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The Greek Vampire: A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death Author(s): Juliet du Boulay
Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Tun., 1982), pp. 219-238 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2801810 Accessed: 04/03/2014 10:34
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THE GREEK VAMPIRE: A STUDY OF CYCLIC SYMBOLISM IN MARRIAGE AND DEATH
Juliet du Boulay
University of Aberdeen
This article offers an interpretation of the phenomenon of the vampire in rural Greece, and argues that it must be seen as part of a pervasive cyclic symbolism. To 'cross over' a dead body is to cause it to return as a vampire. This belief is a result of two prerequisites for the dead: the preservation of sacred space above the body, and the creation of a constant procession around it. Such processional movement relates to the movement of blood, and blood is a central idea in rituals surrounding both marriage and death. The movement is conceived as right-handed, and 'crossing over' denotes reversal. The vampire created by this reversal is thought to return to its own kin and cause their death by drinking their blood. There is an analogy between this phenomenon and the results of contravening a marriage rule known as katamerid: in both misfortunes a similar understanding is being expressed—the necessity of a unidirectional auspicious flow of the blood which in the one case leads to the safe transition of the soul to the other world and in the other leads to the correct transition of women in marriage through the community.
The phenomenon of the vampire in Greece, with its unexpected horror and savagery, has been noted by Hellenic scholars from many disciplines, including that of anthropology, but as yet no attempt has been made to form an interpretation of it. In this article I offer an explanation which draws on field-work conducted in 1971-1973 in Ambéli, a mountain village of North Euboea. My interest had been aroused by the prevalence there of a particular cyclic pattern 'like the dance' (sán horós) to which villagers gave great significance, and which, I argue, is fundamental to their beliefs relating to the vampire.
Anthropology has dealt with cyclic patterns in two principal contexts. On the one hand, circular patterns of marital alliance, ritual movement or neighbourly exchange appear as an indigenous concept in such societies as occur, for example, in Highland Burma (Leach 1954), Indonesia (Barnes 1974), and the Basque country (Ott 1981). On the other hand, cyclic imagery is used as an analytical concept of the anthropologist, amongst which notable examples are the studies of Lévi-Strauss (1949) and Needham (1962) on marriage alliance.
In this article an indigenous concept forms the central theme, for the 'dance' to which the villagers refer is the traditional ring dance of rural Greece, which takes the form of an open ended circle and is led always in the auspicious anti-clockwise direction defined by villagers as 'to the right' (dhexiá).1 A pattern 'like the dance', then, consists of a spiralling motion which proceeds
Man (N.S.) 17, 219-38.
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anti-clockwise and is conceptually right-handed, and is a category which is in many contexts of village life consciously invoked. Thus the cyclic symbolism presented here is rooted solidly in the understanding of Greek villagers, and analysis is carried out strictly within their terms of reference.
Cyclic imagery—whether indigenous or anthropological—has in turn been interpreted within two alternative frameworks. First, the cyclic pattern may be seen as constituting an asymmetric exchange of people or goods—an approach developed by Mauss (1954), Sahlins (1972) and, in the European context, by Hammell (1968); and it is to this literature that Ott (1981) looks to interpret indigenous Basque symbolism. The interest of this understanding lies in what it reveals of social organisation, and of the principles which order it: exchange is seen primarily as a mechanism which orders relationships, and thus as an important contributor to solidarity. A second type of interpretation, however, by no means exclusive of the first but differing in emphasis, has incorporated an attempt to understand the symbolic aspect of cyclic imagery. The thrust of this form of analysis, while it has detailed certain features of social organisation, has been primarily towards elucidating fundamental categories of thought (Leach 1954; Needham 1962; Barnes 1974), which again are often associated with such concepts as left and right (Hertz 1909; Turner 1962; Needham 1973). Emphasis has been on bringing together symbolic correspondences observed in widely divergent contexts, thus making possible an interpretation of specific institutions by revealing in them the operation of a unified system of meaning. Thereafter the coherence of these meanings may give rise to a variety of consequences of which solidarity may or may not be one, and it is the meanings themselves which hold the clue to understanding the part they play within the social order.
It is this second approach which I have thought most suitable for an analysis of the Greek vampire, for the customs which cluster around the vampire show that what is on one level a principle of alliance can become on another level a principle of great destructiveness, in which society appears as much threatened by the phenomenon as consolidated. These consequences flow from an underlying structure of ideas: an understanding of a life-giving right-handed movement, which, prevalent throughout the culture, is here linked to a particular understanding of blood and the organisation of marriage rules. The vampire is consequently explicable as the manifestation, at a crucial point of transition between the living and the dead, of the symbolism which also governs incest prohibitions, and which represents in general the onward and irreversible flow of life.
The puzzle of the Greek vampire
While revenants in general may be known as vampires (vrykolakoi), there is a special type of case in which a person is thought to have been, between death and burial, taken over by the devil in such a way as to become a true 'vampire'. This event involves not only the body but also the soul—the soul becoming in some way so crucially involved with this demonic influence that it 'becomes a
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demon' {yinetai dhaimonas), and, thus impelled, reanimates its own body. It is this reanimated body which, resisting the normal course of decay, returns to the living and appearing in any chosen form—human or animal—drinks the blood of its own kin. The living, in the face of such an emergency, are forced to protect themselves in the only way available. With the use of certain ritual means to destroy the power of the devil, they at the same time destroy the soul.
This belief is common throughout Greek culture (Alexiou 1974: 48), and the causes thought to engender such a transformation of the soul have been noted in some detail.
Lawson (1910: 375—6), summarising evidence from modern Greek folklore as well as from his own observations, lists nine types of vampire or revenant. (1) Those who do not receive the full and due rites of burial. (2) Those who meet with any sudden or violent death (including suicides), or, in Maina, where the vendetta is still in vogue, those murdered who remain unavenged. (3) Children conceived or born on one of the great Church festivals, and children stillborn. (4) Those who die under a curse, especially the curse of a parent, or one self-invoked, as in the case of a man who, in perjuring himself, calls down on his own head all manner of damnation if what he says be false.
(5) Those who die under the ban of the Church, that is to say, excommunicate.
(6) Those who die unbaptised or apostate. (7) Men of evil and immoral life in general, more particularly if they have dealt in the blacker kinds of sorcery.
