Chapter V (1)

THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES AND BOGEYS.

‘ὦ μεγάλαυχοι καὶ φθερσιγενεῖς
Κῆρες Ἐρινύες.’

In the preceding chapters the nature of Greek ritual has been discussed. The main conclusion that has emerged is that this ritual in its earlier phases was mainly characterized by a tendency to what the Greeks called ἀποτροπή, i.e. the turning away, the _aversion_ of evil. This tendency was however rarely quite untouched by an impulse more akin to our modern notion of worship, the impulse to θεραπεία, i.e. the induction, the fostering of good influences.

Incidentally we have of course gathered something of the nature of the objects of worship. When the ritual was not an attempt at the direct impulsion of nature, we have had brief uncertain glimpses of sprites and ghosts and underworld divinities. It now remains to trace with more precision these vague theological or demonological or mythological outlines, to determine the character of the beings worshipped and something of the order of their development.

In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate than in ritual. Ritual, i.e. what men _did_, is either known or not known; what they meant by what they did—the connecting link between ritual and theology—can sometimes be certainly known, more often precariously inferred. Still more hazardous is the attempt to determine how man thought of the objects or beings to whom his ritual was addressed, in a word what was his theology, or, if we prefer the term, his mythology.

At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our minds are imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination peopled with the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the Olympian gods; it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that we realize the fact essential to our study that _there were no gods at all_, that what we have to investigate is not so many actual facts and existences but only conceptions of the human mind, shifting and changing colour with every human mind that conceived them. Art which makes the image, literature which crystallizes attributes and functions, arrest and fix this shifting kaleidoscope; but, until the coming of art and literature and to some extent after, the formulary of theology is ‘all things are in flux’ (πάντα ῥεῖ).

Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the human mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived things in a fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to that realizing of mythology[414] which is the first condition of its being understood, than our modern habit of clear analytic thought. The very terms we use are sharpened to an over nice discrimination. The first necessity is that by an effort of the sympathetic imagination we should think back the ‘many’ we have so sharply and strenuously divided, into the haze of the primitive ‘one.’

Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a deleterious mental fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It is not confusion or even synthesis; rather it is as it were a protoplasmic fulness and forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse forms of its ultimate births. It may even happen, as in the case of the Olympian divinities, that articulation and discrimination sound the note of approaching decadence. As Maeterlinck[415] beautifully puts it, _la clarté parfaite n’est-elle pas d’ordinaire le signe de la lassitude des idées?_

There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind this primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, after articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course of exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating a number of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, i.e. resumes the many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly seen, _mutatis mutandis_, a late philosophizing author is often of great use in illustrating a primitive conception: the multiform divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer to the primitive mind than the clear-cut outlines of Homer’s Olympians.

* * * * *

In our preliminary examination of Athenian festivals we found underlying the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the Anthesteria the revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmophoria we found magical ceremonies for the promotion of fertility addressed as it would seem directly to the earth itself: in the Thargelia we had ceremonies of purification not primarily addressed to any one. In the Diasia and Anthesteria only was there clear evidence of some sort of definite being or beings as the object of worship. The meaning of snake-worship will come up for discussion later (p. 326), for the present we must confine ourselves to the theology or demonology of the beings worshipped in the Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological shapes into which they are developed and discriminated.

THE KER AS GHOST AND SPRITE.

That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria—‘worshipped’ is of course too modern a word—were primarily ghosts, admits, in the face of the evidence previously adduced (pp. 43, 44), of no doubt. That in the fifth century B.C. they were thought of as little winged sprites the vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and to it might be added the evidence of countless other Athenian white lekythi where the _eidolon_ or ghost is shown fluttering about the grave. But to the ancients _Keres_ was a word of far larger and vaguer connotation than our modern _ghosts_, and we must grasp this wider connotation if we would understand the later developments of the term.

Something of their nature has already appeared in the apotropaic precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the doors to catch them, cathartic buckthorn was chewed to eject them; they were dreaded as sources of evil; they were, if not exactly evil spirits, certainly spirits that brought evil: else why these precautions? Plato has this in his mind when he says[416] ‘There are many fair things in the life of mortals, but in most of them there are as it were adherent Keres which pollute and disfigure them.’ Here we have not merely a philosophical notion, that there is a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence surely of an actual popular faith, i.e. the belief that Keres, like a sort of personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution[417]. To such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon[418] in telling the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus (p. 468) says that when it was found by the fisherman ‘it was still singing, nor had it suffered any change from the sea nor any other of the outrages that human Keres inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming and bleeding with fresh blood.’ Conon is of course a late writer, and full of borrowed poetical phrases, but the expression human Keres (ἀνθρώπιναι κῆρες) is not equivalent to the Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption inherent in man.

