THE CURSING OF VENIZELOS.[1]
BY SIR J. G. FRAZER.
The following account of a barbarous ritual, lately performed by the highest dignitaries of the Greek Church in Athens, was sent to me by Dr. R. M. Burrows, Principal of King's College, London, in a letter dated 16 January, 1917, in which he says: "The enclosed is written from a cable that we received from the Venizelists at Salonica, and the accounts of the correspondents of the English papers. For some reason or other it did not appeal to the daily press and has not been widely published." The account runs thus:
"The extraordinary ceremony of 'Anathema' against M. Venizelos performed on Christmas Day [1916] by the ecclesiastical authorities of Athens at the instigation of the League of Reservists has had its uses—besides providing anthropologists with the most remarkable instance on record of the survival in Europe amid the forms of civilisation of a magic ritual common to savages all over the world. The Metropolitan of Athens, as it was reported at the time, solemnly excommunicated a bull's head (which presumably represented the body of Venizelos), and cast the first stone; and then each member of the crowd assembled by King Constantine's hooligans cast a stone on the pile and uttered a curse against the man who had 'plotted against the King.' But King Constantine's appearance as a Hottentot witch-doctor had unexpected results, and only served to prove even in his own stronghold that all the terrorism of German autocracy could not quench the real
- ↑ This article has, by the kind permission of Sir J. G. Frazer and the Editor, been reprinted from The New Europe, vol. ii. No. 19, February 22, 1917.
