'It is impossible that a dead man become a vrykolakas save it be that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents and oft-times at night causeth men to imagine that the dead man whom they knew before cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.
'Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the remains of the man . . . and the dead man—one who has long been dead and buried—appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair . . . and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away with it altogether. . . .'
Then, after denying again the reality of such things which exist [Greek: kata phantasian], in imagination only, the nomocanon continues:
'But know that when such remains be found, the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, . . . and to perform memorial services for the dead with funeral meats.'
The self-contradiction of the pronouncement is exposed in the phrases which I have italicised. Clearly if such remains are found and the dead man is so affected by the work of the Devil that special services for his repose[1] are required, the theory of hallucination is untenable. But this very inconsistency of the nomocanon, though according to Allatius it is of uncertain authorship, proves it, as I will show, a very valuable document of the Church's traditional teaching on this matter.
S. Anastasius Sinaita, who became bishop of Antioch in 561 and died in 599, refers to revenants in a passage which, literally rendered, runs as follows[2]: 'Again it appears that devils, by means of false prophets who obey them and with their aid work signs and heal bodily diseases to the delusion of themselves and others, present even a dead man as risen again, and (in his person) talk with the living, in imagination ([Greek: en phantasia]). For a devil enters into the dead body of the man, and moves it, presenting, which I have rendered with verbal correctness 'memorial services,' really implies more, and corresponds to a mass for the repose of the dead.]
