If the layout of the data on these deplorable creatures has worked as I intend, the reader will have concluded long ago that they are either satyrs or centaurs or a mixture of both. And (here I lean on Lawson again) he will be right. For all the best authorities—Polites and Schmidt and Lawson—though they fall out on some smaller points, are agreed that they are related to satyrs. Lawson goes further. Basing his theory on Polites’ magnificent array of research, but at variance on the derivation of the word, he reaches different conclusions. Kali—the affix deriving from the modern kalos, good (the ancient “beautiful”)—can precede many words, changing little in the sense beyond giving it, like “goodman” and “goodwife,” a faintly benevolent and rustic flavour. This is in accord with the Greek mythological practice, both ancient and modern, of calling a bad thing good from precaution. The change from kentauros to kantzaros, to anyone acquainted with the dialect variations of demotic Greek, is not at all far-fetched; and Lawson traces its mutation with scholarly logic and regard to likelihood and precedent. If he is right, and I feel sure he is, the kallikantzaroi are “good-centaurs.” The centaur as we think of him—the exclusive combination of a horse’s body with a human trunk and torso growing from its breast, the denizen of the Parthenon metopes and poetical literature—was a late classical reduction and idealization of a much wider and more inclusive and variable range of hybrids. On coins and in archaic art, if not in literature, other types of centaur were commoner than the more correctly named hippo-centaur we all know. (I must have been obsessed by these creatures at school. My Greek grammar was smothered with scrawled and inky processions of centaurs, always bearded like Navy Cut bluejackets and often wearing bowler-hats and smoking cherry-wood pipes. If, by this, I meant to indicate that they lived near the sea and, though essentially rural, occasionally paid urban visits, it showed remarkable insight.) There were ono-centaurs, ichthyo-centaurs and trago-centaurs; ass-, fish- (or triton) and goat-centaurs, and even combinations of two or more.[22]
The word “centaur,” in fact, has nothing to do with a horse: it is the human part of a hybrid, and both the hippo-centaur and the trago-centaur—the centaur we all know and the satyr—were subspecies of a single species whose only constant was its human part. They could be either bipeds or quadrupeds. The plastic rule which confined satyrs to two legs while it allotted four to the centaurs, became inflexible only in classical times. In archaic art the ass-centaur seems to be the oldest of the tribe and it is probably the ancestor of both. “Satyr” is itself a fairly late word. Nonnus stated clearly that the satyrs were of centaur stock and awareness of this belief probably lingered on in the chthonian underworld of consciousness and rustic gathering while the grander, neatly-classified livestock, with their stipulated attributes and invariable sum of legs, paraded through the smart golden age of literature and sculpture.
It was only in Graeco-Roman times that the formal hippocentaur fell in step beside the formal satyr in the Bacchic troop. These were, essentially, sophisticated pets; and when the big change came and the Dionysian zoo was broken up, both were impressed into Christian demonology and their natures re-adjusted for the torment of hermits. The satyr was supplied with a pitchfork and turned into a stoker in Hell and the centaur trotted away north-westwards, perhaps to start life again as a unicorn, unaware that biblical translators would muddle him with the hippopotamus.[23] At home meanwhile their matted, telluric and unfashionable poor relations floundered into the void and have wrought havoc ever since. The kallikantzaros now possesses—in his abandoned habits, his bibulousness, gluttony, turbulence, clumsiness and naïvety, his mania for dancing and horseplay—the attributes of both; and his baldness probably commemorates the Sileni. It is remarkable that though the creature is pan-Hellenic, the most abounding source of his legend by far, the region that he infests most thickly, is still his ancient stamping ground, the steep and beautiful villages and the Magnesian chestnut woods of Pelion. It is well known that an illiterate peasant, confronted in a museum by either a centaur or a satyr in marble, quite correctly recognizes it without a second’s hesitation by its pagan-exotic name—“Look! A kallikantzaros!”—and behind his back the semi-literate attendants exchange collusive winks of pity. I have had an instance of this. Some time ago, Joan and I were gazing at the bas-relief of the magnificent ithyphallic satyr in Thasos.[24] He is undoubtedly a satyr by his horns and cloven hoofs, but the phallic attributes and the stallion’s tail cascading from his rump are much more equine than goatish. When we turned to leave, a shepherd leaning on his crook under the olives pointed to him with a friendly and possessive smile and said: “Our kallikantzaros.”
