The short sketch which has been given of the attitude of the Greek peasantry towards the Christian Godhead and all the host of assistant saints, and also the more detailed account of those pagan deities or demons whom the common-folk’s awe, not unmingled with affection, has preserved from oblivion through so many centuries, have, I hope, justified the statement that the religion of Greece both is now, and—if a multitude of coincidences in the very minutiae of ancient and modern beliefs speak at all for the continuity of thought—from the dawn of Greek history onward through its brief bright noontide to its long-drawn dusk and night illumined even now only by borrowed lights has ever been, a form, and a little changed form, of polytheism.

Whatever be the merits and the demerits of such a religion in contrast with the worship of one almighty God, most thinkers will concede to it the property of bringing the divine element within more easy comprehension of the majority of mankind. Proper names, limited attributes, definite duties and spheres of work—these give a starting point from which the peasant can set out towards a conception of gods. He himself bears a name, he himself has qualities, he himself performs his round of work; and though his name be writ smaller than that of the being whom he strives to imagine—though his virtues and perhaps his vices be less pronouncedly white and black—though his daily task be more trivial—yet in one and all of these things he stands on common ground with his deities; they differ from him in degree rather than in kind; he has but to picture a race of beings somewhat stronger and somewhat nobler than the foremost of his own fellow-men, and these whom he thus imagines are gods. A single spirit omniscient and omnipotent is too distant, too inaccessible from any known ground. Lack of the capacity to form or to grasp lofty ideals carries with it at least the compensation of closer intimacy with the supernatural and the divine.

It may therefore be expected that in the course of the intellectual and spiritual development of any primitive people, the more accurately they learn to measure their own imperfections and limitations, and the more imaginatively they magnify the wisdom and power of their gods, the wider and more impassable grows the chasm that divides mortal from immortal, human from divine; communion of man and god becomes less frequent, less direct. Such certainly was the experience of the Greek nation in some measure; but, owing probably to an innate and persistent vanity which at all times has made the race blind to its own failings, that experience was less acute than in the case of other peoples. There had been days indeed when their gods walked the earth with men and counselled them in troubles and fought in their battles; there had been days when the chiefest of all the gods sought a hero’s aid against his giant foes; there had been days when men and women might aspire even to wedlock with immortals, and to possess children half-divine. In those days too death was not the only path by which the heavens or the house of Hades might be gained. Kings and prophets, warriors and fair women passed thither by grace of the gods living and unscathed; nay, even personal skill or prowess emboldened minstrel and hero to match themselves with the gods below, and wielding of club or sweeping of lyre sufficed to open the doors for their return to earth.

But those days soon passed; men walked and spoke and held open fellowship with the gods no more; the very poetry and imagination of the Greek temperament so fast outstripped in rapidity of development the growth of material or moral resources, that the rift between their religious ideals and the realities of their life and character ever widened, until the daily and familiar intercourse of their ancestors with the gods seemed to them a condition of life irretrievable and thenceforth impossible. This result was observed and remarked by the Greeks themselves, but the process by which it had come about was not agreed. To one school of thought, it was the degeneracy of mankind through successive ages—the golden age in which men lived as gods and passed hence, as it were in sleep, to become spirits clothed in air, administering upon earth the purposes of mighty Zeus—the silver age wherein childhood was still long and innocent, and, though men’s riper years brought cares and quarrels and indifference to holy things, yet when the earth covered them they were called blessed and received a measure of honour—the bronze age when all men’s minds were set on war and their stalwart arms were busy with brazen weapons, and by each other’s hands they were sent down to the chill dark house of Hades and their names were no more known—the age of heroes who were called half-divine, who fought in the Theban and the Trojan wars, and when the doom of death overtook them were granted a life apart from other men in the islands of the blest, because they had been nobler and more righteous than those of the age of bronze and had stemmed for a time the current of degeneracy—the fifth age in which the depravity of man grows apace and soon there will be nought but discord between father and son, and no regard will be paid to guest nor comrade nor brother, and children will slight their aged parents, and the voice of gods will be unknown to them[787]—to one school of thought, I say, it was simply and solely this decline of the human race, swift and only once checked, that was held accountable for their estrangement from the powers above them.

But such thinkers were in a minority. Humility and self-dissatisfaction were and are qualities foreign to the ordinary Greek. He observed the wide gulf that separated him from those whom he worshipped, but without any sense of unworthiness, without any depression of spirit. He was not despondent over his own shortcomings and limitations, but was filled rather with a larger complacency in the thought that, incapable though he might be to reproduce actually in his own life and character much of the beauty and nobility of his gods, he was so gifted in mind and godlike in understanding, that in his moments of highest imagination and most spiritual exaltation he could soar to that loftier plane whereon was enacted all the divine life, and could visualise his gods and feel the closeness of their presence. The motive of the highest acts of Greek worship seems to have been not the self-abasement of the worshipper and the glorification of the worshipped, but rather an obliteration of the distinctions between man and god, and a temporary attainment by the human of spiritual equality and companionship with the divine. The votary of Bacchus in his hours of wildest ecstacy enjoyed so completely this sense of equality and of real union with the god, that even to others it seemed fitting that he should be called by the god’s own name[788].

