The Vampire: A Casebook by Alan Dundes

Author:Alan Dundes [Dundes, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference - Paranormal
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 1998-09-25T05:43:00+00:00

Although the arrangement of the mourners varies in different parts, it is not random. The procedure is strict and formal; one of the kinswomen usually leads off, helped by the rest who wail in chorus, and then, when the chief mourner from the other side wishes to "take up" the dirge, she stretches her hand over the body and grasps the hand of the mourner on the left. By this silent stretching of the hand, the dirge is passed over from one group to the other all day long.

In the light of the pattern observed in North Euboea, and in the light also of the general fear in Greece of cats (and by inference anything else) crossing the body, it seems legitimate to interpret this passage as describing not a movement crossing over the body, but one which is circular and goes around it. Thus if one takes the chief mourner who stretches her hand "over the body" and grasps the hand of the mourner "on the left" to be stretching out her left hand to the right hand of the mourner opposite to her at the body's head or foot, this is consistent with a movement not in fact across the body but around it, and in a right-handed direction. And it is striking that the action of stretching out the left hand to take the leader's right is the way in which people used to enter the dance, for traditionally those who wished to join the dance always entered at the head of the line. Thus in the district of Ambeli the dance pattern, invariably associated with a right-handed (anticlockwise) auspicious movement, used to be repeated in the singing of laments, so that the lament, taken from the left and given to the right, and similarly, received by one person and given by another, was, although sung antiphonally by two groups, not exchanged to and fro but passed symbolically on and on in a continuous right-handed circle.

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