9 A ritual of the afterlife or the afterlife of a ritual Maschalismos in Ancient Greece and beyond Julia Doroszewska and Janek Kucharski Kittredge, the author of the first dedicated study of maschalismos, described it as the ancient Greek equivalent of driving wooden stake through the vampire’s chest (1885, p. 166). The analogy may be a bit far-fetched, but not too much: the ancient (and Byzantine) tradition does indeed present us with a bizarre rite, apparently performed to forestall the anger of a murder victim from beyond the grave, one which consisted in cutting off his extremities and stringing them together around the neck and armpits (maschalai). With only a handful of exceptions, modern scholars have been content to accept this, and have seen in the maschalismos a strange ritual practice, a glimpse into the religious imagination of the ancient Greeks – the contemporaries of Aeschylus and Sophocles – populated by demons and revenants, and full of gruesome sympathetic magic. In more recent scholarship, however (Dunn 2017, pp. 11–12; Muller 2011, p. 296), a radical reappraisal of this custom is under way, one which seeks to strip it of its magical component, as well as of its strangeness and essential otherness: these, we are told, were nothing more than the products of the fanciful musings of ancient grammarians. The purpose of this chapter is therefore not only to reassess the evidence for the original meaning and significance of maschalismos, but also to look into the later scholarly accretions, into its ‘afterlife,’ which will help us better understand how it took the uncanny form we are now presented with and how much of it was a product of – sometimes ingenious – misunderstanding. The literary sources Our sources on maschalismos can roughly be divided into two groups: the literary and the scholiastic or lexicographic. The chief difference between them is that the former seems to describe an authentic and more or less contemporary practice, while the latter desperately try to explain what is no longer intelligible. The crucial problem is that of the four literary sources, two refer to maschalismos explicitly, but provide almost no details of it at all, while the other two seem to describe it, but never refer to it as such. The former two come from Aeschylus’ 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111 7521P AFTERLIFE-A_Q16/lb.qxp_Royal A 156 x 234 mm Times New Roman 05/06/2018 01:21 Page 155 First Proofs-NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION