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For the object-oriented programming language, see Gello Expression Language.

Gello (Template:Lang-el), in Greek mythology, is a female demon or revenant who threatens the reproductive cycle by causing infertility, spontaneous abortion, and infant mortality. By the Byzantine era, the gelloudes (γελλούδες) were considered a class of beings. Women believed to be under demonic possession by gelloudes might stand trial or be subjected to exorcism.

Gyllou, Gylou, or Gillo are some of its aliases.

Etymology

Walter Burkert[1] and M.L. West both derive the name Gello from the name of the Babylonian–Assyrian gallū, a demonic revenant believed to bring sickness and death,[2] whose name may be related the later word ghoul.[3]

Greeks folk etymology links the word to the root gel-, "grin, laugh," in the sense of mocking or grimacing, like the expression often found on the face of the Gorgon, to which Barb linked the reproductive demons in origin.[4] Such demons are often associated with or said to come from the sea, and demonologies identify Gyllou with Abyzou, whose name is related to abyssos, the abyss or "deep."[5]

Classical Antiquity

According to ancient myth, Gello was a young woman who died a virgin, and returned as a ghost (Template:Lang-el, phantasma) to do harm to the children of others. The myth is given as an explanation to a proverb by the 2nd-century compiler Zenobius.[6][7] It is noted that Sappho mentioned her, implying that Gello was a feared bane of children at least as far back as the 6th century BC.[8][a]

The lexicographer Hesychius who wrote in the 5th or 6th century AD but drew from earlier lexicons glossed Gello (Template:Lang-el) as a ghost (eidolon) who attacked both virgins and newborn babies.[10][11]

Gello, Lamia, and Mormo due to their similar nature, have often been confounded since the Early Middle Ages.[12] All three also originated as individual women (each with her own origin myth or aition) in Ancient Greece, but later developed into a type of frightening apparitions or demons, as noted by modern commentators.[b][13]

Byzantine Period

The gello eventually came to be regarded as a type of being, rather than an individual revenant. The plural form gelloudes, not found in Ancient Greek, came into existence in the Byzantine period,[14] and used in the 7th–8th century by the patriarch John of Damascus, in his treatise peri Stryggōn (περί Στρυγγῶν), "Regarding striges").[15] The gelloudes (γελοῦδες) were considered synonymous to the stryggai Template:Lang-el; striges) or "witches" by him, and described as beings that flew nocturnally, slipped unhindered into houses even when windows and doors were barred, and strangled infants.[16]

The polymath Michael Psellus of the 11th century inherited the notion that the striggai and gelloudes were "interchangeable".[15] He described them as being that "suck blood and devour all the vital fluids which are in the little infant".[17] Psellus documents a widened scope of the Gello's victims in the belifes of the 11th century. Gello were being held responsible for the deaths of pregnant women and their fetuses as well.[18] Gello (or Gillo) was also blamed for the condition of newborn infants who wasted away, and such infants were called Gillobrota (Γιλλόβρωτα), according to Psellus.[19][20]

Psellus sought in vain for Ancient Greek sources of these beliefs, and formulated the theory that the gello derived from the Hebrew Lilth.[17] Psellus also stated that the name "Gillo" could not be discovered in his usual sources for demonic names in antiquity, and was found in an esoteric or "occult" (ἀπόκρυφος) Hebrew book ascribed to Solomon.[21][22] Lter, the 17th-century Greek Catholic scholar Leo Allatios would criticize Psellos's confounding of the gello and Lilith.[23]

The 14th-century Greek ecclesiastical historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos said gelloudes "bring the infant from the bedroom, as if about to devour him."[24]

Corporeal and phantom forms

Although reports of Gello's behavior are consistent, her nature is less determinate. In the 7-8th century, John of Damascus equated the gello with the strix that sometimes appeared in spirit form while at other times had solid bodies and wore clothing.[25]

The strix could be regarded an "unclean spirit" (akátharton pneuma) in the context of the excorcism of demons, but a human ghost in the context of an aition; not only did she have a previous life as a human being, her gendered nature ruled her out as either demon or angel, which was officially sexless in the theology of the Church.[26] Johnston prefers to use the Greek word aōrōs, "untimely dead," for this form of transgressive or liminal soul or entity, finding the usual phrase "child-killing demon" to be misleading.[27]

From virgin to hag

It has also been pointed out by modern commentators that even though the original Gello was a young woman who died a virgin, as the term gelloudes became synonymous with stryggai or "witches", there they were generally becoming identified with old envious crones in the in the Christian era.[28]

