demonic," "demonological," and "demonology," because they are convenient ways of expressing ideas that otherwise would require elaborate periphrasis. I use "demonic" to describe the behavior or qualities of consistently maleficent supernatural creatures. "Demonological" describes, for example, the treatises of late antique scholars, magicians, or church fathers who sought to convey their knowledge of such creatures to others. "Demonology" refers to the whole complex of such beliefs in a single culture or set of related cultures (e.g,. "ancient Mediterranean demonology") or, alternatively, to a formally organized list and description of demons such as late antique scholars, magicians, or church fathers were fond of constructing.

  BASIC INFORMATION

  According to Zenobius, the Lesbians believed that Gello haunted children, causing their deaths. Zenobius also says, in a separate phrase, that the Lesbians blamed the deaths of aoroi upon Gello as well, which, given his use of the adjective aoros elsewhere, suggests that Gello was held responsible for killing virgins, or in other words, women old enough to be married but who have not yet been married. Gello thwarts reproduction at both ends of the process, then, preventing marriage and pregnancy before they occur and killing their product, the child, if they do occur. Zenobius presents his information about Gello in order to elucidate a phrase from a poem by Sappho that mentions her, which indicates that fear of Gello's destructive powers goes back at least to the sixth century B.C.E.4

  Hesychius similarly reports that Gello was a ghost (eidolon) who attacked two types of individuals: virgins and newborn babies, as does the later Byzantine scholar Michael Psellus, who reports that Gello was credited with killing pregnant women and their fetuses as well; she could also interrupt the reproductive process in the middle, then.' In the seventh century, the Byzantine patriarch John Damascenus discussed such beliefs at length in a composition entitled "Concerning Striges,"6 noting that the common people of his area still believed in ghosts, variously called gelloudes or striges, who flew through the night, slipped into houses although their doors and windows were barred, and then strangled sleeping infants. Belief in Gello was long-lived; indeed, gelloudes still haunt parts of the Greek countryside, attacking women and babies.7

  Spells to avert Gello are found in the Cyranides, a collection of magical lore that probably was compiled in the imperial period but includes material from earlier periods. One spell associates her with the "sort of things you meet up with at night," and the other describes her as the "thing that strangles the infant and persecutes the woman in childbed." 8 Other spells to avert night-wandering female ghosts who attacked both babies and pregnant women are found in various lithica-lists of magical stones and their properties compiled during the late Hellenistic to early imperial ages, but, like the Cyranides, drawing on earlier material.9 One entry tells us that a stone called galactite can be hung around the neck of a newborn to ward off the eyes of evil-planning "Megaira" ("She who is Envious"); another entry similarly says that galactite protects the infant from the "horrible female" (horrida mulier) who seeks to sap his strength.1° "Aetite," or "eagle-stone," prevents premature delivery of the fetus yet facilitates parturition when the proper time has come. Later, it guards infants and girls against both delirium and the maleficent terrors of the night that were associated with the advent of Gello and other aorai. The Cyranides also says that aetite can be worn as an amulet to prevent miscarriage.11 Lychnites,12 another stone, wards off from the infant all nuctalopes, or "night-watchers," 13 which the author defines as strigae and cavanae. Cavanae is a feminine cognate of the masculine word cavannus ("night owl"); this confirms that the creatures who attacked infants were specifically thought to be female. The stone lynguros (amber) protects the whole house against supernatural attacks but particularly guards the pregnant women and infants within it.14 In all these spells, we again glimpse an assumption that the same demonic force threatens the reproductively viable woman and the baby.

  The first-century B.C.E. author Verrius Flaccus recorded the following chant:

  Go away strix, you night-wandering one; / go away from the people, / you bird whose name is not to be mentioned. / Go away upon swift ships." And Plato alludes to the use of incantations against mormolukeiai who threaten children and also mentions that midwives use incantations (epaoidiai) to ensure successful births.16 Allusion to such incantations may be found in lines zz7-3o of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as well, where Demeter promises to guard an Eleusinian child from all evils, for the Greek of these lines has a sing-song, chiasmic effect closely similar to that of real incantations:

  I shall nurse him, nor do I expect that either an attack or the "Undercutter" will harm him due to his nurse's negligence; for I know a great antidote, stronger than the "Plant-cutter," and I know an excellent defense against the attack that brings many ills.17

  She will have ready an "excellent defense" against the "attack" (epelusie ) of something; this probably means the attack of some ghost, judging from other uses of this or similar words.18 We should note that it is not only ghosts that Demeter will protect the child against, however, for the terms "Undercutter" and "Plant-cutter" probably refer to people who might try harm the child using baneful plants, and the "counter-cut" (antitomon) that Demeter boasts of knowing must be a beneficial plant that will combat the harmful ones.19