In fig. 7 we have seen a representation of the harmless Keres, the souls fluttering out of the grave-pithos. Fortunately ancient art has also left us a representation of a baleful Ker. The picture in fig. 17 is from a pelike[419] found at Thisbe and now in the Berlin Museum[420]. Heracles, known by his lion skin and quiver, swings his rudely hewn club (κλάδος) against a tiny winged figure with shrivelled body and distorted ugly face. We might have been at a loss to give a name to his feeble though repulsive antagonist but for an Orphic Hymn to Heracles[421] which ends with the prayer:

‘Come, blessed hero, come and bring allayments
Of all diseases. Brandishing thy club,
Drive forth the baleful fates; with poisoned shafts
Banish the noisome Keres far away.’

The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to a forecast of the truth that it has taken science centuries to establish, i.e. the fact that disease is caused by little live things, germs—bacilli we call them, he used the word Keres. A fragment of the early comic poet Sophron[422] speaks of Herakles throttling Hepiales. Hepiales must be the demon of nightmare, well known to us from other sources and under various confused names as Ephialtes, Epiales, Hepialos. The _Etymologicon Magnum_[423] explains ‘Hepialos’ as a shivering fever and ‘a daimon that comes upon those that are asleep.’ It has been proposed to regard the little winged figure which Herakles is clearly taking by the throat as Hepiales[424], demon of nightmare, rather than as a Ker. The question can scarcely be decided, but the doubt is as instructive as any certainty. Hepiales is a disease caused by a Ker; i.e. it is a special form of Ker, the nightmare bacillus. Blindness also was caused by a Ker, as was madness; hence the expression ‘casting a black Ker on their eyes[425].’ Blindness and madness, blindness of body and spirit are scarcely distinguished, as in the blindness of Oedipus; both come of the Keres-Erinyes.

To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather _are_, bad spirits. Porphyry[426] tells us that blisters are caused by evil spirits which come at us when we eat certain food and settle on our bodies. He goes to the very heart of ancient religious ‘aversion’ when he adds that it is on account of this that purifications are practised, _not in order that we may induce the presence of the gods, but that these wretched things may keep off_. He might have added, it is on account of these bad spirits that we fast; indeed ἁγνεία, the word he uses, means abstinence as well as purity. Eating is highly dangerous because you have your mouth open and a Ker may get in. If a Ker should get in when you are about to partake of specially holy food there will naturally be difficulties. So argues the savage. Porphyry being a vegetarian says that these bad spirits specially delight in blood and impurities generally and they ‘creep into people who make use of such things.’ If you kept about you holy plants with strong scents and purging properties, like rue and buckthorn, you might keep the Keres away, or, if they got in, might speedily and safely eject them.

The physical character of the Keres, their connection with ‘the lusts of the flesh,’ comes out very clearly in a quaint moralising poem preserved by Stobaeus and attributed to Linos. It deals with the dangers of Keres and the necessity for meeting them by ‘purification.’ Its ascetic tone and its attribution to Linos probably point to Orphic origin. It runs as follows[427]:

‘Hearken to these my sayings, zealously lend me your hearing
To the simple truth about all things. Drive far away the disastrous
Keres, they who destroy the herd of the vulgar and fetter
All things around with curses manifold. Many and dreadful
Shapes do they take to deceive. But keep them far from thy spirit,
Ever watchful in mind. This is the purification
That shall rightly and truly purge thee to sanctification
(If but in truth thou hatest the baleful race of the Keres),
And most of all thy belly, the giver of all things shameful,
For desire is her charioteer and she drives with the driving of
madness.’

It is commonly said that diseases are ‘personified’ by the Greeks. This is to invert the real order of primitive thought. It is not that a disease is realized as a power and then turned into a person, it is that primitive man seems unable to conceive of any force except as resulting from some person or being or sprite, something a little like himself. Such is the state of mind of the modern Greek peasant who writes Χολέρα with a capital letter. Hunger, pestilence, madness, nightmare have each a sprite behind them; _are_ all sprites.

Of course, as Hesiod[428] knew, there were ancient golden days when these sprites were not let loose, when they were shut up safe in a cask and

‘Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth
Lived without ills, aloof from grievous toil
And catching plagues which Keres gave to men[429].’

But alas!

‘The woman with her hands took the great lid
From off the cask and scattered them, and thus
Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone
Remained therein, safe held beneath the rim,
Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid[430].’

Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be considered later (p. 283); for the moment we have only to note what manner of things came out of it. The account is strange and significant. She shut the cask too late:

‘For other myriad evils wandered forth
To man, the earth was full, and full the sea.
Diseases, that all round by day and night
Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled,
Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice
Had taken away[431].’

Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things _are_ Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in commenting on the passage, ‘Hesiod gives them (i.e. the diseases) bodily form making them approach without sound, showing that even of these things spirits are the guardians, sending invisibly the diseases decreed by fate and scattering the Keres in the cask.’ After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres were presided over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits, but primitive man believes the Keres _are_ the spirits, _are_ the diseases. Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother Pandora (p. 286), and that the Keres were ghosts. ‘Earth,’ says Hesiod, ‘was full and full the sea.’ This crowd of Keres close-packed is oddly emphasized in a fragment by an anonymous poet[432]:

‘Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill,
And round about us Keres crowding still;
No chink of opening
Is left for entering.’

