Alphito
Alphito (Ancient Greek: Ἀλφιτώ) is a supernatural being first recorded in the Moralia of Plutarch,[1] where "apotropaic nursery tales" about her[2] are told by nursemaids to frighten little children into behaving.[3] Her name is related to alphita, "white flour" (compare Latin albus), and alphitomanteia, a form of divination (-manteia)[4] from flour or barley meal.[5] She was presumably old, with white hair the color of flour.[6]
Although Alphito has been called a mere boogeyman,[7] the 19th-century folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt, forerunner of J.G. Frazer, classified her as originally a "corn mother" because of her name, and others have considered her a vegetation spirit.[8] According to Robert Graves, Frazer thought Alphito was actually Demeter or Persephone.[9]
Although evidence for Alphito rests in the minimal reference in Plutarch and an indirectly relevant entry in the lexicographer Hesychius,[citation needed] Graves developed an elaborate thesis that Alphito was "'the White Goddess', who in Classical times had degenerated into a nursery bugbear but who seems originally to have been the Danaan Barley-goddess of Argos."[10] In The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Graves describes the whiteness of the goddess as a dichotomy:
In one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman's body, or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy. … Alphito, it has been shown, combined these senses: for alphos is white leprosy, the vitiliginous sort which attacks the face, and alphiton is barley, and Alphito lived on the cliff tops of Nonacris in perpetual snow."[11]
No ancient source connects Alphito to leprosy nor the Arcadian site of Nonacris.
In recent scholarship, Alphito is classed with spirits or demons that threaten reproduction and child-nurturing such as Acco, Gello, and Mormo.[12]