  The existence of spells against aorai speaks for itself-people do not buy amulets or chant incantations against creatures whom they do not fear. Intellectuals such as Plato scoffed at such creatures, claiming that only old women and children believed in them, but his prohibition against telling stories about them in his perfect state only helps to prove that many people were not scoffing at all; he must have believed that such stories had a significant effect on those who heard them20 Strabo similarly helps to prove the strength of these beliefs among the populace at large. He initially refers to Mormo and Lamia as fear-inspiring creatures who could be used to control naughty children. But he then goes on to say that, when one has to deal with women or the common folk in general, superstitions such as these can be used as control mechanisms, and that even the founders of states sanctioned and nurtured beliefs in mormolukai in order to keep less intelligent people in line.21 It is hard to say exactly what "keep in line" means here, or how a belief in mormolukai accomplished this; I note only that, whatever Strabo may have thought of such beliefs himself, it is clear that he knew plenty of people who took them seriously. As I remarked earlier, such beliefs arise in part from a need to explain, and thus cope with, devastating personal loss for which there is no obvious cause. A mother who has lost her child or a husband whose child and wife have died in labor seek reasons for what appears to be random evil.

  THE NORMATIVE FORCE OF THE AORE

  As noted in chapter 3, some Greek techniques for dealing with the dead can be traced to Near Eastern cultures such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. The search for Near Eastern origins has had an effect on the study of Greek aorai as well. Most notably, Walter Burkert has suggested that Lamia and Gello were derived from Near Eastern demons known as Lamashtu and gallu.22 Caution is necessary here, however. B
eliefs that express a culture's fears, as demonic beliefs frequently do, are more deeply embedded in that culture's cognitive map than are techniques and rituals. Moreover, whereas new techniques and rituals can frequently be used in concert with old ones, completely new beliefs often cannot. A new belief must either align closely with an old one-in which case it cannot be so new-or be enabled to displace an old belief by other significant changes within the culture (thus, as we have seen, the Greeks' adoption of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian belief in a more active dead was facilitated by various other changes in Greek culture). Certainly, to seek analogies for Greek demonic beliefs in other cultures can be profitable, as comparisons sometimes draw our attention to features that would otherwise go unnoticed. But when we seek precise genealogies for Greek demonic beliefs in other cultures, we are usually on shakier ground, and are likely to miss observations that might shed light on Greek beliefs themselves. In analyzing the Greek aore, we should consider the possibility that some of her individual features may have been borrowed from elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin, but we must keep in mind, as we do so, that the recognition of such borrowings only becomes useful when we take the further step of explaining how or why they upheld or toppled existing Greek taxonomies and beliefs. Moreover, sometimes when we ask the questions "why" and "how," we discover that what looked like a genealogical relationship need not have been one at all; upon further analysis we may discover conditions in the Greek culture that made the indigenous birth of a belief completely possible, even probable. In the case of the aore, this is particularly likely, because the prevalence of belief in such creatures all over the world, in virtually all cultures, argues that it is likely to have been at heart a homegrown phenomenon, however much its individual features may have changed under outside influences.

  Close attention to the role of the demon within the culture, as opposed to its possible origins outside of the culture, was also advocated by J. Z. Smith, in an influential 1978 article. Smith noted that the scholarly quest for the "roots" of Greek demonology in other cultures, including those of the Near East, had placed classical scholars in the same situation as the ancient Greeks themselves, who often sought. to explain anything dark or mysterious in their culture as having been borrowed from the Persians, Egyptians, Chaldeans, and so on-that is, as being anything but truly "Greek." As an alternative, Smith proposed developing precepts set forth by Mary Douglas and other anthropologists, arguing that the demonic frequently serves as a classificatory marker that, by standing outside of all accepted categories, becomes part of a larger system of boundaries that are used to express or reinforce a society's values. Smith understood the demonic to accomplish this by being associ ated with one of two sorts of negativity: "negative valence is attached to things which escape place (the chaotic, the rebellious, the distant) or things found just outside the place where they properly belong (the hybrid, the deviant, the adjacent)" (p. 4z9; emphases added).

  Smith's suggestions apply well to the study of demons in general. Before we try applying them to the Greek aore, however, I would make some further observations about how the negative features of ghosts and demons reflect and reinforce the structures by which a culture organizes its physical and moral worlds.

