Vampire

Count Orlok from Nosferatu

Vampires are mythical or folkloric creatures said to subsist on human and/or animal blood (hematophagy), often having unnatural powers, heightened bodily functions and the ability to transform. Usually a recently deceased person is made a vampire by being fed vampire blood (in some cases, the person must first be killed by a vampire by draining the body completely of human blood). Some cultures have myths of non-human vampires, such as demons or animals like bats, dogs, and spiders. Vampires are often described as having a wide variety of additional powers and character traits, extremely variable in different traditions, and are a frequent subject of folklore, cinema, and contemporary fiction.

Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood. In folklore and popular culture the term generally refers to a belief that one can gain supernatural powers by drinking human blood. The historical practice of vampirism can generally be considered a more specific and less commonly occurring form of cannibalism. The consumption of another's blood has been used as a tactic of psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and it can be used to reflect various spiritual beliefs.

In zoology the term vampirism is used to refer to leeches, mosquitos, mistletoe, vampire bats, and other organisms that prey upon the bodily fluids of other creatures. This term also applies to mythic animals of the same nature, including the chupacabra.

Etymology

English vampire comes from German Vampir, in turn from early Old Polish *vąper' (where ą is a nasal a, and both p and r' are palatalized), in turn from Old Slavic *oper (with a nasal o) or Old Church Slavonic opiri. According to Slavic linguist Franc Miklošič, the word ultimately comes from Kazan Tatar ubyr "witch".

Vampires in ancient cultures

Tales of the dead craving blood are ancient in nearly every culture around the world. Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology. These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of these demons, named Lilitu, was later adapted into Jewish demonology as Lilith. Lilitu/Lilith is sometimes called the mother of all vampires. For further information, see the article on Lilith.

The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of blood lust after slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood.

In Homer's Odyssey, the shades that Odysseus meets on his journey to the underworld are lured to the blood of freshly sacrificed rams, a fact which Odysseus uses to his advantage to summon the shade of Tiresias. Roman tales describe the strix, a nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood. The Roman strix is the source of the Romanian vampire, the Strigoi, which was also influenced by the Slavic vampire, and the Albanian Shtriga.

In early Slavic folklore, a vampire drank blood, was afraid of (but could not be killed by) silver and could be destroyed by cutting off its head and putting it between the corpse's legs or by putting a wooden stake into its heart.

Medieval historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded the earliest English stories of vampires in the 12th century.

Many vampire legends also bear similarities to legends regarding succubi or incubi

In popular western culture, vampires are depicted as unaging (or aging very slowly), intelligent, and mystically endowed in many ways. The vampire typically has a variety of notable abilities. These include great strength and immunity to any lasting effect of any injury by mundane means, with specific exceptions.

It is believed that vampires have no reflection, as traditionally it was thought that mirrors reflected your soul and creatures of evil have no soul. Fiction has extended this belief to an actual aversion to mirrors, as depicted in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula when the vampire casts Harker's shaving mirror out of the window.

Folk beliefs in vampires

It seems that until the 19th century, vampires in Europe were thought to be hideous monsters rather than the debonair vampire made popular by later fictional treatments. They were usually believed to rise from the bodies of suicide victims, criminals, or evil magicians, though in some cases an initial vampire thus "born of sin" could pass on his vampirism onto his innocent victims. In other cases, however, a victim of an untimely or cruel death was susceptible of becoming a vampire. Most of the European vampire myths have Slavic and/or Romanian origins.

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 Catholic 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.

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, 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 or exorcism.

Romanian vampires

Tales of vampiric entities were also found among the ancient Romans and among the Romanized inhabitants of eastern Europe, Romanians (known as Vlachs in historical context). Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it isn't surprising that Romanian vampires are similar to the Slavic vampire. Yet 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 morţi who are dead vampires. The strigoi morţi 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 who 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 Vârcolac which is sometimes mentioned in folklore was more closely related to a mythological wolf that could devour the sun and moon (similar to Fenris in Norse mythology), 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.

