Mani

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Examples of substitution could be cited ad infinitum. “God rains,” say the peasants, recalling cloud-compelling Zeus the Rain-Giver. Old mountaineers north of the gulf of Corinth—hundreds of miles from Crete—swear by “God of Crete,” unconsciously apostrophizing the Ida-born son of Kronos. When it hails, “God is shaking his sieve”; when it thunders, he is shoeing his horse or rolling his wine-casks; strangely unsuitable pursuits for the Christian Ancient of Days.... The clergy did what they could to reduce the pagan characteristics, but there was more truth in the gods’ claims to immortality than is generally thought. The saints satisfied the habit of multiple divinity, and Christianity, although a celestial hierarchy was maintained, became in a sense—in practice if not in theory—polytheistic. Rites are still practised in certain groves on certain saints’ days—on St. George’s in the Cretan village of Asigonia, for instance—which have nothing to do with Christianity; and the fire-walking Anastenari[4] of Thrace are in clear descent from the rites of the Orphic mysteries. The saints, whether of pure Christian or pagano-Christian origin, assumed local spiritual sway and presided over the various fields of human activity in the same manner as the gods. The Panayiá can remedy all human evils; SS. Cosmo and Damian—”the Unmoneyed Ones”—cure illnesses in general; St. Panteléimon is a specific for eye diseases, St. Eleutheros a help in childbirth, St. Modestos has veterinary powers, St. Blaise is sovereign against ulcers, St. Charalampos and St. Catharine ward off plagues, St. Elias—through his connection with the sun—is appealed to against drought, St. Stylianos against infantile complaints, St. James against deafness. The Athenian St. Maura controls warts, St. Symeon birthmarks—that is to say, they inflict these blemishes with the malignance of pagan gods if their feast days are ne-glected. St. Tryphon punishes women who spin on his day but he is sovereign, in Kythnos, against insects. St. George the Drunkard presides over alcoholic excess and smiles on its votaries. Sailors are under the protection, in the northern Cyclades, of St. Sostes and the SS. Akindynoi—“The Fearless Ones”—as well as the universal St. Nicholas, Poseidon’s heir. St. Menas of Crete—like St. Anthony further west—is in charge of lost property. St. John the Baptist cures ague and St. Paraskeve—whose name means Friday—headaches; and St. Catharine and St. Athanasius are appealed to in questions of matchmaking and dowries for girls. These appeals are invariably made via their ikons and by honouring their feast days, often in remote shrines only visited once a year. Sometimes feast days coincide with the rites of pagan predecessors on the same spot. The Graeco-Roman rosalia—still so called—was still celebrated during this century in the Theseum with dancing and feasting on Easter Tuesday. Sometimes there is no Christian excuse. Boys still parade with painted swallows on poles and sing an enchanting song (which is roughly the same as the ancient Che-lidonisma, or swallow-song of Rhodes) to welcome the return of the swallows. May-wreaths woven of various plants and flowers—but always containing the magically potent garlic bulbs—are hung over all the doorways of Greece till the following May Day, exactly like the ancient eiresióne. I have heard that sometimes they are kept after their anniversary and flung into the bonfires of midsummer on St. John’s day, but I have often watched children leaping through these fires (for which there are various explanations) but have never seen wreaths burnt.[5] I may have got it wrong, or it may be a regional thing. At all events, one can deduce from all this that Julian the Apostate need never have uttered his famous cry of despair. Even in Christianity itself the pale Galilean conquest was far from complete.

