CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WANDERERS
ON MARCH 6, 1710, with the Sun King, Louis XIV, still on the throne of France, a discovery was made deep in the vaults of venerable Notre Dame de Paris. While constructing a new crypt beneath the nave, workers uncovered an ancient, four-tiered stone block. Supporting part of the choir and chancel, the block had been part of a pagan temple that once stood on the site. Originally dedicated to the god Jupiter by the Nautae Parisiaci—the mariners of Parisii during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius—the block depicted in bas-relief a number of gods, but none so prominently as the fearsome visage bearing the antlers of a stag. The broken inscription read, “–ernunnos.”
This was almost certainly Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Lord of the Animals, the most famous horned god in European mythology. The Christian Middle Ages, it seemed, truly rested on pagan foundations.
The image (but not the name) of Cernunnos had been known at Val Camonica in the Italian Alps, where a great antlered figure looms out from a fourth-century B.C. cave engraving, a torque necklace on his right arm and a horned serpent on his left. At Autun in France, Cernunnos bears two horned serpents. At Reims, where stags and bulls surround him, he holds a sack of coins or grain. Sometimes he appears with three faces, in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, or even, perhaps, in degraded form as Herne the Hunter, disporting with the merry wives among the oaks of Windsor Forest.
But the horned Cernunnos is most widely recognized in the features of Satan.
A once-fashionable theory suggested that the medieval witch cult was not a Satanist one—that it was not even diabolical but represented the vestiges of an old religion, displaced and driven underground by Christianity, that worshiped the horned god of European paganism. Although this thesis has come under heavy critical fire, it maintains a stubborn life, if only because it suggests that our monsters did not spring sui generis from the medieval imagination. If the demons of Christianity were perhaps the gods of a former faith—at least those not bought off with halos and sainthoods—it is to the pagan world of antiquity, and to its Indo-European underpinnings, that we now must turn.
THE HIDDEN PAST
Buried in a fourth-century Bulgarian manuscript, “Oration of St. Gregory the Theologian,” is a 15th-century insertion sometimes called The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols:
…to the same gods the Slavic people make fires and perform sacrifice, and to vilas and Mokos and the diva and Perun…and Rozanica. And to vampires and bereginas. And dancing to Pereplut, they drink to him in horns.
This puzzling fragment has been pored over and analyzed from every possible angle. What scholars surmise is this: A vilas was a kind of demon, as was a diva. Mokos was a goddess of shearing, spinning, and weaving, while Perun was the widely worshiped Slavic god of thunder and lightning. The Rozanica were the spirits of ancestors, and Pereplut was a god revered by seafarers. As for bereginas, they are believed to be an arcane riverbank entity.
But vampires—why would they have once been considered fit objects for sacrifice? Even the glimmer of an answer demands a journey deep into both the historical and the mythological past.
Somewhere out on the Eurasian steppe, no one is sure exactly where, lies the homeland of the Indo-European peoples. In this prehistoric cradle, tribes that later migrated far away from one another—giving rise in the process to such related language families as the Indo-Iranian, the Italic, the Celtic, the Germanic, and the Slavic—once shared a culture and religion. By historical times, the Greeks, Romans, and Celts, for example, had become simply local inflections of that common ancestral pattern. Their gods, too, had been customized, but in them could still be discerned the slightly distorted echoes of the distant originals.
Among all the daughters of the Indo-Europeans, the ancient Slavs have been the most challenging to trace. Think of a people about whom there are scant eyewitness accounts yet an abundance of biased, if not actively hostile, commentators. Indeed, were it not for the painstaking labors of scholars, linguists, and comparative mythologists, we would be able to glimpse today only a rustic Slavic pantheon, its idols carved from tree trunks or crudely chiseled in stone. Even so, what remains known of many Slavic gods is only their names.
