Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  In Europe as a whole 80 per cent of accused witches were women; in Hungary it was 90 per cent. Only about 10 per cent of the total number of trials for witchcraft across the continent took place during the ‘witch-crazes’ – the frenzied outbreaks of multiple persecutions. Most of the cases that were not politically motivated involved small, scattered communities, where life moved slowly and changed little, and where resentments and suspicions festered for years until a catharsis was needed and a human sacrifice, almost always a woman, was arranged.1

  Witch-hunts could actually be carried out in ‘good faith’ – literally according to the moral standards of the time, by both Catholics and Protestants, or by the secular authorities. The thinking behind such persecutions followed two different paths, both ending in the stake for the accused. Some believed that dying on the executioner’s pyre would save heretics and witches from the everlasting fires of hell, while others held that the shamelessly ungodly had put themselves beyond Christian redemption; society should exact retribution as decisively and painfully as possible. When the papers of the many trials are studied dispassionately from a modern perspective, however, it is certain that there were many instances in which the charge of witchcraft was used as a pretext to settle personal disputes whose origins lay solidly in the material world.

  The very real witches and wizards who inhabited post-Renaissance communities were expected to play the role of the prehistoric shaman in fighting battles in the spirit world on behalf of their fellows, or of making arrangements with supernatural forces to guarantee such benefits as fertile fields and abundant children. In return for this they were rewarded and tolerated, but they would always be feared and envied. Despite their efforts, young children were carried to the churchyard in an unending silent procession, animals sickened and died, storms flattened the crops, floods carried away the seeds. Someone had to take the blame.2

  In the world-pictures of the people of the early modern period, the spirits who lurked on the fringes of the licit Christian belief-system were confused with the real people who lived half in and half outside their own villages and hamlets, the loners, eccentrics and recluses. Witnesses at a witch-trial in 1717 reported: ‘while he was dreaming at noon, he was attacked by a cold wind in the form of Mrs Oláh Mihály’. In Vas county near Elisabeth’s former estates local people testified that ‘Mrs Jancsó, a midwife, made the whirlwind’ and she and the other spirits ‘flew away like kites bringing with them the stone rain...’ The obsession with beauty that Father Túróczi ascribed to Elisabeth Báthory is also an attribute of the godless temptress and the witch; in the year before Túróczi published his revelations, a witch-trial at Szeged had heard that ‘In the assemblies of the witches nobody is ugly or old, they all seem to be very beautiful.’3 In 1702 English visitors coming from the east observed: ‘We noticed a very miserable custom in Transylvania and Hungary as well; they are all convinced that they are surrounded by witches. Several women of all ages are sentenced to death for this reason every year. The evidences for the charge are only weak rumours, e.g. the neighbours complain that their animals are cursed by the accused person . . .’4

  The folklore of eastern Europe was full of remnants of earlier cults from the Mediterranean, the Balkans and western Asia, whose details had been forgotten, but whose archetypes lived on under local names. The seventeenth-century Romanian strigoi of Transylvania were the female owl-demon striges of Ancient Greek legend who disembowelled their human victims. The Transylvanian prikulici were the Slavs’ vrkolaki, flesh-eating and blood-drinking werewolves. And the Magyar fairies were the same as the Slavonic vile, an amalgam of wind-spirits and the souls of real girls who had died as unbaptised babies or virgin brides before they could take their place in the human community. So female innocents were an important and universal element of the magic pantheon of the region. Elisabeth Báthory’s innocent victims could easily be identified with these troops of nymphs, who in the faery world also played the role of servants to more dangerous entities.

  One of the most enduring and resonant figures, appearing in every European folk myth in one incarnation or another, is the fairy queen, a personage who can be beneficent at one moment and mercilessly cruel the next. This character is invariably beautiful, her lair is a place of mortal danger to any human enticed into it, and her habits – bathing herself, concocting magic cosmetics, gazing into enchanted mirrors, are virtually those of flesh-and-blood queens and great ladies. As personified, for example, by the enchantress Morgan le Fay in the Arthurian cycle, this queen is a distant relative of the pagan war-goddesses, transmuted by mediaeval courtly romances into a feudal sorceress. Luca, the Slav devil of the winter solstice, was the leader of a band of lost souls and was attended, like the Blood Countess, by crones. The Romanian fairy queen Doamna Zineloi was both goddess and demon and, like many of these beings, was a memory of the cult of Artemis, whose rites could ensure beauty and physical health for women and whose revels brought about a state of ‘nympholepsy’ – an abandoned, boundless ecstasy which possessed and unhinged young women.