This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering about men haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality to their vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos[433] seems to echo Hesiod when he says ‘hope feeds all men’—but hope is all in vain because of the imminent demon host that work for man’s undoing, disease and death and war and shipwreck and suicide.

‘No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold
Mortals attend, woes and calamities
That none may scape.’

Here and elsewhere to translate ‘Keres’ by fates is to make a premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things not impersonations. So when Aeschylus[434] puts into the mouth of his Danaid women the prayer

‘Nor may diseases, noisome swarm,
Settle upon our heads, to harm
Our citizens,’

the ‘noisome swarm’ is no mere ‘poetical’ figure but the reflection of a real primitive conviction of live pests.

The little fluttering insect-like diseases are naturally spoken of for the most part in the plural, but in the _Philoctetes_ of Sophocles[435] the festering sore of the hero is called ‘an ancient Ker’; here again the usage is primitive rather than poetical. Viewing the Keres ‘as little inherent physical pests,’ we are not surprised to learn from Theognis[436] that

‘For hapless man wine doth two Keres hold—
Limb-slacking Thirst, Drunkenness overbold.’

Nor is it man alone who is beset by these evil sprites. In that storehouse of ancient superstition, the Orphic _Lithica_[437], we hear of Keres who attack the fields. Against them the best remedy is the Lychnis stone, which was also good to keep off a hailstorm.

‘Lychnis, from pelting hail be thou our shield,
Keep off the Keres who attack each field.’

And Theophrastus[438] tells us that each locality has its own Keres dangerous to plants, some coming from the ground, some from the air, some from both. Fire also, it would seem, might be infested by Keres. A commentator on Philo says that it is important that no profane fire, i.e. such as is in ordinary use, should touch an altar because it may be contaminated by myriads of Keres[439]. Instructive too is the statement of Stesichorus[440], who according to tradition ‘called the Keres by the name Telchines.’ Eustathius in quoting the statement of Stesichorus adds as explanatory of Keres τὰς σκοτώσεις: the word σκοτώσεις is late and probably a gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical and spiritual. Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with Telchines is of capital interest and takes us straight back into the world of ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of antiquity, and Strabo[441] tells us that one of their magic arts was to ‘besprinkle animals and plants with the water of Styx and sulphur mixed with it, with a view to destroy them.’

Thus the Keres, from being merely bad influences inherent and almost automatic, became exalted and personified into actual magicians. Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus allows us to see how this happened. He is commenting on the ancient tribe of the Kouretes: these Kouretes, he says, were Cretan and also called Thelgines (_sic_), and they were sorcerers and magicians. ‘Of these there were two sorts: one sort craftsmen and skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious to all good things; these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to be the origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which they used to brew magic potions from roots. They (i.e. the former sort) invented statuary and discovered metals, and they were amphibious and of strange varieties of shape, some were like demons, some like men, some like fishes, some like serpents; and the story went that some had no hands, some no feet, and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And they say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.’ Finally comes the significant statement that _they perished struck down by the thunder of Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo_. The old order is slain by the new. To the imagination of the conqueror the conquered are at once barbarians and magicians, monstrous and magical, hated and feared, craftsmen and medicine men, demons, beings endowed like the spirits they worship, in a word Keres-Telchines[442]. When we find the good, fruitful, beneficent side of the Keres effaced and ignored we must always remember this fact that we see them through the medium of a conquering civilization[443].

THE KERES OF OLD AGE AND DEATH.

By fair means or foul, by such ritual procedures as have already been noted, by the chewing of buckthorn, the sounding of brass, the making of comic figures, most of the Keres could be kept at bay; but there were two who waited relentless, who might not be averted, and these were Old Age and Death. It is the thought that these two Keres are waiting that with the lyric poets most of all overshadows the brightness of life. Theognis[444] prays to Zeus:

‘Keep far the evil Keres, me defend
From Old Age wasting, and from Death the end.’

These haunting Keres of disease, disaster, old age and death Mimnermus[445] can never forget:

‘We blossom like the leaves that come in spring,
What time the sun begins to flame and glow,
And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know,
But always at the goal black Keres stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand.

And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun
Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die
Not live is best, for evils many a one
Are born within the soul. And Poverty
Has wasted one man’s house with niggard care,
And one has lost his children. Desolate
Of this his earthly longing, he must fare
To Hades. And another for his fate
Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man
Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban.

Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All things are beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of Mimnermus are of interest at this point because they show the emergence of the two most dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, from the swarm of minor ills. Poverty, disease and desolation are no longer definitely figured as Keres. The vase-painter shows this fact in a cruder form. On a red-figured amphora (fig. 18) in the Louvre[446] Herakles is represented lifting his club to slay a shrivelled ugly little figure leaning on a stick—the figure obviously is an old man. Fortunately it is inscribed γῆρας. It is not an old man, but Old Age itself, the dreaded Ker. The representation is a close parallel to Herakles slaying the Ker in fig. 17. The Ker of Old Age has no wings: these the vase-painter rightly felt were inappropriate. It is in fact a Ker developed one step further into an impersonation. The vase may be safely dated as belonging to about the middle of the 5th century B.C. It is analogous in style, as in subject, to an amphora[447] in the British Museum bearing the love-name Charmides.

Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, to the great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a flitting remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. This is the usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. Homer’s phraseology is rarely primitive—often fossilized—and the regularly recurring ‘Ker of death[448]’ (κὴρ θανάτοιο) is heir to a long ancestry. In Homer we catch the word Ker at a moment of transition; it is half death, half death-spirit. Odysseus[449] says

‘Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,’

where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents: they are both death and the sprite of death, or as we might say now-a-days death and the angel of death. Homer’s conception so dominates our minds that the custom has obtained of uniformly translating ‘Ker’ by fate, a custom that has led to much confusion of thought.

Two things with respect to Homer’s usage must be borne in mind. First, his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far more abstract and literary than the usage we have already noted. It is impossible to say that Homer has in his mind anything of the nature of a tiny winged bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost always defined and limited by the genitive θανάτοιο, and this looks as though, behind the expression, there lay the half-conscious knowledge that there were Keres of other things than death. Ker itself is _not_ death, but the two have become well-nigh inseparable.

Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems to survive in the expression two-fold Keres (διχθάδιαι Κῆρες). Achilles[450] says:

‘My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis
Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on
To the term of death.’

It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but there is strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The English language has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for Ker, because it has no word weighted with the like associations.

In one passage only in the Iliad[451], i.e. the description of the shield of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the battlefield:

‘And in the thick of battle there was Strife
And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker.
She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound,
Another still unwounded, and one dead
She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red
Her raiment on her shoulders with men’s blood.’

A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the feeling is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case not a fate but a horrible she-demon of slaughter.

THE KER AS HARPY AND WIND-DEMON.

In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but they have another function, they actually _carry off_ the souls to Hades. Odysseus says[452]:

‘Howbeit him Death-Keres carried off
To Hades’ house.’

It is impossible here to translate Keres by ‘fates,’ the word is too abstract: the Keres are πρόσπολοι, angels, messengers, death-demons, souls that carry off souls.

The idea that underlies this constantly recurring formulary, κῆρες ἔβαν θανάτοιο φέρουσαι, emerges clearly when we come to consider those analogous apparitions, the Harpies. The Harpies betray their nature clearly in their name, in its uncontracted form ‘Ἀρεπυια,’ which appears on the vase-painting in fig. 19; they are the Snatchers, winged women-demons, hurrying along like the storm wind and carrying all things to destruction. The vase-painting in fig. 19 from a large black-figured vessel in the Berlin Museum[453] is specially instructive because, though the winged demons are inscribed as Harpies, the scene of which they form part, i.e. the slaying of Medusa, clearly shows that they are Gorgons; so near akin, so shifting and intermingled are the two conceptions. On another vase (fig. 20), also in the Berlin Museum[454], we see an actual Gorgon with the typical Gorgon’s head and protruding tongue performing the function of a Harpy, i.e. of a Snatcher. We say ‘an actual Gorgon,’ but it is not a Gorgon of the usual form but a bird-woman with a Gorgon’s head. The bird-woman is currently and rightly associated with the Siren, a creature to be discussed later (p. 197), a creature malign though seductive in Homer, but gradually softened by the Athenian imagination into a sorrowful death angel.

The tender bird-women of the so-called ‘Harpy tomb’ from Lycia (fig. 21), now in the British Museum, perform the functions of a Harpy, but very gently. They are at least near akin to the sorrowing Sirens on Athenian tombs. We can scarcely call them by the harsh name of the ‘Snatchers.’ And yet, standing as it did in Lycia, this ‘Harpy tomb’ may be the outcome of the same stratum of mythological conceptions as the familiar story of the daughters of the Lycian Pandareos. Penelope[455] in her desolation cries aloud:

‘Would that the storm might snatch me adown its dusky way
And cast me forth where Ocean is outpour’d with ebbing spray,
As when Pandareos’ daughters the storm winds bore away,’

and then, harking back, she tells the ancient Lycian story of the fair nurture of the princesses and how Aphrodite went to high Olympus to plan for them a goodly marriage. But whom the gods love die young:

‘Meantime the Harpies snatched away the maids, and gave them o’er
To the hateful ones, the Erinyes, to serve them evermore[456].’

