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The Great Island
When they reach home he leaves her, for he must return to the grave.
She sees the garden naked, the trees withered.
She sees the balsam dried up, the costmary blackened,
She sees grass growing in front of her door. . . .
She knocks hard on the door, the windows creak.
‘If you are friend, come in, if you are enemy, go.
If you arc Death the bitter, I have no other sons,
And my poor Aretoula is far off in foreign lands.’
‘Get up, mother, open, sweet mother, get up.’
‘Who is that that knocks and calls me mother?’
‘Open up, open up, I am your Arete.’
She went in; they kissed; and together they died.
Thus the vampire need not be bad. But, even if it was bad luck which
made him into a vampire, once he has become one he is peculiarly
subject to the devil’s influence. I mentioned the Cretan vampire who
was banished to Santorin; this happened because Santorin was a
notorious haunt of revenants, and was regarded almost as their natural
home, where one more would make no difference. (The advantage of
banishment was that vampires are incapable of crossing salt water of
their own accord, and so could not come back. The formula of banishment
was potent to convey them across the sea,) Much of our evidence
for vampires comes, strangely, from a Jesuit priest, Father Richard,
who was on Santorin at the height of the trouble.
Father Richard believed in vampires. At first he thought they were
souls returning to ask help in escaping quickly from purgatory. But the
excesses they committed convinced him that diabolic possession was
the only explanation. This was, of course, orthodox belief. Leo Allatius
quotes an Orthodox ordinance: ‘It is impossible that a dead man should
become a vampire, save it be that the devil maketh these portents; and
men in their dreams see visions, and the dead man appears to have
flesh and blood and nails and hair. . . . [These things exist only ‘in
fantasy’.] But when such remains be found, the which, as we have
said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an
invocation of the Mother of God and to perform memorial services with
kollyva. ‘ 2
Leo also believed in vampires; he claimed actually to have seen one
in his youth on Chios. ‘It is great folly to deny altogether that such
bodies are found in the graves incorrupt, and that by use of them the
Devil, if God permits him, devises horrible plans to the hurt of the
Greek race.’ Now Leo and Father Richard and many other believers
were not unsophisticated; and it is clear that the existence of vampires
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