  Elisabeth was on the one hand a Renaissance lady who dutifully and correctly observed her prescribed role in society. She was at the same time in her own eyes a princess, existing beyond and above the limits of mundane humanity. She was both a patroness of the Protestant church and, if not a witch herself, a patron of witches.

  Two potent themes are united in Elisabeth’s legend: pity for the vulnerability of innocent women, and men’s abiding fear of the dominance and insatiability, the uncontrollable, limitless and arcane power that women could unleash; femmes literally fatales as repositories of irrational and ungovernable forces. Two sides of the coin are represented: women as many and helpless and woman as singular and all-powerful. For the educated, Elisabeth was a Hungarian rival for the monstrous ladies of Ancient Rome, a lamia (the female demon of classical mythology who preyed on humans and sucked their blood), a female Tamburlaine, or a transplanted Lucrezia Borgia. As for the peasants of Nitra county, they remembered the fourth- or fifth-hand versions of the court testimonies that had the feudal chatelaine tearing at her subjects with her teeth. They needed a rationale for the enormity of Elisabeth’s crimes and an explanation for the multiple disappearances: why had the widow needed so many? To keep herself young, to keep her aristocratic skin so unnaturally white. These were reasons that even simple people could comprehend. And there was something else, something remaining from Elisabeth’s time that they could see with their own eyes and whisper about at the fireside.

  Under the tall castle with its blind walls and gothic turrets clinging to the limestone outcrop with Čachtice on its flank and the little hamlet of Višnové at its foot, there were natural caverns deep in the white rock of the hillside. Someone, perhaps in the far-off days of Duke Stibor, perhaps in the Nádasdys’ own time, had tunnelled in from the outside and built a crude network of cellars there. Local people even said that there was another secret tunnel running from beneath the manor-house in the village itself all the way under the gardens, the woods and the vineyards up to the castle, where it connected with the subterranean vaults that no one but the family’s most trusted servants had ever seen. These cellars before they had been closed off or their roofs had crumbled, blocking them with rubble, had contained wine-barrels and vats, ancient wooden casks which even when the tunnels came to be abandoned still contained the traces of a rust-red residue.5

  It is not at all far-fetched to imagine that blood, including human blood, was used for cosmetic or ceremonial purposes. Venesection or bleeding was, with bathing and cauterising, one of the most common forms of therapy, practised by all qualified doctors, barber-surgeons and most lay healers too. A basin – wooden in the peasant’s shack, silver in the manor-house – full of fresh blood would have been a common sight to those who gathered round the sickbed of a family member or servant. In the countryside, vats of blood from freshly slaughtered pigs were assembled for the making of sauces and soups – the pörkölt bloo
d goulash is still a favourite – in ceremonies that had come from the Magyars’ pre-Christian days on the Asian plains. Both nomadic and pastoral societies based on rearing cattle and horses had in common the drinking of blood from still-living animals, either from necessity when nourishment was scarce, or in rituals of bonding with their totem animals.

  The apothecaries of the middle ages kept among their stock of potions sanguis draconis, dragon’s blood, a balm and dye once perhaps containing the real blood of a serpent such as a boa constrictor, but later made from the red resin of a tree of the East Indies, or, more perilously for their patients, poisonous cinnabar or minium. In his twentieth-century treatise on blood, Earle Hackett demonstrates that spilled human blood is no more effective as a fertiliser or as a cosmetic than any rotting animal or vegetable matter. Its value is all symbolic: ‘And yet . . . and yet . . . did not roses and anemones grow from the blood of Adonis?’6

  One of the prosaic objections to the idea of a cosmetic blood-bath is that blood quickly coagulates, making immersion in gore an excessively messy and unpleasant experience. Literal-minded supporters of a blood-bathing hypothesis have countered by suggesting that a blood-shower is a more plausible solution, with the victim-donor’s blood either quickly collected and thrown over the recipient, or released directly from above, gushing straight from the interior of one body on to the surface of the other. It was this last scenario that the actress Ingrid Pitt urged the director Peter Sasdy to simulate during the making of the movie Countess Dracula, but it was thought too shocking for the Hammer audience and the censor.

