that these monsters--to judge from the folk-stories of the island--so
far outnumber there all other kinds of ‘pagan’ beings that this one
species has almost appropriated to itself the generic name, or that in
old time, when the word παγανά, ‘pagan,’ was still understood in the
sense which we attribute to it, these monsters were deemed specially
‘pagan’ because, as we shall see later, they delight in disturbing a
season of Christian gladness. But elsewhere the term, still employed
in what must have been its original meaning, comprises all kinds of
non-Christian deities; and in earlier times ‘the pagan ones’ was
probably as frequent an expression as its synonym ‘the extraneous
ones.’ To these may perhaps be added the rare appellation recorded
by Schmidt[114], τσίνια: for if the derivation from τζίνα, ‘fraud,’
‘deceit,’ be right, it will mean ‘the false gods.’
Besides these three names, which indicate the pre-Christian origin
of these deities, there are several others--some in universal usage,
others local and dialectic,--which represent them in various aspects.
As a class of ‘divinities’ they are called δαιμόνια: as ‘apparitions,’
whose precise nature often cannot be further determined, φάσματα or
φαντάσματα and, in Crete, σφανταχτά[115]: as swift and ‘sudden’ in
their coming and going, ξαφνικά[116]: as ghostly and passing like a
vision, εἰδωλικά: as denizens, for the most part, of the air, ἀερικά:
and from their similarity to angels, ἀγγελικά.
It may seem strange that the first and the last of these terms,
δαιμόνια and ἀγγελικά, should be practically interchangeable; for
the Church at any rate did her best in early days to make the former
understood in the sense of ‘demons’ or ‘devils’ rather than ‘deities.’
But the attempted change of meaning seems to have failed to make much
impression on a people who did not view goodness as an essential of
godhead; and in later times the Church herself, or many of her less
educated clergy at any rate, surrendered to the popular ideas. Father
Richard[117], a Jesuit resident during the seventeenth century in the
island of Santorini, mentions the case of an old Greek priest who had
long made a speciality of exorcism and was prepared to expel angels and
demons alike from the bodies of those who were afflicted by them. The
priest when questioned by the Jesuit as to what distinction he drew
between demons and angels, replied that the demons came from hell,
while the angels were ἀερικόν τι, a species of aërial being; but while
he maintained a theoretical difference between them, his practice
betrayed a belief that both were equally harmful. Exorcism had to be
employed in cases of ‘angelic’ as well as of ‘demoniacal’ possession;
and Father Richard details the cruelties and tortures inflicted upon a
woman suspected of the former in order to make the pernicious angelic
spirit within her confess its name. The characters of δαιμόνια and
ἀγγελικά are in fact the same, and the subtle theological distinctions
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