And here too, while the various types of Callicantzari are still before
us, it is worth while to notice, at the cost of a short digression,
a curious principle which seems to govern the representation of
Callicantzari in those districts in which the belief in their power
of metamorphosis has been lost. On Mount Pelion and in Cyprus the
shapes which the Callicantzari are said to assume at will are those of
known and familiar objects--in the former place of women, bearded men,
and he-goats, in the latter of dogs, hares, donkeys, and camels--but
always complete and single shapes whether of man or beast; on the other
hand in the large majority of places in which the remembrance of this
power of transformation is lost, the Callicantzari are represented in
fanciful and abnormal shapes--hybrids as it were between men and such
animals as goat, ass, or ape. What appears to have happened in these
cases is that, as the belief in the metamorphosis of Callicantzari
was lost from the local folklore, a sort of compensation was made by
depicting them arrested in the process of transformation, arrested
halfway in the transition from man to beast. Now there are very few
parts of Greece in which this change in the superstition has not taken
place; and each island of the Greek seas, each district of the Greek
mainland--I had almost said each village, for the folklore like the
dialect of two villages no more than an hour’s journey apart may differ
widely--may be fairly considered to furnish separate instances on which
a general principle can be founded. The law then which seems to me to
have governed the evolution of Greek folklore is this, that a being of
some single, normal, and known shape who has originally been believed
capable of transforming himself into one or more other single, normal,
and known shapes, comes to be represented, when the belief in his power
of transformation dies out, as a being of composite, abnormal, and
fantastic shape, combining incongruous features of the several single,
normal, and known shapes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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