  By curious coincidence there are two proven factors which may prevent human blood from clotting in the ordinary way, and each of them applies neatly to the setting in which Elisabeth’s supposed indulgences took place. First, when a victim undergoes a sudden and violent death, the extreme stress experienced just before dying may trigger an overproduction of fibrinolysin, a powerful anti-coagulant agent. The result is that, even hours after death, the blood in the victim’s cadaver remains perfectly liquid, so much so that it has been possible to transfuse blood taken from a corpse successfully into a living patient. There is another anti-clotting agent which was discovered by orthodox science some 300 years after the death of the Blood Countess, but which would have been readily available to her in the labyrinthine cellars beneath her castle: the acidic deposit which collects around the tops of the wooden casks in which wine was stored.

  Blood has been a recurrent subject of dreams throughout human history, and there is a wealth of literature seeking to explain the archetypal symbolism of blood in terms of fear, particularly male fear of the viscerality of sex, castration-anxiety and horror of menstruation. Conscious and unconscious blood taboos would have been a part of the worldview of the peasants of Čachtice, just as they were everywhere else until well into the early twentieth century. But it is not necessary to invoke dream archetypes and the unconscious to imagine the associations that a bloodstain on a white sheet would have triggered in the early modern mind; first menses on a girl-child’s shift, consumptive blood on the apron of a maiden, a lost maidenhead, a botched abortion or a difficult childbirth, the last traces of mortality on the shroud . . .

  In the sixteenth century the chemical attributes of blood and its circulation through the body were not understood, and neither were the properties of human skin, with the result that blood-drinking – introducing alien blood into the system via the mouth – and the use of blood as a cosmetic, in the hope that it would pass into or through the skin, both seemed quite plausible. The drinking of human blood was less likely to be openly prescribed, but it undoubtedly happened. By primitive logic the blood of the strong was valued for its ability to transfer strength. When the Magyars named their favourite red wine Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood), they were invoking the animal qualities they had once sought from the real thing, as had the worshippers of Mithras who contributed to the Christian mystery of transubstantiation. The Romanians preserved the tradition of the ‘Blood Bear’, a rogue animal fed only on blood and red meat which became possessed of supernatural ferocity.

  A thousand years earlier Pliny described how doctors cured the Egyptian King of elephantiasis by means of human blood. Moreover, ‘Roman epileptics attended gladiatorial displays in the hope of getting a sip or two of supposedly curative strong man’s gore from the unlucky ones among the contestants. Those whose fits were hysterical and not truly epileptic might well have been cured by such a dramatic and public experience, which would have reinforced the legend of this particularly well-known blood-cure.’8 Constantine the Great had hoped that bathing in children’s blood would bring him relief from leprosy; fortunately the apostles Peter and Paul appeared to him in a dream to assure him that only holy water could effect the cure.9 It was known throughout Europe in Elisabeth’s day that a doctor had offered to cure the dying Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 (exactly the same story was told of Sixtus V) by giving him blood drained from three living ten-year-old boys (all of whom subsequently died, as did Innocent, who refused the medicine). Those decadent ladies who had the wherewithal to procure this ultimate restorative and cosmetic no doubt did so, but only rumours survive: Poppaea, Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia are the names most often cited, but almost any feudal noblewoman or wealthy courtesan would have found it easy to engage in a little private collecting from donors – voluntary or involuntary – in the same way that alchemists and necromancers acquired the supplies essential for their experiments.

