kere

A spirit of the dead in ancient Greece. It was believed that keres escaped from the pithos, the jars used to contain the bodies of the dead, and devoted themselves to pestering the living. They were exorcised by ritual and incantation. Sticky tar was painted on doorframes to catch them and prevent them from entering a dwelling. Plato observed, “There are many fair things in the life of mortals, but in most of them there are as it were adherent keres which pollute and disfi gure them.” In mythology, keres are akin to goddesses of death who originally escaped from Pandora’s box. They serve the will of the gods, and their chief functions are to carry off the corpses of the dead and to affl ict the living with disease and illness.