(8) Those who have eaten the flesh of a sheep which was killed by a wolf.
(9) Those over whose dead bodies a cat or other animal has passed. Campbell (1964: 337) says that, among the Sarakatsani, people who are believed to turn into vrykolakoi are 'persons whose lives were corrupted in sin, committed suicide, drowned or were unbaptised; or persons whose bodies were not guarded by their kinsmen in the period between death and burial, or whose bodies, although guarded, were leaped over by a cat'. Blum and Blum (1970: 75-7) quote a number of random stories in which a huge variety of cases are cited, which include the cat crossing over the body, as well as lying, drunkenness, stealing from a school or a church and so on.
The major part of these typical cases, with the exception of the unavenged dead (which is locally specific), thus appears to be related to two main classifications corresponding more or less to cases of (a) unabsolved sin or (b) ritual neglect by the living. Lawson's work reflects this classification, for he discerns two corresponding concepts of the dead, which often had their own terminology and which create a distinction between revenants and vampires. Thus the depraved or sinful dead remained uncorrupt and, being unable to find rest in decay, might wander as revenants, exciting pity but certainly not terror. They would usually be discovered to be undecayed at the exhumation which customarily takes place several years after death,2 and they were sometimes known as the 'drumlike' (tympanaioi) or 'undissolved' (dlytoi) dead. These characteristics contrasted sharply with those of the 'vampire' proper, which showed itself immediately after death in violent attacks on its own kindred, and inspired a terror and revulsion which could reach the heights of panic.
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Lawson then engages on the task of showing that the uncorrupt revenant was a traditional Greek conception, a 'reasonable and usually harmless' creature (1910: 390), and that this was superseded by the vampire which, blood-sucking and life-destroying, derived from the Slavs. Each of these phenomena had separate causes, the essentially Slavonic causes for the creation of the vampire being, in Lawson's view, the last two of the nine he cites (1910: 410)—eating the flesh of a sheep killed by a wolf (which however he notes as a rare belief in Greece), and allowing a cat or other animal to cross the body (which we have seen to be common to this day). This distinction too is important, although the historical argument plainly owes much to Victorian Hellenism; its chief drawback is simply that to provide a historical derivation is not to provide the meaning of the belief or to give any reason as to why it is adopted.
My own evidence in fact corroborates the distinction observed by Lawson, for the villagers of Ambeli distinguish clearly between the generalised category of the uncorrupt dead, and specific instances of vampires (which alone are termed there vrykolakoi). In this village and the surrounding area there is no indication at all that lack of corruption in a body at the time of the exhumation is a sign of a vampire, for it is universally believed that a vampire reveals itself within forty days or not at all, and that an uncorrupt body at exhumation is not a vampire, but a soul with 'sins' (hamarties). And thus while it is said that the service which may be read for a corpse found uncorrupt at exhumation is designed to release the soul from sin and free it into the future life, actions performed at the grave of a vampire are conducted explicitly to achieve the vampire's sudden and permanent destruction; and it is stated clearly that this involves, necessarily, the total and permanent loss of the soul. Moreover, while the villagers of Ambeli believe that the soul of a suicide is 'taken' by the devil (tinpairnei 6 dhaimonas), and that the soul of an unbaptised child is 'lost' (hdttetai) (a word used also for the fate of the soul after exorcism), the ideas both of a suicide and of an unbaptised child are quite distinct from that of the vampire, for this is a soul which has not merely been taken by the devil, but has itself actually become a demon.
While it may be, therefore, that the experience of villagers in other parts of Greece has been genuinely different from that reported here, it is possible also that the two categories of the uncorrupt dead have become confused in the ethnography, so that the dead who remain whole within the period of forty days and are discovered as vampires become conceptually merged with those dead who because of 'sins' are found to be uncorrupt at exhumation. This would be particularly explicable in view of the overlap in various cases, for even in Ambeli, where the distinction between the two main categories of the dead is incontrovertible, there is still a sense in which the uncorrupt dead with 'sins', and therefore 'in hell', parallel the uncorrupt vampire who is possessed, and destroyed, by the devil. But it is, however, also made clear that the action which turns the dead into a vampire is precise, time-limited, and has an immediate and tangible result, whereas the idea of 'sins' provides a general category involving both the known world of obvious evil doing and the unknown world of spiritual consequences: although there is an implicit understanding that the sinful dead are in some way related negatively to the living,
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this is in no sense comparable to the terrible return of the vampire to its kin in its active search for blood.
It is the specific phenomenon of the vampire, then, which I examine here, and I consider it in relation to its characteristic cause—the ritual infringement which results from cats (and, as will be shown, other objects) crossing over the body; for this is the only cause particularly connected with the true vampire which persistently recurs in all the sources quoted. It is also the only one which governs the still living fear of the vampire in the village of Ambeli.
It is apparent that belief in vampires, especially that aspect which relates to the fatal nature of a cat's action in 'crossing over' the dead body, is one which, as Lawson documents, was embarrassing and irrational to the church, and seemed to a European—and especially a Hellenist—shocking and unjust. The effects of this belief did not stop at ritual, however, for fear of vampires in many Greek villages plainly inspired the inhabitants to a degree of terror which was by any reckoning destructive of the social fabric. Such destruction is testified to by relatively sceptical clerical sources—a seventeenth-century source quoted by Lawson (1910: 367-73) refers more than once to numbers of people dead 'of fright or of injuries', amounting in one case to more than fifteen, and a nineteenth-century source which he also quotes speaks similarly of the possibility of whole villages being devastated in an epidemic of panic deaths. Although one may question whether some of these writings were not relying on reports exaggerated by the same panic, this is itself a document to the terror induced by the vampire, and this terror has naturally lent itself to dramatic use. Byron, in The Giaour, uses the idea of the vampire (invalidly, according to the present argument) to sanction a curse on the killer of Hassan:
But first, on earth as Vampire sent, Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent: Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid living corse; Thy victims ere they yet expire Shall know the demon for their sire, As cursing thee, thou cursing them, Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
Novels also capitalise on vampire beliefs to create convincing and frightening effects—for example Karkavitsa (1977) includes an episode about a man, confused with a person recently dead, who creates such terror among the villagers that they pelt him with stones and eventually set fire to his house in an effort to dispose of him. Aside from fiction, relatively recent instances of terror are documented in two cases quoted by the Blums (1970: 71-2). In one the parents of a girl in a coma, unable to believe the doctor's diagnosis and terrified of her return as a vampire, besought him to leave her as she was, and in the end
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buried her alive; while in the other, a man, stirring in his coffin just before his burial, was stoned to death by panic-stricken villagers.