  It is an irony that their Countess should have smeared herself with the red blood of virgins in order to render her own skin whiter, but it is no surprise that the ruddy-featured peasants of Nitra county, whose own skin would turn to copper-brown in the summer fields, would marvel at the delicacy and translucency of their social superiors, wondering if their indifference to their serfs’ wellbeing was because they were literally bloodless. By the same token, the young girls who surrounded the Lady of the house would have contrasted visibly with their counterparts outside the manor: the combination of a closeted existence, the emotional tensions of adolescence, a diet poor in minerals could leave them ghostlike in appearance and prone to fainting and hysteria.

  It was not only the flowing of female blood that triggered the nervous fantasies of male-dominated societies but also the cessation of that flow. In some ways Elisabeth Báthory did not fit the profile of the typical female scapegoat – she was not poor, powerless or noticeably infirm – but she was a post-menopausal widow, and a scold. Elderly women who outlived their men were an economic and psychological threat. They had accumulated knowledge and experience, acquired confidence and often came to express their views forcibly, but they were an affront to male pride and the natural order. Once these women were no longer engaged in the business of birth and nurture, they were redundant and without a niche in the hierarchy of being. The isolation and persecution of women was nothing new, and aristocrats were not exempt. Across Europe and in the New World there are striking parallels which start to suggest a pattern of social behaviour – by the women and by their oppressors – rather than a string of sensational coincidences. One particular case was the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler for witchcraft in fourteenth-century Ireland.

  Dame Alice lived in Kilkenny in south-east Ireland and was a member of the Anglo-Norman elite who ruled over the native Celtic population. She was apparently possessed of great beauty and force of character. By the time the authorities moved against her she had outlived three husbands: an influential financier, William Outlawe, by whom she had a son of the same name, and two wealthy squires, Adam le Blund and Richard de Valle. From the two last she inherited their whole estates, leaving their children, the natural heirs, resentful and impoverished. Soon after Alice had married for the fourth time to a gentleman named John le Poer, rumours of poisoning and witchcraft began to circulate, coinciding with her new husband’s affliction by a mysterious wasting disease. Sir John himself denounced his wife to the ecclesiastical authorities, who began an
investigation, supported by her late husbands’ children and other prominent citizens of Kilkenny town. The Franciscan Bishop of Ossary, an Englishman, Richard de Ledrede, orchestrated the campaign of vilification against Alice Kyteler, her son William (on whom she doted) and the senior servants of her household, citing in evidence a litany of black-magic practices which became a template for the charges repeatedly brought against the witches of the west in the centuries that followed: desecration of the host and mockery of church rituals, animal sacrifices, sexual congress with demons, and the making of potions from ingredients such as the flesh of new-born children, the hair and fingernails of hanged men, offal, insects and noxious plants, mixed and boiled, it was said, in the hollow skull of a beheaded felon.10 The Bishop attempted to arrest the woman and succeeded in having her excommunicated, but his jurisdiction in such cases was not clear and Dame Alice, who refused to be summonsed, had her own powerful supporters. She in turn accused the Bishop of slander in the secular county court and managed to have him confined temporarily in Kilkenny castle.

  In the course of a year, the relentless pressure from the church and the repetition of the terrible accusations, together with local resentment of the Dame’s arrogant behaviour, began to turn official opinion against her, and eventually permission was given to put her on trial for her life.

  The contrasts with Elisabeth Báthory’s case are clear: Dame Alice’s accuser was not as powerful as the Palatine Thurzó, and could not take her into custody or pass sentence on her without official sanction. The accused person’s own husband joined in condemning her and provided evidence of her crimes (her magical paraphernalia and samples of her poisons and charms) to the prosecutors. But the similarities are also significant: by her personal high-handedness and sharp-tongued pride Dame Alice Kyteler had alienated her neighbours, terrified her servants and unsettled her male peers. Most importantly, by accumulating great wealth and protecting it for her favourite heir, she had set herself up as a target for a jealous husband and a band of greedy relatives. The prosecution’s figurehead, de Ledrede himself, stood to benefit materially if the heiress was found guilty and her estates forfeited. There may have been other factors, political or dynastic, which were involved in the affair, but the time elapsed makes it impossible for these to be ascertained. It is clear, however, that there was more to the Kyteler case than the charges of spell-casting and poisoning which were set down in the prosecutors’ papers.