Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

  The Roman poet Ovid later proposed a number of theories for their origins, including the idea that the creatures were born naturally to their state, that they were once women cursed by the gods to become these monsters, or that they were witches who took on the form through magic spells. The latter of the three explanations would go on to be used by the Orthodox Church to describe blood-drinking witches in league with the devil, who also came to be called striges.

  Another vampire-like creature that inhabited the rocky Greek isles were female death spirits called keres, which were released upon the world when the first woman, Pandora, opened a jar (later mistranslated as “box”) containing all the evils to plague mankind. These were terrifying spirits described as dark women dressed in bloodstained garments with gnashing teeth and long talons that hovered over battlefields and drank the blood of the dying and wounded. In what remains of the Hesiodic poem The Shield of Hercules, we get a firsthand look at these evil death spirits:

  … dusky Fates [keres], gnashing their white fangs, lowering, grim, bloody, and unapproachable, struggled for those who were falling, for they all were longing to drink dark blood. So soon as they caught a man overthrown or falling newly wounded, one of them would clasp her great claws about him, and his soul would go down to Hades to chilly Tartarus. And when they had satisfied their souls with human blood, they would cast that one behind them, and rush back again into the tumult and the fray. (Hesiod 1914, 237–9)

  Thousands of these vicious spirits were thought to haunt battlefields, fighting among one another over the bodies of the dying like ghastly scavengers. Some stories even include mention of the Olympian gods themselves standing next to their favorite heroes, beating off these clawing death spirits during important battles.

  A final vampire-like creature of the early Greeks is the lamia, which makes her appearance in the works of such early writers as Aristophanes and Aristotle. Lamia was said to be the daughter of King Belus of Libya and the secret lover of Zeus, king of the gods and ruler of Mount Olympus. When Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, discovered the affair, she immediately flew into a rage and slew all of Lamia’s children. Driven mad with grief, Lamia found she could not directly strike back at Hera, so she chose the next best thing and began her revenge by preying upon the infants of mankind instead. From her sprang a race of female vampires that had the torsos of women and the lower bodies of serpents. These creatures were called lamiae and were feared not only as child killers but also for their power to transform into beautiful maidens and seduce young men into their bedchambers, where they slowly drank their blood.

  In a famous story told by Philostratus in the Life of Apollonius, a young man named Menipus falls in love with an exotic woman he meets traveling on the road one day. After a brief flirtation, she convinces him to return to her house in Corinth where the two young lovers begin an amorous affair. The young man’s teacher, Apollonius, however, sees through the disguise of the creature and warns the young pupil that he has been enchanted by a lamia. When Apollonius later confronts the creature, she admits to the deception and brags that each time she lay with him she drank a little more of his blood. The story then ends with the monster vanishing and the young man saved from an awful fate. The tale later inspired the English romantic poet John Keats to write his famous poem “Lamia”—only this time the foolish young man perishes from the creature’s feeding.

  In examining the stories and practices of other cultures, we find that the precursor of the modern vampire arose not from a single source but rather from several—most notably those of Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley. As the centuries passed, these beliefs were transmitted to new cultures as populations migrated and interacted with one another. Yet nowhere did the fiend find such fertile ground as when it moved its way across the Balkan Peninsula and settled in the dark forests of Eastern Europe. In most cases it traveled in the back of caravan wagons along the trade routes or on the horses of invading foreigners from the east. When the nomadic Magyars crossed the Carpathian Mountains in the fifth century, they settled in lands that came to make up modern Hungary and Romania—lands that later bore witness to the legends of Count Dracula’s reign and eventual reincarnation into the vampire we associate him with today.

  But in the long history of humanity’s migration patterns, no group was as colorful, mysterious, or as closely linked to the legends of the vampire as the Gypsy clans, who appeared at Europe’s doorstep in the tenth century. The name given to these dark-skinned wanderers is derived from the mistake that many early Europeans made in assuming they were Egyptians. Often viewed with suspicion in the lands they traveled through, Gypsies carried with them many superstitions concerning death and the life beyond. One of their most powerful and frightening beliefs was that of vampire spirits similar to the lamia of the Greek isles. Among them it was rumored there even existed a sect known as the Cult of Bibi, which worshiped a demoness that preyed upon the blood of gorgio, or non-Gypsy children. Adherents of the evil Bibi also believed the demoness could infect their enemies with epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis.

  Regardless of the actual transmission source, the belief in vampire-like creatures spread throughout Eastern Europe like wildfire, infecting the land and its people for centuries to come. Only this time, as it mingled with superstitious populations that still had one foot in Christianity and the other in the paganism of their fathers, a new vampire emerged upon the stage—one that could not be chased away so easily by priestly exorcisms or nullified by bloody sacrifices. Instead, this new horror would claw its way out of the grave and shamble through the night, looking for the blood of innocents to feed upon.

