Robert Wagman

CHAPTER III

They call a witch strigla, a word borrowed with a slight change by the Romans. They also call it Gelou, Gello, or Gillo, a name of much more obscure meaning. According to an ancient tale, Gello was a beautiful young woman who died a virgin and whose spectre, hovering over the bed, brought children a premature death. Some claim that Sappho mentions her in  one of her poems, and that from it we have the proverb ‘Loving children more than Gello does’, about those who are crazed about their children. Suidas reports:

‘Loving children more than Gello does’: Gello is one who died prematurely; people believed that her ghost went around attacking children and causing their premature death.

The Corpus of Greek Proverbs has:

‘Loving children more than Gello does’: a proverb said of those who die prematurely, or of those who love their children tenderly but spoil them with luxury. Gello was in fact a maiden. According to a local tradition of Lesbos, since she died a premature death, her ghost haunted children. They also attribute to her other sorts of premature death. Sappho mentions her in her poetry.

Ignatius, Deacon of Constantinople, says in his Life of the Patriarch Tarasius (for which I do not have the Greek text):

In Greece there are stories about a woman named Gello. They say that after her life was cut short by an untimely death, she became some sort of apparition that would go to newly born babies and kill them. Deceived and maddened by the [evil] spirit of this tale, people who believe in such things tried to shift the blame for this heinous crime onto some wretched little women, whom they accused of causing premature deaths by taking the form of spirits.

It is from this that today the Striges are called Gellones, as they plot evil against infants and cause their death by sucking their blood or by some other means. Nicephorus Callistus says, in book 18, chapter 9,

The mother herself said that, at the time of her delivery, a new and unusal scent of sweetness came up from the earth. She also added some old women’s nonsense which I can hardly believe: that the creature called Empusa (others would call her Gilo) removed the infant from the bed and tried to devour him, but she was unable to do him any harm.

Michael Psellus says that the name is borrowed from Hebrew:

Gillo—that ancient and widely celebrated name—is neither a demon nor a human transformed into a ferocious beast. All philosophers negate the ability of nature to change; and neither can a beast ever assume the form of a human nor a human can become a beast, and especially not a demon, or an angel. Moreover, although I looked up the names and many powers of demons in most authors, neither the works of Porphyry on magic artifices, or those of other scholars, bring up the name of Gillo. But there was one obscure book which supplied  me with the name in Hebrew. Like in a play, the author introduces Solomon himself who enunciates the names and activities of demons. According to him, Gillo is a power opposed to birth and life. Therefore, he says, she destroys babies who are still unborn and any babies who come out of the womb, and the time limit for this killing is set at one year. Then Adrastea binds her. But the dominant opinion today assigns this power to little old women. It gives wings to women who are past their prime and makes them able to access infants in their homes without being seen. Then it makes them suck the babies and drain all the fluid which is in them. For this reason, those attending a woman in childbed call newborns who die soon after birth Gillobrota, or ‘Gillo-Eaten’.

NOTES

Forthcoming