Note 1 — Chapter VIII · ROUMANIAN AND TRANSYLVANIAN SORCERIES AND SUPERSTITIONS, CONNECTED WITH THOSE OF THE GYPSIES.

The Oriental or Greek Church is found at every turn, even more than the Catholic, interchanged, twined, and confused with ancient sorcery. Theodore, like Saint Simeon and Anthony in Tuscany, is very much more of a goblin than a holy man. His weakness is young women, and sometimes in the shape of a beautiful youth, at others of a frightful monster, he carries off those who are found working on his day—that is the 23rd of January. Theodore, according to the Solar mythologists personifies the sun. (De Gubernatis, “Zoological Mythology,” vol. ii. p. 296). In any case the saint who seizes girls is the Hindoo Krishna or his prototype, and therefore may have come through the gypsies. The overworked solar myth derives some support from the fact that among the Serbs on Theodore’s day the Sintotere—or centaur, as the name declares—who is half horse and half man, rides over the people who fall in his power. The Centaurs were connected with the “rape of maidens,” as shown in the legend of the Lapithæ, and it is very probable that Theodore himself is, in the language of the Western Americans, “half a horse,” which they regard as the greatest compliment which can be paid to a man.1