from the Roman Church, and that thence it was communicated to England. Nicholas-Hugues Ménard, the famous Maurist,[35] in his glosses upon the S. Gregorii I Papae Liber Sacramentorum, which he printed, Paris, 1646,[36] from a manuscript Missal of S. Eligius, states that it was not this custom which was condemned by the various Councils, but an abuse which had crept up and which consisted in giving communion to the dead, and actually placing the Sacred Host in their mouths. However that may be, we know that Cardinal Humbert, of Silva Candida, legate of S. Leo IX, in the middle of the eleventh century, in his answer to the various objections and difficulties which had been raised by Michael Caerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, author of the second and final schism of the Byzantine Church,[37] reproached the Greeks with the custom of burying any Particles which might remain over after the Communion of the people at Holy Mass.
It is said that even to-day in many places throughout Greece upon the lips of the dead is laid a crumb of consecrated bread from the Eucharist. Out of reverence this has often been replaced by a fragment of pottery on which is cut the sign of the Cross with the legend Ι.Χ.ΝΙ.ΚΑ. (Jesus Christ conquers) at the four angles. Theodore Burt, The Cyclades, informs us that locally in Naxos the object thus employed is a wax cross with the letters Ι.Χ.Ν. imprinted thereon, and this moreover still bears the name ναῦλον, fare, showing that the tradition is closely connected with the old custom of placing the “ferryman’s coin” in the mouth of a dead man, the fee for Charon. Now Charon, who has assumed the form Charos, is entirely familiar to the modern Greek peasant, but his is not merely as classical literature depicts him, Portitor Stygis, the boatman of Styx, he is Death itself, the lord of ghosts and shadows. Until recent years, at all events, the practice prevailed in many parts of Greece of placing in the mouth (more rarely on the breast) of a deceased person a small coin, and in the district of Smyrna this was actually known as “passage-money,” to τὸ περατίκιον.[38] Yet strangely enough although both custom and name survived the reason for the coin had been forgotten, and for a century or more (save it might be obscurely in some very remote spot)[39] it was not associated in any way with Charos. Possibly the original meaning of the coin has vanished in the mists of dateless