But a question remains: were the original centaurs demonic or mortal? Our modern doubt existed even in Pindar’s time. He turns the wise, the scholarly and lyre-playing Chiron, tutor of Asklepios, Achilles and Jason, into a scion of Kronos, no less. In another place he mates Ixion with a cloud and the cloud, as part of his sentence of punishment for lusting after Hera—not a very heavy part of it—bore him a perverse and far from nebulous monster-son called Kentauros who fled to the dales of Pelion and sired the race of hippo-centaurs on the Magnesian mares. But further back, in Hesiod’s account of their drunken brawl with the Lapiths, they are human; and they are human, including Chiron—with no equine or hybrid suggestions—in the Iliad. Their other name, the Pheres (an Aeolian version of the word for “wild” or “fierce”), suggests to Lawson that they were a warlike Pelasgian tribe that withdrew to Mount Pelion when the Thessalian and Magnesian plains were swamped by the invading Achaeans. There, in impregnable mountain haunts, growing fiercer and shaggier as their siege wore on, these Pelasgian “centaurs” seemed to the newly-arrived strangers to be the guardians of all the old wisdom, knowledge and magic of the country; a brood of fierce mountain-dwelling wizards, in fact; with the same mysterious aura as that of the stubborn retreating Celts, at bay in the Welsh crags and the wilds of Cornwall, for the first uneasy Saxons. Hence the omniscient Chiron and perhaps the ruse of Nessus’ shirt; hence, above all, the possible Achaean belief in their ability to transform themselves into all kinds of animals, like the Pelasgian Demeter at Phiga-leia. Had they (this is my idea, not Lawson’s) herded up droves of horses and asses on their retreat? Flat Thessaly, from which Pelion springs, is ideal horse-country, almost the only one in Greece. (It is here, not in horse-taming Argos, that the Greek cavalry is based; and Larissa, the capital, is the most famous donkey-breeding centre and the seat of the greatest yearly donkey-fair in all Greece.) Did they, when the myth of their powers had taken root, sally down on horseback from the Pelion caves on the credulous pedestrian Achaeans? Their dwellings could have started the idea of the troglodytic habitat common to the centaurs and their modern epigones. Did they, uncouth and shaggy as archaic art portrays them, wield great branches—a centaur’s most usual weapon—broken from the Magnesian forests? Again, at some feast for a truce or a peacemaking—perhaps a wedding breakfast—did these rough Pelasgian cave-dwellers from the grapeless crags, already half-horse by hearsay, shock the urbane Achaeans (tamed now by long sojourn in the rich Thessalian champaign) by bolting their food, by getting roaring drunk and, finally by laying hands on the bride and starting a fight?
Yes, perhaps, to the whole of this rhetorical questionnaire; and again, perhaps, no. How enjoyable, how very enjoyable and luxurious it is, suddenly to emerge from the stern labyrinth of fact onto these dawn-lit uplands of surmise! Movement is free and the air is supernaturally bracing. Bright with unclassified flora, the dewy turf underfoot has a special spring. Choirs of birds break into song, groves beckon umbrageously in all directions and it is hard to discern what catches the charmed eye in the half dim, half brilliant haze at the end of the offered vistas: a sundial or a fountain, a delegation of Chinamen, a sedan-chair or a mammoth grazing.... Alien and unseen hands under the armpits lift us in easy parabolas to strange and sparkling destinations....
