superstitious fear attached to omission of burial. But they were no more than theorists as to a belief which was widespread and which the invasion of Oriental magic was to revive. The curse-tablets often evoke, together with other demons, “those who are deprived of a sacred tomb” (ἄποροι τῆς ἱερᾶς ταφῆς).[164] They associate them with those who have died before their time or by a violent death.[165] Heliodorus[166] the romancer, a priest of Emesa in Syria, who probably lived in the third century, pictures for us a very characteristic scene: a child has been killed; a wizard takes its body, places it between two fires, and performs a complicated operation over it, in order to restore it to life by his incantations and to obtain a prediction of the future. “Thou forcest me to rise again and to speak,” the child complains, “taking no thought for my funeral and thus preventing me from mingling with the other dead.” For the shades of the nether world rejected one who had been left unburied.[167] These ancient beliefs, which the East shared with the West, were, more or less modified, to survive the downfall of paganism. If the Christians of the first centuries no longer feared that they would go to join the shades who wandered on the bank of the Styx, they were still pursued by the superstitious dread that they would have no part in the resurrection of the flesh if their bodies did not rest in the grave.[168] Nay, the terrors of former ages still haunt the Greeks of today. The people remain persuaded that those who have not had a religious funeral return to wander on the earth, and that, changed to bloody vampires, they punish men, and in particular their kin, for their neglect.[169] A nomocanon of the Byzantine Church orders that if the body of a ghost be found intact, when disinterred, its maleficent power thus being proved, it be burnt and a funeral service with an offering of meats be afterwards celebrated for its soul. This is exactly what was done in antiquity in order to appease the dead who had not been buried according to the rite, _rite conditi_. II THE NETHER WORLD