Even without these instances, however, there is irony enough in the thought of a human soul being taken over, through no evil doing of its own, by the devil, and ultimately destroyed for ever. In the following pages I do not attempt fully to resolve the evident paradox revealed at this level of understanding; but in explaining the deep structures of thought from which it springs, I hope to provide some understanding of the counterbalancing intuitions which are entrenched in the culture, and which, it must be assumed, act to sustain the villagers in their acceptance of this belief, even while they at the same time provide the motive force for it.
Some aspects of death and burial in North Euboea
The theme of blood is paramount at many of the rituals connected with death in Ambéli, for it is believed that at the moment of death Cháros, or the Angel, sent by God to bring the soul to judgement, with his drawn sword cuts the victim's throat, and drenches with blood not only the dead person but also the house and everyone in it.3 The word for this act is 'slaughter' (spházo)—a word used, except for this one context, specifically in connection with the killing of animals. It means precisely 'to cut the throat of, an association made still more pointed by the custom on St Michael's Day which forbids the killing of any animal, because on that day, the villagers say, 'only one slaughters' (mono énas spházei), that is to say, the Angel of Death himself. There is indeed another word commonly used for the act of dying, which means to 'un-soul' (xepsycháó), and images the process by which the soul is thought to come out of the mouth with the last breath, 'like a baby' (sán moro); and it is this word, and never that meaning simply 'to die' (pethatno), which is used about this last moment. But the action of Death as an act of slaughter occurs not only in generalised accounts, but also in graphic conversations about the recently dead. I remember a family who, even when recalling the death of their father after a long illness, described the moment of death in words which drew upon the traditional imagery: at one moment he had been alive, and the next—'Cháros slaughtered him' (tón ésphaxe ó Cháros). It seems, then, that while the crucial action of the dying person is to deliver up his soul, the action which brings this about is the sudden and violent spilling of his blood.
As a consequence of this, after the moment of death, one of the first acts—by the women of the house and any close female relatives and neighbours—is to wash the body with water and soap, and then a little wine. And as a consequence of this, also, it is considered essential that everyone present in the house at the moment of death, members of the family and visitors alike, should immediately change all their clothes. These clothes must be left in an outbuilding and on no account be taken into any of the houses of their owners until washed on the third or fifth day (moná, in uneven numbers) after the death. In earlier times it was also the custom to sponge over the floor of the room in which the death had occurred, and later to whitewash the walls and
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ceiling, and to do the same to the room in which the body had been laid out if this were a different one. After this there was for a year a prohibition on whitewashing the rooms again. These last-mentioned customs have now lapsed, but that regarding the washing of the clothes is strictly kept, and the reason given is always in the terms of the same idea: 'It seems as if there is blood everywhere'.
While washing the body is the immediate means of transforming the savagery of the event, the fresh clothes then placed on the body, and in particular the shroud (sáváno) which covers them, carry an added symbolism. The shroud is an unsewn length of white material, approximately 13 ft long and 1 ft wide, cut in such a way as to fit over the head of the dead person and stretch down to the feet at both the front and the back. It is worn under the jacket or cardigan, but over the trousers or skirt, and is the most important of all the clothes worn for it is in this garment that the soul is said to appear in the other world.
The interpretation of the shroud given in the village is that it represents the stole (trachilió, or dial, trachomándilo) worn by Orthodox priests when they are fully vested. The stole is worn in representation of the high priesthood of Christ and in revelation of the priest's sacramental function in his name; the shroud as a lay representation of the stole reveals, therefore, an understanding by the villagers of a sacramental function in every man.
The body thus passes through a vital transition from the moment of death until the moment when it is prepared for the visiting of the community: the pollution of death, seen categorically as one of blood, is washed away by water and wine, after which clean clothes and the shroud are put on, and finally candles are lit and the body censed. By this time the change from pollution to holiness has become so extreme that the body is, as it awaits burial, conceived in the same terms as that used for the relics of the Saints—'the holy relics' (tá ághia letpsana). The achievement of this state of holiness, however, is until burial essentially unstable, and must be kept in equilibrium by continual care against a sudden catastrophic revival of the original blood pollution, and the transformation of the soul into a vampire.
As already indicated, in Ambéli only one type of action is believed to create a vampire, and this is often initially framed in terms of the prohibition against cats. This statement is, however, if questioned, always enlarged either to a phrase such as: 'a cat... a mouse', or to the categorical assertion that while cats are especially dangerous, in fact nothing at all should be allowed to pass over the unburied dead. The proscription of cats is thus not itself the focus of belief, but rather a short-hand expression of a danger which is much more general, and which is represented by any action which crosses over the body, whether 'stepping across' (draskyló) or 'passing over' (pernáei apáno ápo) it. And it is this action—whether it is performed by stepping across the body, or by handing anything across it to someone on the other side, or by leaning over the body to place something on the ground opposite—which creates the conditions for a demonic possession so absolute that, whatever the virtue of the person during life, the soul loses for ever its own nature, and becomes immediately an urgent and terrible danger to those it leaves behind. I once heard it said that vampires go 'wherever they are sent' (ópou tón ríxané), but, as is normally affirmed and
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as a proverb quoted later also indicates, the predominant belief is that vampires always return to their own kin. Coming in any guise, human or animal, they return to attack either their own family or their own flocks, damaging and eventually killing them—an action often described as 'suffocating' (ndpnixei)— by going up the nose and drinking their blood.