But the hours, in which the Greeks of the historical age attained by a sort of religious frenzy such intimacy with their gods as their ancestors were famed to have enjoyed all their life long, were few and far between. The means of communion had become in general less direct, less personal. Yet even so the desire for communion continued unabated, and the belief in it still pervaded every phase of life. Intellectual progress had curiously little effect upon the dominant religious ideas. A strongly conservative attachment to ancient tradition and custom was strangely blended with that progressive spirit which made the intellectual development of the Athenians unique in its swiftness, as in its scope, among all peoples known to history. Their minds welcomed new speculations, new doctrines; but their hearts clung to the old unreasonable faith. Ancestral ideas remained for them the sole foundation of religion. Each poet or philosopher in drama or in dialogue, each man in his own heart, was free to build upon it and to ornament his superstructure as he would; and his work found a certain sanction in the appeal which it made to other men’s sense of truth and of beauty. But for the foundation the fiat of antiquity had been pronounced and was immutable. Plato’s reasoned exposition of the soul’s immortality culminates in an Apocalypse ratified by the old mythology; and a quotation from Homer ever served to quash or to confirm the subtlest argument.

That the foundation-stone was not, in the estimate of reason, well and truly laid, that the basis of religion was insecure, must have been obvious to many. Pindar saw it, and, by refusing to impute to the gods any deed or purpose which his own heart condemned as ungodly, strove to repair its defects; Euripides too saw it, and scoffed at those who would build on so unstable a base. But the mass of men, though they also must have seen, were little troubled, it would seem, either to demolish or to repair. They accepted the old beliefs and ceremonies because they were sanctioned by the authority or the experience of past ages; and if sober reasoning and criticism exposed flaws and inconsistencies therein, what matter? They were, as they still are, a people incapable of any mental equilibrium; the mood of the hour swayed them now to emotions, now to reasonings; they did not cultivate consistency; they could not sit still and preserve an even balance between the passions of the heart and the judgements of the intellect, but threw their whole selves into the one scale, and the other for the moment was as vanity.

In the whole complex and irrational scheme of religion thus accepted, nothing was more highly valued than the means by which divine counsel was obtained for the conduct both of public and of private affairs. Omens were regularly taken before battle, at the critical moment when we should prefer to trust experience and generalship. Oracles were consulted as to the sites for planting colonies, in cases where a surveyor’s report might have seemed more decisive. But the efficacy of these old methods of consulting the gods went almost unchallenged. It seems seldom to have occurred to men’s minds that those untoward signs in the victim’s entrails, which perhaps delayed tactics on which victory depended, were the symptoms of an internal disease and not the handiwork of a deity, or that the inferior and ambiguous verse, in which the gods condescended to give counsel, more often confused than confirmed human judgement. Even of the philosophers, according to Cicero[789], two only, Xenophanes and Epicurus, went so far as to deny the validity of all means of communion; and Socrates, for all his questioning and testing of truth, obeyed without question the whispered warnings of a daemon, and in deference to the ambiguous exhortations of a vision spent some of his last days in turning Aesop’s fables into verse, that so he might go into the presence of the gods with his conscience clear. Thus, though men no longer expected to look upon the faces or to hear the voices of the gods, they still felt them to be close at hand, easy of access, ready to counsel, to warn, to encourage; and the methods of communion, in proportion as they stand condemned by reason, commend so much the more the steady faith of the people who used them and never doubted their efficacy. The answer of the ordinary man to those critics, who questioned the validity of divination merely because they could not understand the way in which it operated, is well expressed by Cicero: ‘It is a poor sort of cleverness to try to upset by sophistry facts which are confirmed by the experience of ages. The reason of those facts I cannot discover; the dark ways of Nature, I suppose, conceal it from my view. God has not willed that I should know the reason, but only that I should use the means[790].’

The Greek nation saw many philosophies rise and fall, but it clung always to the religion which it had inherited. The doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus, became for the Greek people as though they had never been; but the old polytheism of the Homeric and earlier ages lived. Faith justified by experience was a living force; the conclusions of reason a mere fabrication. And an essential part of that polytheism which was almost instinctive in the Greeks was their belief in the possibility of close and frequent communion with their gods.

