Gello

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In the myth and folklore of the Near East and Europe, Gello (also Gyllou, Gylou, Gillo, etc.) is one of the many names for a female demon or revenant who threatens the reproductive cycle by causing infertility, spontaneous abortion, and infant mortality.

By the Byzantine era, the gello (Greek: γελλώ; plural γελλούδες gelloudes) had become a type of demonic possession rather than an individual being. Women might be tried for being gelloudes or subjected to exorcism.

The Names of Gello

Aramaic inscriptional evidence of a child-snatching demon appears on a silver lamella (metal-leaf sheet) from Palestine and two incantation bowls dating to the 5th or 6th century; on these she is called Sideros (Greek for iron, a traditional protection for women during childbirth). Under various names, she continues to appear in medieval Christian manuscripts written in Greek, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Romanian, Slavonic, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew. In literary texts and on amulets, the demon's adversaries are Solomon, saints, or angels.

Knowledge of a demon's name was required to control or compel it; a demon could act under an alias. Redundant naming is characteristic of magic charms, "stressing," as A.A. Barb noted in his classic essay "Antaura," "the well-known magic rule that the omission of a single one can give the demons a loophole through which they can work their harm."

In one Greek tale set in the time of “Trajan the King,” the demon under torture reveals her “twelve and a half names”:
“My first and special name is called Gyllou; the second Amorphous; the third Abyzou; the fourth Karkhous; the fifth Brianê; the sixth Bardellous; the seventh Aigyptianê; the eighth Barna; the ninth Kharkhanistrea; the tenth Adikia; (…) the twelfth Myia; the half Petomene. ”
Elsewhere, the twelve-and-a-half names are given as Gylo, Morrha, Byzo, Marmaro, Petasia, Pelagia, Bordona, Apleto, Chomodracaena, Anabardalaea, Psychoanaspastria, Paedopniktria, and Strigla. Although magic words (voces magicae) have often been corrupted in transmission or deliberately exoticized, several of these names suggest recognizable Greek elements and can be deciphered as functional epithets: Petasia, "she who strikes"; Apleto, "boundless, limitless"; Paedopniktria, "child suffocator." Byzo is a form of Abyzou, abyssos, "the Deep," to which Pelagia ("she of the sea") is equivalent.

Gello is named also in works by the polymaths John of Damascus (7th–8th century) and Michael Psellos (11th century), the latter of whom notes that he has found her only in "an apocryphal Hebrew book" ascribed to Solomon and not in his usual sources for demonic names in antiquity. Psellos was one of the earliest scholars to identify Gello with the Hebrew Lilith, and says that these demons "suck blood and devour all the vital fluids which are in the little infant." The 17th-century Greek Catholic scholar Leo Allatios, however, criticizes Psellos and insists that the gello, Lilith and other demonic creatures should be regarded as separate and unrelated.

The Aition of Gello

Gello appears in Greek sources as one of three reproductive demons who developed as a persona with an individual story of origin (aition). The fears she personifies thus associate her with the Mormo and Lamia, whose narratives also show them to have suffered the fate that they in turn inflict on other women.Mormo, driven to insanity, killed and ate her own children; Lamia was the lover of Zeus and bore him many children, but Hera in her envy killed each as it was born.

Gello was once a young woman who died a virgin. The Christian-era lexicographer Hesychius said that she was a ghost (eidolon) who attacked both virgins and newborn babies. The earliest mention of this demonic creature by her Greek name occurs in a fragment of Sappho of Lesbos, in which Gello is said to be "fond of children." The fragment is preserved by the 2nd-century compiler Zenobius, who offers a psychological explanation:
“'Fonder of children than Gello' is a saying applied to women who die prematurely (aôrôs), or to those who are fond of children but ruin them by their upbringing. For Gello was a maiden (parthenos), and because she died prematurely (aôrôs), the Lesbians say that her ghost haunts little children, and they also blame her for the deaths of those who die prematurely (aôrôn).”

Magic texts and amulets attest by name to the prevalence of a belief in reproductive demons in the Greco-Roman world. During the Byzantine period, textual evidence of the child-harming demon is most often found in exorcisms or demonologies. Historian of ancient religion Sarah Iles Johnston suggests that this belief is expressed more commonly in earlier literature than has been noticed. The Homeric epics allude to the unmarried dead, who are excluded from the Underworld and might harm the living. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Demeter in her role as a kourotrophic ("youth-nurturing") goddess promises to protect her hosts' infant from demonic attack in language that recalls known magical incantations. Centuries later, in Augustan Rome, Ovid describes the practice of protecting doorways with buckthorn after the birth of a child to ward off striges, winged female demons who were thought to suck the blood of newborns. One of the twelve-and-a-half names of Gylo (see above) is Strigla, a form of the word strix as a kind of witch.

Michael Psellos says that Gello also killed pregnant women and their fetuses. Thus Gello in general blocked the cycle of reproduction. The patriarch John of Damascus, in the treatise Peri strygnôn ("Regarding striges"), records a belief among the "common people," still current in his day, that ghosts called gelloudes or striges flew nocturnally, slipped into houses even when the windows and doors were barred, and strangled sleeping infants. John's use of the plural shows that Gello has become a type, rather than an individual revenant. The 14th-century Greek ecclesiastical historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos said gelloudes "bring the infant from the bedroom, as if about to devour him." Leo Allatios explicitly cross-identifies striges and gelloudes, recasting the demonic or revenant gello of Eastern tradition as the witch of Western Europe, who is often marginalized by age and poverty. The transformation of the gello from the ancient "virginal reproductive demon" to an envious crone occurs in the Christian era; what the virgin and crone share is their exclusion from the reproductive cycle, and their envy of fertility. The Greek folk belief continued into the modern era.
Although reports of Gello's behavior are consistent, her nature is less determinate. She is regarded as a demon in exorcisms and commanded as an "unclean spirit" (akatharton pneuma). But her aition as a human being would make a ghost of her, as did her gendered nature, since demons, like angels, were officially sexless in the theology of the Church. Johnston prefers to use the Greek word aôrôs, "untimely dead," for this form of transgressive or liminal soul or entity, finding the usual phrase "child-killing demon" to be misleading.

Protections Against Gello

The late antique magico-medical compilation Cyranides provides defensive spells against the "frightful woman" (horrida mulier) who attacks babies. The eagle-stone or aetites is to be worn as an amulet to prevent miscarriage, to assure timely and complication-free delivery, and to relieve delirium and night terrors associated with Gello and other revenants. A cross or image of Christ might be placed by a child's bed to ward off Gello or demons in general; burning lamps to illuminate sacred images and incense were also used in the bedroom. The practice of baptizing infants was thought to offer protection against demon-snatching, and specifically against the gello, according to Leo Allatios. Allatios also records, but does not condone, the hanging of red coral or a head of garlic on the infant's cot, along with other remedies he finds too unspeakable to name.