Early death was figured by the primitive Greek as a snatching away by evil death-demons, storm-ghosts. These snatchers he called Harpies, the modern Greek calls them Nereids. In Homer’s lines we seem to catch the winds as snatchers, half-way to their full impersonation as Harpies. To give them a capital letter is to crystallize their personality prematurely. Even when they become fully persons, their name carried to the Greek its adjectival sense now partly lost to us.

* * * * *

Another function of the Harpies links them very closely with the Keres, and shows in odd and instructive fashion the animistic habit of ancient thought. The Harpies not only snatch away souls to death but they give life, bringing things to birth. A Harpy was the mother by Zephyros of the horses of Achilles[457]. Both parents are in a sense winds, only the Harpy wind halts between horse and woman. By winds as Vergil tells us mares became pregnant[458].

As such a Harpy, half horse, half Gorgon-woman, Medusa is represented on a curious Boeotian vase (fig. 22) of very archaic style now in the Louvre[459]. The representation is instructive, it shows how in art as in literature the types of Gorgon and Harpy were for a time in flux; a particular artist could please his own fancy. The horse Medusa was apparently not a success, for she did not survive.

It is easy enough to see how winds were conceived of as Snatchers, death-demons, but why should they impregnate, give life? It is not, I think, by a mere figure of speech that breezes (πνοιαί) are spoken of as ‘life-begetting’ (ζωογόνοι) and ‘soul-rearing’ (ψυχοτρόφοι). It is not because they are in our sense life-giving and refreshing as well as destructive: the truth lies deeper down. Only life can give life, only a soul gives birth to a soul; the winds _are_ souls as well as breaths (πνεύματα). Here as so often we get at the real truth through an ancient Athenian cultus practice. When an Athenian was about to be married he prayed and sacrificed, Suidas tells us, to the Tritopatores. The statement is quoted from Phanodemus who wrote a book on _Attic Matters_[460]. Suidas tells us also who the Tritopatores were. They were, as we might guess from their name, fathers in the third degree, forefathers, ancestors, ghosts, and Dêmon in his _Atthis_ said they were winds. To the winds, it has already been seen (p. 67), are offered such expiatory sacrifices (σφάγια) as are due to the spirits of the underworld. The idea that the Tritopatores were winds as well as ghosts was never lost. To Photius and Suidas they are ‘lords of the winds’ and the Orphics make them ‘gate-keepers and guardians of the winds.’ From ghosts of dead men, Hippocrates[461] tells us, came nurture and growth and seeds, and the author of the _Geoponica_[462] says that winds give life not only to plants but to all things. It was natural enough that the winds should be divided into demons beneficent and maleficent, as it depends where you live whether a wind from a particular quarter will do you good or ill.

In the black-figured vase-painting in fig. 23, found at Naukratis and now in the British Museum[463], a local nymph is depicted: only the lower part of her figure is left us, drapery, the ends of her long hair and her feet, but she must be the nymph Cyrene beloved of Apollo, for close to her and probably held in her hand is a great branch of the silphium plant. To right of her approaching to minister or to worship are winged genii. It is the very image of θεραπεία, tendance, ministration, fostering care, worship, all in one. The genii tend the nymph who is the land itself, her and her products. The figures to the right are bearded: they can scarcely be other than the spirits of the North wind, the Boreadae, the cool healthful wind that comes over the sea to sun-burnt Africa. If these be Boreadae, the opposing figures, beardless and therefore almost certainly female, are Harpies, demons of the South wind, to Africa the wind coming across the desert and bringing heat and blight and pestilence[464].

It might be bold to assert so much, but for the existence of another vase-painting on a situla from Daphnae (fig. 24), also, happily for comparison, in the British Museum[465]. On the one side, not figured here, is a winged bearded figure ending in a snake, probably Boreas: such a snake-tailed Boreas was seen by Pausanias[466] on the chest of Cypselus in the act of seizing Oreithyia. There is nothing harsh in the snake tail for Boreas, for the winds, as has already been noted (p. 68), were regarded as earth-born. Behind Boreas is a plant in blossom rising from the ground, a symbol of the vegetation nourished by the North wind. On the reverse (fig. 25) is a winged figure closely like the left hand genii of the Cyrene cylix, and this figure drives in front of it destructive creatures, a locust, the pest of the South, two birds of prey attacking a hare, and a third that is obviously a vulture. The two representations taken together justify us in regarding the left hand genii as destructive. Taking these two representations together with a third vase-painting, the celebrated Phineus cylix[467], we are further justified in calling these destructive wind-demons Harpies. On this vase[468] the Boreadae, Zetes and Kalais, show their true antagonism. The Harpies have fouled the food of Phineus like the pestilential winds they were, and the clean clear sons of the North wind give chase. It is seldom that ancient art has preserved for us so clear a picture of the duality of things.