Now the means of communion between men and gods are obviously twofold—the methods by which men make their communications to the gods, and the methods by which the gods make their communications to men. The former class of communications involve for the most part questions or petitions; the latter are mainly the responses thereto; and it would seem natural to consider them in that order. But inasmuch as more is known of the ancient methods by which the gods signified their will to men than of the reverse process, it will be convenient first to establish the unity of modern folklore with ancient religion in this division of the subject, and afterwards to discuss how any modern ideas concerning the means open to man of communicating with the gods may bear upon the less known corresponding department of ancient religion. For if we find that the theory no less than the practice of divination, that is, of receiving and interpreting divine messages, has been handed down from antiquity almost unchanged, there will be a greater probability that, along with the general modern system of sacrifices or offerings which accompany men’s petitions, a curious conception of human sacrifice in particular which I once encountered is also a relic of ancient religion.

The survival of divination then in its several branches first claims our attention. The various modes employed are for the most part enumerated by Aeschylus[791] in the passage where Prometheus recounts the subjects in which he claimed to have first instructed mankind: dreams and their interpretation; chance words (κληδόνες) overheard, often conveying another meaning to the hearer than that which the speaker intended; meetings on the road (ἐνόδιοι σύμβολοι), where the person or object encountered was a portent of the traveller’s success or failure in his errand; auspices in the strict sense of the word, observations, that is, of the flight and habits of birds; augury from a sacrificial victim, either by inspection of its entrails or by signs seen in the fire in which it was being consumed. To these arts Suidas[792] adds ‘domestic divination’ (οἰκοσκοπικόν)—the interpretation of various trivial incidents of domestic life—palmistry (χειροσκοπικόν), and divination from the twitching of any part of the body (παλμικόν). Finally of course there was direct inspiration (μαντική), either temporary, as in an individual seer, or permanent, as at the oracle of Delphi.

Whether the common-folk ever distinguished the comparative values of these many methods of divination may well be doubted. The Delphic oracle, I suspect, attained its high prestige more because it was ready to supply immediately on demand a more or less direct and detailed answer to a definite question, than because personal inspiration was held to be in any way a surer channel for divine communications than were other means of divination. Some thinkers indeed, chiefly of the Peripatetic school[793], were inclined to draw distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘skilled’ divination[794]. The ‘natural’ methods, including dreams and all direct inspiration, were accepted by them; the ‘skilled’ methods, those which required the services of a professional augur or interpreter, were disallowed. But the division proposed was in itself bad—for dreams do not by any means exclusively belong to the first class, but probably in the majority of cases require interpretation by experts—and, apart from that consideration, the distinction was the invention of a philosophical sect and not an expression of popular feeling. There is nothing to show that the common-folk, believing as they did in the practicability of communion with their gods, esteemed one means of divination as intrinsically more valuable than another.

Nor was there any logical reason for such discrimination. Granted that there were gods superior to man in knowledge and in power and also willing to communicate with him, no restriction could logically be set upon the means of communication which they might choose to adopt. There was no reason why they should speak by the mouth of a priestess intoxicated with mephitic vapours or disturb men’s sleep with visions rather than use the birds as their messengers or write their commandment on the intestines of a sacrificial victim.

A certain justification for accepting some means of divination, such as intelligible dreams, and for suspecting others, might certainly have been found in distrust of any human intermediary; vagrant and necessitous oracle-mongers infested the country; and even the priestess of Delphi, as history shows, was not always superior to political and pecuniary considerations. But experience of fraud did not apparently teach distrust; the fact that oracles and other means of divination were undoubtedly often abused did not cause the Greek people to reject the proper use of them; down to this day all the chief methods of ancient divination still continue. In some cases, we shall see, the modern employment of such methods is a mere survival of ancient custom without any intelligent religious motive; but in others there is abundant evidence that the modern folk are still actuated by the feelings which so dominated the lives of their ancestors—the belief in, and the desire for, close and frequent communion with the powers above.

Direct inspiration is a gift which at the present day a man is not inclined to claim for himself, though he will often attribute it to another; for it implies insanity. But though the gift is not therefore envied, it is everywhere respected. Mental derangement, which appears to me to be exceedingly common among the Greek peasants, sets the sufferer not merely apart from his fellows but in a sense above them. His utterances are received with a certain awe, and so far as they are intelligible are taken as predictions. He is in general secure from ill-treatment, and though he do no work he is not allowed to want. The strangest case which I encountered was that of a man, unquestionably mad, who wandered from place to place and seemed to be known everywhere. I met him in all three times, in Athens, in Tenos, and in Thessaly. He had no fixed home, did no work, and was usually penniless; but a wild manner, a rolling eye, and an extraordinary power of conducting his part of a conversation in metrical, if not highly poetical, form sufficed to obtain for him lodging, food, and clothing, and even a free passage, it appeared, on the Greek coasting steamers. Whether the long monologues in verse in which he sometimes indulged were also improvisations, I could not of course tell; but once to have heard and seen his delivery of them was to understand why, among a superstitious people, he passed for a prophet. He was a modern type of those old seers whose name μάντεις was believed by Plato to have been formed from the verb μαίνεσθαι, ‘to be mad’; his frenzy really gave the appearance of inspiration.

