nothing more could be done. Such indeed was the minimum but it was enough, and this little ceremony was by Attic Law enjoined upon all who happened to chance upon a corpse that lay unburied. To us it would seem wholly inadequate, if not nugatory and vain, but to the Greeks—and who knows how much wiser they were in this than are we?—this act had a mystical significance, for it was as Ælian has so happily expressed it “the fulfilment of some mysterious law of piety imposed by nature.”[10] It was even believed that animals when they came upon the dead of their kind, would scrape with their paws a little earth over the body. To the modern man burial in the earth, or it may be cremation, is a necessary and decorous manner for the disposal of the dead. Yet in the Greek imagination these rites implied something far more, and they involved a certain provision for the welfare of that which was immaterial but permanent, the spirit or the soul. So long as the body remains the soul might be in some way tied and painfully linked with it, a belief which as we have noted, was held by Tertullian and many other of the early writers. But the dissolution of the body meant that the soul was no longer detained in this world where it had no appointed place, but that it was able to pass without let or hindrance to its own mansion prepared for it and for which it was prepared. Of old, men dutifully assisted the dead in this manner as a pious obligation, and as we have seen in the most famous case of all, that of Antigone, they were prepared to go to any length and to make any sacrifice to fulfil this obligation. It was in later years, especially under the influence of Slavonic tradition that not only love but fear compelled them to perform this duty to the dead, since it was generally thought that those whose bodies were not dissolved might return, reanimated corpses, the vampire eager to satisfy his vengeance upon the living, his lust for sucking hot reeking blood, and therefore the fulfilment of these funeral duties was a protection for themselves as well as a benefit to the departed.
Very closely linked with this idea is the belief that those persons become vampires who die under the ban of the church, that is to say who die excommunicate. Excommunication is the principal and most serious penalty that the Church can inflict, and being so severe a penalty it naturally presupposes some very grave offence. It may be roughly defined