One big barrier to our knowledge of Slavic deities is that the early Slavs had no alphabet. That came with the priests. Slavic tribes first came into contact with Christianity in the sixth century, when they wandered into central Europe and down into the Balkans. Not until 863, however, did Cyril and Methodius, the Slavic apostles, arrive in Moravia, the rolling region of hill and valley now part of the Czech Republic. By the time their mission was expelled for political reasons two decades later, they had created what eventually became the Cyrillic alphabet and had used it to shape what is called the Slavonic liturgy.
After 886, when Bulgaria’s Khan Boris I welcomed the refugees of the Moravian mission, the Balkans, especially Macedonia, became the true cradle of the Slavonic rite. From there, that liturgy spread to Serbia and Romania. By 988, it had reached Russia, where the statue of Perun was toppled from its site overlooking Kiev, dragged by horse to the Dnieper, given a thorough beating, and dumped into the river.
Although the church bestowed literacy, churchmen were never sympathetic to pagan “superstitions.” This makes it hard to distinguish the authentic elements of medieval chronicles. The last of the Baltic Slavs were finally converted to Christianity early in the 15th century, yet the Prussian Chronicle, written about 1520 by a Dominican priest named Simon Grunau, gives such a fanciful account of the Slavs’ chief pagan shrine that scholars still debate its veracity. According to Grunau, the idols were hung high in a sacred oak; they included a Perun-like god of thunder—all angry visage and curly beard—and a death god, all pallid countenance with green beard, a thirst for human blood, and a garland of human and animal skulls.
The Russians, for their part, were often accused of practicing a “mixed faith”—acting piously Christian in church but stubbornly pagan in woods and field. After centuries of listening to imprecations thundered down on “heretics,” many Russian villagers came to clump all their suspicious dead under the single label of eretiks. They knew little and cared less about doctrinal disputes, and it was simpler to keep the properly Orthodox dead in hallowed ground and to consign the eretiks to the margins.
Eretiks comprised not just schismatics and Old Believers—those who objected to the 17th-century liturgical reforms—but “sorcerers” as well. A whiff of ominous familiarity shrouds those “sorcerers,” especially those purported to leave their graves at night to roam the village and to eat people. A vampire, it seems, smells just as vile by any other name.
Eretiks, then, might encompass all the dangerous dead. The means of dispatching one for good likewise has a familiar cast: Open the grave, roll the corpse over, drive an aspen stake through it, and perhaps burn it as well. (In one village, it sufficed to give the body “a thorough thrashing” by horsewhip.) Beset by a prolonged drought, a village might exhume an eretik who had once been suspected of sorcery, dash the remains with water, or toss them into the Volga. During one such ritual, villagers beat the skull of a corpse while crying out, “Bring rain!”
In parts of Russia, the vampire —upir, in Russian—had clearly been subsumed under the broader category of spiritual outlaws dubbed heretics. Possibly that relationship began the other way around: The word heretic, along with pagan, may once have been subsumed beneath vampire—which may originally have had no supernatural connotations whatsoever.
Linguists seeking the origins of the word vampire have been shaking the etymological bushes for clues for at least a century. Vampir, upir, upyr, upior, and other cognate forms from around the Slavic world were long thought to have stemmed from the root word uber—Turkish for “witch.” That seemed logical, given the number of authorities who suspected vampires of having hatched in the Balkans, so long under the sway of the sultan. Although other linguists favored an entirely Hungarian
origin or argued that the root of vampire was the Greek word pi— “to drink”—many scholars, including the influential Montague Summers, embraced the Turkish theory.
The consensus today, by contrast, is that vampire is almost undoubtedly Slavic. The root, as far back as it can be traced, seems to be a medieval Serbian word; when anglicized, it came to resemble something like vampir. Originating perhaps in the heart of the Balkans, the word gradually diffused throughout the Slavic world. Each local adaptation gave the word its own slight new twist.
The thorniest question of all, however, persists: What did vampir originally mean?