Dreams furnish a more sober and naturally also a more general means of communion with the gods; and the belief in them as a channel of divine revelation is both firmly rooted and widely spread. This indeed is only natural. The change from paganism to Christianity, even if it had been more thorough and complete than it actually has been, would probably not have affected this article of faith. So long as a people believe in any one or more deities not wholly removed from human affairs, it is logically competent for them to regard their dreams as a special communication to them from heaven; and Christianity, far from repudiating the old pagan idea, confirmed it by biblical authority. The Greek Church, as we shall see, has made effective use of it.

The degree of importance universally attached in old time to dreams is too well known to all students of Greek literature to call for comment. Artemidorus’ prefatory remarks to his Oneirocritica, or ‘Treatise on the interpretation of dreams,’ and his criticism of former exponents of the same science, would alone prove that public interest in the subject must indeed have been great to stimulate so serious and so large a literature. There is the same practical evidence of a similar interest in modern Greece. Books of the same nature are sought after and consulted no less eagerly now than then. A new edition of some Μέγας Ὀνειροκρίτης, or ‘Great Dream-interpreter,’ figures constantly in the advertisements of Athenian newspapers, and the public demand for such works is undeniable. In isolated homesteads, to which the Bible has never found its way, I have several times seen a grimy tattered copy of such a book preserved among the most precious possessions of the family, and honoured with a place on the shelf where stood the icon of the household’s patron-saint and whence hung his holy lamp.

One of the pieces of information most frequently imparted to men in dreams is the situation of some buried treasure. The precautions necessary for unearthing it, namely complete reticence as to the dream, and the sacrifice of a cock, have already been mentioned[795]. This kind of dream has been utilized by the Greek Church. There is no article of ecclesiastical property of more value than a venerable icon; to any church or monastery which aspires to become a great religious centre an ancient and reputable icon, competent to work miracles, is indispensable.

Now the most obvious way of obtaining such pictures is, it seems, to dig them up. A few weeks underground will have given the right tone to the crudest copy of crude Byzantine art, and all that is required, in order to determine the spot for excavation, is a dream on the part of some person privy to the interment. It was on this system that the miracle-working icon of Tenos came to be unearthed on the very day that the standard of revolt from Turkey was raised, thus making the island the home of patriotism as well as of religion. And this is no solitary example; the number of icons exhumed in obedience to dreams is immense; wherever the traveller goes in Greece, he is wearied with the same reiterated story, and if the picture in question happens to be of the Panagia, there is often an appendix to the effect that the painter of it was St Luke—an attribution which can only have been based on clerical criticism of the style. Inspection is now difficult; the old pagan custom of covering venerable statues with gold or silver foil by way of thank-offering[796] has, to avoid idolatry, been transferred to icons; and in many cases only the faces and the hands of the saints depicted are left visible, the outlines of the rest of the picture being merely incised upon the silver foil. But, with inspection thus limited, the layman does not detect in any crudity of style a sufficient reason why the saintly painter, if only he could have foreseen the ordinary decoration of Greek churches, should have had his productions put out of sight in the ground. Nevertheless the story of the origin of the icon is believed as readily as the story of its finding.

Nor is it only in stories that the discovery of icons in obedience to dreams is heard of. During my stay in Greece a village schoolmaster embarrassed the Education Office by applying for a week’s holiday in order to direct a party of his fellow-villagers in digging up an icon of which he had dreamt, and to build a chapel for it on the spot. It was felt that a body concerned with religious as well as secular instruction ought not to commit the impiety of refusing such a request, but it was feared that other schoolmasters would be encouraged to dream.

Besides those visions which are concerned with the finding of treasure or of icons, that class of dream also may be noticed in which is given some divine communication as to the healing of the sick. Many a time I have met in some sanctuary of miraculous repute peasants from a far-off village, who have travelled from one end of Greece to another, bringing wife or child, in the faith that mind will be restored or sickness healed; time after time their story is the same, that they were bidden in a dream to go and tarry so many days in such a church, and they have started off at once, obedient to what they feel to be a promise of divine help, begging their way may be for many days, but unflinchingly hopeful. And then comes the long sojourn in a strange village, for a mere visit is not always enough; weeks and months they wait, sleeping each night in the holy precincts and if possible at the foot of the icon, hoping and believing that some mysterious virtue of the place will heal the sufferer, or at the least that in a fresh dream they will be told what is next to be done. And if nothing happen—for now and then rest or change of air or, it may be, faith[797] effects the cure desired—they return home with hope lessened but belief unshaken, ready to obey again if another message be vouchsafed to them from the dream-land of heaven.

