|
Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in almost every culture around the
world. Their variety is almost endless; from red eyed monsters with green or pink hair in
China to the Greek Lamia which has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a
winged serpent; from vampire foxes in Japan to a head with trailing entrails known as the
Penanggalang in Malaysia.
However, the vampires we are familiar with today, although mutated by fiction and film,
are largely based on Eastern European myths. The vampire myths of Europe originated in
the far East, and were transported from places like China, Tibet and India with the trade
caravans along the silk route to the Mediterranean. Here they spread out along the Black
Sea coast to Greece, the Balkans and of course the Carpathian mountains, including
Hungary and Transylvania.
Our modern concept of the vampire still retains threads, such as blood drinking, return
from death, preying on humans at night, etc in common with the Eastern European
myths. However many things we are familiar with; the wearing of evening clothes, capes
with tall collars, turning into bats, etc are much more recent inventions.
On the other hand, many features of the old myths such as the placing of millet or poppy
seeds at the gravesite in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting seeds
rather than preying on relatives, have all but disappeared from modern fiction and film.
Even among the Eastern European countries there is a large variety of vampires.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SLAVIC VAMPIRES:
The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Bulgaria, Serbia to
Poland, have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world. The Slavs came from
north of the Black Sea and were closely associated with the Iranians. Prior to 8th century
AD they migrated north and west to where they are now.
Christianization began almost as soon as they arrived in their new homelands. But
through the 9th and 10th centuries the Eastern Orthodox Church and the western Roman
Church were struggling with each other for supremacy. They formally broke in 1054 AD,
with the Bulgarians, Russians, and Serbians staying Orthodox, while the Poles, Czechs,
and Croatians went Roman. This split caused a big difference in the development of
vampire lore - the Roman church believed incorrupt bodies were saints, while the
Orthodox church believed they were vampires.
The origin of Slavic vampire myths developed during 9th C as a result of conflict between
pre-Christian paganism and Christianity. Christianity won out with the vampires and other
pagan beliefs surviving in folklore. Causes of vampirism included: being born with a caul,
teeth, or tail, being conceived on certain days, irregular death, excommunication, improper
burial rituals etc. Preventative measures included: placing a crucifix in the coffin, or blocks
under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for
the same reason, placing millet or poppy seeds in the grave because vampires had a
fascination with counting, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes.
Evidence that a vampire was at work in the neighbourhood included: death of cattle,
sheep, relatives, neighbours, exhumed bodies being in a lifelike state with new growth of
the fingernails or hair, or if the body was swelled up like a drum, or there was blood on
the mouth and if the corpse had a ruddy complexion.
Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head
between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, holy water on the grave,
exorcism.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROMANIA:
Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it isn't surprising that their vampires are
variants of the Slavic vampire. They are called Strigoi based on the Roman term strix for
screech owl which also came to mean demon or witch.
There are different types of strigoi: strigoi vii are live witches who will become vampires
after death. They can send out their soul at night to meet with other witches or with
Strigoi mort who are dead vampires. The strigoi mort are the reanimated bodies which
return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbours.
A person born with a caul, tail, born out of wedlock, or one who died an unnatural death,
or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire. As was the seventh child of
the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who didn't eat salt or was looked
at by a vampire, or a witch. And naturally, being bitten by vampire, meant certain
condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.
The Vircolac which is sometimes mentioned in folklore was more closely related to a
mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon and later became connected with
werewolves rather than vampires. The person afflicted with lycanthropy could turn into a
dog, pig, or wolf.
The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw
things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most active
on the Eve of St George's Day (April 22 Julian, May 4 Gregorian calendar), the night
when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad. St Georges Day is still celebrated in
Europe. A vampire in the grave could be told by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse
with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were found by
distributing garlic in church and seeing who didn't eat it. Graves were often opened three
years after death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after
the death of an adult to check for vampirism. Measures to prevent a person becoming a
vampire included, removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could
eat any of it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing
over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on
windows and rubbing it on cattle, especially on St George's & St Andrew's days.
To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body followed by decapitation and
placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century people were shooting a bullet through
the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed
with water, and given to family members as a cure.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GYPSIES AND VAMPIRES:
Even today, Gypsies frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by
Bram
Stoker's book "Dracula" in which the Szgany gypsies served Dracula, carrying his boxes of
earth and guarding him.
In reality, Gypsies originated as nomadic tribes in northern India, but got their name from
the early belief that they came from Egypt. By 1000 AD they started spreading westward
and settled in Turkey for a time, incorporating many Turkish words into their Romany
language.