Leo Allatios explicitly cross-identifies striges and gelloudes, recasting the demonic or revenant gello of Eastern tradition as the witch of Western Europe, who is often marginalized by age and poverty.[29]

Protections against Gello

The Late Antiquity magico-medical compilation Cyranides provides defensive spells against the "frightful woman" (horrida mulier[30]) who attacks babies. The eagle-stone or aetites is to be worn as an amulet to prevent miscarriage, to assure timely and complication-free delivery, and to relieve delirium and night terrors associated with Gello and other revenants.[31] A cross or image of Christ might be placed by a child's bed to ward off Gello or demons in general; burning lamps to illuminate sacred images and incense were also used in the bedroom. The practice of baptizing infants was thought to offer protection against demon-snatching, and specifically against the gello, according to Leo Allatios. Allatios also records, but does not condone, the hanging of red coral or a head of garlic[c] on the infant's cot, along with other remedies he finds too unspeakable to name.[32]

The names of Gello

Aramaic inscriptional evidence of a child-snatching demon appears on a silver lamella (metal-leaf sheet) from Palestine and two incantation bowls dating to the 5th or 6th century; on these she is called Sideros (Greek for iron, a traditional protection for women during childbirth). Under various names, she continues to appear in medieval Christian manuscripts written in Greek, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Romanian, Slavonic, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew. In literary texts and on amulets, the demon's adversaries are Solomon, saints, or angels.[33][d]

Knowledge of a demon's name was required to control or compel it; a demon could act under an alias. Redundant naming is characteristic of magic charms, "stressing," as A.A. Barb noted in his classic essay "Antaura",[34] "the well-known magic rule that the omission of a single one can give the demons a loophole through which they can work their harm."[35]

In one Greek tale set in the time of “Trajan the King,” the demon under torture reveals her “twelve and a half names”:

My first and special name is called Gyllou; the second Amorphous; the third Abyzou; the fourth Karkhous; the fifth Brianê; the sixth Bardellous; the seventh Aigyptianê; the eighth Barna; the ninth Kharkhanistrea; the tenth Adikia; (…)[36] the twelfth Myia; the half Petomene.[37]

Elsewhere, the twelve-and-a-half names are given as Gylo, Morrha, Byzo, Marmaro, Petasia, Pelagia, Bordona, Apleto, Chomodracaena, Anabardalaea,[38] Psychoanaspastria, Paedopniktria, and Strigla.[39][e] Although magic words (voces magicae) have often been corrupted in transmission or deliberately exoticized,[40] several of these names suggest recognizable Greek elements and can be deciphered as functional epithets: Petasia, "she who strikes"; Apleto, "boundless, limitless"; Paedopniktria, "child suffocator." Byzo is a form of Abyzou, abyssos, "the Deep," to which Pelagia ("she of the sea") is equivalent.[41]

Gello and her adversaries

In Byzantine sources, the adversary of Gello is often St. Sisinnius or Sisoe, whose defeat of her is his most renowned deed. On amulets, Sisinnius is depicted as a horseman bearing down with his spear on the female demon, who has fish- or serpent-like attributes below the waist.[42] In one Byzantine folktale, Gello slips into a heavily guarded castle by disguising herself as a fly on the saint's horse, since only Sisinnius could pass through the gate.[43][f]

There is an Ethiopian tradition in which the sister of Sisinnius was possessed by a demon and killed newborns. When Sisinnius became a Christian, he murdered her. In a Byzantine version,[44] Sisinnius defends his sister Melitene's children from the demon Gyllou.[45] A sample narrative of Melitene's travails against the gelu may be found online.

A 15th-century manuscript describes an encounter between the archangel Michael and Gylou:

The archangel Michael said to her, 'Where have you come from and where are you going?' The abominable one answered and said, 'I am going off to a house and, entering it like a snake, like a dragon, or like some reptile, I will destroy the animals. I am going to strike down women; I will make their hearts ache, I will dry up their milk … I will strangle [their] children, or I will let them live for a while and then kill them' … .[46]

Although the name Gylou is not found on any surviving amulets, Michael is the adversary Gylou encounters most often in medieval Byzantine texts.[47]

Modern interpretations

Envy

Johnston offers an interpretation of the "reproductive demons" social significance:

By making Gello a virgin and Lamia and Mormo mothers who had lost their children, myth reiterated the message that a Greek woman's life was defined by successful reproduction and that women who failed to live up to this goal belonged in the dark and marginal world of the restless dead rather than in the human world. … Greek tradition was also normative in that it censured the real acts of killing a child or impeding reproduction. By going further, however, and describing these ghosts as envious — by virtually making them personifications of envy — tradition also censured the envy itself. 'This is where reproductive envy leads,' the myths seem to say, 'to exclusion from humanity and an eternity spent in restless wandering.'[48]