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  At this hour, we repeat, these are the facts as we know them. There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins.

  —Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead,

  written by George Romero and John Russo

  2

  Night of the

  Living Dead

  In 1968, when George Romero released his independent, black-and-white zombie film Night of the Living Dead, audiences were shocked by the darkly lit images of dead bodies rising from the grave to tear at the flesh of the living. The film, which was produced on a $114,000 budget, featured a group of survivors holed up in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse fighting off wave after wave of mysteriously reanimated corpses. In the end, all of the main characters died, but the movie went on to gain a life of its own, grossing millions over the years with cinematic re-releases and sequels that continue to this day. Despite the fact that it was initially criticized for its graphic content and terrifying storyline, this low-budget tale of the walking dead opened an entire zombie apocalypse sub-genre that forever changed the way audiences viewed horror films.

  In today’s world, of course, we have the luxury of turning off the television when things get a little scary, but for the small, isolated towns and villages that sprawled across Eastern Europe during the era of the vampire, the fear of corpses wandering about at night knocking on farmhouse doors in search of fresh victims was all too real. These revenants, or reawakened corpses, cast horrifying images in the minds of not only the superstitious peasantry, but also the learned thinkers and writers of the time as well. In the Harleian Miscellany of 1810, John Heinrich Zopfius is said to have commented that “the vampyres, which come out of the graves in the night-time, rush upon people sleeping in their beds, suck out all their blood, and destroy them. They attack men, wo’men, and children, sparing neither age nor sex. The people attacked by them complain of suffocation, and a great interception of spirits; after which, they soon expire. Some of them, being asked, at the point of death, what is the matter with them, say they suffer in the manner just related from people lately dead …” (Malham and Oldys 1808, 233).

  Other serious minds, such as the famous French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, gave a similar definition of
the revenant. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote that revenants were “… corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpse grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite” (1856, 371).

  Yet of all the great writers to take a stab at defining the habits and nature of the vampire, it is perhaps John Scoffern who said it best when he said it the simplest: “The best definition I can give of a vampire is a living mischievous and murderous dead body” (1870, 350).

  Naming the Damned

  References in English literature to vampiric revenants, however, appear long before these writers put pen to paper; the first mention of the creatures was in a little-known text on English churches in 1679. Although the term vampire still hadn’t come into print yet, it did begin to surface in popular language sometime after 1688. It wouldn’t emerge on the printed page until almost fifty years later, when it finally materialized in a work entitled Travels of Three Gentlemen from Venice to Hamburg, Being the Grand Tour of Germany in the Year 1734, by an anonymous author.

  The word vampire is thought to have been borrowed from the German word vampir, which found its genesis in the Eastern Slavic word upir, first written in a 1047 translation of the Book of Psalms. In it, the priest transcribing the work from Glagolitic, the oldest known Slavic alphabet, to the Cyrillic of the First Bulgarian Empire in the ninth century writes his name Upir Likhyi, meaning “Wicked or Foul Vampire.” Although a distasteful moniker such as this seems strange to us today, it is the remnant of an older pagan practice of replacing personal names with nicknames.

  Etymologists tracing the roots of the word have branched into four schools of thought over the years, leading to a great deal of lively debate among scholars and folklorists alike. The first was proposed by German scholars in the 1700s who believed the word vampire came from the Greek verb pivnw, meaning “to drink.” Later, in the 1800s, a linguist named Franz Miklosich suggested that the Slavic word upir and its synonyms upior, uper, and upyr came from the Northern Turkish word uber, which meant “witch.” In direct opposition to Miklosich, other linguists such as André Vaillant claimed that the Turkish word uber was in fact derived from the Slavic word upir.

  As if all that weren’t confusing enough, the final and most recent theory is that the word vampire existed no further back than the German-Hungarian word vampir, and its origin is relatively new in the scheme of things.

  There were, of course, many other names for these creatures, spoken in many other tongues not directly tied to the English vampire. For instance, the words wukodalak, vurkulaka, and vrykolaka were found among the Russians, Albanians, and Greeks, all of which translated roughly to mean “wolf-fairy,” demonstrating an early comingling of the archetypes for the vampire and the werewolf. Beyond this, the further one digs back through the pages of history, the more obscure and clouded the names become—until they are lost entirely.

  Categories of Vampirism

  Just as the names for vampires changed to suit the tongue they were spoken in, so too did the nature and habits of the creatures change to fit the cultures that believed in them. Despite the many variations on the theme, for the purposes of our investigation vampires can be broken down into three distinct categories. The first and most common form of vampire was as feared as it was dreadful to behold. These ghastly night stalkers, which we will call revenants, were traditionally the corpses of the living dead, who roamed the night in search of tasty victims, much as George Romero’s zombies did in Night of the Living Dead. In some cultures the dead bodies were controlled by the spirit of the deceased, who after death could find no rest and so was cursed to rise again, while in others the corpse was merely a rotting vessel inhabited and spurred on by a demon or other evil spirit. In most cases, revenants were pictured as if they had just clawed their way out of the grave still wearing the death shrouds they were buried in. Reports describe them as shambling monsters with bloated bodies and ruddy or blackened colored flesh, long scraggly hair, and ragged claws with fresh blood seeping from their mouths and nostrils.

