CHAPTER SEVENTEEN DEFINING THE DREADFUL: REMARKS ON THE GREEK CHILD-KILLING

Sarah Iles Johnston

At the beginning of his fifteenth Idyll, Theocritus portrays two women who are trying to get out of the house and have some fun at the annual festival for Adonis. 1 What holds them back is a child who, in the manner of all children about to be left behind with babysitters, is protesting loudly. Finally, in line 40, his exasperated mother says to him, "I will not take you with me, child. , the horse, bites!" (ouK a~ro tu, tEKVOV. MOPIJ.cO &ilcvet i1t1t0<;). The reference to Mormo is intended to scare the child into quieting down. The scholiast on the passage implies that the mother is reminding the child that such as Mormo lurk outside in the dark; another scholiast explains that Mormo was the name of a phasma who killed children. 2 In this essay, I will discuss not magic per se, but rather the na­ ture of the beast against whom magic was directed-or at least, the nature of one beast: the child-killing demon.J I will react in par­ ticular to the works of two other scholars. The first is Walter Burkert's monograph on Oriental influences on Greek culture. Burkert briefly suggested there that two Greek child-killing demons named and Gello were derived from Near Eastern demons

1 I am grateful for the helpful conunents made by participants in the Kansas conference on Magic in the Ancient World after I delivered the oral version of this paper, particularly conunents by David Frankfurter and JoAnn Scurlock. Work on the written version was facilitated by grants from The Melton Center for Jewish Studies at The Ohio State University and Ohio State's College of Hu­ manities. This essay is offered to Oliver Phillips in thanks for his encouragement and instruction during my years at the University of Kansas. 2 Schol. on Theoc. 15.40: ['H J.u\trtp] mrmtpelll£ t0v lhyov lfpb:; m ~tatliov 'to ICAdiov, ml ~mv, oiJK iil;ro ae, 'ttlCVOv, ~'t' tJ.wu, lm it J.WPJ.!d> 'bmo; 8tiJCVet. Schol. on Aristid. p. 41 Dindorf. Mormo frequently is identified with Lamia and Gello, two other child-killing demons (below, note 18). C£ also the remarks ofErinn., Distaff line 25; Lib. Or. 30.38.12 and 33.42.7; Str. Geo. 1.2.8. 25 and 43; and Xen. Hell. 4.4.17.7, attesting to children's fear of Mormo. 3 I include, however, an afterword on magical means of combatting this type of demon. 362 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN such as Lamashtu and Galh1.4 One of my goals will be to evaluate Burkert's suggestion: can the origin of any of the Greek child­ killing demon's traits securely be traced to the East? Need we seek them there? The second work is Jonathan Z. Smith's 1978 article "Towards Interpreting Demonic Powers in Hellenistic and Roman Antiq­ uity."5 Smith suggested that the scholarly quest for the "roots" of Greek demonology among other cultures, including those of the Near East, was misguided; in fact, he noted, it placed scholars in the same situation as the ancient themselves, who sought to explain away anything dark or mysterious within their culture as having been borrowed from the Persians, Egyptians, Chaldeans, et cetera-as being anything but "Greek." Smith suggested that our energies would be better spent examining how Greek and Roman demonological beliefs functioned within those cultures themselves. In particular, he developed the precepts set forth by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger by arguing that the demonic frequently serves as a classificatory marker that is part of a larger system of boundaries used to express or reinforce a society's values. Smith sees this as working in one of two ways: "negative valence is attached to things which escape place (the chaotic, the rebellious, the distant) or things found just outside the place where they properly belong (the hybrid, the deviant, the adjacent)." He goes on to note that: The most frequent form of demons is that of a hybrid or monster, a pro­ tean figure capable of a range of transformations or as a being with super­ fluous parts .... the demonic is frequently characterized by the extremes of being either hard and cold (e.g., Satan's penis which is often described in witchcraft literature as being made of hom or iron and icy to the touch) or squishy and rotten (i.e., overheated) .... To translate this range: de­ mons are perceived as being either overdefined or underdetermined. De­ mons serve as classificatory markers which signal what is strong and weak, controlled and exaggerated in a given society at a given moment. Smith's suggestions apply well to the study of demons in general. Before we consider the Greek child-killing demons, however, I

4 W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution, trans. Margaret E. Pinder and W. Burkert (1984; Eng. trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 82-87. See also now David R. West, "Gello and Lamia: Two Hellenic Daemons of Semitic Origin," Ugarit-Forschung 23 (1991): 361-68 (volume 23 was available in early 1993; West's work kindly was brought to my attention by Richard Beat). 5 ANRW, 2.16.1 425-39.