The protections against Gellou, as an embodiment of envy, resemble those against the evil eye.[49] One exorcism text dating from around the turn of the 19th–20th century gives Baskania as a name for the gello as well as for the evil eye.[50]

The gello and the Church

Leo Allatios collected beliefs pertaining to Gello

The psychological aspects of Gello were observed also by Leo Allatios in his work De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinionibus ("On the beliefs of the Greeks today"). Textual sources he collected on the Gello included Sappho's poem, the Suda,[51] exorcisms, a church history, the Life of Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople written by Ignatius the Deacon, and proverbs. Allatios's purpose was to demonstrate the continuity of customs and morals,[52] but also to show that these beliefs distorted or ran contrary to Christian doctrine. Sometimes the acts characteristic of Gello were attributed to "poor and miserable old crones," who could be accused in court as gelloudes and might even claim or confess to have acted as such. In his Life of Tarasios, Ignatius the Deacon recounts an actual case in which two women were charged as gelloudes and brought before his subject's father, who acquitted them.[53] Penance might be prescribed for confessed gelloudes, and is found specified in a few Nomocanons, or collections of ecclesiastical law. Michael Psellos, however, rejected the notion that human beings could transform into demonic beings, and so there would be no need for a particular penance; the official position of Orthodoxy was that such creatures did not exist.[54]

Despite her official non-existence, the gello is named in exorcisms, which required the attendance of a priest, and in prayer formularies. The Virgin Mary is invoked against the child-harming demon gylo:

Therefore I pray, my Lady, for your swiftest aid, so that the children of these your servants N and N[55] may grow up, and that they may live and give thanks in the sight of the Lord for all the days of their lives. Thus let it be, my Lady. Listen to me, a sinner and unworthy servant and although I am a sinner, do not despise my poor and miserable prayer but protect the children of your servants and let them live and send the Angel of Light so that he may protect and defend them from all evil, from wicked spirits, and from fiends which are in the air, and do not let them be singled out by other <demons> and by the accursed gylo lest harm comes to them and their children.[56]

In one exorcism of the gello, no fewer than 36 saints are invoked by name along with Mary and the "318 Saints of the Fathers", with a final addendum of "all the saints."[57] Some prayers resemble magic spells in attempting to command or compel the saints, rather than humbly requesting aid.[58] Exorcisms emphasize that Christian families deserve exclusive protection.[59] Gello continued to be named in exorcisms into the 20th century.[52]

In early Christianity, a program of exorcism was preliminary to baptism as a kind of purification and to drive away evil spirits, and not necessarily because the person was thought to be possessed. The ambiguous state of the unbaptized is expressed by conflicting views of the infant: that the newborn had not sinned, and that the newborn nonetheless bore the pollution of original sin and was thus closer to the Devil than to God.[60] The travel writer Sonnini de Manoncourt recorded[61] that the Greeks called an unbaptized child drako (or dracon, "serpent, python,[62] dragon"). At baptism, the name Drako is shed and replaced with a Christian name. The names of Gylo include Chomodracaena, containing drakaina, "female dragon." In one text dealing with the gello, she is banished to the mountains to drink the blood of the drako; in another, she becomes a drako and in this form attacks human beings. In other texts, the child itself is addressed as Abouzin (Abyzou).[63]

In ancient and medieval medical texts, a child was thought to be conceived from the father's "seed" and the mother's blood. The gello, herself infertile and envious, aimed to drink blood, the source of fertility, and was attracted to the dangerous time of birth and recovery in part because the new mother was regarded in Judaeo-Christian tradition as unclean;[64] this state of pollution was congenial to demons.[65] As long as the infant remained exclusively within the birth mother's sphere of influence, it was vulnerable to female demons seeking blood. In the story of Melitene, sister of the saints Sisinnios and Sisynodorus, the child is in peril until it is "returned" to the hands of men. In one version, the gello swallows the child and must be forced by the male saints to regurgitate it alive. This cycle — death by swallowing, regurgitation, new life — may be symbolized in initiation ceremonies such as baptism, which marked the separation of the child from the taint of its mother's gello-attracting blood.[66]

Modern folklore

The Greek folk belief continued into the modern era.[10]

Modern Luciferianism

Gyllou is featured in a major text of modern Luciferianism, a belief system that venerates Lucifer. In The Bible of the Adversary by Michael W. Ford, she is associated with Lilith and represents Vampyrism as a desire for eternal life.[67]

