on Mendip and Butleigh, near Glastonbury as never having passed to the third generation. So did Cromwell’s generals and adherents transmit a troubled inheritance to their descendants. Fairfax House, Putney, had its haunted chamber which was never used.
It must be remembered that a solemn curse is not merely an expletive or an imprecatory exclamation, perhaps quite meaningless, but it is far more than this; it is significant and operative. The malediction is conceived as having a certain efficacious power, and it may be noted that this force if rightly launched does not seem to exhaust itself. No more terrible fate could be imagined than for a man to become a vampire, and this was the inevitable consequence if he were not cleared of a merited malison. The old proverb says:
Curses are like young chicken
And still come home to roost.[41]
This adage is terribly exemplified in the vampire who is supposed when he returns from his grave first to attack those who on earth have been his nearest and dearest. Of all curses the parental malediction is most dreaded, and curiously enough in Macedonia, Mr. Abbott tells us that a godfather is regarded with even greater respect than the actual parents and his “malediction is dreaded even more than that of a Bishop.”[42] At the present day in Greece many of the usual imprecations definitely refer to the fact that the person so cursed will become a vampire after death. Such imprecations as the following are in common use. “May the earth not receive him,” (Νὰ μήν τον δεχτᾐ ἡ γῆς); “May the ground not consume him” (Νὰ μήν τον φάγῃ τὸ χῶμα): “May the earth not digest thee” (Ἡ γῆ νὰ μή σε χωνέψῃ): “May the black earth spew thee up” (Ἡ μαύρη γῆ νά σ᾿ ἀναξεράσῃ); “Mayest thou remain incorrupt,” (Να μείνῃς ἄλυωτος); “May the earth not loose thee” which is to say may the body not decompose (Νὰ μή σε λυώσῃ ἡ γἠ); “May the ground reject thee” (Νά σε βγάλῃ τὸ χῶμα); “Mayest thou become in the grave like rigid wood” (Κουτοῦκι νὰ βγᾐς); “May the ground reject him wholly” (Τὸ χῶμα ᾿ξεράσ᾿ τόνε), which last phrase is the most terrible of all since it is nothing other than an unspeakably impious parody of the prayer which is uttered by the mourners at every Greek funeral Ὁθεὸς ᾿χωρέσ᾿ τόνε, “May God forgive him.”
