Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture

By Charles Stewart

In present-day Greece many people still speak of exotikNB--mermaids, dog-form creatures, and other monstrous beings similar to those pictured on medieval maps. Challenging the conventional notion that these often malevolent demons belong exclusively to a realm of folklore or superstition separate from Christianity, Charles Stewart looks at beliefs about the exotikNB and the Orthodox Devil to demonstrate the interdependency of doctrinal and local religion. He argues persuasively that students who cling to the timeworn folk/official distinction will find it impossible to appreciate the breadth and coherence of contemporary Greek cosmology. Like the medieval cartographers' fantasies, which were placed on the "edges" of the physical world, Greek demons cluster in marginal locations--outlying streams, wells, and caves. The demons are near enough to the community, however, to attack humans--causing illness or death, according to Stewart's informants. Drawing on an unusual range of sources, from the author's fieldwork on the Cycladic island of Naxos to Orthodox liturgical texts, this book pictures the exotikNB as elements of a Greek cognitive map: figures that enable individuals to navigate the traumas and ambiguities of life. Stewart also examines the social forces that have by turns disposed the Greek people to embrace these demons as indicative of links with the classical past or to eschew them as signs of backwardness and ignorance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781400884391

Book preview

Demons and the Devil

PRINCETON MODERN GREEK STUDIES

This series is sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies under the auspices of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund.

Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement by Loring M. Danforth

Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by Peter Bien

George Seferis: Complete Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece by Jane K. Cowan

Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses translated by Edmund Keeley

Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis

A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town by Michael Herzfeld

Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture by Charles Stewart

Demons and the Devil

MORAL IMAGINATION IN MODERN GREEK CULTURE

Charles Stewart

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1991 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford

All Rights Reserved

Stewart, Charles, 1956-Demons and the Devil: moral imagination in modern Greek culture / Charles Stewart.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Demonology—Greece. 2. Demonology—Greece—Naxos. 3. Orthodox Eastern Church—Greece—Doctrines. 4. Greece—Religious life and customs. 5. Naxos (Greece)—Religious life and customs. I. Title.

BT981.S74 1991 306.6'91216'09499—dc20 91-6543

ISBN 0-691-09446-2 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-691-02848-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Publication of this book has been aided by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies under the auspices of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund

eISBN: 978-1-400-88439-1

R0

TO HELEN

EΛENH:

AΓΓEΛOΣ:

HELEN: I never went to Troy; it was a simulacrum.

MESSENGER: What are you saying? Did we come to such grief just for a cloud?

—Euripides, apud Seferis

Contents

List of Figures and Illustrations ix

A Note on Transliteration xi

Abbreviations xiii

Preface xv

Introduction 3

PART ONE: Local Cosmology

CHAPTER ONE

Naxos: History, Demography, and Identity 19

CHAPTER TWO

Traditions and Values in Apeíranthos 43

CHAPTER THREE

Cosmology and Morality 76

CHAPTER FOUR

Modernization and Rationality 116

PART TWO: The Composition of the Exotiká

CHAPTER FIVE

From Devil to Exotiká: Orthodox Tradition and Beyond 137

CHAPTER SIX

The Symbolism of the Exotiká 162

PART THREE: Rituals and the Demonic

CHAPTER SEVEN

Baptism: Of Holy Spirit and Evil Spirits 195

CHAPTER EIGHT

Exorcism: The Power of Names 211

CHAPTER NINE

Spells: On the Boundary between Church Practice and Sorcery 222

Conclusion 244

APPENDIX 1

A Glossary of Exotiká 251

APPENDIX 2

Xiropotámou 98 255

Notes 261

Bibliography 295

Index 323

List of Figures and Illustrations

Photographs are by Charles Stewart unless otherwise noted.

1.Map of Naxos

2.The division of Naxos into communal districts

3.Villages on either side of the mountains/plains divide

4.The chapel of St. Pakhómios near Tsikalarió

5.The best scarecrow proves to be a dead crow

6.Apeíranthos against the backdrop of Mt. Phanári

7.The drama of carnival in Apeíranthos

8.A village grave

9.Making female cheese

10.Only males may ring the church bells

11.‘‘Jehovah’s Witnesses Out!’’

