The details of the rites and the full forms of incantation are in general extremely difficult to obtain. The witches themselves are always reticent on such points, and I have known one plead, by way of excuse for her apparent discourtesy in withholding information, that the virtue of magic was diminished in proportion as the knowledge of it was disseminated. One cure, however,--a cure for headache--will sufficiently illustrate the principle on which the healing art among the common-folk generally proceeds. This cure is based upon the assumption that the tense and bruised feeling of a bad headache is due to the presence of some demon within the skull, and that the room which he occupies must have been provided by distention of the head,--which will therefore measure more in circumference while it aches than when the demon has been exorcised. This is demonstrated in the course of the cure. The witch takes a handkerchief and measures with it the patient’s head. Doubling back the six or eight inches of the handkerchief that remain over, she puts in the fold three cloves of garlic, three grains of salt, or some other article of magical virtue, and ties a knot. Then waving the handkerchief about the patient’s head, she recites her form of exorcism,--but usually in a tone so low and mumbling that the bystanders cannot catch the words. The exorcism being finished, she again measures the head, and this time the knot, which marks the previous measurement, is found to overlap, by two or three inches it may be, the other end of the kerchief,--a sure sign that the intruding demon has been expelled and that the head having returned to its natural dimensions will no longer ache[30]. The exact words of the incantation which should accompany this rite I could not obtain; but I make little doubt that in substance they would differ little from a Macedonian formula recently published:--

‘For megrim and headache:

‘Write on a piece of paper:--God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, loose the demon of the megrim from the head of Thy servant. I charge thee, unclean spirit which ever sittest in the head of man, take thy pain and depart from the head: from half-head, membrane, and vertebra, from the servant of God, So-and-so. Stand we fairly, stand we with fear of God. Amen[31].’

In this instance we have the formula but not, it seems, the rite which should accompany it; for the mere act of committing the words to paper is hardly likely to be deemed sufficient. Probably the paper would be laid under the pillow at night, or, as I have known in other cases, would be burnt, and its ashes taken as a sedative powder.

The various charms which we have so far considered are directed towards the hurt or the healing of man: but external nature is also responsive to magic spells. It is rumoured that there are still witches who have power to draw down the moon from the heavens by incantation; but a more useful ceremony, designed to draw down the clouds upon a parched land, may still be actually witnessed. The most recent case known to me was in the April of 1899, when the rite was carried out some few days, unfortunately, after I had left the district by the people of Larissa. The custom is known all over the north of Greece--in Epirus[32], Thessaly, and Macedonia,--and also it is said among some of the Turks, Wallachs, and Servians; to the south of those regions and in the islands of the Aegean I heard nothing of it. A boy (or sometimes, it is said, a girl[33]) is stripped naked and then dressed up in wreaths and festoons of leafage, grass, and flowers, and, escorted by a troop of children of his own age, goes the round of the neighbourhood. He is known as the περπερία, and his companions sing as they go,

Perpería goes his way And to God above doth pray, Rain, O God, a gentle rain, Shed, O God, a gentle shower, That the fields may give their grain, And the vines may come to flower,

and so forth in such simple strain[34]. At each doorway and more particularly at every spring and well, which it is the special duty of the Perpería to visit, anyone who will may empty a vessel of water over the boy, to whom some compensation for his drenching is usually made in the form of sweetmeats or coppers.

The word περπερία has been the subject of considerable discussion. By-forms περπερίτσα, περπεροῦνα, and παππαροῦνα also occur. The first two are of the nature of diminutives; the last-named is a corrupt form used only, so far as I know, in one district of Epirus, and means a ‘garden-poppy.’ The perversion of the word has in this district (Zagorion) affected the rite itself; for it is considered necessary for this flower to be used largely in dressing up the chief actor in the ceremony[35]. But the most general, and, as I think, most correct form is περπερία (or περπερεία). With the ancient word περπερεία, derived from the Latin perperus and used in the sense of ‘boasting’ or ‘ostentation,’ it can, I feel, have no connexion; and I suggest that it stands for περιπορεία, with the same abbreviation as in περπατῶ for περιπατῶ, ‘walk,’ and subsequent assimilation of the first two syllables. If my conjecture is right, the word originally meant nothing more than a ‘procession round’ the village; next it became confined in usage to a procession for the particular purpose of procuring rain; and finally, the words πορεία[36] and πορεύομαι having been lost from popular speech, it was taken to be the name of the boy who plays the uncomfortable part of vegetation craving water. And indeed it would seem likely that the song which forms part of the ceremony was actually first composed at a time when περπερία was still understood in the sense of ‘procession’: for in every recorded version known to me it would be still possible to interpret the word in this meaning without detriment to the context.

The rite itself as an example of sympathetic magic requires no commentary: a simpler application of the principle that like produces like could not be found.

* * * * *

Other examples of primitive customs and beliefs still prevalent in Greece might easily be amassed: but I have preferred to select these few for detailed treatment rather than to glance over a larger number, in order that they may the more clearly be seen to belong to certain types of superstition found the whole world over and therefore presumably dating from prehistoric ages: for if the population of Greece has proved a good vehicle for the transmission of superstitions so primaeval, it will surely follow that there is nothing extravagant in hoping to learn also from their traditions something of the religion of historic Hellas.

§ 3. THE SURVIVAL OF HELLENIC TRADITION.

There may however be some who, while admitting that mere lapse of time need not have extinguished ancient Hellenic ideas, will be disposed to question the likelihood, even the possibility, of their transmission on racial grounds. The belief in the evil eye and the practice of sympathetic magic were once, they may say, the common property of the whole uncivilised world; and though the inhabitants of modern Greece have inherited these old superstitions and usages, there is nothing to show from what ancestry they have received the inheritance. The population, it may be urged, has changed; the Greeks of to-day are not Hellenes; their blood has been contaminated by foreign admixture, and with this admixture may have come external, non-Hellenic traditions; has not Fallmerayer stoutly maintained that the modern inhabitants of Greece have practically no claim to the name of Hellenes, but come of a stock Slavonic in the main, though cross-bred with the offscourings of many peoples?

The historical facts from which Fallmerayer argued are not to be slighted. It is well established[37] that, from the middle of the sixth century onwards, successive hordes of Slavonic invaders swept over Greece, driving such of the native population as escaped destruction into the more mountainous or remote districts; that in the middle of the eighth century, when the numbers of the Greek population had been further reduced by the great pestilence of 746, ‘the whole country,’ to use the exact phrase of Constantine Porphyrogenitus[38], ‘became Slavonic and was occupied by foreigners’; that the Slavonic supremacy lasted at least until the end of the tenth century; that thereafter a gradual fusion of the remnants of the Greek population with their conquerors began, but proceeded so slowly that at the beginning of the thirteenth century the ‘Franks,’ as the warriors of Western Christendom were popularly called, found Slavonic tribes in Elis and Laconia quite detached from the rest of the population, acknowledging indeed the supremacy of the Byzantine government, but still employing their own language and their own laws; and finally that the amalgamation of the two races was not complete even by the middle of the fifteenth century, for the Turks at their conquest of Greece found several tribes of the Peloponnese, especially in the neighbourhood of Mount Taygetus, still speaking a Slavonic tongue.