Such dreams as these are regarded as spontaneous revelations of the divine will, granted possibly in response to prayer, but in no way controlled or procured by any previous action of the dreamer. But there is one curious custom, observed by the girls of Greece, by which dreams are deliberately induced as a means of foreknowing their matrimonial destinies. On the eve of St Catharine’s day[798] most appropriately, for she is the patroness of all marrying and giving in marriage, but sometimes also on the first day of Lent[799], the girls knead and bake cakes (ἀρμυροκούλουρα) of which, as their name implies, the chief ingredient is salt. By consuming undue quantities of this concoction, and often by assuaging the consequent thirst with an equally undue quantity of wine, they produce a condition of body eminently suited to cause a troubled sleep, and, their minds being already absorbed in speculations on marriage, it is little wonder if their dreams reveal to them their future husbands. How far this custom is now taken seriously, I cannot determine; in some districts it has certainly degenerated into a somewhat disreputable game. But the fact that the intoxication of the girls is tolerated on this occasion among a peasantry whose men even are seldom drunk except on certain religious occasions—on Easter-day and after funerals—proves clearly that the custom was once, as I think it sometimes is now, a genuinely religious rite and an acknowledged means of divination.

A modification of this custom, preferred in some districts as obviating alike the unpleasant process of eating salt-cake and the disreputable sequel thereto, substitutes for dreaming two other ancient methods of divination—divination by drawing lots, a primitive system common to many peoples but employed nevertheless even by established oracles[800] in ancient Greece, and divination from chance words overheard by the diviner, a method which is, I think, more exclusively Hellenic. For this form of the custom also salt-cakes are required, but only a morsel of each is eaten, and the remainder of the cake is divided into three portions, to which are tied respectively red, black, and blue ribbands. Each girl then places her three pieces under her pillow for the night, and in the morning draws out one by chance. The red ribband denotes a bachelor, the black a widower, and the blue a stranger, that is to say some one other than a fellow-villager. Then, in order to supplement with fuller detail the indications of the lot, the girl takes her stand in the door-way of the cottage and listens to the casual conversation of the neighbours or the passers-by; and the first name, trade, occupation, and suchlike which she hears mentioned are taken to be those of her future husband.

Another similar custom, practised only by girls and not necessarily taken more seriously than a game of forfeits, preserves in its modern name ὁ κλήδονας[801] the old word κληδών, and the purpose of the custom is to obtain that which Homer[802] actually denoted by κληδών, a presage drawn from chance words. The preliminaries of the ceremony are as follows. On the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist[803] a boy (who for choice should be the first-born of parents still living) is sent to fetch fresh water from the spring or well. This water is known as ἀμίλητο νερό, ‘speechless water,’ because the boy who brings it is forbidden to speak to anyone on his way. Each girl then drops into the vessel of water some object such as a coin, a ring, or, most frequently, an apple as her token. The vessel is then closed up and left for the night on the roof of a house or some other open place ‘where the stars may see it.’ The proceedings of the next morning vary. According to one traveller[804], each girl first takes out her own apple—for he mentions only this token—and then draws off some of the water into a smaller vessel. This vessel is then supported by two other girls on the points of their four thumbs and begins to revolve of its own accord. If it turn towards the right, the girl may expect to marry as she wishes; if to the left, otherwise. Also, he says, they wash their hands with this water and then go out into the road, and take the first name they hear spoken as that of their future husband. This latter part of the ceremony is true to the meaning of the word κλήδονας and is a genuine instance of divination from chance words. But neither this nor the former part as described by Magnoncourt is generally practised now. The usual procedure is either for the boy who fetched the water or for the girls in rotation to plunge the hand in and draw out the first object touched, improvising or reciting at the same time some couplet favourable or adverse to the love or matrimonial prospects of her who shall be found to own the forthcoming object; and so in turn, until each girl has received back her token and learnt the presage of her fate.

The recitation of possibly prepared distichs by those who are taking part in the ceremony is certainly a less pure method of divination than the earlier practice described by Magnoncourt. The prediction is deliberately provided, and the element of chance or of divine guidance is confined to the drawing of the token. The older method exhibits more clearly the relation of the modern custom to the superstitious observation of κληδόνες from the time of the Odyssey[805] onwards. Thus when Odysseus heard the suitors threaten to take the beggar Irus to Epirus, ‘even to the tyrant Echetus the destroyer of all men,’ he hailed the chance words as a divine ratification of his hope that soon the suitors should take their own journey to another destroyer of all men, even the tyrant of the nether world, and ‘he rejoiced in the presage’ (χαῖρεν δὲ κλεηδόνι)[806].