Roma and vampires

Even today, Roma frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by Bram Stoker's book "Dracula" in which the Szgany Roma served Dracula, carrying his boxes of earth and guarding him.

Traditional Romani beliefs include the idea that the dead soul enters a world similar to ours except that there is no death. The soul stays around the body and sometimes wants to come back. The Roma myths of the living dead added to and enriched the vampire myths of Hungary, Romania, and Slavic lands.

The ancient home of the Roma, India, has many mythical vampire figures. The Bhuta is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating dead bodies at night and attacks 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 deity associated with blood-drinking is Kali who has fangs, wears a garland of corpses or skulls and has four arms. Her temples are 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. Some refer to their Black Goddess as "Black Cally" or "Black Kali".

One form of vampire in Romani myth is called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire is 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. (See the article on vampire watermelons.)

To get rid of a vampire people would hire a Dhampir (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.

Other Old World vampires

In Ancient Greece and Medieval Bulgaria the Lamia had the upper body of a woman, the lower body of a winged serpent and craved blood (especially the blood of women).

In Moravia, vampires were fond of throwing off their shrouds and attacking their victims in the nude.

In Albania, a type of vampire known as the Liogat was suppossed to be the reanimated corpse of Albanians of Turkish descent. It was covered in a shroud and wore high heeled shoes. The only way to vanquish it was to have a wolf bite its legs off so it would never rise again from its grave.

In Bulgaria, a vampire had only one nostril and slept with his left eye open and his thumbs linked. It was held responsible for cattle plagues.

New World

In Aztec mythology, the Civatateo was a sort of vampire, created when a noblewoman died in childbirth.

Later Mexican vampires were easily recognizable by their fleshless skulls.

In the Caribbean, vampires known as Soucoyant in Trinidad and Tobago, Ol' Higue in Jamaica, and Loogaroo in Grenada, take the form of old women during the day, and at night shed their skin to become flying balls of flame who seek blood. They were said to be notoriously obsessive compulsive, and could be thwarted by sprinkling salt or rice at entrances, crossroads and near beds. The vampire would feel compelled to pick up every grain. They could also be killed by rubbing salt into their discarded skin, which would burn them upon returning to it before morning.

The Rocky Mountain vampires sucked the blood out of its victim's ears using its pointed nose.

Brazilian vampires had plush-covered feet.

Asia and the Pacific

In India (especially in the southern state of Kerala) vampires (known as Yakshis) were beautiful women who seduced men in order to kill or eat them. They are said to be averse to iron objects in addition to other religious symbols, and could be killed by driving an iron nail through the head. They could also be imprisoned in trees using blessed objects. India is also home to the vetala, a wraithly vampire that can leave its host body to feed.

Japanese vampire myths include a river demon called the Kappa, a mischevious creature who could be a deadly enemy, a benign creature who would heal broken bones and limbs with amazing skill, or a horrible prankster. They derived strength from water in a bowl-shaped indentation on their head, which would tip and empty when they returned the traditional Japanese greeting (a bow). Their primary method of draining blood from the victim was through the anus rather than the neck. Certain Japanese Oni myths also have similarities with Western vampire legends. Other Japanese myths include vampire foxes.

The Chinese vampire, the hopping corpse (jiāngshī), has more in common with Western ideas of corporeal zombies or ghouls but is still depicted as draining the victim of blood.

In Philippine folklore, the Manananggal was a female vampire whose entire upper body could separate from her lower body and who could fly using wings. She sucked the blood of fetuses. The Aswang was believed to always be a female of considerable beauty by day and, by night, a fearsome flying fiend. She lived in a house, could marry and have children, and was a seemingly normal human during the daylight hours.

In Malaysian folklore, the Penanggalan was a vampire whose head could separate from its body, with its entrails dangling from the base of its neck. The Pontianak was a female vampire that sucked the blood of newborn babies and sometimes that of young children or pregnant women.

In Australian aboriginal mythology, the "Yara-Ma-Yha-Who" [1] was a vampire with suckers on his fingers that lurked in fig trees.

