Recently I’ve been working rather slowly on some big projects — first London Labour and the London Poor, and now Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, by John Cuthbert Lawson.
This project took five year from its beginning on Distributed Proofreaders to final publication on Project Gutenberg; almost all of that time was taken up with me adding the (hopefully) correct accents and breathings to the Greek, of which there were 2626 snippets of varying length.
Lawson wrote the book in the first decade of the 20th century, and attempts by the study of contemporary Greek culture (primarily folksongs, travellers’ reports, and his own observations) to draw connections between the modern folklore and the religion in classical times, with the aim of elucidating the relationship between popular religion in classical times and its literary representations.
In the first part of the book he examines traces of a series of mythological figures in folk culture. Particularly interesting is his view of Charon, who he argues is a much more general representation of Death than the ferryman familiar from classical literature. Additionally, he views the well-known tradition of putting a coin in a corpse’s mouth in order to pay Charon for his services as a distortion of an original practice whereby the coin was a token intended to prevent the soul re-animating the body.
This leads on to his discussion of revenants: corpses which rather than decomposing after burial, would return and seek revenge on those reponsible for their death, or who had failed to perform the proper funeral rites. In recent times, the revenants were combined with the Slavic tradition of the vampire to create a general bugbear, while Lawson argues that in the tragedies, the ghosts of Agamemnon, Clytemnaestra etc. are euphemistic representations of the physical revenants from popular belief.
The final chapter of the book explores the similarities between wedding and funeral services, and connects them with what is known about the Mysteries of the classical period. He argues that these are all evidence of a belief in marriage with the gods after death, whether for the worthy or specifically for those initiated into the Mysteries.
I don’t know how influential the book has been since its publication, or how his arguments are/would be viewed today; one of the odder consequences of reading a lot of public-domain-era books is that your ideas tend to get stuck in 1922. But while it’s not an easy read, I found the techniques of the book fascinating.
Along the way, I found some particular gems, from the elevated:
The famous saying of Heraclitus, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμον, ‘the god that guides man’s lot is character,’
to the gruesome:
Children born on Christmas-day, or according to some accounts on any day between Christmas and Epiphany, are deemed likely to become Callicantzari [a monster which Lawson argues descends from the centaurs]…. A modern … treatment is to place the child in an oven and to light a fire outside to frighten it, and then to ask the question, ‘Bread or meat?’ If the child says ‘bread,’ all is well; but if he says ‘meat,’ he is believed to be possessed by a savage craving for human flesh, and the treatment is continued till he answers ‘bread.’
and the very familiar to the modern reader:
At the present day the common-folk are extraordinarily vague in their nomenclature of natural objects…. my general experience might fairly be summed up by saying that the average peasant divides all birds which he does not eat into two classes; the larger ones are hawks, and the smaller are–‘little birds, God knows what’; and an accompanying shrug of the shoulders indicates that the man does not care; while most flowers can be called either violets or gilly-flowers at pleasure.