The earliest written evidence of vampir—oupir or upir, as it happens—appears in the margin of a manuscript called the Book of the Prophets, a copy of a work whose original dates to 1047. Its contextual significance is cryptic in the extreme; an Orthodox monk from Novgorod uses it to describe some personal shortcoming of his.
Then again, there is that mention, in The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols, of sacrifices made to “vampires and bereginas.” Since the reference is probably a 15th-century insertion, it may not shed much light on the original meaning of vampir. Yet the association with sacrifice, however tenuous, remains a tantalizing clue.
Its rampant polytheism aside, paganism was vilified for its blood and orgies—that is, for its public sacrifices and riotous feasting. Blood sacrifice—the cutting of an animal’s throat at the altar to propitiate a divinity—was forbidden in Scripture. On the other hand, it formed a central rite in nearly every religion of pagan Europe.
On the shores of the Baltic, where paganism lingered longest, oxen and sheep were regularly sacrificed as late as the 12th century. So too were prisoners of war and (according to the Saxon priest Helmold, author of Chronicle of the Slavs) Christians, whose blood was said to particularly please the gods. “[A]fter the victim is felled,” Helmold wrote of sacrifices in general, “the priest drinks of its blood in order to render himself more potent in the receiving of oracles. For it is the opinion of many that demons are very easily conjured with blood.”
And the orgies? Pagan feast days were infamous for their licentiousness, and pagan marriage ceremonies—especially ancient fertility rituals—verged on the truly orgiastic. What’s more, pagans favored barbarous initiation ceremonies, and with good reason, they were reputed to believe in reincarnation—anathema to the Church.
All of this strongly suggests that the word vampir arose in the crucible of the Balkans at a time when Christianity was locked in combat with paganism. If vampir does indeed spring from an obscure root word meaning “to drink,” it’s only a short logical leap to the understanding that it was likely first used as an epithet flung at those blood-drinking pagans who, tenacious of custom, refused the uncertain embrace of the Church. This may also help explain why the word lingered so long as a proper name in Russia, where an 11th-century nobleman from Novgorod went by the name Prince Upir—Prince Vampire.
By the same token, warg— the Nordic word for “wolf,” as every Tolkien reader knows—might at one time have been used to denote outlaws. Transformed thereby from men into wolves—in the eyes of the law, at any rate—the outlaws could be killed on sight. This allegorical shape-shifting may have given rise to the “wild man of the woods” figure so common in medieval folklore, contributing to a range of myths from Robin Hood to werewolves.
Might natural outlaws, then—anathematized, excommunicated, and exiled to the forest—have metamorphosed over the centuries into supernatural ones? If so, the vampir may have been moved along that path by a heresy—one similarly centered in southern Serbia and Macedonia, where between the 10th and 14th centuries, there flourished a little-known sect called the Bogomils.
EVEN THE DEMONS FLED
Arising in the highlands of Armenia, the sect of the Bogomils was one in a long line of dualist religions—faiths that condemn all matter as evil and revere all spirit as good. Named for one of their early priests, the Bogomils first entered Bulgaria, perhaps pushed west off the stark Iranian plateau by the armies of Islam, before making the Balkans their redoubt. From there they spread into Russia, central Europe, and even France, where they became known as the Albigenses.
The Bogomils, in turn, had been inspired by the Paulicians, an even more obscure Armenian sect, whose leaders the Byzantine emperors had burned at the stake for heresy. These dualistic movements threatened the Church not only because their adherents fiercely opposed anything hierarchical or liturgical, but also because they bore a disturbing resemblance to the Gnostic heresy that had split the early Christian community.
Despite being persecuted, the Bogomils exerted an insidious influence on the growing Slavic Church. After Russia embraced Orthodoxy in 988, Bulgarian priests—many of them tinged with more than a little Bogomilism—were numerous among its formative clergy. The same thing happened all over eastern Europe. Even after Bogomilism had been condemned as heresy and stamped out, the movement’s dualistic imprint endured deep in the fabric of Orthodoxy, especially in its attitude toward the dead.