12.A typical roadside shrine

13.An elaborate marble shrine

14.Devotions suspended beneath an icon of St. Nektários

15.Cosmological drawing (on a cigarette box) by a young man from Apeíranthos

16.A cosmopolitan artist’s depiction of the "Picasso-nosed female kallikántzaros"

17.Christ exorcising the Gerasene demoniacs

18.The heavenly ladder of St. John Climacos

19.Fresco by Pagónis, The Wily Confessions of Christians

20.St. Christopher, the Dog-Headed

21.A gorgóna on the wall of a seaside restaurant

22.Icon of the Panagía Gorgóna

23.Mediatory supernatural powers viewed from the perspective of the microcosm

24.The spatial distribution of the exotiká

25.The table of the Beauty of the Mountains from an eighteenth-or nineteenth-century manuscript

26.The exotiká and the lifecycle

27.Daoútis, the shadowy one, an exotikó that attacks animals

28.The goat-footed kallikántzaros urinating on a tray of Christmas sweets

29.Fresco by Pagónis, "It is the Devil who adorns those who love diabolical metamorphosis’’

30.Divining by bowl (lekanomandeía) from an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century manuscript

31.Jumping over bonfires on the feast day of St. John

32.Fresco. Kynops the Sorcerer commands demons to attack St. John

33.The Hebraic structure and the Hellenistic Greek content of Orthodox Christian cosmology

A Note on Transliteration

THE SYSTEM of transliteration used in this book represents a compromise between the phonology and orthography of modern Greek suited to the present analysis that treats both written and spoken forms of the language. With the exception of the digraph oi, pronunciation following conventions of standard English will yield a reasonable approximation of the sound of modern Greek. Stress accents are noted on all transliterated words, including personal names. Standard anglicized forms are used for certain well-known personal and place-names (i.e., Athens not Athína).

Only passages longer than a few words are cited in the Greek alphabet in the text, whereas in the notes I have made more extensive use of the Greek script. Post-1821 sources are presented in the monotonic accent system, while the polytonic system is retained for earlier sources, including scriptural and liturgical texts.

DIGRAPHS

CONSONANT CLUSTERS

Abbreviations

Preface

The devil is small, but his acts are large.

—Byzantine proverb

MEDIEVAL cartographers marked the edges of the known world on their maps with representations of monsters thought to rule those places. The reported sightings of sirens, mermaids, dog-headed creatures, and cyclopes by early explorers (Todorov 1984: 14) further testifies to the currency and imaginary force of such figures as the age of exploration began. It also presents an instance of how maps may govern perceptions and experiences of territories they intend only to chart. Columbus, a good empiricist, showed signs of breaking with this rule. In a letter dated February 15, 1493, he wrote: Down to the present, I have not found in those islands any monstrous men, as many expected, but on the contrary all the people are very comely (Columbus 1893: 16). Later, however, when his position within Spanish society became somewhat precarious, even Columbus seems to have retreated to the traditional medieval worldview, recounting tales of islands of paradise, amazons, and tailed men in the New World (Hodgen 1964: 19).

In present-day Greece one may hear similar talk of mermaids, dog-form creatures, and other monstrous beings. This array of sometimes benevolent, but more often malevolent demons, fairies, and spirits is called exotiká* in modern Greek. Like the cartographers’ fantasies, the exotiká also cluster around marginal areas of the physical environment—the mountains, springs, and caves that lie beyond the safe confines of the village—but this spatial exteriority comprises only one of their aspects. In the following pages the exotiká will emerge more fully as elements of a collective Greek cognitive cartography, a set of figures that enables individuals to map and encompass the traumas and ambiguities of life. By presenting an idiom in which reconciliatory understanding may occur, the exotiká may be seen to offer a means of navigation within a morally structured cosmos.

A book about exotiká might well arouse surprise among those who supposed anthropology had given up its predilection for exotica. Indeed, the creatures and the stories I have recorded about them may well appear fantastic, and many Greeks also consider them to be preposterous, but these same Greeks may occasionally be overcome with real fear at the thought of just such phantoms. Like Columbus, they waver. Whatever view one may take of these beings does not change the fact that exotiká is an indigenous category in Greek culture and has been so since the Middle Ages at the very least. This examination of exotiká may thus be read as de-exoticising, for it offers the opportunity to address the very concept of exoticness by exploring how alien images are constructed and debated in the daily life of a Christian European country.