The same method of divination was frequently employed in the classical age also, and that too not only privately[807] but even by public oracles. It was thus that Hermes Agoraeus at Pherae made response to his worshippers. The enquirer presented himself towards evening before the statue of the god, burnt incense on the hearth, filled with oil and lighted some bronze lamps that stood there, placed a certain bronze coin of the local currency upon the altar, whispered his question into the ear of the statue, and then at once holding his hands over his ears made his way out of the agora. Once outside, he removed his hands, and the first words which greeted his ears were accepted as the god’s response to his question[808]. A primitive statue of Hermes with the surname κλεηδόνιος existed also at Pitane[809], which place may be the actual site of that ‘sanctuary of chance utterances’ (κληδόνων ἱερόν) to which, according to Pausanias[810], the people of Smyrna resorted for oracles. And at Thebes again Apollo Spodios gave his replies in like manner[811].

Clearly then in antiquity divination from chance words was a well-established religious institution; and at the present day, though the practice is rarer, its character is unchanged. The religious nature of the two customs which I have described is shown by their association with the festivals of St Catharine and St John the Baptist; and though in different localities or periods a certain amount of divination by the lot or other means has been mixed up with divination from chance words, the latter obviously forms the essence of both rites, supplying as it does to the one its very name, and supplementing in the other the meagre indications of the lot with more detailed information. A girl may learn from the colour of the ribband attached to the piece of salt-cake which she happens to draw whether her future husband is bachelor, widower, or stranger; but only from the chance utterance accepted as an answer to her own secret questionings can she learn the name and home and occupation and appearance of her destined husband.

The next branch of divination, the science of reading omens of success or failure in the objects which a traveller meets on his road, is still largely cultivated. In old days indeed it was so elaborate a science that a treatise, as Suidas tells us, could be written on this one method of divination alone. Possibly the same feat might be accomplished at the present day if a complete collection were made of all the superstitions on the subject of ‘meeting’ (ἀπάντημα) in all the villages of Greece. How instructive the results might be, I cannot forecast; but at any rate the task is beyond me, and I must content myself with mentioning a few of the commonest examples. To meet a priest is always unlucky, and for men even more so than for women, for, unless they take due precautions as they pass him[812], their virility is likely to be impaired; and the omen is even worse if the priest happen to be riding a donkey, for even the name of that animal is not mentioned by some of the peasants without an apology[813]. To meet a witch also is unfortunate, and since any old woman may be a witch, it is wise to make the sign of the cross before passing her. A cripple is also ominous of failure in an enterprise. On the other hand to meet an insane person is usually accounted a good omen, for insanity implies close communion with the powers above. To meet a woman with child is also fortunate, for it indicates that the journey undertaken will bear fruit; and the peasant by way of acknowledgement never fails to bow or to bare his head, and if he be exceptionally polite may wish the woman a good confinement. Of animals those which most commonly forebode ill are the hare, the rat, the stoat, the weasel, and any kind of snake. In Aetolia superstition is so strong regarding these that the mere sight of one of them, or indeed of the trail of a snake across the path, is enough to deter many a peasant from his day’s work and to send him back home to sit idly secure from morn till night; and even the more stout-hearted will cross themselves or spit three times before proceeding.

That some of these beliefs date from classical times is certain. Aristophanes, playing upon the use of ὄρνις, ‘a bird,’ in the sense of ‘omen,’ rallies the Athenians upon calling ‘a meeting a bird, a sound a bird, a servant a bird, and an ass a bird[814]’; and there can be little doubt that the ass belonged then as now to the category of objects ominous to encounter on the road; and the same author[815], corroborated in this case by Theophrastus’ portrait of the superstitious man[816], speaks to the dread inspired by a weasel crossing a man’s path. The snake too, it can hardly be doubted, was, owing perhaps to its association with tombs, an object of awe to the superstitious out of doors as well as within the house[817]. On the other hand an insane person apparently was in Theophrastus’ time not as now an omen of good but of evil, to be averted by spitting on the bosom[818]. But though the modern interpretations of such omens may not be identical in every respect with the old, enough has been said to show that the science of divining from the encounters of the road is still flourishing.

The observation of birds is in many cases closely allied with the last method of divination; for naturally the peasant as he goes on his way is as quick to notice the birds as any other object which he encounters. But since auspices may also be taken under other conditions, it will be well to observe the old line of demarcation, and to treat this branch of augury, as it was treated in ancient handbooks[819], separately. Moreover the attitude of the modern folk towards these two branches of divination justifies the division. The superstitions which I have just recorded are somewhat blindly and unintelligently held; but in the taking of auspices proper the ordinances of ancient lore which the people follow are felt by them to be doubly sanctioned—by reason as well as by antiquity; they apprehend the theory on which their practice is based—the idea that birds are better suited than any other animate thing, by virtue both of their rapid flight and of their keen and extended vision, to be the messengers between gods and men.