Once a vampire has been suspected, proof of its existence is sought at the graveyard, in the presence of a hole in the grave about the size of two cupped hands held together, around the region of the corpse's head and chest. Those who can bear to, I was told, look in and see the gleaming eyes of the vampire in its depths. The remedies which then have to be practised, between the hours of Vespers on Saturday and the end of the liturgy on the Sunday morning (since between those hours the vampire is compelled to remain in the grave), consist of 'boiling' (zimatdo) the vampire by pouring a mixture of about four kilos of boiling oil and vinegar into the hole in the grave, and 'reading' (dhiavasma), that is to say exorcism, by the priest. The effect of these actions is dramatic, for they cause the soul, with its demonic power, immediately to 'burst' (skdzei) or 'be lost' (hdnetai); it is extinguished in a moment, and neither heaven nor hell knows it thereafter. Nothing avails, therefore, to undo the harm that has been done, and henceforward no candles are lit for the soul, no remembrance food is made, the long sequence of memorial customs lapses utterly.
There is plainly a contradiction here between the belief that on death the soul leaves the body through the mouth and is taken by the Angel, and the belief that through some subsequent fortuitous action it can be taken over totally by the devil, thus fatally reanimating the body. This contradiction presents a difficulty, not only because the same word psychi, denoting the soul, is used in both contexts, but also because villagers do not differentiate in any conscious sense between the two uses of the word. Nevertheless, there are hints in certain accompanying beliefs relating not only to the dead but also to the blood, which may suggest that at a relatively inexplicit level the soul is understood in what are virtually two distinct senses.
The blood theme will be developed in detail elsewhere, but with reference to the theme of the dead it may be said here that there exists in rural Greek thought, running alongside those beliefs which relate to the destiny of the soul separated from the body and taken by the Angel, a parallel belief that the rupture between the body and the person who inhabited it is not made absolute on death, but is only finally completed when the flesh, as villagers say, 'has dissolved' (echei liosei) from the bones—a process indicating also the dissolution of sins—and when the bones are exhumed and brought up 'into the air' (ston aera). According to this latter series of ideas, then, possession by the devil of the body, of the flesh and blood, would necessarily involve in some way the possession of a psychic element of the person also—of that psychic element whose dissolution is equivalent to the dissolution of sins; and this is said to occur despite the fact that another psychic element has already left the body with the Angel. The distinction between these two elements of the 'soul' (psychi) cannot be pressed too far for, as has been said, the villagers do not explicitly mark a difference of sense, and they speak merely of the 'soul' in both contexts. Yet at the same time they are untroubled by the contradiction
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between the two uses, and the nascent distinction thus suggested would account for the fact that they are much less concerned about the fate of the vampire's soul than they are about the reanimation of the corpse, and for the corresponding fact that they are much less fearful of actually becoming a vampire than they are of making or meeting with one.
Whatever the explanation of this contradiction, however, the necessity of preventing, or alternatively destroying, the vampire, carries in Ambeli urgent and total assent, and the consequences of this belief govern the actions of everyone to come near a body during the period of the wake. The wake itself is often referred to as a process of 'guarding' (fildne) the body (a word which implies guarding it from being 'crossed over'), although this is not its only purpose; and indeed for the twenty-four hours which elapse between death and burial, the body is never for one minute left alone. However, the wake itself holds its own dangers: in a small room crammed with people it is easy for someone to make a mistake—and in fact the last case of a vampire in the village, an event remembered by all the older villagers, occurred through a child inadvertently crossing over the body as it lay on the floor. The child was immediately handed back again in an attempt to undo the evil, but to no avail, and for several nights after the burial the dead woman returned as a great heavy woolly apparition, terrifying her husband and children, until the hole in the grave was discovered and the vampire exorcised. For three Saturdays the villagers poured boiling oil and vinegar into the hole in the grave and the priest read the service, and all was quiet thereafter.
The danger, then, is extreme, and at the wake there is persistent avoidance of any action which could be construed as passing over the body. This precaution is continually reinforced by the injunction that, as chairs, cushions, cups of coffee and so on are needed and passed around, and as people come and go, those concerned should 'take care' (nd prosexeis) and 'not cross over' (min to draskylds) the body of the dead.
In this passing of things round the body there is a suggestion of the cyclic movement that I shall argue is central to the understanding of the vampire; but in the meantime I draw attention to other patterns of circular movement which occur alongside these events in the course of the wake.
When the body is laid out, it is placed 'facing the sun' {pros ton ilio), that is to say with the feet, and thus the face, towards the East, lying 'on the ground' (kataget) on a white sheet which in turn is sometimes placed on a goat weave rug. The eyes are closed and the hands crossed right over left on the breast, and usually a cloth is laid over the face which reaches down to, but does not cover, the hands. Candles are placed around the body—always in an uneven number —and the candle known as the isou is placed over the navel. Isou derives from isos, meaning 'equal' or 'equivalent', and this candle is made soon after the moment of death by someone who rubs wax around a collection of threads cut to the same length as the height of the dead person. This long candle is then coiled round and round, anti-clockwise, spiralling outwards from the centre, in a flat circular mat—and when this is done the centre of this coil is pulled up and lit, so that in its burning the candle consumes itself in the direction according to which it was made. During the night of the wake it must be allowed to burn
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itself down to one third of its original length only, before it is extinguished and an ordinary candle lit in its place. The second night it is lit and burns down through the second third of its length, and on the third night it is lit again and entirely consumed.
The placing of the isou on the navel reinforces the symbolism of the spiral with which the isou is itself informed, since the navel is conceived by the villagers as being the centre of the body and itself formed in a spiral. This spiral can at times become unwound, giving rise to pains in the area, and sickness— an ailment known as the 'unwinding of the navel' (xéstrima toú aphaloú), or sometimes merely the 'unwinding'. If not attended to it passes eventually, but can be cured quite pragmatically, without the use of spells, by winding it up again. There are various ways in which this is done, but all (except for cupping) work according to the same principle, which is to reform the true spiral of the navel by twisting it back 'like the dance' in an anti-clockwise direction. The vital significance of the maintenance of this direction will be made clear, but it is already implied in the startled response to my inadvertently miming in this context a spiral going clockwise, 'towards the left' (aristerá); 'You don't dance like that! Don't do it that way or the person will die!'
Finally just as the shroud is, of the clothes, the one indispensable article, so the isou is, among the candles, the most essential; for it is the isou which is supposed to give the soul of the dead person light for the forty days during which it is said that it remains in touch with the earth, and it is with the isou before it that the soul finally, at the end of this period, appears before God.