My object here is to illuminate a particular pattern of ideation by studying its expressions and their relation to overarching structures such as doctrinal religion and quotidian cosmology. This turns out, more by coincidence than by design, to correspond with the recent efforts of historians to grasp what they have variously termed the structures of consciousness, the psychological equipment, the mental outlook—in short, the mentalité of earlier societies (e.g., Le Goff 1988: 3; Gurevich 1988: xix). Of course, here I attempt to understand the present—at most the recent past—and I have had the advantage of being able to converse directly with the members of the society under study. The results are anthropology, but an anthropology that very much complements the efforts of Europeanist social historians to grasp the workings of the imagination. In particular it addresses precisely those representations of the diabolical that time and again have been central to historians’ concerns (Thomas 1971; Ginzburg 1983, 1989; Ladurie 1987). Le Goff (1988: 12) has even expressed the opinion that Satan stood at the center of the medieval imagination, and, as he puts it, called the tune to which medieval society moved.

The connection of this work to social history arose by chance because most immediately I saw myself as responding to the challenge issued by social anthropologists such as Louis Dumont and David Pocock (1957a), Maurice Freedman (1979: 396, 405), and Stanley Tambiah (1987: 189). They have urged those working in complex societies with long literate traditions to combine a philological understanding of religious and other texts with the results of empirical fieldwork. To attempt this in the Greek case, I chose to focus on the two subversive beings named in my title: the demons (or exotiká), which figure at the local level, and the Devil, which expresses a developed doctrinal Orthodox conception of evil. I hoped thereby to reveal the similarities and differences between doctrinal and local conceptions of ambiguity and evil. The undertaking proved to be enormous, and in the case of Greek culture there were many allied fields such as classics, Byzantine studies, and theology upon which to draw. Obviously I cannot claim mastery of this wide terrain, but I do hope that the present work will indicate, if very sketchily, some of the fruitful ways in which philology may deepen and place in broader perspective the understandings arrived at through field research.

As a classics undergraduate I became interested in Greek demons when I spent a few months among the Greek-speakers of Calabria and Apuglia in Italy. In order to record samples of the dialects, I found it easiest to ask people to tell stories, and some of these contained reference to malevolent beings such as narades, female creatures with the feet of a mule that would attack people in the fields and mountains surrounding the villages. The names of most Italo-Greek spirits could also be found, with some dialectal variation, throughout Greece, and the following year, with the aid of a Watson Fellowship, I began to gather further scraps of information on exotiká in Greece. It is now clear to me that this start would have been impossible without the active support and encouragement of three people: Leonard Muellner and Douglas Stewart, who first kindled my interest in the Greek language, and Gregory Nagy, who pointed a tempting finger in the direction of South Italy.

From March 1983 to October 1984 I conducted field research into the exotiká on the island of Naxos. I chose Naxos because I had contacts there from an earlier visit (1978) when I stayed for two months with a family in the village of Philóti. It was there that I first learned to speak modern Greek, and it was in large part the experience of the people’s warmth and patience that encouraged me to select Naxos as the location for this project.

Since concluding fieldwork, I have returned several times to Naxos, most recently in the summer of 1989, and I have incorporated some information gathered during the course of those visits. I have not attempted to disguise the location of my field research, although I have used pseudonyms to protect the identities of individuals. To have done otherwise would, I think, have been a weak attempt to thwart a dialogue between myself, and by extension the society of which I am a member, and the islanders. This dialogue was a condition of fieldwork, and it carries on in forms that are in any case beyond my control. Naxiotes have long been interested in and influenced by how others perceive their local traditions. They travel abroad and foreigners come to visit them, and this contact frequently causes them to question or alter their local ways. Interaction with cosmopolitan opinion is thus part of the very fabric of their culture, something that enriches it and imbues it with vitality, not something against which they should be insulated. I have consequently written this book fully aware that its contents, in one form or another, will be made directly available to the people of Naxos and Greece generally. A portion of this research has, in fact, already been translated into Greek and published in a Naxos journal (Stewart 1986).