  Some of the great gods, then, were compromised and frogmarched into collaboration. Others escaped and, quite literally, took to the hills. There, like divine maquisards, they have led a spiritual underground for close on two thousand years. Fed and supported by fishermen and mountaineers during the interim, they have, in a measure, gone peasant themselves. The quarrel lost its acerbity and, with the years, their rustic hosts, and almost everyone else, forgot the cause. Country people found nothing contradictory in serving both sides. Anyway, half of the conquering faction, in spite of the banners above their garrisons, seemed to be in tacit collusion with the ex-fugitives. Rivalry died and they settled into harmonious co-existence. Both sides appeared to co-operate and to complete each other in ordering the sorrows and happiness of men and all feeling of a split allegiance was lost. The mountain influences and those blazoned forth in ikons were indistinguishable. Village priests, who were peasants themselves, shared the attitude of their parishioners. Every century or so an explosion of protest resounded from some far-off bishopric but the echoes of these fulminations died away long before they could reach the highlands and archipelagos they were aimed at. Mountaineers and islanders have always been hostile to centralized authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical; and anyway, what was there to put one’s finger on? The brushwood ancien régime, unencumbered with giveaway temples or paraphernalia, travelled light. There was nothing, on examination, but murmurs, hearsay, candlelight and shadows and the bare limestone hillside.... The overt ceremonies (which still exist) had adopted enough religious camouflage to confuse all but the most penetrating. And a few have survived quite undisguised. Indeed, Christian and pagan practice—both the official (i.e. Christian in form) and unofficial—survive in the same way that the older Pelasgian and chthonian religion survived underneath and alongside the official Olympian paganism of the Achaeans in Homeric and classical times. Strangely enough, it is, on the whole, the old Pelasgian deities which have outlived not only the Achaean Olympians, but much of Christianity as well.

  Zeus has been almost entirely swallowed up in God the Father, whose character, in peasant eyes, he has strongly affected; but little of him remains outside church walls except in mainland ejaculations referring to his Cretan birth. Some traces of his battle with the Titans still survive in Zantiot fairy tales. The same source commemorates Poseidon, “a demon of the sea” with his three-pronged fork; but St. Nicholas has almost entirely taken him over. There are clear references in folk tales to Midas, the Sphinx, Icarus and the Cyclopes, and occasionally to a figure resembling Pan who may also be the Far Away One I heard of a little further back.[6]

  The clearest case of one of the ancients having the best of both worlds is Demeter. Young, almost imberb, astride a chestnut horse and clad in full armour, Diocletian’s megalomartyr is not only one of the most puissant saints of Orthodoxy, but, with the great St. George whose mount is white, one of the only two that ride on horseback. Pausanias talks of horse-headed statues of the goddess which may account for the insistence of iconographers on his or her equestrian status after the changeover. The one place where she resisted this change and became an uncanonical “St. Demetra,” was Eleusis, the former home of her most sacred rites in the Eleusinian mysteries. Here an ancient statue of her, escaping the zeal of the iconoclasts, was worshipped and crowned with garlands and surrounded with prayers for prosperous harvests until two Englishmen called Clark and Cripps, armed with a document from the local pasha, carried her off from the heart of the outraged and rioting peasantry, in 1801. An immemorial tradition was broken and this exiled goddess, who had probably been an object of worship as long as any other in the world, now languishes in Cambridge, ungarlanded, unhallowed and forlorn, as exhibit No. XIV in the Fitzwilliam Museum.[7] But her memory still lingers in the region of her ravished shrine.

  Lenormant records, from the same district, an extraordinary tale, which he had from an old Albanian, of St. Demetra, an Athenian lady with a beautiful daughter who was stolen by a wicked pasha and carried off to Souli, but allowed to return every so often under certain conditions which were closely linked with the welfare of crops. It is not hard to discern Demeter and Persephone here and Pluto, dressed in a turban and a caftan. The heroic hills of Souli dominate the junction of Acheron and Cocytus, routes down to Hades almost as famous as the one at Matapan; and one ancient version of Persephone’s descent is placed exactly there. Lenormant found similar traditions in Epirus itself and Lawson in Arcadia
, near the “devil holes” of Phonia in the mountains above the river Ladon and also in those desolate ranges round the temple of Bassae: parts of Arcadia where the old Pelasgian cults were least affected by the Achaean and Dorian immigrations. There are parts of northern Arcadia where, alone in all Greece, the eating of swine’s flesh is mysteriously taboo; pigs were held sacred to Demeter and Persephone. But apart from these scattered cases, a “Mistress of the Earth and Sea” or just “the Mistress”—a non-Christian immortal but nevertheless of flesh and blood, kindly to men, but quite distinct from the Blessed Virgin—presides in many remote and mountainous districts over the welfare of fruit trees, the abundance of crops and the increase of flocks. In Aetolia, where tobacco-growing is the main agriculture, she has the tobacco plant under her especial care. Sometimes she is just known as “the Lady”—“Kyra” or “Despoina”—but she has no church, although the same epithets are often applied to the Virgin. She lives in the deepest heart of the mountains as befits a chthonian; as, indeed, Pausanias tells of her dwelling in Mt. Elaion. She may have had temples but her true sanctuary was a splendid subterranean hall and from such haunts she still sends her benign influences forth. With her, too, is connected in folk tales “the beautiful one of the earth”—Persephone—guarded by a three-headed dog “that sleeps not day or night”; in other versions this warden becomes a triple-headed snake. Cerberus is also mentioned in most convincing detail, though not by name, as “Charon’s watchdog” in a Macedonian folk-song.

