Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion

John Cuthbert Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion is a searching scholarly study of "survivals," arguing that living customs in modern Greece can illuminate the religious imagination of antiquity. Drawn from two years of fieldwork in Greece under a Craven Studentship, Lawson bases his inquiry on conversation, observation, festivals, village life, and local storytelling, using folklore as a living bridge between past and present. He treats Greek religion as a rich but unwritten system, shaped by shared custom rather than a single creed, and therefore best understood through its enduring practices, contradictions, and symbols. The book ranges widely across pagan survivals, gods and spirits, the soul and body, vampires and revenants, burial rites, and the religious meanings of death. Lawson shows how ancient beliefs persist in the modern fear of the evil eye, in a water-oracle consulted for practical decisions, and in older ideas of divine communication that may even underlie human sacrifice and funeral lament. Serious, comparative, and deeply rooted in lived experience, the work reveals continuity between myth, ritual, superstition, and everyday life across centuries of Greek culture. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.