Traditional and Modern Vampire Mythology
by Maxwell Rygiol
August 8th, 2005
Count Dracula would be almost unrecognizable as a
vampire to the 18th century vampire believers of
Eastern Europe, though modern mythology is steeped in
vampire references. The vampire of folklore
was not a pale, gaunt nobleman in a
cloak. The original vampires of myth and legend
were
bloated men of Slavic origin, with long
clawlike fingernails. They may or may not have
physically attacked and drank the blood of their
victims. And the causes of tradition folkloric
vampires vary much more widely from the Dracula
legends. As well do the methods of killing vampires,
which varies not from legend to legend,
but case by case.
The likely candidate to become a vampire in
traditional 18th century folklore took many forms.
Commonly it was believed that those who
were strange, sinners, and despised people
could rise from the grave after death.
Another account lists: "The godless [including
believers of all other faiths], evildoers, suicides,
sorcerers, witches, and werewolves;
among the Bulgarians the group is expanded by
robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes,
deceitful and treacherous barmaids, and other
dishonorable people." (Barber 1990). Accounts in
Russia point to the corpses of alcoholics being
exhumed and killed as vampires. Another common cause
of vampirism was suicide, and suicide
victims were often refused burial in church
cemeteries for fear of their corpses rising from the
dead. Among Poles, potential vampires were
often diagnosed at birth based on congenital
defects such as bestial features,
webbed digits, or tails. (Barber)
Vampires took the form not of a pale, handsome
figure, but a bloated, bleeding corpse draped in
burial shrouds. The word vampire itself did not enter
the English language until 1734 (Barber).
The concept of a corpse rising from the
grave is much older than the term "vampire"
and was often called a "revenant"
in European folklore, which was
essentially a walking corpse intending to harm
humans. The traditional folkloric vampire
did not necessarily even suck blood
from
the neck. Many accounts and legends feature
vampires biting the torso, the left
breast over the heart, or even the victim's nipples.
(Barber) Vampires were responsible for
many other ailments other than death, such as
disease, famine, crop failure, and
animal/insect infestation.
As stated previously, the methods used to destroy
suspected vampires ranges widely. Exhumations of
corpses were more common in Eastern Europe, where the
Russian Orthodox church permitted more pagan
beliefs than the Catholic church. When
bodies were exhumed, people generally looked for
anything out of the ordinary that could be blamed on
vampirism. If a corpse was bloody, undecayed,
bloated, or generally unusual it was
often thought to be a vampire and the corpse
was "killed" a second time. One of the
first accounts of a corpse exhumed for being
suspected of vampirism was staked through the heart
into the ground and an audible groan was
released from the corpse along with large amounts
of blood (Barber). Corpses exhumed under
suspicion of vampirism often fit some
criteria that would qualify them as vampires, and
they were usually staked through the heart to the
ground to prevent them from rising out of their
graves. One account however, suggests that staking
was not always enough to prevent a
vampire from rising. It tells of a vampire that
was terrorizing the countryside whose corpse
was exhumed, a consecrated nail hammered
through his skull, and his heart staked.
Nevertheless, the account says the corpse
continued to rise and the body was once
again exhumed and this time cremated. The
vampires that the people in Europe feared may
not have been real, but the exhumations and
desecration of corpses were very real. Paul
Barber points out that preventive measures
taken against vampires included smearing
a suspected vampires blood on oneself or
ingesting the suspected corpse's blood. So as
Mr. Barber points out, even though vampires
may not have been drinking blood, some
of the people who believed in the vampires
were in fact drinking blood. This is
referred to as the saying "similia similiis curantur
(similar things are cured by similar
things)." (Barber)
The explanations for vampirism range from scientific
to cultural. The first witnesses to
the practices regarding the belief of vampires
were Austrian Military medical officers.
They described what they observed, but
offered no conclusions regarding the symptoms of
vampirism. "The first scientific
hypothesis
for vampirism, proposed in 1985 by
David Dolphin, a chemist at the University of British
Columbia, was that those thought to be
suffering from it were actually the victims of
porphyria." (Economist 1998) Porphyria causes
a sensitivity to sunlight, retraction of
the gums, and reddened urine which may have
been construed as a side-effect of drinking
blood. (Economist) This is a bit
unlikely, as it refers more to the Dracula mythology
than the traditional folkloric vampire.
