generally to pierce the suspected corpse with a stake of aspen or whitethorn, taking care to drive it right through the heart at one blow. The usual Greek method is to burn the body. The Greeks therefore, who learnt from the Slavs all that is most horrible in their conception of vrykolakes, none the less thought that they knew a better way of disposing of these new-found pests than that which was practised by their teachers. Convinced by foreign influence of the danger, they relied on a native method of obviating it. They would not impale the vrykolakas; they would burn him. Clearly there must have been some strong conviction and assurance in the heart of a people who, freshly persuaded of the peril threatening them at the hands of so loathly and savage a monster, yet chose to pursue their own method of combating it rather than to adopt the foreign and repugnant practice of impaling the dead. That conviction plainly was that cremation, by ensuring the immediate and complete dissolution of the body, put an end to all relations of the dead with the living; and their confidence in it can only have been based upon their own experience in the treatment of the Greek species of revenants. Cremation then was the means by which the Greek folk had always been wont to succour those of the dead who suffered from incorruptibility and resuscitation.
Such a custom would not, so far as I can judge, have encountered any serious ecclesiastical opposition. The Church, it is true, in her earlier days had condemned cremation as a pagan rite, and with the spread of Christianity inhumation became the ordinary rite. But in the case of those who, having been buried, yet returned from the grave, since the Christian rite had proved of no avail, some concession to pagan traditions would have been natural. Many of the clergy, as we have seen, condoned cremation in the case of vrykolakes as a measure of self-defence; surely they would equally have allowed it as an act of charity to more innocent men to whom the earth had denied dissolution and death had brought no repose.
Thus the actual custom of burning dates from the pre-Slavonic era; it is only the motive of the act which is changed. Formerly men felt pity for the revenant, and sought to promote his dissolution in order to release him from a state of suffering; now, as for some centuries past, men feel only horror of the vrykolakas, and