The right-handed or anti-clockwise spiralling movement according to which the isou burns recurs throughout village life in a great variety of contexts, and it is seen again in the censing of the body carried out at intervals throughout the wake. In this context it is performed in the same way as in everyday life—that is to say with the customary anti-clockwise movement of the hand, which villagers say is 'right-handed' (dhexiá) and 'like the dance' (sán horós)—to spread the incense. A complete right-handed circle is also described round the body (as in normal circumstances it is described round the room) before the incense is set down again beside the head. And it is particularly significant that this same pattern used to be reiterated in the singing of the laments at a wake, which were also, I was told, passed around the body 'like the dance'.
This assimilation of the lament to the dance, as in all instances when the dance pattern is being invoked, is of great importance, and may illuminate the description of the same ritual from other parts of Greece quoted by Alexiou (1974: 40). Describing antiphonal lamentation at wakes throughout Greece she writes, with a reference to Pasayannis (1928):
Although the arrangement of the mourners varies in different parts, it is not random. The procedure is strict and formal; one of the kinswomen usually leads off, helped by the rest who wail in chorus, and then, when the chief mourner from the other side wishes to 'take up' the dirge, she stretches her hand over the body and grasps the hand of the mourner on the left. By this silent stretching of the hand, the dirge is passed over from one group to the other all day long.
In the light of the pattern observed in North Euboea, and in the light also of the general fear in Greece of cats (and by inference anything else) crossing
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the body, it seems legitimate to interpret this passage as describing not a movement crossing over the body, but one which is circular and goes around it. Thus if one takes the chief mourner who stretches her hand 'over the body' and grasps the hand of the mourner 'on the left' to be stretching out her left hand to the right hand of the mourner opposite to her at the body's head or foot, this is consistent with a movement not in fact across the body but around it, and in a right-handed direction. And it is striking that the action of stretching out the left hand to take the leader's right is the way in which people used to enter the dance, for traditionally those who wished to join the dance always entered at the head of the line. Thus in the district of Ambeli the dance pattern, invariably associated with a right-handed (anti-clockwise) auspicious movement, used to be repeated in the singing of laments, so that the lament, taken from the left and given to the right, and similarly, received by one person and given by another, was, although sung antiphonally by two groups, not exchanged to and fro but passed symbolically on and on in a continuous right-handed circle.
An analogue in kinship—katameria
Lack of space compels me to summarise an argument which will be set out at length elsewhere, and which concerns ideas about the flow of the blood and its relationship to conceptions of kinship and the incest prohibition. The rule to which I draw attention here is known as katameria (du Boulay 1974: 146, 165).
Katameria (pi. katameries) is a word for which only a clumsy translation can be found, but it is likely to be derived from katd meros, 'according to its place', and best rendered as 'a process for putting things according to their category'.4 It is thus an abstract concept which is given meaning only by context, since the precise categories are peculiar to each situation.
Because kinship reckoning in Ambeli is cognatic, covering four generations from ego to his great grandparents, the marriage rule which results prohibits marriage between all descendants of a common great grandparent. Thus up to the degree of second cousin, collaterals are 'kin' (sot), but after this they have 'unkinned' (xesoisane) and can marry. Some ambiguity is experienced concerning marriages between those in categories immediately outside the relationship of second cousin, because, as it was explained to me once, 'kinship has passed, but a vein of blood endures' (perase to sot, alia vastaei fleva). However, this idea does not, and apparently even in the thirties did not, act as a customary prohibition, but simply as involving a degree of disquiet. There was, nevertheless, one sequence of marriages, in addition to those within the canonical kindred, which used to be forbidden by a clear rule—a rule which was still in the late fifties enforced against one proposed marriage in the village, and which continued to be of concern to some older people up to at least the early seventies. This rule, known as katameria, prescribed, to put it briefly, that after a couple had married, any future marriages between the collateral kin of the wife and the collateral kin of the husband should follow the initial movement of the sexes. Thus once a woman had married, her male collateral kin could not after that point take a woman back from her husband's collateral kin; and any
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man from her kin, if he did so, was said to have 'turned back' (gýrise) to take his wife, and to be courting disaster. This expression, 'to turn back', always, when it is used symbolically, indicates an inauspicious action; and in this case the agent by which misfortune occurred is revealed unequivocally as the blood, for, as the villagers say, in such a case 'the blood returned' {gýrise tó aima), bringing with it misfortune or death.
My evidence refers only to a single generation, and does not establish whether or not any descending generations used to be taken into account in calculating the applicability of the rule of katameriá, although it is possible that such a calculation might at one time have been made. However, the inclusion in the calculation, by some people, of lateral kinship as far as second cousin, indicates that the principle was one which could operate over a wide field of kin, and was thus a significant influence towards the distribution of marriages through the community.
The meaning of katameriá is one which is not immediately apparent from the way in which the rule is normally presented, for at first sight it appears as if it expresses a prescription for the uni-directional exchange of men and women between their respective kindreds in such a way as to represent men going one way and women another. However, as I have argued elsewhere,5 all the attitudes to the marriage of men and women, together with a significant element of the vocabulary used, imply an essential understanding of men as 'in the house' (mésa stó sptti) with women 'destined for a strange hearth' (xenogoniá), and thus represent men as the static, women as the moving, principles. In the light of this it therefore becomes apparent that what katameriá is stating is not two opposite transitive movements of women and men between the kindreds, but a principle which, accepting men to be identified with the natal kindred in a way in which women are not, dictates the movement of their women out, and prohibits their return. Thus for a particular category of kinsmen to give women back—before due time has passed—to a category from which it has previously taken them, is to turn backwards and to 'return' the blood to its original source. Katameriá is thus a rule which incorporates two important statements about Greek kinship; it states the auspicious nature of the asymmetric progression of the women through the kindreds,6 and it states also that this progression of women is an analogue of the progression of blood.
