GREEK MAGIC AND MENTAL ILLNESS.
Gillian Bouras*
You see before you a suitable case for treatment. Well, I suppose we all are, to some degree. Humans cling to the illusion of control, to the notion that we are masters of our fates and captains of our souls, but when that veil of illusion tears, as it so often does, the results can often be disastrous in terms of our emotional and mental wellbeing. I think we all have the potentiality to suffer some kind of mental illness, and the experts seem to agree that one in three of us have suffered, or will suffer, an episode of what used to be called nervous breakdown.
The title of this paper is, in a sense, drawn from life: mine. (What else is new? many would ask!) My family has a demonstrated genetic tendency towards marked mood disorder, and I have spent the best part of 30 years in a haunted world, one in which many people still believe in the existence of supernatural beings, and in the power of magic.
My highly educated neighbour informs me that my late mother-in-law was a white witch, that he and I, luckily, live in an area of white magic rather than black, but that other villagers worry about me because I persist in walking in fairy-infested areas. ‘And fairies love writers,’ he told me ominously, and went on to warn me that I could be whisked away any old time. Well, I live in hope.
There is, of course, magic all around us: the magic of land, sea and sky and the whole natural world, the magic of science, the magic of human individuality. (I think cloning might turn out to be fairly boring.)
I know nothing about quantum physics, but a dear friend has pointed out that the work of the late great David Bohm is in effect a statement that magic happens, and is explicable: one particle in one area can affect a particle in another, even though the information from the first cannot have reached the second. At the other end of the creative spectrum, so to speak, it is the novelist’s job to remind us that things are not as simple as we think: a novelist often tears the veil in his/her own way.
Most traditional cultures, as far as I can tell, seek some sort of balance via magic: what is uncertain in the natural world can be explained and accounted for in the supernatural one, and it is part of being human, I think, to long for certainty. Whereas the pioneer believed in linear progress because he had to, that being the main reason for migration and pioneering, the peasant experienced, and still experiences, a kind of cyclic repetition, which all too often features various forms of ambush. Historically, the Greek peasant felt helpless in the face of disease, hardship and famine, the threat of the Turks, brigands and pirates, and the actions of hostile neighbours. Belief in magic and the practice of its prescribed rituals helped people in an agricultural society maintain that all-important illusion of control.
Oversimplifying wildly as one must in a short time for presentation and discussion, I would suggest that the development of the Greek world can be seen as involving movement from the pagan beliefs of ancient times, when people believed that suffering was brought about by the anger or the envy of the gods, through the folklore and superstition inherited from Byzantium, with its deeply-held conviction of a demon-inhabited world, to the consolation of Christian Orthodoxy.
Modern Greeks are almost always overtly devout, but have no difficulty in believing in both magic and religion. And indeed it can be argued that both are very closely related, even though magic is based on the principle of causality, while religion is based on that of the miraculous. Religion, however, has won more social approval over time.
In this land of dazzling light, a preoccupation with eyes is hardly to be wondered at. In most churches, a large Eye occupies a central position at the top of the iconostasis, the wall of icons that separates the main body of the church from the holy place that only males can enter. (I will draw a thick feminist veil over my thoughts on this particular matter.)
This Eye is a symbol of the all-seeing and omnipotent God the Father. (But well before the birth of Christ Athenian ships had a blue eye painted on their prows, and it is thought that this custom originated in Ancient Egypt.) The dark side of this benevolent Eye symbol is to mati, the Evil Eye, and the force of the demonic world. (Most Greek infants wear an Eye of God brooch in order to protect them from the Evil Eye, babies being extremely vulnerable, as are brides, new mothers and the very old.) The Evil Eye belief is based on the idea that harm can be caused by either a look or the spoken word.
The Eye is envious, because the human eye is never satisfied: it always wants more, and it always envies beauty and innocence, any sort of perfection. Admiration tempts the Eye to do its worst, can make one ill to the point of wasting away, and can ruin any business venture or wreck any house.
My own education with regard to the Eye: I am one of those women who is quite soppy about little babies, but I soon learned never to say anything good about a Greek baby, no matter how beautiful he/she was. But if I absolutely had to comment, I was told to dry-spit (Phtou! Phtou!), as this practice renders the Eye powerless: dryspitting, interestingly enough, is part of the Orthodox baptismal ceremony. The use of the colours red and blue is another way of combating the Eye: the Czar of all the Russias always wore demon-defying red on Easter Day.
Weighty tomes such as The Dangerous Hour, by anthropologists Richard and Eva Blum, have been written about Greek magic, and if I were even to attempt a summary of all that is known about the subject, we would be here all day. Suffice it to say that there is a huge list of preventative measures that can be taken against the Evil Eye or against just plain bad luck. Drivers often have a bulb of garlic, encased in a little net of blue, hanging from the rear-vision mirror, while gold coins are a source of good power, gold being a symbol of eternity.
People often wear black knotted bracelets (33 knots, with one knot for every year of Christ’s life) and/or carry little embroidered pouches in their purses or pockets: these pouches traditionally contain rue, salt, gunpowder, peppercorns, a tiny piece of cloth soaked in oil from the Wednesday of Holy Week, and a piece of paper on which the Lord’s Prayer is written backwards. In the first hours of Easter Day the candle from the Holy Liturgy is carried, still alight, to each house, where a smoky Cross is described on the top part of the architrave of the front door. Not only is the Cross allpowerful, but the house is protected from the Evil Eye’s envy because its beauty is no longer perfect.
