WITH ALL THIS ROOM for choice and contradiction, therefore, this book does not attempt any firm dogmatic separation of orthodox and heterodox elements. Rather, I try to portray the particularities of the villagers’ own images of the sacred while presenting alongside them liturgical material which is universal in Orthodox practice. Of course not every person in such a community embodies this tradition without distortion, and in fact the freedom to make subversive choices is an indispensable part of the process by which each generation of the community learns how to live within the whole communal understanding. However, in the overall direction of such a community and of the symbolism with which it lives it is, I believe, not difficult to recognize the extent to which it is an accurate reflection of Orthodox tradition.

These comments have been for those who have some religious or theological interest in the themes of this book, but there remain issues of interpreting Greek religious thought for readers who come with little previous knowledge or sympathy. First there is the difficulty today that Christianity, because it is associated with the past, may also be associated for them with power structures in which masters ruled servants, men ruled women, and nation or empire ruled all. Many people today seem unaware that Christianity from the beginning sought to soften and replace all these structures, saying, in the words of St Paul, that ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’, (37) and the struggle against these structures has continued in Christianity with some success up to the present day. But at each stage of the history of this struggle, many of the forms of the society of that time have been accepted as current realities which could only be transformed slowly, and could not immediately be overthrown without worse consequences. In Greek peasant villages the distinction between these brutal realities and the vision of the faith is sharp, but both perspectives are found alongside each other in their language and symbolism, and a casual reader may be deceived into supposing that the villagers do not see the contradictions. It is important therefore to understand that the dialogue between these opposed viewpoints is crystallized in the village accounts of paradise and the fall, and that this dialogue is an inner presupposition of Greek culture and of the Orthodox faith—one which has shown a capacity to sustain realism along with transcendent vision in a way which simple utopianism would find hard to match.

This is illustrated in the position of women in the villages, which has been governed by circumstances that from a modern western perspective are harsh (although less commonly perceived is the degree to which the position of men is harsh too), and this is explained in village life by the story of Eve. But readers who are unfamiliar with Orthodox thought may not appreciate at first that this story is only one of two poles of thought, only one aspect of a paradox well understood by villagers and expressed in the story, told me by a village woman, of Kassiane, a young girl questioned by the emperor’s son who was looking for his match in marriage. ‘From one woman came all evil’, said the emperor’s son, alluding to Eve, to be answered by Kassiane with an allusion to Mary: ‘And from one woman came all good’. (38) This story makes clear that Greek villages cannot be understood without taking into account the extraordinary significance of the Orthodox title Mother of God, the Panaghía (Παναγία) or All-holy One, a title which especially as Panaghía is found on the lips of these Greek villagers in every kind of circumstance. To unravel the symbolic implications of these phrases is part of the task of this book, for they are inseparable from the understanding also of the nature of the Orthodox cosmos, and the Orthodox view of life and death.

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