  Very frequently, the "displacement" of the demonic is expressed as liminality. That is, the demon or the demonic is not merely outside of any single, given category, but situated exactly between two categories that are otherwise considered to be mutually exclusive. The hybrid nature of demons is a form of this, and the werewolf is a good example: precisely because it is categorically neither human nor animal, it is far more frightening than either a normal wolf or a normal man would be. Such juxtapositions of animal and human are disconcerting because they suggest that one of the organizational grids that culture has imposed on the world is liable to flux; all the means that humans have developed for dealing with the world as they know it fall short of addressing this new and disturbing development. Shape-shifting, a common demonic talent, is a diachronic rather than synchronic form of hybridism: the demon does not necessarily display the traits of two or more categories simultaneously, as the werewolf does, but its ability to change from human to horse to fire to tiger nonetheless prevents its secure categorization and is thus frightening. Empousa's shape-shifting in Aristophanes' Frogs, which terrifies Dionysus and Xanthias, is a good example. The common belief that the doorway is a gathering place for demons and ghosts reflects the connection between liminality and the demonic in a different way, for the threshold belongs to neither the interior sphere nor that of the outside world. Crossroads-the interstices between three or four roads-also are associated with ghosts and demons in many cultures, including the Greek. In these cases, doorways or crossroads are perceived as dangerous places precisely because they are liminal-because they fall between otherwise defined and controlled areas--and thus come to be viewed as just the sorts of locations where demons gather and lurk.23

  In flouting established categories, the association between liminality and the demonic actually helps to uphold those categories by suggesting that anything falling between them is dangerous and must be avoided. Another way in which the demonic can flout-and thus implicitly uphold-established categories is by serving as a sort of concave mirror for the human world, a mirror in which perfect inversions of behavioral or physical desiderata are held up to view.24 In this paradigm, "normal" demonic behavior equals abnormal human behavior. The worldwide tendency to portray demons and the human magicians or witches who associate with them as indulging in incest and cannibalistic feasts is an obvious example of this. Such tales send the message that anyone who wishes to retain membership in the human race-that is, anyone who does not wish to be classed among the demons-must adhere to the established standards of behavior and appearance.

  Often, an item, a person, or a mode of behavior first is condemned as demonic because it aligns with one of these two paradigms of exclusion (it either refuses to adhere to a single category or inverts a category), but subsequently popular belief elaborates by adding to the item, person, or mode of behavior qualities of the other paradigm. One of the simplest examples of this tendency has already been mentioned: demons, who by definition delight in harming people (and who thereby invert the rules of civilized human conduct), are often imagined to manifest themselves in physical forms that are liminal insofar as they are hybrid-the traditional picture of Satan, for example, is that of a man with goat's horns, feet, and tail, and the harpy is a bird-woman. Michael Herzfeld, in an article on contemporary rural Greek superstitions, gives an example of the opposite development, whereby a person who inverted one of the structures that underlay his society was suspected of having demonic powers. A man who refused to reciprocate coffeehouse hospitality and who, instead, spent his time talking with tourists (in other words, a man who transgressed the boundaries of his group, preferring the things that were "outside" to those that were "inside"), was accused of having the Evil Eye (a desire and ability to harm the innocent).25 Secondary expressions of either form of displacement-liminality or inversion-can be added to a demonic figure ad infinitum, each one moving it further and further from established norms and, thus, further and further con demning the behavior that made it demonic in the first place. The European tales of witches' sabbats that grew up during the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries are full of inventive examples: not only do witches indulge in incest and cannibalism, but they do such things as walk on their hands, eat salt to quench their thirst, and dance back-to-back instead of facing one another.

  With these theoretical considerations in mind, let us now turn our attention specifically to the Greek aorai. The fact that gelloudes, lamiai, mormones, and other types of aorai killed babies and women already moves them, of course, into the realm of the demonic; they are utterly inimical to the goals of human society, and no good Greek woman would ever dream of imitating them. The aitiological stories told about some of the mythic crystallizations of these aorai delimited the acceptabl
e behavior of a Greek woman even more strictly, however. Zenobius tells Gello's story as follows:

  "Fonder of children than Gello" is a saying applied to women who die prematurely [aoros], or to those who are fond of children but ruin them by their upbringing. For Gello was a maiden [parthenos], and because she died prematurely [aoros], the Lesbians say that her ghost haunts little children, and they also blame her for the deaths of those who die prematurely [a6r6n].26

  Hesychius also reports that Gello died unmarried. Our second aore, Lamia, does manage to conceive and give birth, but she fails as a mother, because her children die early in life (usually due to the wrath of Hera, jealous of Lamia's relationship with her husband, Zeus). The fullestalbeit euhemerizing-version of Lamia's story is given by Diodorus Siculus:

  At the base of this [Libyan mountain] was a large cave thickly covered with ivy and bryony, in which according to myth had been born Lamia, a queen of surpassing beauty. But on account of the savagery of her heart they say that the time that has elapsed since has transformed her face to a bestial aspect. For when all of the children that had been born to her had died, weighed down with her misfortune and envying the happiness of other women in their children, she ordered that newborn babies be snatched away from their mothers' arms and straightaway slain. Wherefore, among us even down to the present generation, the story of this woman remains among the children and her name is most terrifying to them. [R. M. Geer's translation.]