The reason given for the katameriá proscription—fear of the 'return' of the 'blood'—reveals clearly that the marriage relationship is conceived in some way as extending from the bride or groom to a category of the kin into which he or she has married, although the sense in which this could be so plainly cannot rely on the facts of blood relationship as they are seen to operate in the physiological kindred. A complex symbolism of the blood is hinted at here, which may be illustrated in two additional instances. One concerns a concept of the relationship believed to exist between a god-parent and the child which he or she baptises, for this relationship, created primarily with the oil with which the god-parents anoint the child, is said to involve the child 'taking a vein [of blood]' (paírnei fléva) from the god-parents. And it is consistent with this that the children of the god-parent and the god-children are, it is said, 'as of one blood' (sán aima), and may not marry. This case indicates the possibility,
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in village thinking, of a type of blood link created by sacrament rather than by procreation, and one way in which such a link may be understood is illustrated in my second instance, which highlights the point already made in katamerid and deals with the link thought to be created between affines. This occurred during a conversation concerning marriage and certain of the quasi-blood relationships created thereby, in answer to my questioning of the rationale behind them. My interlocutor suddenly picked up a glass and, making as if she were drinking a glass ofwater, said: 'If you drink water it becomes part of you. So it is with blood'.
The course followed by this blood as it flows through the community is not directly expressed by the villagers, but it is revealed by following through the implications of katamerid. The movement of women between the kindreds is equated with the movement of blood, and expresses the principle that this movement should be uni-directional and should not be reversed. It is thus a movement which is characterised by a cyclic progress since the blood not only circulates through the community, but may also, after the prescribed generational delay, return to the descendants of the original kindred. It is for this reason that the idea of a spiral constantly recurs in the imagery of the blood. This is most commonly manifest in the expression 'the blood endures to the seventh zindri'—a zindri being the long belt which was traditionally wound spirally round and round the waist; but it also occurred in the words 'mia volta ('one cycle' or 'one revolution') which I once heard used in description of the progress of kinship outwards to third cousin. Zindri is a relative term, the analytic interpretation of which depends on context, but it here means approximately 'generation'. One volta or 'cycle', on the other hand, was, in the case quoted above, being used to describe the cycle of time and of marriages which must pass before the women may again return—as is ultimately necessary in a small and residentially stable population—to the descendants of the kindred which sent them out. Too hasty a return, as in the marriage of second cousins or of those who run counter to the movement of katamerid, is to cause the blood to turn back and to court disaster.
Neither the imagery of zindri nor that of volta defines the direction conceptually followed by this spiral. However, the interpretation of the principle of katamerid provides an implied definition, for in katamerid the movement of the blood is seen to be analogous to the movement of women through the community in marriage; and in marriage, as the persistently recurring symbolism in all the processional movements show, this progression is envisaged as right-handed. Thus the movement of the blood—the correct procession oizindria—runs symbolically in a right-handed spiral which must always maintain its momentum and be perpetually guarded against a return on itself.
The 'return' of the blood to the kindred, the ominous reversing of this right-handed spiral movement of the blood, has close parallels in the fatal return of the vampire to its own kin, although I only once heard such a connection between these two ideas being consciously made by villagers. Its occasion was, however, significant; for it arose in a discussion by two women of a marriage between second cousins which had taken place in the village some years before. The women were agreeing that for a marriage to be propitious the participants had to go to 'strange blood' (xeno aima)—a statement which is frequently heard
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and which is the mirror image of the doctrine already noted, that, in cases of the union of similar blood, 'the blood returns', bringing catastrophe. In this context the comment then uttered takes on a startling significance, for, said as an aside and half under the breath, it took the form of a well-known proverb: 'The vampire hunts its own kindred' (vrykolakas to soi kynigdei). The image of the vampire returning from the grave to hunt its own kin sprang intuitively to mind in the context of the blood which in second cousin marriage returns to destroy its originators.
The intolerable reversal—an interpretation of the vampire
As was stated earlier, the village understanding is that death is caused by Charos cutting the throat and letting the blood pour out of the body, and that at this moment also the soul comes out of the mouth like a baby. The immediate concern of the living, then, is to deal with both the negative and the positive aspects of death—to purge the blood pollution and to assist the soul in its journey to the other world.
The immediate fate of the soul is enshrined in a tradition which, broadly speaking, teaches that for forty days after death the soul is taken by its angel around the scene of its earthly life, where it learns about the merits and defects of all the actions it performed when in the body; and at the fortieth day, it is taken up to God for the judgement, and there sent to its 'allotted place' (thesis).7 In connection with this journey of the soul, the theme of the (sou must be recapitulated.
It will be remembered that the (sou is the candle which gives light to the soul during its journey; it is made immediately after the death, its length being calculated according to the height of the dead person, after which it is twisted into a flat right-handed spiral and placed on the navel of the body to burn to two-thirds of its length. During the two subsequent nights the remaining two-thirds are burned, until it is finished. Set over the navel and burning in the life-giving right-handed spiral, the isou is plainly an image of life, and the correspondence of its length with the height of the body—not to mention the name isou or 'of the same (length)'—is clear indication of its symbolic correspondence with the person who has just died. Again the three days of the burning of the isou on earth are thought to correspond with the forty days of the soul's journey over its past life; and thus it seems that the isou, representing the interim period during which the soul is neither of this world nor of the next, relates the one to the other through the judgement finally passed on the soul's accumulated lifetime of deeds. The burning of the isou appears to represent, from birth to death, a replay of the life which has just ended, together with the soul's progressive enlightenment as, taught by the Angel, it comes to understand the significance of all it did during life. Thus it is all the gathered deeds both good and bad recollected and comprehended by the soul as the past years and places are re-visited, that the flame of the isou symbolises, as the soul appears before God.
While, however, the forty days spent revisiting the past, and the ultimate
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appearance of the soul before God, reveal a belief in a just judgement awaiting the soul which has left the body at the end of its life on earth, the belief in the annihilation of that other aspect of the soul, which, apparently fortuitously, becomes a vampire, appears to relate to an antithetical structure of thought. Yet the meaning of this belief as well, although capricious and impersonal in expression, has its origin in the same understanding of life—and of the life after death—which informs the idea both of the isou and of the judgement.