John Campbell (St. Antony’s College, Oxford) oversaw the doctoral work upon which this study is based, and I owe much to his sensibility in matters of Greek ethnography. I feel very fortunate to have been among the last group of students to study with him before his retirement. Many others have also made important contributions to my understanding of Greek culture or culture generally, and I would especially like to thank the following: Panagiotis Agapitos, Basil Arabos, Glenn Bowman, Vangelis Calotychos, Sophia Emmanuel, Richard Greenfield, Laurie Hart, Renée Hirschon, Roger Just, Peter Mackridge, Julie Makris, Stefania Pandolfo, Peter Parkes, Giovanni Petropoulos, Nancy Sultan, and Sybil Wolfram.

The Philip Bagby Trust of the Institute of Social Anthropology (Oxford) provided the financial support that made much of my research in Oxford possible, and a grant from the Fulbright Foundation enabled field research on Naxos. Chip Ammerman and the staff of the Fulbright office in Athens saw to the creation of a very genial atmosphere for research in Greece, while fellow members of the Fab Four—Jane Cowan, Janet Hart, and Karen Van Dyck—were wonderful sources of insight and good humor then as now.

The Hellenic Foundation honored me by naming the dissertation on which this book is based the best doctoral thesis on a modern Greek topic for the year 1988. Michael Gilsenan and Juliet du Boulay examined that work and suggested many useful ways of thinking. Juliet du Boulay in particular forced me to clarify my ideas in the course of a remarkable correspondence that lasted for a full year afterward. Michael Herzfeld has also been an especially valued colleague. He, Lawrence Taylor, and Ole Smith read this entire work in manuscript; Jeffrey Burton Russell and Richard Valantasis commented upon portions of it. Of course none of the above should be held accountable for the views that I present here.

The people of Naxos deserve huge credit for putting up with me—especially the people of Apeíranthos, who received me at a time when anti-American sentiment in Greece was running high. Just a few days before my arrival a half-million people had marched in Athens shouting Americans out! and calling for the removal of U.S. military bases from Greek soil. Dialekhtí and Pétros Glézos, Níkos Kephalliniádis, Giórgos Moustákis, Vasílis Sphyróeras, Father Manólis Remoúndos, and Giórgos Zevgólis all went to considerable trouble in securing or making available materials that enriched this study. In Athens, Ánna Papamikhaíl permitted me access to the archives of the Center for Research on Greek Folklore, and Eléni Psykhogioú-Ioannídi helped me to locate specific documents in the files of the center.

I am especially grateful to Margaret Alexiou, who has guided this project along in more ways than I can enumerate. It was, in fact, her study of funeral lamentation (1974) that first opened my eyes to the value of examining Greek culture over long stretches of time. Much of the content and approach of the present book was first discussed in a number of seminars that she organized at Birmingham University. I am grateful to those who participated then, and I remain indebted to Meg for the inspiration that she continued to provide as I readied this manuscript for the press.

Finally I would like to thank my parents for their support and forbearance; my sister, Merrie, as well as Nicholas Arabos, for their graphic details; and Helen, who over these ten years has come to be much more than just a figment of my imagination.

* This spelling has been adopted by most writers on the subject. In actual speech the word is pronounced xotiká, and the fairest transliteration would take the form (e)xotiká. I deemed this too cumbersome for use. When not presented in transliteration, the exotiká are referred to as demons or demonic beings for reasons that will become clear. The literal meaning of the word is things outside or beyond.

Demons and the Devil

Introduction

Considering the whole, its superior elements appeared to me as better than the inferior; but a saner judgement made me to estimate that the whole was better than its superior elements taken alone.

—St. Augustine, Confessions, VII, xiii

I NEVER imagined it would be easy to enter villages on Naxos, ask people to tell me about exotiká, and then expect to be recounted everything down to the most recent, frightening experiences. I was a total stranger to all but the few who knew me from earlier visits. On top of that I was educated, or at least in the course of gaining an education, and this status difference gave cause for initial suspicion and reserve among the locals. Was I, in fact, out to expose and ridicule their backwardness? The word for a scholar in Greek, no matter what the subject, is epistímonas (lit. scientist), and scientists are supposed to know better than to be obsessed with fairies and demons.

