en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gello In early Christianity, a program of exorcism was preliminary to baptism as a kind of purification and to drive away evil spirits, and not necessarily because the person was thought to be possessed. The ambiguous state of the unbaptized is expressed by conflicting views of the infant: that the newborn had not sinned, and that the newborn nonetheless bore the pollution of original sin and was thus closer to the Devil than to God.[62] The travel writer Sonnini de Manoncourt recorded[63] that the Greeks called an unbaptized child drako (or dracon, serpent, python,[64] dragon). At baptism, the name Drako is shed and replaced with a Christian name. The names of Gylo include Chomodracaena, containing drakaina, female dragon. In one text dealing with the gello, she is banished to the mountains to drink the blood of the drako; in another, she becomes a drako and in this form attacks human beings. In other texts, the child itself is addressed as Abouzin (Abyzou).[65] In ancient and medieval medical texts, a child was thought to be conceived from the fathers seed and the mothers blood. The gello, herself infertile and envious, aimed to drink blood, the source of fertility, and was attracted to the dangerous time of birth and recovery in part because the new mother was regarded in Judaeo-Christian tradition as unclean;[66] this state of pollution was congenial to demons.[67] As long as the infant remained exclusively within the birth mothers sphere of influence, it was vulnerable to female demons seeking blood. In the story of Melitene, sister of the saints Sisinnios and Sisynodorus, the child is in peril until it is returned to the hands of men. In one version, the gello swallows the child and must be forced by the male saints to regurgitate it alive. This cycle — death by swallowing, regurgitation, new life — may be symbolized in initiation ceremonies such as baptism, which marked the separation of the child from the taint of its mothers gello-attracting blood.[68]
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:56:08 +0000
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