Juan Gomez-Alonso more recently proposed
that the myth of vampires could have
arisen from an outbreak of rabies in the 18th century.
"Some of the symptoms, such as aggressiveness and
hyper sexuality, would not have been seen as
manifestations of a disease," he says. "Uneducated
people could have thought all this was the work
of a malign being. Moreover, the bizarre
rejection of some stimuli - odors, light, water, and
mirrors - shown by rabid humans must have
been quite puzzling." (Discover 1999)
This also seems unlikely, as the symptoms described
once again have no real relation to the
folkloric vampire myth, only the more modern
Dracula vampire myth. There are more
specific scientific explanations for specific
phenomena experienced in connection with the vampire
of folklore, such as the account
regarding the exhumed corpse that groaned when
staked. When the chest cavity was compressed by
staking, air would have traveled out of the lungs and
past the glottis, mimicking the sound of a
groan. (Barber)
The cultural explanations stem from both a lack of
scientific knowledge and a different cultural
point of view regarding death, souls,
and decay. The forensic knowledge of decay
was not understood in 18th century Europe.
As Paul Barber puts it, "The body's
posthumous movements, changes in dimension, or
the like are not real for us since we do not
will them. For the most part, however, our
ancestors made no such distinction. To them,
if after death the body changed in color,
moved, bled, and so on (as it does), then
it continued to experience a kind of life."
The people of 18th century Europe did not
fully understand decomposition, so when a
suspected vampire was exhumed, almost anything out of
the ordinary was viewed as evidence confirming
their suspicions. If a corpse wasn't decomposed,
bled or was bloody around the mouth,
or was bloated it was considered a
vampire. The fact is, almost all corpses exhumed
showed some signs that "proved" the corpse was a
vampire. The anomaly of a corpse not decaying as
expected was taken as a sign of evil. As Barber
points out though, when a saint's corpse fails to
decompose it's considered a miracle, when a
criminal's corpse fails to decompose it's considered
a vampire. Another misunderstood sign
was the lack of rigor mortis in a corpse.
People often did not understand that
rigor mortis is a temporary condition, and viewed the
flexibility of a corpse as proof that it was
still alive and moving.
In many cultures, the soul is not firmly attached to
the body, and may roam while a person is
asleep or unconscious. This explains
many "victims" of vampires experiencing dreams of
walking dead and believing that they actually
experienced such a thing while their soul was not
anchored to their body. Dreams were interpreted as
having a strong relationship to reality. As a
result, many so-called victims claimed that a
recently deceased person in the community had
risen as a vampire. The corpses would
consequently be exhumed and local models of vampiric
symptoms would be applied to the corpses
as "evidence." In fact, many myths regarding
vampires do not necessarily involve physically
rising from the grave to feast on
blood. It was believed that vampires could exists
simultaneous as corporeal and non-corporeal entities.
The vampire's malevolent spirit would
invade a victim's dreams and drain them of
their blood, often physically manifesting on
the vampire's corpse. This served as a
religious model to both describe the reality of a
victim afflicted with an unknown disease, and create
the reality of a vampire with unholy and
evil intentions opposed to the victim's deity.
Besides the more specific relationships between
anomalous phenomena and the belief in vampires,
misfortune was also ascribed to vampiric activity.
Severe weather, disease, famine, and
natural disasters that could not be
rationally explained were related to the vampire
myth. Bacteria and microorganisms were unknown at the
time, and disease and death were often
thought to be purposeful, directed plagues. While the
bacteria involved with many diseases followed
organized models, the models that people
in that time and place produced related
more to religious beliefs than scientific
knowledge. It was believed that the
death was transmitted purposefully by the
dead. It was the cultural belief that a spirit still
inhabited the body until it had decayed
down to the bone that caused a belief in malicious
spirits and the undead that sought harm
on the living. (Barber)
The more modern vampire myth primarily originated
from the book Dracula by Bram Stoker. Stoker
researched some of the folkloric vampire mythology,
as well as the history of the area
from which the traditional mythology originated. He
based the vampire on his book on the 15th
century Wallachian warlord, Vlad Tepes. (Johnson
1994) Vlad was responsible for expelling invading
Turkish forces from Romania, and is considered a hero
in Romania, but never a vampire. Vlad was
reported to have impaled the captive Turkish
troops and even dipped his bread in their
blood before consuming it. Bram Stoker
fused this legend with traditional vampire mythology
to create Count Dracula. In Stoker's
version, Dracula was a prince who
renounced God and became an undead creature sustained
by sucking the blood from his victims'
necks. He was not at all like the
traditional vampire of mythology. He was a tall,
strong, pale aristocrat. Not at all like the bloated
corpse of the traditional mythology.