In any case I wanted to see how, if at all, the exotiká surfaced in the course of daily life without my prompting. So I resolved to sit tight for the first few months if necessary, until something happened, or at least until I became better known all around. I described myself to people as an anthropologist, but this term is not well understood in Greece, where social anthropology only became a university subject in 1987. With little fuss, however, we agreed upon my classification as a folklorist, there to learn about the morals and customs (ta íthi kai éthima) of local society. These are the terms Greek folklorists use to describe their goals, and villagers seemed perfectly accepting of these objectives.

I did not hear much about exotiká for a long time, although I did learn plenty about local agricultural and herding techniques, economy, and Orthodox religious practices. I began to doubt the wisdom of my passive strategy. Some conversations turned up details about dreams and miracles, but the exotiká only appeared tangentially. Finally, perilously long into my stay, I resolved to ask more directly and openly about experiences with demons. This would surely alter the nature of my information, but then it was perhaps naive to think that anything I had heard until then was unbiased, as if I were myself an imperceptible phantom overhearing and noting down conversations.

Shortly thereafter I broached the question of the existence of exotiká in the coffee house of a mountain village. A group of young men, workers on their lunch break, responded with laughter and derision. Courgettes! they proclaimed, getting up to leave (in other words, nonsense [squash is deemed by Greeks to contain no nutritional value]). But a group of older men called me over to where they were sitting. They told me a few details, expressed some skepticism, and then directed me to an old woman living with her son in a half-deserted hamlet. This woman, Kyría Sophía, reputedly knew a lot about exotiká and one of these men took me to meet her.

Wearing a faded dress that looked to be the handiwork of a village tailor in a distant past, and speaking quickly in thick local dialect, Sophía related two stories in the following order:

A woman wanted a load of wood for her fire and went to her husband’s hut to ask him to make it up for her. In fact she was a neráïda [see Appendix 1] who had transformed herself to look like his wife. When she arrived, the husband said to her, "First let’s do our job [i.e., let’s have sex] and then I’ll fix up the load of wood.’’ So they did their job, and he prepared the load of wood and she left.

The next day he himself returned home to visit his house. His wife asked if he had brought a load of wood. He said, But I made you one just yesterday. Do you want wood again?’’ [a double entendre meaning also, Do you want another beating?’’].

His wife denied this, so he tried to remind her. Don’t you remember?’’ he said. You came, we did our job, and then I made you up a load of wood." His wife was outraged. This was the man’s error. He should never have mentioned that he had made love with a neráïda, because this means death.

That night his genitals began to swell and cause him pain. His wife wondered what was the matter. The condition continued for days. They called the priest to come and read him [an exorcism] and they also called in medical doctors, but nobody was able to help him. The man died.

It was winter, and a shepherd was staying outside to be near his flocks. In the night a woman he thought was his wife came and slept with him. In the morning when he saw his wife he said, Not even as newlyweds was it so good.

She was surprised. She didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, Didn’t you come and sleep with me last night? No, she replied. Then they realized that it must have been a neráïda.

The shepherd fell ill almost immediately. His penis began to swell up, and his wife sent him to the doctor. The doctor recommended some bran compresses. That didn’t work. Next they had to find a plant, pipiliés.¹ He was told to urinate on the pipiliés in order to purify himself. This too failed.

The only thing left was sprinkling with holy water at the very spot where he made love with the nymph. But the sprinkling should have been done before going to the doctor. For one year he could not move. He died at the end of that time.

One of the surprising features of these accounts is that Sophía began with a story that I took to be more a folktale than the relation of a true event as she claimed. The second story then appeared to be a variant of the first. Sophía told these tales in a gripping and entertaining fashion, and actually broke into a smile at times as the various shocking details of the shepherds’ diseases registered on me. When she then explained that the second story dealt with real events in her own life, that she was the wife and her deceased husband, Stamátis, the afflicted shepherd, I laughed too. She was leading me on. Did she not narrate the story in the third person? But no, she, her son, and the neighbors standing around assured me in very sober tones that this was indeed the story—perhaps not the only one—that Kyría Sophía told about Stamátis’s death.