* * * * *

On black-figured vase-paintings little winged figures occur not unfrequently to which it is by no means easy to give a name. In fig. 26 we have such a representation[469]—Europa seated on the bull passes in rapid flight over the sea which is indicated by fishes and dolphins. In front of her flies a vulture-like bird, behind comes a winged figure holding two wreaths. Is she Nike, bringing good success to the lover? is she a favouring wind speeding the flight? I incline to think the vase-painter did not clearly discriminate. She is a sort of good Ker, a fostering favouring influence. In all these cases of early genii it is important to bear in mind that the sharp distinction between moral and physical influence, so natural to the modern mind, is not yet established.

We return to the Keres from which the wind demons sprang.

THE KER AS FATE.

One Homeric instance of the use of Ker remains to be examined. When Achilles[470] had the fourth time chased Hector round the walls of Troy, Zeus was wearied and

‘Hung up his golden scales and in them set
Twain Keres, fates of death that lays men low.’

This weighing of Keres, this ‘Kerostasia,’ is a weighing of death fates, but it is interesting to find that it reappears under another name, i.e. the ‘Psychostasia,’ the weighing of souls. We know from Plutarch[471] that Aeschylus wrote a play with this title. The subject was the weighing of the souls or lives not of Hector and Achilles, but Achilles and Memnon. This is certain because, Plutarch says, he placed at either side of the scales the mothers Thetis and Eos praying for their sons. Pollux[472] adds that Zeus and his attendants were suspended from a crane. In the scene of the Kerostasia as given by Quintus Smyrnaeus[473], a scene which probably goes back to the earlier tradition of ‘Arctinos,’ it is noticeable that Memnon the loser has a swarthy Ker while Achilles the winner has a bright cheerful one, a fact which seems to anticipate the white and black Erinyes.

The scene of the Psychostasia or Kerostasia, as it is variously called, appears on several vase-paintings, one of which from the British Museum[474] is reproduced in fig. 27. Hermes holds the scales, in either scale is the Ker or _eidolon_ of one of the combatants; the lekythos is black-figured, and is our earliest source for the Kerostasia. The Keres or ψυχαί are represented as miniature men, it is the _lives_ rather than the fates that are weighed. So the notion shifts.

In Hesiod, as has already been noted (p. 169), the Keres are more primitive and actual, they are in a sense fates, but they are also little winged spirits. But Hesiod is Homer-ridden, so we get the ‘black Ker,’ own sister to Thanatos and hateful Moros (Doom) and Sleep and the tribes of Dreams[475]. We get also[476] the dawnings of an Erinys, of an _avenging_ fate, though the lines look like an interpolation:

‘Night bore
The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.’

Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the Fates, Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they

‘To mortals at their birth
Give good and evil both.’

Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both because it gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the Erinyes, and also because with a reminiscence of earlier thought it makes them the source of good and of evil. It is probably this last idea that is at the back of the curious Hesiodic epithet Κηριτρεφής, which occurs in the _Works and Days_[477]:

‘Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day
For a brief space over the heads of men
Ker-nourished.’

‘Men nourished for death’ assuredly is not the meaning; the idea seems to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that nourishes him, keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on which his life depends. The epithet might come to signify something like _mortal_, subject to, depending on fate. If this be the meaning it looks back to an early stage of things when the Ker had not been specialized down to death and was not wholly ‘black,’ when it was more a man’s luck than his fate, a sort of embryo Genius.

Κηριτρεφής, Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of Κηρίφατος ‘slain by Keres,’ which Hesychius[478] explains as those who died of disease; and would look back to a primitive doubleness of functions when the Keres were demons of all work. In vague and fitful fashion they begin where the Semnae magnificently end, as Moirae with control over all human weal and woe.

‘These for their guerdon hold dominion
O’er all things mortal[479].’

In such returning cycles runs the wheel of theology.

* * * * *

But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most impressive to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of death, almost a personified death, it was fitting and natural that it should be tricked out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, or the writer of the _Shield_, with his rude peasant imagination was ready for the task. The Keres of Pandora’s jar are purely primitive, and quite natural, not thought out at all: the Keres of the _Shield_ are a literary effort and much too horrid to be frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted hands for their fighting children stood

‘The blue-black Keres, grinding their white teeth,
Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable;
They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink
Black blood, and whomsoever first they found
Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh
A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass
To Hades and chill gloom of Tartarus[480].’

Pausanias[481] in his description of the chest of Cypselus tells of the figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. The scene is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes; Polyneikes has fallen on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at him. ‘Behind Polyneikes is a woman-figure with teeth, as cruel as a wild beast’s, and her finger-nails are hooked. An inscription near her says that she is a Ker, as though Polyneikes were carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles were in accordance with justice.’ Pausanias regards the word Ker as the equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a conception so abstract on the primitive artist who decorated the chest.