As has been shown already, the chief contrast between life and death is that between blood and not-blood which emerges at the moment of death, when the life-blood of the living is shed to its last drop by the brutal act of Charos. The soul leaves the body for the 'other world' (alios kosmos) at that precise moment when the last of the blood of this world pours symbolically out into the house; and the soul is the opposite of fleshly life and blood—a 'shadow' (iskio), a 'breath' (andsa), 'air' (aeras). In a dominant folk description of the 'other world' the insubstantial souls everlastingly flit about like shadows, in a world where 'there is no sitting down' (dhen kdthondai), 'there is no drinking or merrymaking' (dhen pinoun dhen glenddne); a world where the dead only half recognise each other, never able to grasp even their memories for certain. This last idea is given a powerful rendering in the demonstration by villagers of how the dead meet each other—passing by each other and stretching out their right hands behind them, infinitely quietly, to grasp the hand of the other, while still looking ahead and in the very act of separation, saying, 'Somewhere I've seen you before' (kdpou se eidha). In this enactment the impression is of continual drifting motion, of perpetual non-encounter, of everlasting existence in a bloodless world lacking in all reality. And when it is remembered that the villagers, in life, are involved habitually in the most vivid and vital face-to-face relationships, it becomes apparent that the opposition between the world of the living and that of the dead is seen as fundamental and absolute.
The moment of death, then, is the polar opposite of life, and this opposition is expressed predominantly in terms of blood. It is thus entirely consistent with this symbolism that the greatest fear that the living have of the dead, and for the dead, is lest this metamorphosis from the world of the living to that of the dead should in any way fail to be maintained, and it is consistent too that the failure of this metamorphosis should be seen in terms of the physical reanimation of the dead. Thus the period of the wake is shown to be a transitional time during which the proper state of the dead is liable to reversal, and vampires—those dead whose transition into the other world has somehow been arrested before completion—return not as ineffective revenants, but as living demons, illegitimately demanding blood.
While the presence of a phenomenon like the vampire may thus fit coherently into the rural Greek tradition relating to the after-life, the means by which a soul is transformed into such a vampire may appear less logical. In fact, however, its logic is equally clear, for the prohibition on cats crossing over a dead body involves a particular ritual action of great significance. It has been said that in Ambeli the prohibition is not confined to cats only, but extends to all objects, animate and inanimate, and that on this level no distinction is actually made between, for instance, a cat or a candle. Cats are
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singled out to embody the proscription not because they possess an intrinsic power of evil, but because, being domesticated and yet at the same time unsocialised, the danger in their case is particularly acute that they might cross over a dead body. Other animals would be kept away by the mere presence of people, and dogs in any event are never allowed inside the house; but a cat could well perform the fatal action, even in a crowded room. In such a situation therefore cats are, indeed, dangerous.
The prohibition on crossing over the body is subject to interpretation on various different levels. A phrase in the village describes the situation of a person living alone and likely to die alone: 'The cats will eat him' (thá tón fane oí gáttes). It could therefore be argued on a sociological level that this fear of vampires finds its origin in the need for the young to look after the old, and that the custom thus guards against anyone being left alone 'to be eaten by the cats'. Although, however, this may well have been one consequence of this belief, the realities of the culture make it necessary to look further and to understand the meaning of vampires in terms more akin to those in which the villagers themselves see them.
Initially, it becomes evident that if a body lies on the floor in the middle of the community, and if there is a prohibition against stepping over or passing anything across it, there is being voiced an imperative on preserving the space above the dead—who has by now been transformed into 'holy relics'—which no-one and nothing must enter. The earth, on which the body is traditionally laid, is thus linked to the upper world and to the underworld by means of the dead person who provides the central point at which the two worlds meet.
There is here a clear suggestion of an axis leading from one world to the other, though it is no more than a suggestion. However this sense of a sacred space above and below the dead is emphasised by the second consequence of the prohibition, for the corollary of having a space into which nothing earthly must enter, but which nevertheless is the focus for the tasks of the living community, is that the community and its possessions must circulate around it. In Ambéli in the present day things are passed impartially to and fro, round either the head or the feet. But on my asking an old woman which way they used to be passed in the old days, the answer came immediately: 'Like the dance'. 'Not to the left?' I enquired. 'No', emphatically, 'the devil comes from there.' It appears, then, that persistent symbolism of the right-handed spiral movement 'like the dance', evident throughout village culture but recurring with particular frequency in the rituals of death, is repeated yet again in the symbolism which protects both the community and the dead from the phenomenon of the vampire. The present day custom is faithful to the insistence on a circular movement round the body, but has failed to perpetuate the true right-handed direction; the older custom, it appears, created a continual reassertion of traditional realities as people, cushions, chairs, babies, cups of coffee and all the paraphernalia of the wake, processed in an unending dance around the dead person in the centre. The world—to use an exact translation of the Greek for 'people', 'community' (kosmos)—revolves, literally, around the dead person, at whose own centre, on the navel, the right-handed spiral of the tsou burns.
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The precise meaning of this dance of life around the dead is closely related to the context of blood in which it is found. It has been shown that this blood is thought to run in a uni-directional, right-handed spiral, and that its direction must be perpetuated through the flow of marriages katamerid—'according to category' or 'to strange blood'—through the community. Contravention of this —the contraction of a marriage against the direction created by the necessity oi katamerid—causes the blood to 'return' as a catastrophic force, bringing misfortune or death to those from whom it originated. The parallels between this belief and that concerning the creation of a vampire are striking.
On the death of a person, as has been said, Charos slits the victim's throat and spills his blood, slaughtering the body and at the same time releasing the soul to its review of its past life and its passage to God. The body and blood of physical life are thus separated from the soul of the spiritual existence, and the customs thereafter are designed to maintain this separation until, with the consignment of the body to the earth, it is assured. The blood, that is to say, must flow one way, out of the body, and the body itself be laid to rest in the earth. One thing only can interrupt this process, and this is an action symbolised by the 'stepping over' of the body, for this causes the blood to flow back into it, reanimating it as a demon and sending it back to the living in a hunt for the blood of its own kin. This action plainly parallels that carried out for those marriages which are not katameria; for just as the cutting across of the proper categories of blood causes the blood 'to return' to the kindred and results in misfortune and death, so the breaking of the dance around the dead symbolises the return of the blood on itself, pouring back into the dead, reviving it with demonic life, and sending it in a horrific search for its own kind. And this relationship between the two images becomes even clearer when it is remembered that the fusion of two kindreds on marriage was described by one woman as the action of 'drinking blood'-an action which, if enacted between the correct categories of people, ensures the on-flowing of the life blood of the generations, but if enacted between kin or in defiance of the rule o£katamerid, turns the blood 'back' and results in stagnation or death. Thus it is plain that the movement of the blood from kindred to kindred according to the correct categories of relationship, as well as the pouring out of the blood in death, are seen as aspects of the same life-giving spiral, and that the interruption of the flow in either case causes the blood to reverse its true life-giving character and to return home down the spiral of relationship as a deadly force. It was, then, for this reason that the subconscious connection was made by the woman who recalled, in the context of second cousin marriage, the vampire returning to its kin; for the image of the vampire is a parellel to the image of marriage within the kindred.