As I prepared to leave later that evening, Sophía’s son presented me with a hand-carved cross upon which he had inscribed the Orthodox Christian abbreviation for Jesus Christ Conquers’’ (IS XS NI KA) at the four points. Inset at the bottom on both sides were blue plastic beads resembling eyes for protection against the evil eye. He told me that the wood he used was special because it sank in water. Furthermore, it had been cut in a place where the cock does not crow’ ’ (pou den krázei o kókkoras)—a phrase that we shall meet again in the final chapter on spells. Clearly this was more than just a cross; it was practically an amulet designed to prevent the very sort of attack that had befallen his father.

For the moment I would like to draw attention to the framework within which the exotiká were situated above. No one asked the neráïdes to appear; they came unbidden, by surprise. Doctors were consulted in both cases, but note the greater importance attributed to the priest and thus to the institution of the Greek Orthodox Church. If only the priest had been summoned first, Kyría Sophía suggests, her husband might have been saved. This situating of the exotiká within a Christian framework, although general to a wide range of accounts, has not, I think, been properly understood in the Greek case. To see why, a brief glance at the suppositions behind previous collections and interpretations is necessary.

SURVIVALISM

Since Greek independence (1832), folklorists have concentrated on the exotiká as potential proof of the fledgling nation’s ancient pedigree (Herzfeld 1982a).² The neráïda, for example, could be traced back linguistically to the ancient nereid or the gorgóna (Appendix 1) to its more monstrous classical namesake. One of the features of continuity theory was that scholars tended to treat the various exotiká as isolates, entities that could freely be detached from their cultural context and compared with historical forerunners. Details such as the subordinate position of the exotiká within a surrounding Christian cosmology and their high degree of interdependence with Orthodox holy figures were therefore often overlooked. Scholars tended to treat them purely as pagan survivals, implying that a sort of polytheism or cosmological pluralism obtained in modern Greece. In the accounts told by Kyría Sophía there are, at first, no grounds for assuming that the neráïda necessarily belongs to either a pagan or a Christian religious system. Her appearance does, however, call for the expression of faith in the efficacy of Christian practice and this, I think, is very important to note.

An exclusive focus on continuity misleadingly suggests that entities or institutions remain exactly as they once were, and risks obscuring both the pragmatic and the broadly structural interrelations of the exotiká with Orthodoxy. From the viewpoint of a discipline such as social anthropology, the vast body of data assembled by folklorists calls out for reanalysis. The present work accordingly considers the exotiká in a broad social framework and asks if they influence or interact with any particular areas of contemporary life more than others; it seeks to make sense of them against the background of modern Greek culture rather than as fragments dislodged from that culture (and from each other) and primarily referable back to a distant past. It was readily apparent, for example, that the plethora of individual exotiká that had been insisted upon by continuity theorists actually shared a striking number of attributes among themselves. This led to the step, set out in Part 2 below, of resolving them into a common pool of combinable and recombinable features.

Several writers (e.g., Schmidt 1871; Polítis 1871; Hamilton 1910) have endeavored to show that many elements of Christian Orthodoxy itself, such as various saints, were only thinly disguised pre-Christian gods. In this view, even the practice of Orthodoxy in its most acceptable forms amounted to an expression of religious pluralism. According to the classical scholar J. C. Lawson,

the common-folk indeed profess and call themselves Christian; their priesthood is a Christian priesthood; their places of worship are Christian churches; they make the sign of the cross at every turn; and the names of God and Christ and the Virgin are their commonest ejaculations. But with all this external Christianity they are as pagan and as polytheistic in their hearts as were ever their ancestors. By their acceptance of Christianity they have increased rather than diminished their number of gods: in their conception of them and attitude towards them they have made little advance since the Homeric Age. (1910: 47)

Statements such as these conflate historical stages of Greek religion and make the assumption that if certain ancient Greek gods may be detected in modern Greece, then the cosmology that once supported them must also be vital today. This suits a continuity theory oriented to the past and rather less concerned with understanding contemporary Greek religion (Danforth 1984). The very title of Lawson’s book, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, openly states this presupposition.

