This story consists of three episodes. The first, in which the driver of the mule outwits the Callicantzari by lying flat on the animal’s back and making himself look like a sack of meal, occurs time after time in the popular tales with hardly any variation; indeed it often forms in itself the _motif_ of a whole story, in which, as soon as the man reaches his home, the cock crows and the Callicantzari flee. The second episode in which the wife effects some delay by bargaining with the Callicantzari that they shall count the holes in a sieve, is also fairly common, but the difficulty which the monsters find, in every other version of which I know, is that they dare not pronounce the word ‘three,’ and so go on counting ‘one, two,’ ‘one, two’ till cock-crow[532]. The third episode in which the priests chase away the Callicantzari is not often found in current stories, but the belief that the ἁγιασμός or ‘hallowing’ which takes place on the morning of Epiphany is the signal for the final departure of the Callicantzari is firmly held throughout Greece. This ceremony consists primarily in ‘blessing the waters’--whether of the sea, of rivers, of village-wells, or, as at Athens, of the reservoir--by carrying a cross in procession to the appointed place and throwing it in; but in many districts also the priests afterwards fill vessels with the blest waters, and with these and their censers make a round of the village, sprinkling and purifying the people and their houses and cornfields and vineyards. The fear which the Callicantzari feel of this purification is embodied in some rough lines which they are supposed to chant as they disappear at Twelfth-night:
φύγετε, νὰ φύγουμε, τ’ ἔφτασ’ ὁ τουρλόπαπας μὲ τὴν ἁγι̯αστοῦρα του καὶ μὲ τὴ βρεχτοῦρα του, κι’ ἅγι̯ασε τὰ ῥέμματα καὶ μᾶς ἐμαγάρισε[533].
Quick, begone! we must begone, Here comes the pot-bellied priest, With his censer in his hand And his sprinkling-vessel too; He has purified the streams And he has polluted us.
In the actual tales however as told by the people the intervention of the priests is not a common episode. More often the story ends in a rescue effected by neighbours armed with firebrands, of which the Callicantzari go in mortal terror, or simply with the crowing of the black cock.