by Brian Righi
These evil spirits often proved the most persistent and difficult to dislodge once they latched onto their victim, and inviting an attack by one could result from actions as simple as gazing upon an impure corpse or touching food contaminated by the spirit. Being a creature of the wind and the darkness, it could also pass through solid objects at will, such as doors or walls. In cases in which the ekimmu resulted from improper burial, performing the appropriate rites was often enough to put the spirit to rest. In other instances, the spirit could be destroyed with weapons made of wood—a defense that would resurface in later vampire traditions in the form of a wooden stake. When all else failed, however, temple priests performed lengthy and elaborate exorcisms, some of which still exist today, as in the form of the following incantation:
The gods which seize (upon man)
Have come forth from the grave;
The evil wind-gusts
Have come forth from the grave.
To demand the payment of rites and the
pouring out of libations,
They have come forth from the grave;
All that is evil in their hosts, like a whirlwind
Hath come forth from the grave.
The evil spirit, the evil demon, the evil devil,
From the earth hath come forth;
From the underworld unto the land they
Have come forth;
In heaven they are unknown,
On earth they are not understood.
They neither stand nor sit
Nor eat nor drink. (Thompson 1908, 7)
A second type of fiendish blood drinker, thought to roam the desert places and city streets alike, was a creature that never existed in human form, but was born of pure evil. Primitive records from the reign of the Babylonians tell of a particularly bloodthirsty demoness referred to as Lamashtu, who appears to have evolved from a demoness of even older origin named Lamme. As a feared night stalker, Lamashtu ran the gambit of evil doings, including seducing men, harming pregnant women, destroying crops, causing disease, and drinking the blood of the living. In Babylonian theology, she was the daughter of the sky god Anu, who ruled all other gods, spirits, and demons. During the birth of a child, Lamashtu was said to slip into the birthing chamber and feed on the flesh and blood of the newborn, and many a stillborn child’s death was blamed on her presence. The only protection afforded to a vulnerable mother and child was through the use of magical amulets and prayers chanted by temple priests during the birth.
Lone travelers were also at particular risk of encountering Lamashtu and were often warned that she made her home in desolate mountains and lonely marshlands. Although, in truth, demons were thought to be formless entities of pure evil, they were often depicted physically with allegorical descriptions that matched their characteristics and traits. Lamashtu, for example, was frequently described as a winged woman with a hairy body and the head of a ferocious lion, or in some illustrations as a woman holding a double-headed serpent in each hand while suckling a dog on her right breast and a pig on her left.
A demonic spirit similar to the Lamashtu was the gallu, and though there is some confusion as to whether this was a single entity or an entire class of demons, it was often referred to as part of the “Seven Demons,” which took the shape of a raging bull and flew about the cities at night eating the flesh of humans and drinking their blood. These loathsome creatures haunted dark places and were tasked with hauling off unfortunate souls to the underworld. Slaughtering a lamb upon the temple altar or other blood offerings were the only known way to appease them. When such measures failed, the people often turned to their priests, who, as in other cases of demon attack, relied on the power of exorcisms, a fragment of which survives:
Spirits that minish heaven and earth,
That minish the land,
Spirits that minish the land,
Of giant strength,
Of giant strength and giant tread,
Demons (like) raging bulls, great ghosts,
Ghosts that break through all houses,
Demons that have no shame,
Seven are they!
Knowing no care,
They grind the land like corn;
Knowing no mercy,
They rage against mankind:
They spill their blood like rain,
Devouring their flesh (and) sucking
Their veins.
Where the images of the gods are,
There they quake
In the temple of Nabu, who fertiliseth
The shoots of wheat.
They are demons full of violence
Ceaselessly devouring blood.
Invoke the ban against them,
That they no more return to this
Neighborhood.
By heaven be ye exorcised! By earth be
Ye exorcised! (Thompson 1903, 69–71)
Of all the known demons to claw their way out of the walled cities and incense-filled temples of Mesopotamia, one found its most enduring legacy not with the powerful Babylonians, but with a small group of captives from a far-off land known as the Kingdom of Judah. In the Jewish mythology, no demon held such aversion and dismay as that of a winged night demoness named Lilith, who terrified expectant mothers and slumbering men like no other. Some scholars traced the adoption of Lilith to a period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian Captivity, in which Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE and its people deported to Babylon. After Babylon was in turn conquered by the Persian Empire in 538 BCE, the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great gave the Jews permission to return to their native land. Although some remained, many returned and brought back with them the traditions and superstitions of their former captors, including a fear of the demoness Lilith.
Much like the Lamashtu from which she originated, Lilith was primarily seen as an infant killer. As a protective measure, many Hebrews wrote in the four corners of their birthing chambers the words “Adam, Eve, begone hence Lilith,” or hung special amulets over their child’s cradle, which included the names of angels written upon them to act as wards. Also, like earlier incarnations, the Lilith that followed the Hebrews home was a voracious succubus who seduced men in their sleep to obtain their seed in the hopes of spawning demonic offspring of her own. Men waking from fitful dreams to find they had experienced a nocturnal emission were required to recite a prayer the next morning to prevent such an occurrence.
Like many stories passed down over the ages, Lilith’s tale is one that transforms with leaps and bounds as each successive culture adopted it as their own. The first mention of a creature called a lilith can be found in the Sumerian story of Inanna and the Hullupu Tree, first set down on clay tablets during the seventh century BCE. In this creation myth, the earth and the sky had just separated from one another when a violent storm arose and uprooted a beautiful willow tree, which rested upon the banks of the Euphrates River. Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, rescued the tree and planted it among her sacred groves in the city of Uruk. While she waited for the tree to grow large enough to make into a chair and bed for herself, three evil creatures settled on it. The first was a magical snake that coiled itself between the roots; the second was a lilith, who made its home inside the trunk; and the third was an anzu bird (a mythological creature much like a sphinx), which nested in the branches. Unable to rid her precious willow tree of these intruders, Inanna turned to her brother Utu, the sun god, but he refused to help. In the end, Gilgamesh, Uruk’s famed warrior king, took up the challenge; and after the heavily armed hero killed the snake, the lilith and anzu bird fled in terror.
Such early manifestations suggest that Lilith was initially seen as a vague sort of female spirit, and that it wasn’t until she merged with the tales of the Lamashtu that she took on more vampiric qualities. Eve
n then she wasn’t viewed as the singular figure we see later on, but rather as a class of liltu that were minor owl spirits that attacked humans. As the legend grew, so too did the evils she was said to commit, including being the bearer of storms and disease. Yet it wouldn’t be until the Middle Ages that she emerged in the role she became best known for when she began appearing in the rabbinic traditions of the eighth and tenth centuries, most notably in an anonymous medieval text known as the Alphabet of Ben Sira.
In this work the author writes that Lilith was the first wife of Adam, but after refusing to take on a subservient role she runs off. When God hears of her rebellion, he becomes angry and sends three angels in pursuit who eventually catch up to her while she is escaping across the Red Sea. Yet despite all their threats, Lilith still refuses to return and submit to Adam. In the end, the angels consent to let her live, but with the warning that each day God would destroy one hundred of her offspring as punishment for her defiance, and from that moment on in the mind of medieval scholars and rabbis, the war between Lilith and man had begun.
As the mythology and superstitions of the Jews interacted and influenced other cultures with which they came in contact, the legend of Lilith underwent an additional series of changes. For instance, in Christian lands during the Middle Ages, Lilith was the wife of Asmodeus, king of the demons, the nine hells, and who represented the sin of lust to the church. The pairing of these two monsters seemed inevitable, and as their story grew the two were said to live in a separate world where they continually created demonic offspring to plague humanity. Many unexplained disasters and calamities were blamed on them, including everything from making men impotent to turning wine sour.
It is also during this period that Lilith takes on her most seductive qualities and was said to always travel with cohorts of succubi to do her bidding. Although Lilith came to be blamed for everything Western patriarchal structures feared the most, including the power of seduction, procreation, and the displacement of gender roles, something far deeper resided in her legends. What revolted the early Hebrews the most was that Lilith was a blood drinker, and for the tribes of Israel no taboo was greater in the eyes of God than to consume the blood of another.
Savage Gods from the East
Even though it might be easy to jump to the conclusion that the precursor to the modern vampire resulted solely from the lands of Mesopotamia, evidence in fact points to the theory that it developed simultaneously from several early sources. While the ancient priests of Babylon were busy exorcising the night demons that plagued their cities, far to the east, in the mist-filled valleys of the Indus River, which borders the western portion of the Indian subcontinent, men were bowing before the blood-drenched altars of strange and fearsome gods. Little is known of the blood cults that originated from the region other than the dark gods they worshiped appeared to demand more than mere obedience; they also wanted human blood.
Wall paintings and carved figures dating back to 3000 BCE have been discovered depicting blood gods with green faces; pale blue bodies; and large, bloodstained fangs. One of the earliest works includes a painting of the Nepalese Lord of Death, who appears standing atop a pile of human bones with massive fangs and a cup of blood shaped from a human skull. Later religious texts would also come to incorporate a belief in blood gods within their pages, including one of the most famous: the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead. Not only does this funerary text describe the passage of the soul after death through the nether regions to rebirth, it also lists as many as fifty-eight wrathful deities known for their blood-drinking appetites.