The process whereby a people selects elements from two (or more) vital cosmologies and mingles them in their religious practice—perhaps creating a third cosmology—has been labeled syncretism by anthropologists.³ The view of some of the above-mentioned survivalists suggests that religion in Greece may today be understood as syncretistic. I do not think this is accurate. No doubt elements of ancient Greek religion are discernible in contemporary Greek religious experience, but Orthodox Christians everywhere in Greece conceive of themselves as just that: Orthodox Christians. Paganism as a vital cosmology is long gone. Today people can neither dabble in it nor choose it altogether as an alternative. Those elements of earlier religions still discernible today are either drawn into a relation with Orthodoxy in practice (as in the case of the neráïda) or else altogether integrated within the Christian structure. Take, for example, the case of Charos ( the modern-day personification of death (Alexiou 1978). Few would deny that this figure is descended from the ancient Charon (X ), although over the millennia there have been significant transformations. Charos is no longer represented as the decrepit old ferryman who conveys the dead across the River Styx. He no longer inhabits an ancient cosmological landscape. For the modern Greeks he may take the form of a hunter or be confused with the Archangel Michael. In all cases he is considered subservient to a higher power, God.

For this reason it is worthwhile to differentiate syncretism as an ongoing process from synthetic religions, such as Greek Orthodoxy, which traversed a period of active syncretism in the past but have now emerged as unified theological structures. Certainly Orthodoxy is perceived and treated as such by its members. Were we not to make this distinction the practice of virtually every religion, certainly every world religion, could be considered an instance of syncretism. Islam contains elements of Judaism and Christianity; Buddhism relies on certain Hindu principles; and Christianity itself can be seen to amalgamate doctines from Judaism and other Eastern religions. Yet I doubt if adherents approach these religions as anything other than unified faiths at the level of basic cosmological and eschatological principles. The question of local variations in practice or interpretation is another matter to be examined below.

Christian cosmology, with its opposition of God to the Devil, was always well suited to encompass extraneous beliefs. Opposing deities or doctrines could simply be aligned with the Devil and thus immediately incorporated as an internal opposing force. This is one reason why I tend to view the exotiká as located within the broad framework of Orthodoxy; they form a complementary, although antithetical, part of a whole, not a separate anti-structure. We may compare this configuration with Gananath Obeyesekere’s description of the Sri Lankan Buddhist pantheon, where foreign gods or demons may be incorporated so long as they are shown to be subordinate to the Buddha. In dramatizations of one particular myth, the demon Kola-Sanniya is only allowed to disembark on Sri Lanka after presenting a letter of permission from the Buddha (Obeyesekere 1963: 145-46). But once he has landed and been allowed into the pantheon there is no reason, for us or for the Sri Lankans, to consider him alien.

Accounts such as those told by Kyría Sophía differ slightly since at first sight they present only a pragmatic interrelation between the exotiká and Orthodox Christianity. Charos, on the other hand, presents a case of structural accommodation within Christian cosmology. Acknowledgment of this difference does not compel us to promote one type of interrelation above the other in importance. In any event, thus far all we have to go on in Kyría Sophía’s case are the stories themselves. Further evidence collected on Naxos shows that people often conflated the exotiká with the Devil⁴ in ordinary speech, and many features of the exotiká are shared in common with images of the Devil. Viewed either pragmatically or structurally, the exotiká thus seem to fit within the domain of contemporary cosmology and must be treated as participating in the network of symbols and values that cosmology in Greece entails. They amount to more than survivals or folkloric residue; they are symbolic and ideological complements best treated in relation to the whole religion.

RELIGION

Throughout, I broadly consider religion as the body of beliefs and practices directed at supernatural beings and powers (cf. Goody 1961: 144).⁵ Admittedly this is an outside observer’s point of view, but it is really only a starting point used to identify a subject matter for study. The perplexing neráïda of Kyría Sophía’s accounts thus falls into my purview as an aspect of religion on these grounds, even though I may not immediately be in a position to say much about the nature of this female demon. The approach to religion taken here does offer that advantage and furthermore it obviates accepting any particular social group’s definition of religion as the grounds for analysis. Instead it permits the treatment of Orthodox practices and those deemed non-Orthodox by the Church together, thereby bridging what are sometimes said to be two separate domains: that of proper religion and that of superstition.

The exotiká lack any sort of theology or doxology and, excluding the recent folklore and survivalist literature, one must go back to the fourteenth-century De Daemonibus of Pseudo-Psellós (Gautier 1980) to find a systematic indigenous account of Greek demons. The reason for this lack of codification may lie in the fact that the exotiká have for centuries been proscribed by the Orthodox Church and labeled as a body of superstitions. Thus any exceptional display of interest in them, whether theoretical or practical, could have been seen as heresy. While not dismissing the fact of Church opposition to the exotiká or their inferior power vis-à-vis God and the saints, this study observes a pervasive interdependence between the exotiká and the Christian sacra.