  I have touched on the survival of Charon earlier on. Even he, probably from the excessive zeal of convert peasants at the time of the big shift—it must have seemed that the entire pagan world was to be enrolled lock, stock and barrel—has appeared at times as “St. Charon.” We have seen that he is no longer a ferryman,[8] but Death himself, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback. It is thus that he appears in innumerable peasant songs and poems from the days of Byzantium until now. Sometimes he acts on his own, sometimes as God’s emissary, sometimes he is a fully-armed warrior prepared for fierce and protracted combat. In the oldest sources, he was closer to his present character (to which the nearest approach in classical times is the mild Thanatos, in the Alcestis, who arrives to take Admetus’s queen to Hades; for even to-day he is not always fierce). His warlike persona corresponds to that boatless Charon, armed with axe, hammer and sword, on the flanks of some Etruscan sarcophagi. His boat, in fact, may be an Achaean novelty of comparatively late origin; probably his earlier Pelasgian form had sunk deep popular roots among the Greeks and the Etruscans long before his later imago took shape; and, when time’s current bore away the later Charon with all his fluvial gear, his hoary and long-established and land-lubbing forerunner took over and survives to-day more robustly than any of that ancient company.

  Eros, complete with his bow and arrow, is often referred to in songs and tales; but as the same word is still used for “love” in modern Greek, one must be on one’s guard. Aphrodite, not styled by her name but as “the Mother of Eros,” has had only a vague and shadowy existence in Christian times, and now she has vanished. (Her duties were assumed by St. Catharine in church, and outside it by the still surviving Fates.) However, I was excited to discover that until recently the word “aphroditissa,” meaning a whore, still faintly commemorates Aphrodite Pandemos among the Maniots of Cargese.

  Though they are less well known than Charon, the three Fates, sheltering in scattered grottoes hard of access, are still with us. Their shrines are scarce but they are dotted all over Greece. I have several times talked to old women who have consulted them. The most famous—in the peasant world that is—are near Sparta (a few miles from the start of this book, on the eastern flank of Taygetus) and in Aetolia, on Mount Pelion and in Scyros. There were many in Asia Minor, now, with the exchange of populations, stripped of their votaries. Well into this century Athens itself was their haunt, notably those rock-dwellings in the Hill of the Muses and more especially the one known as “Socrates’ prison,” which, during the last century, was often filled with their offerings:[9] “cups of honey and white almonds, cakes on a little napkin and a vase of aromatic herbs burning and exhaling an agreeable perfume.” This continued till a short time ago.[10] Love, weddings and childbirth are their special care; their suitors are nearly always women or girls; cakes and honey are their favourite offering and they are wooed with alliterative incantations beginning “O Moirais...” (“O Fates”); for their collective name is still the same and though they are no longer separately known as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, their rôles have only changed by a third. One spins, another holds a book in which human destinies are inscribed, a third wields the shears. (“His thread is cut” is a common phrase for “he is dead”; also “his spindle is wound full.”) Except in Andros and Kythnos, where they are sometimes known as “the Erinyes”—and, by inflicting consumption, they conduct themselves with the spite of Furies—they are now poor, soft-hearted old women easily moved to compassion. The Fates, like some nereids, are also known as “the good ladies.” They invariably visit houses three days after a child is born. The watchdog must be chained then, the door put on the latch, a rushlight left burning and a feast of cakes, almonds, honey bread and a glass of water laid out on a low table surrounded by three cushioned stools. Mothers have seen these three crones confer together in murmurs, stooping over the cradle to write invisible destinies on the child’s brow:—moles are known as “writings of the Fates,” as though they had accented or punctuated their messages in indelible ink. Then they steal off into the night. Neglect of due care in receiving them can stir their anger and call down on the baby an inauspicious destiny. “Moira” is also used in the singular in everyday speech for one’s own or somebody else’s ordinary fate; it is usually mentioned with noddings of the head and sad sighs.

  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.