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Alphito () is a supernatural being first recorded in the ''Moralia'' of Plutarch,〔Plutarch, ''Moralia'' 1040B, "Contradictions of the Stoics" (''De stoicorum repugnantiis'' 15): τῆς Ἀκκοῦς καὶ τῆς Ἀλφιτοῦς δ᾽ ὦν τὰ παιδάρια τοῦ κακοσχολεῖν αἱ γυναῖκες ἀνείργουσιν.〕 where "apotropaic nursery tales" about her〔Mary Rosaria Gorman, ''The Nurse in Greek Life'' (Boston, 1917), p. 37.〕 are told by nursemaids to frighten little children into behaving.〔Frederick E. Brink, "Demonology in the Early Imperial Period," ''Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt'' II.16.3 (1986), p. 2071.〕 Her name is related to ''alphita'', "white flour" (compare Latin ''albus''), and ''alphitomanteia'', a form of divination ''(-manteia)''〔Georg Luck, ''Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds'' (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, reissued 2006), p. 495.〕 from flour or barley meal.〔O. Crusius, ''RE'' (1894), vol. 1, p. 1637.〕 She was presumably old, with white hair the color of flour.〔James Redfield, "From Sex to Politics: The Rites of Artemis Triklaria and Dionysos Aisymnetes at Patras," in ''Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World'' (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 102.〕 Although Alphito has been called a mere boogeyman,〔Graham Anderson, ''Greek and Roman Folklore: A Handbook'' (Greenwood Publishing Company, 2006), p. 195.〕 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.〔Crusius, ''RE'' 1637.〕 According to Robert Graves, Frazer thought Alphito was actually Demeter or Persephone.〔Robert Graves, ''The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth'' (New York, 1948, 1975, 1999 printing), p. 66.〕 Although evidence for Alphito rests in the minimal reference in Plutarch and an indirectly relevant entry in the lexicographer Hesychius, 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."〔Graves, ''The White Goddess'', p. 66.〕 In ''The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth'', Graves describes the whiteness of the goddess as a dichotomy:
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.〔Jan N. Bremmer, ''The Early Greek Concept of the Soul'' (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 101–102 (online ); John Kevin Newman, ''Roman Catullus and the Modification of the Alexandrian Sensibililty'' (Georg Olms, 1990), p. 223, note 46.〕 ==In popular culture== In the foreword to Maida Heatter's ''Cookies'', Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff compare the cookbook's author to Alphito:
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