Conclusion
The district of Ambeli is only a small part of Greece, and it would be unwise to suppose that the detailed expression of the themes of blood, marriage and death found there would be discovered in exactly the same forms throughout Greece.
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Particular refinements of dress, ritual and behaviour often show a creative variety from region to region; and it is appropriate, in conclusion, to draw out what appear to be the essential and invariate principles of the interpretation put forward. In brief, the explanation given here identifies the spiral pattern of the dance first with the inflow of blood through the generations by means of marriage, and second with the outflow of blood in a death auspiciously accomplished—both these flows being in a vital sense irreversible.
Because of the great number of contexts in Greek village life in which this image of the spiral is found, it seems that in spite of the close similarities between the incest prohibition and the custom relating to vampires, it is inappropriate to explain one in terms of the other. What seems more likely is that the custom relating to vampires reveals, not a literal equivalence at a death with the incest taboos which operate during life, but a continuity of understanding which informs the processes both of life and of death. Thus the symbolic equivalence of blood with life is carried to its logical conclusion in the insistent theme of the bloodlessness of death; while at the same time the auspicious spiral which, during life, must be perpetuated by the correct flow of blood in marriage, is at death perpetuated by the symbolic outpouring of blood from the dead, and the vital prohibition against its return. In this way the image of continual movement that protects the life in the blood as it circles through the generations, protects also, at the moment of death, the soul from being trapped in a physical form which is neither alive nor dead. According to the understanding implicit in both contexts, it is motionlessness which is the true death, for motionlessness here involves retrogression. Blood going to 'strange' blood pours in a life-giving spiral through the community; while blood going to blood that 'resembles itself—that is to say, stays where it is—halts and doubles back. Similarly, the life in which the outpouring of the blood in death has not been frustrated moves on without check into the new and auspicious categories of the other world; while a life in which this outpouring is, by some inauspicious action, checked and turned back on itself, returns to devour the succeeding generations, and imperils the destiny of its own soul. Thus the women moving outwards from kindred to kindred, and the soul moving freely from this life to the next, are parallel images derived from the same understanding of life.
There is then, on one level, a chasm between life and death in Greek rural thinking which is unbridgeable, in so far as if bridged it gives rise to the primary horror that Greeks experience, the extinguishing of which takes precedence over all personal justice and all affection of the living for the dead. On another level, however, it appears that the principle of ongoing right-handed movement which establishes the bloodlessness of the body, preventing the return of the vampire and consolidating the 'otherness' of the dead, ensures not only the health of the living community, but also the safe passage of the soul into the other world. Thus the spiral dance of life, while it divides irrevocably blood from non-blood and the living from the dead, at the same time permeates the opposed worlds of life and death, and transcends, though it does not reconcile, their opposition.
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NOTES
I acknowledge with thanks a generous grant from the Social Science Research Council, which supported my fieldwork.
1 It should perhaps be mentioned that the concept of the 'right' and 'left' hand is primarily a symbolic rather than a physical category, and that because of this the physical direction implied by either category, in any particular culture, can vary. In Greece, and among the Kédang (Barnes 1974), right-handedness is conceived to involve motion in an anti-clockwise direction, while among the Basques (Ott 1981), the motion conceived as right-handed is one which proceeds clockwise. What is as important, then, is not the literal direction conveyed by either classification, but only whether the rule which orders this classification remains constant. In Greece the rule is unambiguous—that the dance pattern, anti-clockwise motion, right-handedness, and an auspicious connotation, are all invariably associated with one another.
2 This exhumation of the bones is a ritual common throughout Greece, and is in Ambéli normally carried out either three or five years after a death. The bones are washed with water and wine, placed in a box, and finally put into the ossuary.
3 Cháros cutting his victim's throat is not, of course, the only image of death in rural Greece, although it is certainly the dominant one in Ambéli. Amongst others, there is for instance the image of the dying person wrestling with Cháros on the marble threshing floor—well-known in Greek folksong. Such images as this, however, incorporating as they do the idea of violence, do not run counter to the image of Death as one who slaughters, and the generality of this latter idea is bome out by the presence, in many laments from districts far removed from Ambéli, of Cháros depicted either with a sword (spathi) or with a 'double bladed knife' (dhíkopo machairi). Thus I would claim that the understanding of Death as the spiller of blood which is presented here, on which much of the argument depends, is not confined to Ambéli and its environs, but is found in many parts of Greece, and is coherent with other rural Greek images of death.
4 This differs slightly from a derivation which I give in du Boulay 1974: 146, where I propose a root in katamerizo, meaning 'to divide up in proportion'. I now think this derivation, although relevant, is not sufficiently basic.
5 This is argued more fully in The meaning of dowry: changing values in rural Greece. Proceedings of the Modern Greek Studies Association, Philadelphia, 1980, forthcoming.
6 It should be made clear at this point that there is no question here of a descent group of any sort being involved, as in the instances of prescriptive alliance cited by Lévi-Strauss (1949) and Needham (1962). The 'kindred' (tó sól) in Ambéli is a group of blood relations which, never more than four generations in depth, is centred always on one particular group of siblings, and is thus, as a group, constantly being redefined. Nevertheless it is still the case that the kindred is, jor each individual, a finite entity with fixed limits, and it is in relation to these individually defined groups that both the marriage rule and the rule of katameriá is invoked.
7 There is reason for supposing that this understanding is a compressed version of a more differentiated teaching which derives from the vision of St Makários. The story runs that St Makários asked to see the fate of the soul after death, and accordingly he was shown that for three days the soul circles around the earth reviewing its past deeds, and is then taken before God. For the next six days it is taken to paradise to see the joys of the saints, after which it is again taken before God. Finally, until the fortieth day, it goes down into hell, after which it appears before God for the judgment on its own life. While, however, there are some vestiges of this understanding still evident in the village, the simpler version given in my text is by far the most common.
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