In practice this branch of divination is still concerned chiefly with the large and predatory birds to which alone was originally applied the term οἰωνός. ‘The largest, the strongest, the most intelligent, and at the same time those whose solitary habits gave them more individual character,’ says a French writer[820], ‘were deliberately preferred by the diviners of antiquity as the subjects of their observation. For these and these only was reserved at first the name οἰωνός, “solitary bird[821],” or bird of presage’; and he goes on to suggest that the Oriental belief in the magical power of blood to revivify the souls of the dead and to stimulate prophecy influenced the selection for a prophetic rôle of carnivorous birds such as might indeed often feed on the entrails of those very victims from which sacrificial omens were taken. But the reasons assigned by Plutarch for the pre-eminence of birds among all other things as the messengers of heaven apply with so special a force to the special class of birds selected, that it seems unnecessary to search out reasons more abstruse.

‘Birds,’ he says[822], ‘by their quickness and intelligence and their alertness in acting upon every thought, are a ready instrument for the use of God, who can prompt their movements, their cries and songs, their pauses or wind-like flights, thus bidding some men check, and others pursue to the end, their course of action or ambitions. It is on this account that Euripides calls birds in general “heralds of gods,” while Socrates speaks of making himself “a fellow-servant with swans.”’

In this special class of ominous birds the principal group, says the same French writer[823], was composed of the eagle (ἀετός), the messenger[824] of Zeus, the ‘most perfect of birds[825]’; the vulture (γύψ), which closely rivalled even the king of birds[826]; the raven (κόραξ), the favourite and companion of Apollo, a bird so much observed that there were specialists (κορακομάντεις) who studied no other species; and the carrion-crow (κορώνη), transferred from the service of Apollo to that of Hera[827] or Athene[828]. These, it may safely be said, were observed at all periods. Of others, various species of hawk (ἵεραξ, ἴρηξ)—in particular that known as κίρκος, acting in Homeric times as the ‘swift messenger of Apollo[829]’ and thus rivalling the raven—and with them the heron[830] (ἐρωδιός) enjoyed in early times great respect, but gradually fell out of favour with the augur. But as these disappeared from the canon of ornithological divination, certain other birds were admitted, the wren[831] (τρόχιλος or βασιλίσκος), the owl (γλαῦξ)[832], the κρέξ dubiously identified with our ‘rail’ (crex rallus, Linn.), and the woodpecker (δρυοκολάπτης).

The continuity of the art of taking auspices is at once obvious when it is found that the birds which the modern peasant most frequently observes are of the very same class which furnished the Homeric gods with their special envoys. Eagles, vultures, hawks, ravens, crows—these are still the chief messengers of heaven, and only one other bird can claim equality with them, that bird which in classical times symbolised wisdom, the owl.

Of the methods pursued by the professional augurs in ancient Greece unfortunately less is known. The best treatise on the subject is that of Michael Psellus[833], written in the eleventh century; but probably ancient works on the subject, such as that of Telegonus to which Suidas[834] refers, were then extant and contributed the bulk of his information. But even so it is the broad principles rather than the detailed application of them which Psellus presents, and on them we must in the main rely in comparing the modern science with the ancient.

First of all the species of bird under observation had to be ascertained; for the characters of different species were held to be so various that birds as closely cognate as the raven and the crow employed wholly contrary methods of communication with mankind. ‘If as we go out of our house to work,’ says Psellus[835], ‘we hear the cry of a raven behind or of a crow in front, it forebodes anxieties and difficulties in our business, while if a crow fly past and caw on the left or a raven do likewise on the other side, it gives hope and confidence.’ The crow then was not subject even to the rule concerning right and left which applied, so far as I know, to all other birds, but, thanks to some innate contrariety, reversed the normal significance of position, and therewith also of cry and of flight[836]. Such exceptions even to the most general rules made the accurate identification of species an indispensable preliminary to successful augury. The same primary condition still holds. The diviner must be able to distinguish the cawing of a crow settled on his roof from that of a jackdaw; the former is an omen of death, as perhaps it was in Hesiod’s day[837], to some member of his family, the latter heralds the coming of a letter from a friend abroad. Again he must be able to distinguish the brown owl (κουκουβάγια) from the tawny owl (χαροποῦλι)[838]; the message of the former may be good or bad, as we shall see, according to its actions, while the latter brings only presages of woe.

The species having been identified, there remained, according to Psellus[839], four possible points in the behaviour of the bird itself (all of them liable to be modified in significance by the position of the observer) to be noticed and interpreted; these were its cry (anciently φωνή or κλαγγή), its flight (πτῆσις), its posture when settled (ἕδρα or καθέδρα), and any movement or action performed by it while thus settled (ἐνέργεια). These divisions are still recognised in modern augury.