The authority of the Church’s view presents another reason (in addition to survivalism) why no serious attempt has been made to study the manner and degree to which the exotiká and Christian holy figures reinforce one another at the local level. In the case of Greek folklorists, their identity as Christians, and perhaps the departmental divide between their discipline and theology, meant that they rarely compared standard Christian worship with nonstandard practices and beliefs such as the exotiká. For them, religion and folklore were two very separate things. In a review of J. K. Campbell’s Honour, Family and Patronage, a study that attempted in its final chapter to reconcile apparently non-Orthodox lore with Orthodoxy (1964: 331ff.), the Greek folklorist Dimitrios Loukátos raised the following objection: Here Campbell mixes in the Devil with various evil spirits or with Nymphs who are, of course, something different, and he says nothing about the Classical Greek tradition and the evil spirits of the sheepfold, known from the worship of Pan.’’ The preference, as we have already seen, was to distinguish two mutually exclusive systems, one Christian, the other comprised of pre-Christian elements" (Blum and Blum 1970: 183).

Paradoxically, both Christian and pagan elements, even though mutually opposed, were prized as indicators of Greek identity. In an attempt to resolve this contradiction, one Greek folklorist, Spýridon Zambélios, even argued that the ancients were already Christian in essence. Christ and his followers simply clarified and set the seal on their early creative achievement (Herzfeld 1982a: 44). For the most part, however, the paradox of the exotiká as both good because they speak for a cultural identity linked with ancient Greece and bad because they contradict a fully Christian identity has not been resolved. It just poses one more example of Greek cultural ambiguity and bipolarity, a facet that Herzfeld has labeled disemia (1987a: 114). The observation that belief in exotiká could be interpreted as prestigious from a political, nationalist point of view is nevertheless important because this has surely been one crucial force insuring their continued existence into recent times.

Here I follow neither the Church’s nor the classicizing, nationalistic folklorists’ determinations of what religion is in Greece. This stance then allows me to observe the pragmatic consequences that these two considerable forces have had upon representations of supernatural beings such as the exotiká. I would add to this that I have divided, or rather united, the field the way I have strictly for the purposes of describing and analyzing an area of Greek culture. Church and scholarly pronouncements have exercised important effects on received lay opinion regarding matters such as the exotiká. It is thought that if something is called superstitious then it really is separate and of an entirely different order than Orthodox religion. Greek and foreign folklorists, either because they were swayed by the Church’s view or else were chasing visions of survivals, never imagined that Orthodoxy and the exotiká could be broached within the same structure. Of course I do not mean to imply that the Church’s proscription of the exotiká was unjustifiable, for I have no objection to the Church’s statement of doctrine. As an anthropologist, not as a theologian, I am merely pointing out that in the Greek case these sanctions label beliefs and practices as different when culturally they share much in common and even form complementary parts of the same broad cosmological picture. Recognition of this has involved connecting various aspects of Greek cosmology with each other where Greek folklorists and theologians would shy away.

LOCAL RELIGION

The relation between local religious observance and theological doctrine has been much attended to in the case of Asian and South Asian religions (Sangren 1984). Lately European Christianity has also begun to attract the attention of anthropologists (Christian 1989a, 1989b; Badone 1990). In such great and little tradition situations (Redfield 1956: 41-42), one stares the consequences of literacy squarely in the face. Texts allow for and inspire different sorts of thinking than oral memory; they permit the accumulation of details and the unrushed operation of systematizing, logical thought upon these details (Ong 1982). One of the results is that great traditions frequently arrive at universalist abstractions while little traditions express basically similar concepts through accounts of particular events; one speaks in terms of the Devil, the other in terms of devils (Goody 1986: 24f., 184).

As an example, I cite the case of an African Catholic priest whose renown as a healer and exorcist recently aroused disapproving concern at the Vatican. This priest, Emmanuel Milingo, visited Rome in the summer of 1989 and took part in a debate with a skeptical cardinal who stated his