But the theology itself is more interesting than its material basis.
This witch--a good Christian, they told me, but a little mad, with a
madness however of which sane vine-growers were eager enough to avail
themselves--acknowledged certainly three gods: the unknown thunder-god
was clearly distinct from the god of the rain who was known to her: and
there was also the god of the waters under the earth, in whose service
she had perhaps followed the calling of a water-finder, and to whom she
ascribed, as did the ancients to Poseidon, the shaking of the earth.
Polytheism then even in its purely pagan form is not yet extinct in
Greece. In the disguise of Christianity, we shall see, it is everywhere
triumphant.
Among the Christian objects of worship--for I have already explained
that by the common-folk the saints are worshipped as deities--the
Trinity and the Virgin occupy the highest places, rivalled perhaps
here and there by some local saint of great repute for miracles, but
nowhere surpassed. It is the Virgin indeed who, in Pashley’s opinion,
‘is throughout Greece the chief object of the Christian peasant’s
worship[81]’; and certainly, I think, more numerous and more various
petitions are addressed to her than to any person of the Trinity or
to any saint. But the Trinity, or at any rate God (ὁ Θεός) and Christ
(ὁ Χριστός), as the peasants say,--for the Holy Ghost is hardly a
personality to them and is rarely named except in doxologies and formal
invocations--are of almost equal importance, and are so closely allied
with the Virgin that it is difficult to draw distinctions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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