Bogomils had claimed that demons fled from them alone but inhabited all other men. These demons were said to instruct their hosts “in vice, lead them to wickedness and after their death dwell in their corpses.” No surprise, then, that in 1143, two Orthodox bishops in Asia Minor were accused of being Bogomils after they “dug up bodies in the belief that they were possessed of demons and unfit for burial.”
That belief in the demonic, married to a word associated with blood drinking and death, may have greatly propelled the transformation of vampir into the vampire that surfaced in the 18th century. All it needed was a corpse to wrap itself around.
Throughout this social and religious upheaval, men and women had continued dying—and their dead bodies had continued to act in strange ways, or at least were alleged to do so. A ninth-century capitulary of Charlemagne directed that “if any person, deceived by the devil, shall believe, after the manner of the Pagans, that any man or woman was a Strygis, or Stryx [night-flying bloodsucker], and was given to eat men, and for this cause should burn such person, or should give such person’s flesh to be eaten, or should eat such flesh, such man or woman should be capitally punished.”
And in the sixth century, just as the Slavs were beginning to infiltrate the Balkans, Clovis, king of the Franks, was inserting into the Lex Salica— the foundation of most European legal codes—explicit punishments for the desecration of the dead. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of the third to seventh centuries have been discovered to contain many prone burials—that is, burials with the corpse buried facedown. Should the cadaver then choose to wander, the thinking apparently went, it would invariably head in the wrong direction.
The British graves also hold decapitated skeletons, whose severed skulls are usually lodged between the legs or feet. Were these executions? Or were they other methods of restricting the movements of the restless dead? The bones are silent, but folklore speaks volumes. Sir James Frazer, in The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion, quotes an illuminating passage from an 1835 German source:
In East Prussia when a person is believed to be suffering from the attacks of a vampire and suspicion falls on the ghost of somebody who died lately, the only remedy is thought to be for the family of the deceased to go to his grave, dig up his body, behead it and place the head between the legs of the corpse. If blood flows from the severed head the man was certainly a vampire, and the family must drink of the flowing blood, thus recovering the blood which had been sucked from their living bodies by the vampire. Thus the vampire is paid out in kind.
The cradle of the vampir might very well be the Balkans of the ninth and tenth centuries. And as both a word and a concept, the vampire may very well—and quite logically, in the final analysis—be rooted in the social, political, and religious realities of the day. But if we are to follow the trail of wandering corpses to its conclusion, we must now head south, to Greece.
/> THE Vrykolakas
One evening in the mid-19th century, Henry Tozer, an Oxford don and authority on the geography of the far-flung Ottoman Empire, arrived in the small Greek town of Aghia. The hamlet perched on the flanks of Mount Ossa, overlooking the plains of Thessaly—fabled since classical times for the Olympics, for horses, and for superstition:
During the night which we spent at Aghia the population were disturbed by apparitions of spirits, which they described as gliding about with large lanterns in their hands. These are called vrykolaka by the Greeks and vurkolak by the Turks, for both Christians and Mahometans believe in them; the name, however, is written and pronounced in a great variety of ways. It was curious to meet with them in this manner as soon as we descended into the plains of Thessaly, the ancient land of witches; but the belief in these appearances is widely spread, not only throughout Thessaly and Epirus, but also among the islands of the Aegean and over a great part of Turkey. The idea concerning them is, that some persons come to life again after death, sleep in their tombs with their eyes open, and wander abroad by night, especially when the moon is shining brightly.
The moon shining brightly, of course, suggests werewolves on the prowl. Vrykolakas — like the Turkish vurkolak, Serbian vukodlak, Bulgarian volkudlak, Albanian vurvolak, and similar cognates that have burrowed deep into the linguistic map of eastern Europe—has usually been interpreted as “werewolf” because it stems from a Slavic root (probably vârkolak)—that presumably meant “wolf pelt.” It came to be interchangeable with vampire the reasoning goes, only because werewolves in folklore were suspected of becoming vampires after death.
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