How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to avert them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment of early Corinthian pottery[491] now in the Berlin Museum reproduced in fig. 32. Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at work, but he is afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the Smasher and the rest. He has done what he can; a great owl is perched on the oven to protect it, and in front he has put a little ugly comic man, a charm to keep off evil spirits: he might have put a Satyr-head[492] or a Gorgoneion; he often did put both; it is all the same. Pollux[493] tells us it was the custom to put such comic figures (γελοῖα) before bronze-foundries; they could be either hung up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was ‘the aversion of ill-will’ (ἐπὶ φθόνου ἀποτροπῇ). These little images were also called βασκάνια or by the unlearned προβασκάνια, charms against the evil eye; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aristophanes[494] they formed part of the furniture of most people’s chimney corners at Athens. Of such βασκάνια the Gorgon mask was one and perhaps the most common shape. [Illustration: FIG. 32.] * * * * * In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and this Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus[495] in Hades would fain have held further converse with dead heroes, but ‘Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round in myriads manifold, Weird was the magic din they made, a pale-green fear gat hold Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread From Hades should send up an awful monster’s grizzly head.’ Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful monster is; all that is clear is that the head only is feared as an ἀποτρόπαιον, a bogey to keep you off. Whether he knew of an actual monster called a Gorgon is uncertain. The nameless horror may be the head of either man or beast, or monster compounded of both. In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the human Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast is good as a protective charm. Prof. Ridgeway[496] has conclusively shown that the Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head of the slain beast whose skin was the raiment of the primitive goddess; the head is worn on the breast, and serves to protect the wearer and to frighten his foe; it is a primitive half-magical shield. The natural head is later tricked out into an artificial bogey. [Illustration: FIG. 33.]