There is an overall belief, at least among villagers, in the power of spells and curses. And in an interesting parallel with the beliefs of the Australian Aborigine, autosuggestion also seems to have a great deal of power.
As magic has always been with us, so has mental illness: it was certainly well-known to the ancient Greeks, as a study of the classical tragedies and their choruses will prove. Hippocrates, in whose home/patritha we are so fortunate to be gathered during the course of this conference, was well aware of it. His theory of the four humours needs no explanation to this company, but the theory, particularly the part of it that attaches melancholia to an excess of black bile, has remained significant throughout the centuries. As has his view that what is needed in the human psyche is isonomia, a balance: that is to say, none of the four humours should dominate any of the others.
Further on in time, a supernatural explanation of mental illness was advanced. It is of course recorded in the New Testament that Christ cast out the demons that were inhabiting the minds and bodies of the afflicted; He passed that power on to the disciples, and exorcism is still a vital part of Orthodox belief. The supernatural explanation of mental illness has persisted for a very long time, and during that time the clergy were most often the equivalent of modern psychotherapists.
The conference subject is Challenges in Law, Medicine and Science. The process of confronting and working with challenges involves the asking of questions. The question I have been asking myself with regard to my particular topic is: What happens in a society like Greece when it is forced to progress, for various reasons, from a notion of mental illness being caused by sin, the Evil Eye, or demonic possession to another notion: that of the disease model of modern medicine?
One answer is that of marked resistance to progress. As the product of Australian pioneering and Nonconformist stock, I have had continual problems with Greek fatalism. The old yiayiathes/grannies cross themselves and say Oti thelei o Theos/ Whatever God wants. My grannies regarded any crossing of breasts as Papist nonsense, and were prone to muttering: God helps those who help themselves. The fatalism I have just mentioned has led in the past to an acceptance of situations that were, in the eyes of many, quite simply unacceptable.
Some of you may recall the major Greek scandal of 1989, which involved the Leros mental hospital: sufferers were to be found wandering around half naked and almost totally neglected, and there were only two psychiatrists for approximately 1100 patients. This, in spite of the fact that under the provisions of the EEC regulation 815/84 Greece had begun to receive subsidies for the modernization and scaling down of the institutional approach to psychiatric medicine.
An anecdote of relevance. Some years ago a handsome young shepherd named Yianni, a neighbour of mine, was going about the business of tending his flock when he sustained a severe shock: another villager, an older man, had hanged himself from the branch of an olive tree. The poor boy had to cut the body down, and to this day has never recovered from this traumatic experience.
My inevitably modern response, not that it was any of my business and of course I never expressed it, ran along the lines of doctors, counsellors and anti-depressants. This was not the response favoured by the people closest to Yianni. Church and priests were the answer. Very unfortunately, this solution has not worked: Yianni’s health, both physical and mental, is very precarious, and his marriage broke down long ago. I hesitate to suggest that modern methods would necessarily have been more efficacious, but I do not hesitate to point out village conservatism and resistance to anything, any idea or practice, that is remotely different. Doctors in general are still on a pedestal, but psychiatrists and psychologists most definitely are not, and anything that can be construed as mental illness carries with it the terrible burden of stigma.
The stigma attached to mental illness has of course been a problem everywhere. My sister, who spent periods of time in various psychiatric hospitals in Melbourne in the course of her very sad life, believed that nobody ever felt quite at ease with any person known to have been in a so-called mental hospital. She fell ill in the 1960s; it is encouraging to note that things are considerably different in the Australia of today. Greek village society, however, encourages the formation of the false self. (Of course it is not the only society that does so.) It has very firm answers to the question What is normal? And expects the afflicted to endure any amount of suffering. In the case of Yianni, there seemed to be no understanding of hypersensitivity, lack of resilience, environmental input, and the incidence of shock in the form of a triggering life event. Villages are bad places in which to be depressed or different; despite popular notions, they are not romantic havens, but rather places in which cast-iron formulae, developed over the sort of passage of time that Australians of Anglo-Celtic background cannot hope to understand, control every part of life.
Resistance to change is one of a number of peasant strategies for survival. So is the demand for social conformity, to the point where there are recorded cases of parents having preferred their children to stay in hospital, even though doctors have declared them fit for discharge.
It is of great interest to me that in Internet researches about the mental illness scene in Greece, I have learned far more from Australian sources than Greek ones. (Of course, the links between Greece and Australia are now a tradition, and so this Australian involvement in the Greek scene is only natural.)
For example, the Victorian Multicultural Commission reports that as late as 2003 there were no official statistics for mental disorders and disabilities within the general Greek population.
But the Hellenic Psychiatric Association is now very active, and a Balkan psychiatric conference is to take place in Thessaloniki just as we are about to set out for home, wherever home may be. Slowly but surely, the Greek psychiatric scene is changing, and for the better. As part of the EU’s directive five mental hospitals are to be closed, and 467 community support services established. Easing the transition in attitudes is naturally of vital importance.
On Sunday 16 September 2007 there was a general election in Greece. For a number of years now, the various and successive Ministers for Health have committed themselves to working towards reform in the area of mental health, and towards removing the stigma of mental illness from the general Greek perception. That is the challenge. But in fact it is not merely the challenge in Greece, but the challenge everywhere.
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* Gillian Bouras is an Australian born writer, now resident near Kalamata, Greece
Copyright 2007. Greek Legal and Medical Conference