Pelion itself, the home of the centaurs for the last few thousand years,
a precipitous, wide-skirted peninsula leaning into the Aegean towards the Sporades from south-eastern Thessaly, covered with grass and forest as the rest of Greece must have been before erosion, tree-felling and goats laid it bare, is such a region. Almost every acre of Greece is in some way venerable and, like most points in Greek geography thickly wreathed with fable, Mount Pelion—once its beautiful villages are left behind—is locked in a prehistoric hush that only birds and leaves disturb; as though the solitary stranger’s were the first mortal lungs to fill with that early air and the ancient legends were only beginning. Every rock and stream is a myth. But, in spite of the last few pages, it is neither the putative archaic tribesman nor the lop-eared primordial quadruped of old coins nor the cinder-eyed modern kallikantzaros that I detect in those steep Magnesian glades. Such is the power of early training that I hear the thud of a cavalcade and see sleek piebald and skewbald flanks, the fall of abundant tails and the slither of spatulate leaf shadows over hairy quarters and sunburnt biceps and the merge of muscular peasant backs into strawberry-roan withers. Classical centaurs are at large. Stooping to avoid the moss-covered branches and nesting in whiskers and speckled sailors’ beards, a couple of pleasant uncomplex faces gravely confer three yards above their eight loitering hoofs. Breaking into their colloquy, a dappled greybeard with garland of vine leaves all awry links arms and begs them in the obsolete dual mode to let it rip. There are unwieldy subsidences in the blue-green shade, a doubling-up of forelegs and tangled fetlocks and a sprawl of recumbent groups with chins cupped in horny hands. The leisurely swish of tails dispels the mayflies and there is a murmur of confabulation. Somewhere among the glaucous trunks a new-peeled spit is turning and a whiff of roast reaches the nostril. The tuning note of a plucked string vibrates in a hollow tortoiseshell. Sudden uninhibited laughter is heard and the glug of wine pouring from a calabash. From the islanded sea the rumour of far-away conches comes echoing up the ravines; while, scattered round them on the grass, among the half-whittled arrows, thorny green carapaces split open to show the dark gleam of chestnuts in the dew.
It would be pleasant to dawdle with them here; but the towers of the Mani are calling us.
[1] Nearly four times as much, in fact, as the treasury of English literature—“To be or not to be” plus “My kingdom for a horse,” a beggarly twelve words, though free of nationalism—that adorn the memories of their exact English equivalents. I very much fear that the Greek might win even more signally by also being able to quote the first of these Shakespearian fragments.
[2] There are understandable reasons, mistaken though they may be in this case, for this attitude. The last few centuries have been full of miseries, and it is natural to wish to forget them and the poverty and hardship that went with them, of which superstition can seem a part. During those sombre times, the only inspiration was the memory and example of klephtic heroes. As Greece re-emerged, these were joined by a remoter pantheon of ancient, more dimly remembered ancestors—warriors, rulers, philosophers and artists—who though they had yet to re-attain in rustic minds the same lustre as the klephts and the traditions of lost Byzantium, were considered by the rest of Europe, which the Greeks, by force of arms, had at last rejoined, as the glory of the world. A few decades later, Professor Fallmerayer sought to prove that the Greek population of the peninsula had been entirely replaced by Slavs in the Dark Ages. The theory has been discredited, but it was both bewildering and angering to the Greeks, not only as impugning their Greekness, but because, since early Byzantium to the present day, Slavs have been natural enemies and “barbarians,” and, the Bulgars especially, utterly abhorrent. This theory has left a legacy of touchiness. Fallmerayer’s main argument is based on the number of Slav place-names in Greece. It proves nothing one way or the other. A low ebb of national spirits, a brief foreign ascendency and a temporary change of land tenure may, though it is not the rule, do the trick in a generation or two. A minute English ascendency has changed thousands of place-names in the British Empire, a handful of English altered
[3] Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion by John Cuthbert Lawson, Fellow and Lecturer of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1910.
[4] I shall write of these at length in another book.
[5] Somebody—I forget who—told me ages ago that the fire-leaping which marks the summer and winter solstice—for it also occurs at Christmas—celebrates the victory over Antichrist. But I have asked and searched in vain for corroboration. Perhaps a reader may know.
[6] Surely it is Pan that the Greek Doctors, and St. Jerome in the Vulgate, had in mind when translating the Hebrew of the 91st Psalm. “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flyeth by day.” The English translated it quite literally, “... Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” Symptoma kai daimonion mesembrinon, the Greeks rendered the last phrase, and incursus et daemonium meridianum, St. Jerome—the onrush and the noonday demon; both quite gratuitously.
[7] Like much else in these pages, Lawson is my source for this sad tale.
[8] Except twice in a late source which is perhaps to be suspected of sophisticated post-facto influences. In one old Maniot dirge he is called a “corsair.”
[9] Dodwell.
[10] By this sort of phrase I mean a matter of decades, never centuries.
[11] The Cyclades, Theo Bent.