We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged bacilli, but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts who in the Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), and—a forecast of the Erinyes—the ‘blue-black[482]’ Keres are near akin to the horrid Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi. Pausanias[483] says, ‘Above the figures I have mentioned (i.e. the sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eurynomos; the guides of Delphi say that Eurynomos is one of the demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of the dead bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer’s poem about Odysseus, and those called the _Minyas_ and the _Nostoi_, though they all make mention of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. I will therefore say this much, I will describe what sort of a person Eurynomos is and in what fashion he appears in the painting. The colour is blue-black (κυανοῦ τὴν χρόαν μεταξύ ἐστι καὶ μέλανος) like the colour of the flies that settle on meat; he is showing his teeth and is seated on the skin of a vulture.’ The Keres of the _Shield_ are human vultures; Eurynomos is the sarcophagus incarnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld, the flesh-eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly sits upon a vulture’s skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes, are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when he sees a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh; the answer is ‘a Ker.’ We are in the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, Empusa, Lamia and Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem, of Siren.

To examine severally each of these bogey forms would lead too far afield, but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren and Sphinx both in art and literature is so instructive that at the risk of digression each of these forms must be examined somewhat in detail.

THE KER AS GORGON.

The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom one, most evil of the three, Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her lovely terrible face had power to turn men into stone.

The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a general tendency, to be discussed later—a tendency which makes of each woman-goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, the Charites, the Semnae, and a host of other triple groups. It is immediately obvious that the triple Gorgons are not really three but one + two. The two unslain sisters are mere superfluous appendages due to convention; the real Gorgon is Medusa. It is equally apparent that in her essence Medusa is a head and nothing more; her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there was in his ritual a horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with glaring eyes and protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. How did this Gorgoneion come to be? A hero had slain a beast called the Gorgon, and this was its head. Though many other associations gathered round it, the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual object comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster.

Ritual masks are part of the appliances of most primitive cults. They are the natural agents of a religion of fear and ‘riddance.’ Most anthropological museums[484] contain specimens of ‘Gorgoneia’ still in use among savages, Gorgoneia which are veritable Medusa heads in every detail, glaring eyes, pendent tongue, protruding tusks. The function of such masks is permanently to ‘make an ugly face,’ _at_ you if you are doing wrong, breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in battle; _for_ you if you are doing right.

Scattered notices show us that masks and faces were part of the apparatus of a religion of terror among the Greeks. There was, we learn from the lexicographers[485], a goddess Praxidike, Exactress of Vengeance, whose images were heads only, and her sacrifices the like. By the time of Pausanias[486] this head or mask goddess had, like the Erinys, taken on a multiple, probably a triple form. At Haliartos in Boeotia he saw in the open air ‘a sanctuary of the goddesses whom they call Praxidikae. Here the Haliartans swear, but the oath is not one that they take lightly.’ In like manner at ancient Pheneus, there was a thing called the Petroma[487] which contained a mask of Demeter with the surname of Cidaria: by this Petroma most of the people of Pheneus swore on the most important matters. If the mask like its covering were of stone, such a stone-mask may well have helped out the legend of Medusa. The mask enclosed in the Petroma was the vehicle of the goddess: the priest put it on when he performed the ceremony of smiting the Underground Folk with rods.

The use of masks in regular ritual was probably a rare survival, and would persist only in remote regions, but the common people were slow to lose their faith in the apotropaic virtue of an ‘ugly face.’ Fire was a natural terror to primitive man and all operations of baking beset by possible Keres. Therefore on his ovens he thought it well to set a Gorgon mask. In fig. 28, a portable oven now in the museum at Athens[488], the mask is outside guarding the entrance. In fig. 29 the upper part of a similar oven is shown, and inside, where the fire flames up, are set three masks. These ovens are not very early, but they are essentially primitive. The face need not be of the type we call a Gorgon. In fig. 30 we have a Satyr type, bearded, with stark upstanding ears and hair, the image of fright set to frighten the frightful. It might be the picture of Phobos himself. In fig. 31 we have neither Gorgon nor Satyr but that typical bogey of the workshop, the Cyclops. He wears the typical workman’s cap, and to either side are set the thunderbolts it is his business to forge. The craftsman is regarded as an uncanny bogey himself, cunning over-much, often deformed, and so he is good to frighten other bogeys. The Cyclops was a terror even in high Olympus. Callimachus[489] in his charming way tells how

‘Even the little goddesses are in a dreadful fright;
If one of them will not be good, up in Olympos’ height,
Her mother calls a Cyclops, and there is sore disgrace,
And Hermes goes and gets a coal, and blacks his dreadful face,
And down the chimney comes. She runs straight to her mother’s lap,
And shuts her eyes tight in her hands for fear of dire mishap.’

This fear of the bogey that beset the potter, and indeed beset every action, even the simplest, of human life, is very well shown in the Hymn[490] ‘The Oven, or the Potters,’ which shows clearly the order of beings against which the ‘ugly face’ was efficacious:

‘If you but pay me my hire, potters, I sing to command.
Hither, come hither, Athene, bless with a fostering hand
Furnace and potters and pots, let the making and baking go well;
Fair shall they stand in the streets and the market, and quick shall
they sell,
Great be the gain. But if at your peril you cheat me my price,
Tricksters by birth, then straight to the furnace I call in a trice
Mischievous imps one and all, Crusher and Crasher by name,
Smasher and Half-bake and Him-who-burns-with-Unquenchable-Flame,
They shall scorch up the house and the furnace, ruin it, bring it to
nought.
Wail shall the potters and snort shall the furnace, as horses do snort.’