By the 14th century they were all through the Balkans and within two more centuries had
spread all across Europe. Gypsies arrived in Romania a short time before Vlad Dracula
was born in 1431.
Their religion is complex and varies between tribes, but they have a god called O Del, as
well as the concept of Good and Evil forces and a strong relationship and loyalty to dead
relatives. They believed the dead soul entered a world similar to ours except that there is
no death. The soul stayed around the body and sometimes wanted to come back. The
Gypsy myths of the living dead added to and enriched the vampire myths of Hungary,
Romania, and Slavic lands.
The ancient home of the Gypsies, India has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhuta
is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wandered around animating dead bodies
at night and attacked the living like a ghoul. In northern India could be found the
brahmaparusha, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull
from which it drank blood.
The most famous Indian vampire is Kali who had fangs, wore a garland of corpses or
skulls and had four arms. Her temples were near the cremation grounds. She and the
goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who could reproduce himself from each drop
of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle
and killing Raktabija.
Sara or the Black Goddess is the form in which Kali survived among Gypsies. Gypsies
have a belief that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France and baptised a
Gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony each May 24th in the French village where
this is supposed to have occurred.
One Gypsy vampire was called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire was believed to
return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who
had caused their death, or not properly observed the burial ceremonies, or who kept the
deceased's possessions instead of destroying them as was proper.) Female vampires could
return, lead a normal life and even marry but would exhaust the husband. Anyone who
had a hideous appearance, was missing a finger, or had animal appendages, etc. was
believed to be a vampire.
Even plants or dogs, cats, or farm animals could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons
kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood. To get rid of a
vampire people would hire a dhampire (the son of a vampire and his widow) to detect the
vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart
and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the
time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake
through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling
water over it, decapitating the corpse, or burning it.
In spite of the disruption of Gypsy lives by the various eastern European communist
regimes, they still retain much of their culture. In 1992 a new king of the Gypsies was
chosen in Bistritz, Romania.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BATS:
No discussion of vampires is even thinkable without talking about bats. They are integral
to the modern day concept of the vampire, but this was not always the case.
Many cultures have various myths about bats. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god
of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld. In Europe, bats and owls were
long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the
other hand, the Gypsies thought them lucky - they wore charms made of bat bones. And
in England the Wakefield crest and those of some others have bats on them.
So how did bats end up becoming associated with vampires? There are only three species
of vampires bats in the entire world, all of which occur in Central and South America.
During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with them and
recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their
mythical vampires. It wasn't long before they began to associate bats with their vampire
legends. Over the following centuries the association became stronger and was used by
various people, including James Malcom Rhymer who wrote "Varney the Vampyre" in
the 1840's. Stoker cemented the linkage of bats and vampires in the minds of the general
public.
-------------------------------------------------- EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VAMPIRE CONTROVERSY:
Today everyone is familiar with vampires, but in Britain very little was known of
vampires prior to the 18th century. What brought the vampire to the attention of the
general public? During the 18th century there was a major vampire scare in Eastern
Europe. Even government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of
vampires.
This controversy was directly responsible for England's current vampire myths. In fact,
the word Vampire only came into English language in 1732 via an English translation of
a German report of the much publicized Arnold Paole vampire staking in Serbia.
Western scholars seriously considered the existence of vampires for the first time rather
than just brushing them off as superstition. It all started with an outbreak of vampire
attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Austro-Hungarian empire from 1725-1734.
Two famous cases involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. Plogojowitz died at the
age of 62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When
the son refused, he was found dead the next day. Soon Plogojowitz returned and attacked
some neighbours who died from loss of blood. In the other famous case Arnold Paole,
an ex-soldier turned farmer who had been attacked by a vampire years before, died while
haying. After death people began to die and it was believed by everyone that Paole had
returned to prey on the neighbours.
These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials examined the
cases and the bodies, wrote them up in reports, and books were published afterwards of the
Paole case and distributed around Europe. The controversy raged for a generation. The
problem was exacerbated by rural people having an epidemic of vampire attacks digging
up bodies all over the place. Many scholars said vampires didn't exist - they attributed reports
to premature burial, or rabies which causes thirst. However, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well
respected French theologian and scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746
which said vampires did exist. This had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.
Eventually, Austrian Empress Marie Theresa sent her personal physician to investigate.
He said vampires didn't exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of
graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the vampire epidemics. But by then
everyone knew about vampires and it was only a matter of time before authors would
preserve and mould the vampire into something new and much more accessible to the
general public.
|
