Gello

The lamp in the birthing room stayed lit until dawn, because the dark hours were hers. A new mother in a Byzantine village would pin a thin strip of inscribed bronze to her child’s swaddling, whisper a saint’s name, and listen. If the baby sickened for no reason, if it wasted in the cradle and the milk did no good, the household knew what had crossed the threshold. Gello had come for another one.

She is one of the oldest fears in Greek culture given a name and a face. Long before the amulet-makers of Constantinople went to work, Sappho was already invoking her on Lesbos in the sixth century BC, and the line that survives turns on a proverb: someone who lost children young, or died before bearing any, was said to be fonder of children than Gello. It is a grim joke. Gello loved children the way a fox loves hens.

The story underneath the proverb is small and sad. Gello had been a girl of Lesbos who died young, unmarried and childless, and could not rest. What she had been denied in life she took from the living. Her ghost slipped into houses at night and pressed the breath out of infants, and where she passed, women miscarried or could not conceive at all. Grief turned envious, and envy turned predatory. That is the engine of the whole legend, and the Greeks understood it precisely, because they buried a great many infants and needed somewhere to put the blame.

Over the centuries the single restless girl multiplied. By the Byzantine period people no longer spoke of Gello alone but of the gelloudes, a whole order of such beings, and the line between demon and damned woman blurred. A gello was thought able to enter an old woman and hollow her out, so that the crone herself rose at night to hunt cradles and remembered nothing of it by morning. She was blamed for the full span of reproductive disaster, from the failure to conceive to the silent death of a child already born. The demon kept company with Lamia and Mormo, the other two great child-stealers of Greek nightmare, and later writers folded her together with the demon Abyzou on protective charms, until the names ran into one another.

What did she look like? Mostly she looked like nothing, which was the point; a thing that takes babies in the night does not need a body. When the amulet-engravers did give her a shape, they cut a figure that was a woman to the waist and serpent or fish below it, coiling, eel-smooth, the lower half of something that had no business in a human house. In her possessed form she wore the face of an ordinary grandmother, which was far worse. The horror of Gello was never spectacle. It was the empty cradle and the calm old woman by the fire.

Her most famous defeat survives in a tale copied into more than thirty Greek manuscripts across nine centuries. A woman named Melitene had borne several children and lost every one of them to the demon. Pregnant again, she built a fortified tower, sealed herself inside with guards, and waited. Her brothers Sisinnios and Sines pursued the demon as she fled into the mountains and the sea, and in some tellings the Archangel Michael rides to the chase in their place. They caught her. To win her release she was forced to confess her secret names, twelve and a half of them in the common version and more in others, and a name once spoken aloud is a leash. Knowing what to call her was knowing how to keep her out.

That is the whole architecture of her weakness. Gello has no single throat to cut. Against her the Byzantines used bronze and lead amulets worn at the neck, the invoked name of Saint Sisinnios who had beaten her once and could be summoned to do it again, and above all the recitation of her own true names, which stripped her of the anonymity she hunted in. The lamp left burning was part of it too. She worked in the dark and disliked being watched.

She never entirely died, only thinned out into folklore and theology. The eleventh-century scholar Michael Psellos wrote her up among the demons that trouble women in childbed, and six centuries later Leo Allatios catalogued the village beliefs still clinging to her, arguing against Psellos that she should be kept distinct from Lilith and the rest. Some etymologists trace her name all the way back to the Mesopotamian gallû, the underworld spirits of sickness and death, and from the same root they draw the English word ghoul. The line is disputed, like much about her. What is not disputed is the shape of the fear, the same in every culture that has buried a child and refused to believe the dark was empty.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Gello in Greek mythology?

Gello is a female demon of Greek and Byzantine folklore blamed for infant deaths, miscarriages, and infertility. According to legend she was a young woman of Lesbos who died unmarried and childless and returned as a vengeful ghost to harm the children of others.

What does Gello do to children?

Gello preys on newborns, pregnant women, and women in childbirth, slipping into homes at night to kill or sicken infants. Greek and Byzantine families blamed her for the otherwise unexplained wasting and death of babies in the cradle, and believed she could even possess old women to do her hunting.

How can Gello be stopped?

Gello was warded off with inscribed bronze and lead amulets, the invoked name of Saint Sisinnios who defeated her in legend, and the recitation of her own secret names. In the Sisinnios story she is forced to reveal twelve and a half secret names, and knowing them gives a household the power to keep her out.

Who defeated Gello?

In the most widely copied legend, Saint Sisinnios, and in some versions the Archangel Michael, pursued and cornered the demon after she killed the children of his sister Melitene. He forced her to confess her secret names, which broke her power and freed her victims.

Is Gello the same as Lamia and Lilith?

Gello belongs to the same group of Greek child-killing demons as Lamia and Mormo, and Byzantine writers later linked her with the demon Abyzou. Some scholars connect her to the Mesopotamian gallû and to figures like Lilith, though the 17th-century scholar Leo Allatios argued she should be kept distinct from them.

Related Entries

Lamia, Mormo, Mormolykeia, Empusa, Hecate, Strix, Lilith, Lamashtu, Pontianak, Strzyga, La Llorona