How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to avert them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment of early Corinthian pottery[491] now in the Berlin Museum reproduced in fig. 32. Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at work, but he is afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the Smasher and the rest. He has done what he can; a great owl is perched on the oven to protect it, and in front he has put a little ugly comic man, a charm to keep off evil spirits: he might have put a Satyr-head[492] or a Gorgoneion; he often did put both; it is all the same. Pollux[493] tells us it was the custom to put such comic figures (γελοῖα) before bronze-foundries; they could be either hung up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was ‘the aversion of ill-will’ (ἐπὶ φθόνου ἀποτροπῇ). These little images were also called βασκάνια or by the unlearned προβασκάνια, charms against the evil eye; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aristophanes[494] they formed part of the furniture of most people’s chimney corners at Athens. Of such βασκάνια the Gorgon mask was one and perhaps the most common shape.

* * * * *

In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and this Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus[495] in Hades would fain have held further converse with dead heroes, but

‘Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round in myriads manifold,
Weird was the magic din they made, a pale-green fear gat hold
Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread
From Hades should send up an awful monster’s grizzly head.’

Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful monster is; all that is clear is that the head only is feared as an ἀποτρόπαιον, a bogey to keep you off. Whether he knew of an actual monster called a Gorgon is uncertain. The nameless horror may be the head of either man or beast, or monster compounded of both.

In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the human Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast is good as a protective charm. Prof. Ridgeway[496] has conclusively shown that the Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head of the slain beast whose skin was the raiment of the primitive goddess; the head is worn on the breast, and serves to protect the wearer and to frighten his foe; it is a primitive half-magical shield. The natural head is later tricked out into an artificial bogey.

We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the Gorgoneion on tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis[497] in fig. 33 the Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two delicate feet remain. On two sides of the triangular statue we have the Gorgon head; on the third, serving a like protective purpose, a ram’s head. The statue, dedicated in the precinct of Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself, but we need seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and Apollo; Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis has a further interest in that the inscription[498] dates the Gorgon-type represented with some precision. The form of the letters shows it to have been the work and the dedication of a Naxian artist of the early part of the 6th century.

On a Rhodian plate[499] in the British Museum in fig. 34 the Gorgoneion has been furnished with a body tricked out with wings, but the mask-head is still dominant. The figure is conceived in the typical heraldic fashion of the Mistress of Wild Things (πότνια θηρῶν); she is in fact the ugly bogey-, Erinys-side of the Great Mother; she is a potent goddess, not as in later days a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest divinities of the religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys of the cult of ‘service.’ The Olympians in their turn became Christian devils.

Aeschylus[500] in instructive fashion places side by side the two sets of three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but two by-forms of each other. Prometheus foretells to Io her long wandering in the bogey land of Nowhere:

‘Pass onward o’er the sounding sea, till thou
Dost touch Kisthene’s dreadful plains, wherein
The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids,
Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all,
One tooth—whom never doth the rising sun
Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night—
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged,
With snakes for hair—hated of mortal man—
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.’

The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod[501] calls Grey Ones or Old Ones, Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and one-toothed; but the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye shows that in tooth and eye resided their potency, and that in this they were own sisters to the Gorgons.

The Graiae appear, so far as I know, only once in vase-paintings, on the cover of a pyxis in the Central Museum at Athens[502], reproduced in fig. 35. They are sea-maidens, as the dolphins show; old Phorkys their father is seated near them, and Poseidon and Athene are present in regular Athenian fashion. Hermes has brought Perseus, and Perseus waits his chance to get the one eye as it is passed from hand to hand. The eye is clearly seen in the hand outstretched above Perseus; one blind sister hands it to the other. The third holds in her hand the fanged tooth. The vase-painter will not have the Graiae old and loathsome, they are lovely maidens; he remembers that they were white-haired from their youth.

The account given by Aeschylus of the Gorgons helps to explain their nature:

‘None may behold, and bear their breathing blight[503].’

They slay by a malign effluence, and this effluence, tradition said, came from their eyes. Athenaeus[504] quotes Alexander the Myndian as his authority for the statement that there actually existed creatures who could by their eyes turn men to stone. Some say the beast which the Libyans called Gorgon was like a wild sheep, others like a calf; it had a mane hanging over its eyes so heavy that it could only shake it aside with difficulty; it killed whomever it looked at, not by its breath but by a destructive exhalation from its eyes.

What the beast was and how the story arose cannot be decided, but it is clear that the Gorgon was regarded as a sort of incarnate Evil Eye. The monster was tricked out with cruel tusks and snakes, but it slew by the eye, it _fascinated_.

* * * * *