  • Gello (here spelled "Gilou") is the primary antagonist of Jessie D. Eaker's short story The Name of the Demoness, featured in the sixth Sword and Sorceress anthology. She appears as a dog-headed woman with snakes for fingers who steals newborn babies, and her many names are a major plot point.[68]
  • The "gylou" or "handmaiden devil" is an all-female species of devil in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. They are also known as "Maids of Miscarriage" and are noted to particularly hate babies.[69]
Adam clutches a child in the presence of the child-snatcher Lilith

Scholarly discussions of Gello associate her with and analyze the meaning of her narrative traditions in relation to the following demons and supernatural beings:

Explanatory notes

  1. ^ In fact, the proverb, "Fonder of children than Gello" is generally considered a fragment of Sappho's poem.[9].
  2. ^ Sarah Iles Johnston employs the phrase "reproductive demons" for the three beings.
  3. ^ Garlic is perhaps most familiar as a folkloric protection against vampires; see Vampire: Protection.
  4. ^ It is unlikely but not impossible that the demon Sideros is related to the Greek mythological figure Sidero.
  5. ^ The names are transliterated as Gylou, Morra, Byzou, Marmarou, Petasia, Pelagia, Bordona, Apletou, Chamodrakaina, Anabardalaia, Psychanospastria, Paidopniktria and Strigla in Ryan, William Francis (1999), The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, Penn State Press, p. 246.
  6. ^ There are many versions of this story; often it is the Devil himself who enters disguised as a grain of millet or a clump of dirt in the horseshoe.