However, it is this version of the vampire that makes
up modern vampire mythology.
Today in Romania, tourists flock to the areas
referred to in Bram Stoker's Dracula. When the first
tourists began visiting Romania in search
of Dracula mythology after the fall of the
Soviet Union, the Romanian people did not
even know who Dracula was, or were very knowledgeable
of vampire mythology. In fact,
during the Soviet reign in Romania, literature
regarding vampire mythology was repressed, and Bram
Stoker's Dracula was banned in the country.
Today things have changed. Now there are
tours that visitors take that visit all of
the points of interest from Stoker's novel.
These sites are not historically accurate,
however they are the most popular. On
the approximate site of Dracula's castle in
Stoker's novel, a hotel has been built in the form of
a castle in order to accommodate the vampire-
seeking tourists. (Johnson) Vlad Tepes's castle
is a distance away and is in ruins, but is
till visited by vampire enthusiasts. The
vampire-tourist industry in fact helps support the
Romanian economy by bringing in tourist
dollars to the country.
In America, vampire mythology is alive and well,
though based on Bram Stoker's fictional vampire
mythology. There literally hundreds of movies and
books and other pop-culture references to vampires
since Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is
embraced by fans of the genre as a lifestyle, and
many people live out fantasies of being vampires. It
may only be dressing like the modern concept
of a vampire, or wearing temporary or
permanent fangs. It also manifests in the form of
blood drinking, either one's own blood, or a willing
participants. It also manifests in more
deviant behavior and psychological
afflictions that are documented.
A census of the undead carried out in 2000 by the
Vampire Empire, a New York based organization for
lovers of the genre, netted 272 people who said they
were, or had previously been, vampires. Of
these, 71 percent admitted to drinking blood
(from friends or themselves) or at least
red drinks. 48 percent wore fangs and 84
percent avoided sunlight, but just 11 percent
believed they'd live longer than the rest
of us. (Ferguson 2005)
There are however, people who participate in even
more disturbing activities, such as drinking animal
blood or consuming the flesh of murder
victims, but these are extremely rare. Cases such as
these are often associated with a
psychological disorder called Renfield's Syndrome,
after one of the characters in Stoker's
novel. "Those suffering from the
syndrome have an erotic attraction to ingesting
blood, which they see as a means of gaining
immortality and other powers. Most self-proclaimed
vampires are simply harmless
fantasists. Even those individuals that consumer
their blood and the blood of willing participants are
at least acting with consent.
Modern vampire mythology is still mythology, though
with different origins from the traditional
folklore. Modern vampire beliefs still have some
roots in the rituals and anxieties that accompanied
tradition vampire mythology. The
traditional mythology of vampires was developed as a
response to anomalous phenomenon. Animals
associated with vampires (wolves, bats, rats) were
all considered taboo creatures and often
associated with the devil. Most vampire mythology is
a response to orthodox Christian religions
such as the Russian Orthodox and Catholic churches.
They represent an agent of the devil
that is responsible for unexplained deaths,
famine, and disease. This is manifested
in a physical form by the corpses that
were exhumed and "killed." This ritual of
killing the corpses would help to assuage the
anxieties of the populace, while at the same
time creating more anxieties by spreading
the fear of the walking dead. Modern
vampire mythology is still mythology,
though with different origins from the traditional
folklore. Modern vampire beliefs
still have some roots in the rituals and anxieties
that accompanied tradition vampire
mythology. While both the traditional and modern
myths are rooted in the same anxieties, the rituals
involved have changed. Originally the
rituals effectively relieved anxiety caused by
unfortunate events believed to be the work of evil
spirits, as well as spread the belief of
vampires. Modern rituals associated with vampires are
more a response to the traditional anxieties,
and often a response to traditional
religions.
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