[12] The word and the bird exist in ancient Greek, but with no sinister implications. Sad legends attach to its small congerer, the little owl—gioni in modern Greek—whose intermittent melancholy note haunts the whole Mediterranean night; but they have no relevance here.
[13] Tattooing is often practised by prisoners as well, “to pass the time”; and those patterns in blue gunpowder (which are never the erotic symbols of the West; stern village morality seems to veto them) often indicate unorthodox sojourns in the old fort at Nauplia, or at Levkas or in Itzeddin or the agricultural jails of Crete. There are less inhibitions about this in Greece than in England. Indeed, the uncensorious and charitable character of the Greeks and certain factors in the free life of the mountains—the many revolutions, blood feuds, smuggling, bloodshed in a rage, the armed abduction and marriage of girls, to a certain extent sheep-rustling in Crete—robs prison life of its stigma. I have often listened to uninhibited and often hilariously funny reminiscences between magnificent old greybeards who were at Itzeddin or some other—I was about to say university—together. The Gorgons, caiques, phoenixes, patriotic banners, saints and Virgins that cover their arms from shoulder to wrist have the same emblematic function as college blazers. Away from the northern mists, guilt is never quite at home. Among the poor in Greece it is only really crimes against the sense of personal or national honour—philotimo, in fact—that are burdened with guilt and scorn; and in this, they are implacable.
[14] Santorin.
[15] Probably in the person, as usual, of a shepherd or a sailor.
[16] Yet, given the vitality of gods, one has difficulty in accepting outright the efficacy of reconsecration. Swarms of Byzantine saints and angels and crusading Madonnas with their northern retinues must have troubled the air for centuries above the turbaned heads in Aya Sofia and Famagusta. What old popish numina really preside in secret over the Anglican asepsis of usurped pre-Reformation churches? A keen eye and ear should detect the flight of afrits and djinns and the ghost of a muezzin’s call round the great Giralda minaret which is now the belfry of Seville Cathedral.
[17] My friend Col. Thanos Veloudios is a great authority on these, as on many other odd matters.
[18] The Latin word has left deep traces in the language, in association with Christmas; it seems to have stuck in various parts of the Empire. Thanks, again, to Trajan’s victory over Decebalus and the colonization of Dacia, calînda is still the Roumanian word for a Christmas carol.
[19] Kolovelónides.
[20] During the war, when the occupying forces on one of their seasonal
beat-ups in search of hidden arms had done exactly this (with the exception of the gag), an old woman, pointing to the wreckage of spilt oil and wine, compared the enemy, with rueful humour, to the creatures we are discussing.
[21] This may be a trace of native prejudice, for the southern Euboeans, though now completely assimilated, are largely of Albanian stock.
[22] It is interesting to see how the Alexandrian translators of the Septuagint dragoon the pagan fauna into the bestiary as symbols of wilderness and desolation. In Isaiah 34, the Hebrew words for various desert animals like wolves, jackals, “howling creatures,” etc., were unscrupulously Greeked as ono-centaurs, satyrs and sirens, which were quite unknown to the Jews; as though prematurely to ram home their outcast, exotic plight. However, it has not stopped some of them haring about the cities and having a wonderful time till to-day.
[23] One feels inclined to found a R.S.P.C.C.A., the extra C standing for “classical.”
[24] Not the small formal Pan piping to a listening goat on the rocks by Apollo’s temple on top of the hill but the life-size figure outside the town in an olive grove, on the solitary gatepost of the old town wall.
14. CONFABULATION IN LAYIA: CYPRUS AND MRS. GLADSTONE
WE SET off from the towers of Vatheia next morning. It is impossible to penetrate very far into the narrow Mani so near its tip without climbing a blank mountain-side. The sea, lodged like a set-square at the bottom of every valley, is seldom out of sight. In cleft after cleft irregular blue triangles appear, expanding as one climbs the backbone of this stony southernmost shire until the intervening headlands sink and the straight lines from which all the triangles hang cohere in a single and continuous horizontal that keeps pace with the ascending track and goes on climbing until the horizon is half-way up the heavens. The meridian dazzle erases the skyline and the hot rock underfoot seems the igneous flank of a planet embedded in still cocoons of blue space.
Mani Page 23