References

Citations
  1. ^ Burkert, Walter (1992), The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, Harvard University Press, pp. 82–87.
  2. ^ M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, reprinted 2003), pp. 58–59 [1] and 111. On gallû, see also W.H.Ph. Römer, "The Religion of Ancient Mesopotamia," in Historia Religionum: Religions of the Past (Brill, 1969), p. 182 online.
  3. ^ Barb (1966), p. 5.
  4. ^ Barb (1966), "Antaura," passim, and Burkert (1992), p. 82 ("evil grinning").
  5. ^ For Barb's etymology of Abyzou and the connection to the primeval sea, see Abyzou: Origins.
  6. ^ 'Fonder of children than Gello' is a saying applied to women who die prematurely (aōros), or to those fond of children who ruin them with their upbringing. For Gello was a maiden (parthenos) who died prematurely (aōros), and as the people of Lesbos say, her ghost (phāntasma) haunts little children and she is to blame for occurrences of premature deaths (aōron). Sappho mentions her". (translated after Johnston (2013), Restless Dead, p. 173 (adapted from the Loeb Classical Library edition), and Barnstone (2009), p. 181.
  7. ^ Zenobius, Proverbs 3.3 (in Greek with notes in Latin).
  8. ^ Johnston (2013).
  9. ^ "Γελλώ παιδοφιλοτέρα (Gello paidophilotera. [She is] [even] fonder of children than Gello)". Sappho, frg. 178 in Poeta Lesbiorum fragmenta, edited by Edgar Lobel and Denys Page (Oxford 1955), p. 101; translated Barnstone (2009), p. 20. Also explained in Hartnup (2004), pp. 35, 85–86, 149–150.
  10. ^ a b Johnston (2013), p. 166.
  11. ^ Hesychius (of Alexandria) (1858). Alberti, Johann; Schmidt, Moritz; Menge, Rudolf (eds.). Hesychios: Hesychii alexandrini Lexicon post Ioannem Albertum. Vol. 1. sumptibus F. Maukii. p. 421. Γελ(λ)ώ : είδωλον Ἔμπούσης το τών ἀώρων, τών παρθένων
  12. ^ Lawson (1910), p. 173.
  13. ^ Johnston (2013), p. 164.
  14. ^ Johnston (2013), p. viii.
  15. ^ a b Lawson (1910), p. 178.
  16. ^ John of Damascus, Peri strygnōn I, p. 143 (περί Στρυγγῶν), Migne ed., Patrologia Graeca xciv, p. 1604, quoted in translation, and cited in Lawson (1910), pp. 178, 181
  17. ^ a b Hartnup (2004), pp. 85–86.
  18. ^ Psellus in Leo Allatios, De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus epistola (1643), §3, cited by Johnston (1995), p. 366: "The Byzantine scholar Michael Psellus reports that in his day, Gello was credited with killing pregnant women and/or their fetuses as well as infants (ap. Leo Ailatius.. ".
  19. ^ Lawson (1910), citing Michael Psellus.
  20. ^ Michael Psellos, Philosophica minora , O'Meara, D., ed. (1989), vol. 1, p. 164, lines 1–20, cited by Hartnup (2004), p. 149
  21. ^ The Testament of Solomon?
  22. ^ Michael Psellos, Philosophica minora , O'Meara, D., ed. (1989), vol. 1, p. 164, as cited by Magdalino, Paul; Mavroudi, Maria (2006)The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, p. 15.
  23. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 158.
  24. ^ Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, Ecclesiasticae historiae, in PG 147, cols. 345–348, as cited by Hartnup (2004), p. 87.
  25. ^ John of Damascus, I, p. 473, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, p. 1604. Cited by Lawson (1910), p. 144
  26. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 88 and 91ff.
  27. ^ Johnston (2013), pp. 162–166.
  28. ^ Johnston, Sarah Iles (1997), "Corinthian Medea and th Cult of Hera Akraia," in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, Princeton University Press, p. 58.
  29. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 160.
  30. ^ In the 12th-century Latin translation of the 4th-century Greek text; see Cyranides.
  31. ^ Johnston (2013), pp. 164 and 166–167.
  32. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 95–96, with an entire chapter devoted to infant baptism and the gello, pp. 105–122.
  33. ^ Naveh & Shaked (1985), pp. 104–122, 189–197. For references on using iron in childbirth, including Jewish, Polish, Armenian, and Arab practice, see p. 121, note 23.
  34. ^ Barb (1966), p. 4.
  35. ^ Extensive discussion on the power of naming in Hartnup, Karen (2004) On the Beliefs of the Greeks: Leo Allatios and Popular Orthodoxy, Brill, pp. 97–101
  36. ^ There is a gap in the original text.
  37. ^ Naveh & Shaked (1985), pp. 114–115.
  38. ^ Anabardalaea is also given as a name of Abyzou on a Byzantine amulet; Spier (1993), p. 30.
  39. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 98.
  40. ^ Voces magicae, including the naming of supernatural beings, are discussed at length by William M. Brashear, “The Greek Magical Papyri: 'Voces Magicae',” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II, 18.5 (1995), pp. 3422–3438, limited preview [2]
  41. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 99–100.
  42. ^ Johnston (2013), p. 195, note 91. See also Abyzou: On medical amulets and Alabasandria.
  43. ^ Johnston (2013), p. 109.
  44. ^ Apostrophe seu narratio de impura Gyllone (BHG, 2403), published by K.N. Sathas, Μεσαιωνικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη 5 (1876), pp. 573–575, among writings attributed to Michael Psellos.
  45. ^ Christopher Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition (Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p. 241 online.
  46. ^ Spier (1993), p. 184, and citing the manuscript as from the Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Parisinus Gr. 2316, fols. 432r–433r.
  47. ^ Spier (1993), p. 37, note 67; there may be a discrepancy between this assertion and Johnston's claim that Sisinnius is the regular adversary of Gello.
  48. ^ Johnston (2013), p. 93.
  49. ^ Mary Margaret Fulgum, "Coins Used as Amulets in Late Antiquity," in Between Magic and Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 143 online; Derek Krueger, Byzantine Christianity (Fortress Press, 2006), p. 184 [3]
  50. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 148, note 71.
  51. ^ Suidae Lexicon, edited by Ada Adler (Leipzig 1928), vol. 1, p. 512, no. 112.
  52. ^ a b Hartnup (2004), p. 85.
  53. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 88 and 93.
  54. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 89–91.
  55. ^ "N" in ancient and medieval prayers and magic spells stands for nomen, "name"; here the parents' names would be inserted.
  56. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 97, citing Allatios, De opinionibus VII, p. 132.
  57. ^ For a full list, see Hartnup (2004), p. 102
  58. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 103.
  59. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 108.
  60. ^ See article 'Infant baptism.
  61. ^ C.S. Sonnini, Travels in Greece and Turkey (London 1801), vol. 2, p. 107.
  62. ^ See also Pneuma pythona.
  63. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 116–117, especially for citations on the drako.
  64. ^ See Tumah for the Jewish concept of the impurity of childbirth.
  65. ^ Hartnup (2004), p. 122.
  66. ^ Hartnup (2004), pp. 129–130.
  67. ^ Michael Ford, The Bible of the Adversary (Lulu.com, 2008), pp. 110–111 online.
  68. ^ Jessie D. Eaker, The Name of the Demoness excerpt.
  69. ^ Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 2 product discussion at Paizo.com.
Bibliography

It is in a myth in the greek mythology

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