These are strong statements to make concerning even the humblest and most ignorant members of the Holy Orthodox Church: but I shall show, I think, that they do not exceed the warranty of facts.
First of all then the peasant believes himself to be ever compassed about by a host of supernatural beings, who have no relation with his Christian faith, and some of whom he unconsciously acknowledges, by the very names that he applies to them, as ‘pagan’ beings and ‘outside’ the Christian fold[77]. To all of these--and they are a motley crew, gods and demons, fairies and dragons--he assigns severally and distinctly their looks, their dispositions, their habitations, and their works. To some of them he prays and makes offerings; against others he arms and fortifies himself in the season of their maleficence; but all of them, whether for good or ill, are to him real existent beings; no phantoms conjured up by trepidation of mind, but persons whose substance is proved by sight and hearing and touch.
Nothing is more amazing in the peasantry of modern Greece than their familiarity with these various beings. More than once I have overheard two peasants comparing notes on the ghostly fauna of their respective districts; and the intimate and detailed character of their knowledge was a revelation in regard to their powers of visualisation. It is the mountaineers and the mariners who excel in this; but even the duller folk of the lowlands see much that is hidden from foreign eyes. Once however I did see a nymph--or what my guide took for one--moving about in an olive-grove near Sparta; and I must confess that had I possessed an initial faith in the existence of nymphs and in the danger of looking upon them, so lifelike was the apparition that I might have sworn as firmly as did my guide that it was a nymph that we had seen, and might have required as strong a dose as he at the next inn to restore my nerves. The initial faith in such things, which the child acquires from its mother, is no doubt an important factor in the visualisation; but it is certainly strange that often in Greece not one man only but several together will see an apparition at the same moment, and even agree afterwards as to what they saw.