The cry is observed in the case of many birds. The scream of an eagle is a warning of fighting or conflict to come. The croak of a raven, especially if it be thrice repeated, while the bird is flying over a house or a village, is a premonition of death to one of the inmates. The laugh of the woodpecker, owing I suppose to its mocking sound, is a sign that an intrigue against some one’s person or pocket is in train. The repeated call of the cuckoo within the bounds of a village forebodes an epidemic therein.

Flight is chiefly observed in the case of the birds of prey. The successful swoop of an eagle upon its prey, or the rapid determined flight of a hawk in pursuit of some other bird, is an encouragement to the observer (provided of course that the birds are seen on his right hand) to pursue untiringly any enterprise in which he is engaged, and is a promise of success and profit therein. In Scyros I once pointed out to my guide a large hawk chasing a flock of pigeons, which he at once hailed as a good omen and watched carefully as long as it was in sight; and when I asked him what kind of hawk it was, he promptly replied that that kind was known as τσίκρος—the goshawk, I believe. This word is a modern form of the ancient κίρκος[840], and a closely similar incident is mentioned in the Odyssey, when this bird, the ‘swift messenger of Apollo,’ is seen by Telemachus on the right, tearing a pigeon in its talons and scattering its feathers to the ground, and is taken to foreshow the fate that awaits Eurymachus[841].

The position occupied and the posture are observed above all in the case of owls. The ‘brown owl’ (κουκουβάγια), perched upon the roof of a house and suggesting by its inert posture that it is waiting in true oriental fashion for an event expected within a few days, forebodes a death in the household; but if it settle there for a few moments only, alert and vigilant, and then fly off elsewhere, it betokens merely the advent and sojourn there of some acquaintance. Another species of owl, our ‘tawny owl’ I believe, known popularly as χαροποῦλι or ‘Charon’s bird[842],’ is, as the name suggests, a messenger of evil under all circumstances, whether it be heard hooting or be seen sitting in deathlike stillness or flitting past like a ghost in the gathering darkness.

The casual actions and movements of birds are less observed now than the cry, flight, and posture; nor am I aware of any auspices being drawn therefrom with regard to any matters of higher importance and interest than the prospective state of the weather. For such humdrum prognostication poultry[843] serve better than the more dignified birds—perhaps because their movements on the ground are more easily observed—and by pluming themselves, by scratching a hole in which to dust themselves over, and by roosting on one leg or with their heads turned in some particular direction foretell rain, fine weather, or a change of wind.

All these auspices are further modified, as in ancient times, by the position of the observer in reference to the bird observed. The right hand side is the region of good omen, whether the bird be seen or heard; and if it be a case of the bird crossing the path of the observer, passage from left to right is to be desired, on the principle that all is well that ends well; flight from right to left indicates a decline of good fortune. Motion towards the right, it may be noted, has always been the auspicious direction in Greece. In that direction, according to Homer, the herald carried round the lot which had been shaken from the helmet, to be claimed by that Chieftain whose token it might prove to be[844]; in that direction Odysseus in beggar-guise proceeded round the board, asking alms of the suitors[845]; in that direction even the gods passed their wine[846]. And in like manner at the present day wine is passed, cards are played, and at weddings bride and bridegroom are led round the altar, from left to right. Thus then in modern augury too, if the eagle’s scream, which forebodes fighting, be heard on the right, the hearer will come well out of it, but if on the left, he is like to be worsted. If the woodpecker laugh on the right, the hearer may proceed with full confidence to cheat his neighbour, but if the sound come from the left, he must be wary to baffle intrigues against himself. If the hawk pursue its prey on the right or across a man’s path from left to right, he may take the pursuer as the type of himself and go about the work in hand with assurance of success; but if the omen be on the other side or in the other direction, some enemy is the hawk and he himself is the pigeon to be plucked.

The interpretation of auspices is also affected by number. A single or twice repeated cry of a bird may be of good omen, but, if the same note be heard three times, the meaning may be reversed. This applies in Cephallenia, as I was told, to the case already mentioned of a raven flying over a house; one or two croaks are a presage of security or plenty, but three are a warning of imminent death. In this detail a pronounced change of feeling towards the number three is responsible for what must, I think, be a contravention of the ancient rules in the case. According to Michael Psellus, an even number of cries from the crow were lucky and an odd number unlucky; but the crow, as we have seen, was perverse and abnormal; reversing therefore the rule in the case of other birds, we find that an odd number of croaks from a raven should be lucky. But the number three, which in old times was lucky, is now universally unlucky; the peasant often will apologize for having to mention the number; and Tuesday, being called Τρίτη, the ‘third day’ of the week, is the unlucky day. But if in this case the significance of a particular number has changed, the principle of taking number into consideration is indubitably ancient.

Moreover there are some cases in which even the particular application of the old principle holds good. The first, almost the only, literary poet of modern Greece (as distinguished from the many composers of unwritten ballads), who found beauty in the popular beliefs and music in the vulgar tongue, makes his heroine thus divine her own death: