Читать книгу Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals онлайн

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But perchance Pan is not dead yet, or if dead not forgotten. And as this solitary modern story, if it be genuine, testifies to a longlived remembrance of his better qualities, so in the demonology of the middle ages a sterner aspect of his ancient character still secured to him men’s awe. Theocritus[139] gave voice to a well-known superstition when he made the goat-herd say: ‘Nay, shepherd, it may not be; in the noontide we may not pipe; ’tis Pan that we fear’; for in his rage if roused from his midday slumber he was believed to strike the intruder with ‘panic’ terror: and it was this superstition which influenced the translators of the Septuagint when they rendered the phrase, which in our Bible version of the Psalms[140] appears as ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday,’ by the words σύμπτωμα καὶ δαιμόνιον μεσημβρινόν. By the latter half of this phrase the memory of Pan was undoubtedly perpetuated; for in certain forms of prayer quoted by Leo Allatius[141] in the seventeenth century, among the perils from which divine deliverance is sought is mentioned more than once this ‘midday demon’; and a corresponding ‘daemon meridianus[142]’ found a place of equal dignity among the ghostly enemies of Roman Catholics.

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