The same idea furnishes also what I believe to be the true explanation of the custom of the so-called 'Charon's obol.' The coin or other object placed in the mouth of the dead was originally, I have argued[1], a charm to prevent the entry of some evil spirit or the re-entry of the soul into the corpse. In Chios and in Rhodes, as we have seen, this is the popular explanation still given—the particular spirit against whom the precaution is taken being, owing to Christian influence, a devil. But if, as is likely, a devil has merely been substituted for the soul, while the rest of the superstition has remained unchanged, it follows that the precaution was originally directed against the return of the soul, and so was a means of ensuring bodily dissolution; for, though I cannot actually prove it, it is natural to suppose that re-animation was not the result, but the cause, of incorruption.
To sum up, the conclusions which have been reached stand thus:—Death, according to the popular religion of ancient Greece, was not a final separation of body and soul; in certain cases the body remained incorrupt and the soul re-animated it. This condition, in which the dead belonged neither to this nor to the nether world, was one of misery; and bodily dissolution was to be desired. Dissolution could in no case be properly effected without the rite of interment or cremation. The unburied therefore formed one class of revenants. But even due interment did not necessarily produce dissolution; a sudden or violent death rendered the body incorruptible, presumably because the proper hour had not yet come for the soul to leave it; an imprecation withheld the body from decay by its own 'binding' power; and finally, the commission of a deadly sin, above all of murder, rendered the sinner subject to the same dire fate as if the curse which his sin merited had actually been pronounced. The only unfailing method of dissolution was cremation.
§ 4. Revenants as Avengers of Blood.
The conclusions which have now been reached show, among others, the somewhat surprising result, that the popular religion of Greece both ancient and modern has always comprised the belief that both the murdered and the murderer were doomed to
- ↑ See above, pp. 110 ff.
