THE VRYKOLAKAS
The spread of the idea that the dead return is a broad one.
After all, here in England we celebrate halloween
and fill it with vampires and zombies,
although surely it's more to do with witches.
Here is a tale from Greece, -the island of Mykanos -
related in the book i quoted from in the last post.
This is recorded by the botanist Pitton de Tounefort
at the beginning of the 18th century.
Pitton writes:
"..he had been killed in the fields, no one knew by whom or how.
Two days after he had been buried in a chapel in the town
it was bruited about that he had been walking during the night.....
that he came into houses, turned over furniture,
extinguished lamps, and embraced people from behind.
"On the tenth day they said a mass in the chapel where the body lay,
in order to drive out the demon that they believed
to be concealed in it."
They disinterred the body and the village butcher tore out its heart.
He claimed that the blood was red, and that it was still warm.
The villagers also claimed that the smell and fumes
emitted by the corpse, when it was opened, were unnatural.
Following this scare, various magical attempts were made to lay
the monster, by putting holy swords into the coffin.
Nothing seemed to work.
In the end they burnt the body on a funeral pyre.
This is very interesting because nothing which happened,
as the author emphasizes, need not be totally
normal for a decomposing corpse, under certain conditions.
But how many people actually do know how a dead body decomposes?
We hide it away so quickly, don't we?
No comments:
Post a Comment