As worship of the blood gods flourished throughout the river valleys, they eventually spread north to the mountain passes of Tibet and south into the steamy jungles of India, where both the number of blood gods and their power over men grew to new heights. One of the more horrid incarnations to take hold was the Hindu goddess of death and destruction known as Kali, who in many ways came to closely epitomize the image of the female vampire more than any other. Like many of her godly contemporaries, Kali was a spectacle straight from man’s darkest nightmares with sharp, bloodstained fangs, a garland of human skulls, and four arms—each bearing a sword or cleaver. Her temples were often located on cremation grounds throughout India, and stories of her taste for blood state that it was so great she once slit her own throat in order to drink the blood that poured from it. Her most memorable tale centers around a battle between herself and the goddess Durga on one side and an unbeatable demon named Raktabija on the other. What made the demon such a dangerous foe was that each time his blood spilled upon the ground he rejuvenated himself. All day long the three battled, with neither Kali nor Durga able to beat the demon. Finally, in a flash of inspiration, Kali gained the upper hand by springing upon the demon and drinking all of his blood. Without his ability to refresh himself, the demon was quickly subdued.
Not only was the goddess Kali responsible for numerous tales of violence and bloodlust, but also for one of the most infamous blood cults the world has ever seen. Beginning sometime in the seventeenth century and continuing into the nineteenth century, a group emerged from the shadows known as the Thuggees, from which we get the English word thug. This band of assassins was accused of murdering tens of thousands in the name of Kali before being stamped out by the British in the 1830s. Although many of their practices remain a mystery today, their name continues to live on in legends and through movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where they appear as bloodthirsty bad guys.
Members of the clandestine cult are said to have operated in groups posing as common travelers who joined merchant caravans as they passed through remote areas between towns and cities. Once the caravan came to a halt for the night and all its members were asleep, the thugs silently crept from their bedrolls and strangled everyone in the party. The caravan’s goods would be looted and all traces that it ever existed destroyed while the bodies of their victims were drained of blood and roasted on a spit before an idol of Kali. In some stories the thugs even drank the blood in order to obtain special occult powers from it.
In 1822, a former British officer named William Sleeman was appointed by Governor General William Bentinck to investigate claims of caravans disappearing in the wilderness. Over the next ten years, Sleeman’s police force uncovered evidence of the thugs and eventually tracked down and captured as many as 3,700 cultists, putting an end to their bloody reign once and for all. Many confessed to their deeds and were hanged, while many more were imprisoned for life. Critics of the British crackdown claim that the thugs only existed in the minds of fearful Hindu peasants and that it was nothing more than a modern-day witch hunt. Others contend that the thugs did indeed exist and may even continue their bloody worship of Kali in remote parts of India today.
Similar beliefs in blood gods existed in other parts of the world as well. Egyptians enlisted into their pantheon of gods a particularly brutal warrior goddess named Sekhmet, whose ferocity and bloodlust were matched by no other. Known by a host of monikers, all gruesome of course, including the Scarlet Lady and the Mistress of Slaughter, Sekhmet was often represented as having the head of a lion and the body of a woman. So great was her thirst for blood that she prowled the fields of battle like a lion, drinking the blood and eating the flesh of those who fell in combat. In one of her most celebrated tales, referred to as The Revenge of Ra, the sun god Ra creates Sekhmet to punish his rebellious humans for plotting against him. After setting her loose upon the world, Sekhmet quickly devours most of mankind, but when Ra orders her to stop before there are no subjects left, Sekhmet refuses. Fearing her bloodlust has become too powerful, Ra devises a plan to save what was left of humanity. His first step is to turn the waters of the Nile River red so that, mistaking it for blood, Sekhmet will drink from it. Once she begins drinking greedily from the waters, Ra then changes it into beer, causing Sekhmet to become intoxicated and fall into a deep sleep. When she finally wakes from her d
runken slumber, she has entirely forgotten her thirst for blood and mankind is spared from annihilation.
Sekhmet’s tale was more than just a bedtime story used by the ancient Egyptians to scare small children, however; it was linked to the natural flood cycles of the Nile River, the lifeblood of the land itself. Each year the Nile is inundated with sand and silt from connecting rivers farther upstream, turning the waters blood red and bringing life-giving nutrients to the farmlands that border its course. To celebrate the event, the Egyptians held a yearly festival in which they drank red-colored alcohol in imitation of Sekhmet. Worship of the violent goddess eventually reached its zenith during the reign of Amenemhat I, from 1991 to 1962 BCE, when followers of Sekhmet attained ruling authority over Egypt, and the center of government shifted from its previous location to the headquarters of the cult in Itjtawy.
Monsters of the
Western World
Even from the far-flung coasts of ancient Greece we find early references, in its literature, to various gods, spirits, and other monsters that fed upon the blood of humans. One such creature was Empusa, the daughter of the goddess Hecate, who took the form of a demonic bronze-footed monster that could change into a beautiful woman and feast upon the blood of young men while they slept. Even more feared were creatures known as striges, who like the lilith of distant Babylon were winged night creatures that either had the bodies of crows and the heads of women or were women who could change into birds of prey at will. In this guise they flew into homes at night where no barrier or lock could keep them out and fed off the blood of sleeping infants and men. It is also said they were particularly fond of human liver and other various internal organs, which they ate with great relish.