  In some areas, the revenant took on other physical traits that departed somewhat from the usual corpse-like appearance—but were equally horrifying. For instance, in the Saronic Isles of the Mediterranean, revenants had hunchbacks and attacked with viscous dagger-like claws. In Bulgaria they had only one nostril, while high on Mount Pelion in central Greece they glowed in the dark. Among some of the Slavic and Germanic Gypsies it was even thought that revenants had no bones, a belief based on the observation that vampires often left their bones in the grave when they went hunting. What may surprise many is that the tradition of vampires sporting sharpened canine fangs was a literary invention that surfaced much later.

  In most cases, what seemed to motivate the revenant was an insatiable hunger for blood, which it was believed allowed the creature to continue in its undead state. Upon first awaking in its coffin, the revenant began to devour its own body, including the funeral shroud it was buried in. The more of itself the revenant consumed, the more its living family members mysteriously began to grow ill and waste away, causing their deaths. At some point in the meal, the revenant either rises from the grave as an invisible spirit through holes in the ground or physically claws its way through the dirt. Once free from its tomb, it wanders through the night in search of family members and relatives to continue its feeding frenzy. After those closest to it have succumbed to its appetites, it turns its attention to former neighbors or even livestock such as sheep or cattle.

  Male vampires in particular were said to have strong sexual cravings and often forced their advances on former wives, girlfriends, and other women. Finally, when it can find no more victims within its vicinity, it slowly climbs its way atop the church belfry at midnight and rings the bells so that all who hear the mournful peal will sicken and die. In this manner, revenants such as the Slovakian nelapsi were said to have decimated entire villages.

  Although when we think of the revenant draining the blood of its victims the common misconception is to envision those telltale puncture marks on the neck, the truth is that most were believed to drain their victim’s blood from the heart, stomach, nose, or from between the eyes. Revenants were also blamed for other mischief, including suffocating their victims, damaging their property, causing crops to wither and fail, or bringing bad luck to a household. Among the German and Polish Kashubians, the nachzehrer, or “afterwards devourer,” could cause a person’s death if its shadow simply fell upon them, while the mwere, the vampiric spirits of children who died before being baptized, were thought to cause nightmares. One of the most powerful weapons in the revenant’s arsenal was known as the evil eye. Belief held that the mere glance of a revenant could cause people to become ill, cursed, or waste away and die. Even inanimate objects were affected by their gaze, causing bread to turn stale, wine to sour, and tools to grow dull and rusty.

  Unlike the night demons that swept up from the east and preyed mostly on pregnant women and newborns, the European revenant seemed fixated on those who were closest to them in life; these usually meant immediate family members or others with similar ties. Although being a relation was often enough to become a victim of the undead, other reasons included not observing the proper burial customs of the deceased or somehow causing their death. In Gypsy folklore, being singled out by a mullo, meaning “one who is dead,” usually meant the victim kept the deceased’s possessions after burial rather than destroying them as was the Gypsy custom.

  According to most traditions, revenants could only travel about during the night and had to return to their earthly graves before the cock crowed and the sun rose above the horizon—or else they would risk a sort of forced catatonia and the vengeance of angry peasants. The rare exception to this rule is found among the Russ
ians and Poles, who concluded that revenants could attack victims anytime from noon to midnight. It was also held that the creatures were allowed to work their evil any day of the week barring Saturday, which the church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. On this holy day, even witches dared not hold their depraved Sabbaths and all the devil’s minions were excluded from conducting their dark business.

  Revenants were also thought to be more active during the months right before the feasts of St. George and St. Andrew, when the darkness of the nights lasted their longest and winter blanketed the land like a sort of death itself. Once set free from their tombs, besides general bloodsucking and other foul deeds, revenants were said to haunt deserted crossroads or churchyards, where they perched atop tombstones, rocking back and forth, shrieking in the night. At other times they congregated in remote forests and ruined castles plotting evil deeds together.

  The second type of vampire is distinct to the annals of the blood drinkers in that it is a living vampire. In some societies a person could be born a vampire or become one while they were still alive. Those who willingly chose to become a vampire rather than being born one were usually sorcerers or witches engaged in the dark arts. In Romania one of the more feared living vampires was known as strigoi vii, which was a type of hag that had two hearts or souls. While they slept, one of their souls left the body and ranged the countryside, drinking the blood of the humans and livestock they came across or reanimating corpses at crossroads to waylay passersby.