On the other hand, where the curser was akin to the cursed, the nearer the tie of blood the more incomprehensible would be the attitude of one who by an imprecation should recall from the grave so malignant a thing as the modern vrykolakas, only to fall himself perhaps the first victim to its blood-thirstiness. If the phrase 'May the earth reject thee' had suggested anything beyond simple resuscitation, if there had been any resemblance in character between the Greek revenant and the Slavonic vampire, such an imprecation would have been impossible where close kinship existed; it would at once recoil with fatal force upon the curser's own head; above all, that most solemn curse, the curse of parent upon child, would have been the first to 'come home to roost'; and yet the use of such parental imprecations is both celebrated in ballad and not unknown, I am told, in actual experience. Once more then the use of these curses is explicable only on the hypothesis that the original Greek revenants were not the formidable monsters now known as vrykolakes, and that, when under Slavonic influence the popular conception of them changed, the old set phrases of commination—coins, as it were, of speech, struck in the mint of the original superstition—continued current in spite of their inconsistency with the new ideas. These colloquial survivals of the original Greek superstition are at once a proof and a measure of its later contamination. The Greeks had believed in reasonable human revenants; the Slavs taught them to believe in brutish inhuman vampires.
This conclusion is confirmed by the ballad to which I have just referred; in it a mother's imprecation recalls her son from the grave; the revenant, who is the protagonist in a most dramatic story, is, as will be seen, of the type which I claim to have been the original Greek type and exhibits no Slavonic traits.
The ballad[1], which as an important document I translate at length, runs as follows:
Mother with children richly blest, nine sons and one dear daughter,
The darling of thy heart was she, and fondly did'st thou tend her;
For full twelve years thou guardedst her, and the sun looked not on her,
But in the dusk thou bathedst her, by moonlight trim'dst her tresses,
By evening-star and morning-star her curls in order settest.
And lo! a message brought to thee, from Babylon a message,
Bidding thee wed thy child afar, afar in a strange country;
- ↑ The version which I translate is No. 517 in Passow's Popularia Carmina Graec. recent.