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 his 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 epidemics of vampire attacks and locals 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, animal-like behaviours, and can prompt the attacking - including biting - of humans. Nonetheless, 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. By then, though, 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.

Contemporary belief in vampires

Belief in vampires still persists across the globe. During January of 2003, mobs in Malawi stoned to death one individual and attacked four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, due to a belief that the government is colluding with vampires.

In January 2005, it was reported that an attacker had bitten a number of people in Birmingham, England, fuelling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets. However, local police stated that no such crimes had been reported to them, and this case appears to be an urban legend.

In the modern folklore of Latin America, the chupacabra (goat-sucker) is a vampiric creature that feeds upon domesticated animals.

Traits of vampires

Vampires, being already dead, do not need most normal things required for human life, such as oxygen.

Vampires are sometimes considered to be shape-shifters, though this feature is more commonly present in fiction than in the original folklore.

Some vampires can fly. Sometimes this is supernatural, other times it is connected to the vampire's ability to turn into flying creatures (e.g., bats, owls, flys) or into lightweight forms (e.g. straw, dust, smoke) and then create winds as a means of propulsion.

Vampires typically cast no shadow and have no reflection. This mythical power is largely confined to European vampiric myths and may be tied to folklore regarding the vampire's lack of a soul.

Vampire powers are often limited during the day.

Vampires may be reluctant to enter or cross bodies of water.

Some tales maintain that vampires must return to their native soil before sunrise to safely take their rest. This property may be related to phenomena involving digging up corpses to see if they were vampires.

Vampires in some tales have very specific dietary requirements while others do not. However, most tales of the undead feature vampires that cannot eat (or at least cannot gain nourishment from) normal human food.

There are things in which vampires have no power against such as garlic, a branch of wild rose, and all things sacred (e.g., holy water, a crucifix, a rosary, or sacred objects from other faiths). This weakness fluctuates depending on the the tale. Garlic is confined mostly to European vampire legends. In myths of other regions, other plants of holy or mythical properties sometimes have similar effects. Holy water and other holy symbols depend upon the culture. In Eastern vampiric myths, vampires are often similarly warded by holy devices such as Shintō seals.

There are three main ways to destroy a typical European vampire: a sacred bullet, a wooden stake through the heart, or decapitation. This includes other means of death that effectively removes a vampire's head, such as incinerating the body completely.

Old folklore from Eastern Europe suggests that many vampires suffered from a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, being fascinated with counting. Millet or poppy seeds were placed on the ground at the gravesite of a presumed vampire, in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting. Aside from the muppet character of Count von Count on Sesame Street this characteristic seems to have largely disappeared from popular culture.

Natural phenomena that propagate the vampire myth

Pathology and vampirism

Some people argue that vampire stories might have been influenced by a rare illness called porphyria. The disease disrupts the production of heme. People with extreme but rare cases of this hereditary disease can be so sensitive to sunlight that they can get a sunburn through heavy cloud cover, causing them to avoid sunlight. (Although it should be noted that the idea that vampires are harmed by sunlight is largely from modern fiction and not the original beliefs.) Certain forms of porphyria are also associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders. However, the hypotheses that porphyria sufferers "crave" the heme in human blood, or that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are possibly based on a misunderstanding of the condition, as was common in centuries past, but because the origional beleifs are so old, it is impossible to verify if this is indeed the case.

Others argue that there is a relationship between vampirism and rabies. The legend of vampirism is known to have existed in the 19th century Eastern Europe, where there were massive rabies outbreaks(of course, vampire fokllore long predates this period). Rabies causes high fever, loss of appetite, and fatigue as initial symptoms. In later stages, patients try to avoid the sunlight and prefer walking at night. Strong light and mirrors can cause episodes characterized by violent and animal-like behaviors and a tendency to attack people and bite them. Concomitant facial spasms might give the patient an animal-like (or a vampire-like) expression. In a furious form of the disease, patients might have an increased urgency for sexual activity or occasionally vomit blood. Rabies is contagious. Again, it is noteworthey to state that there is no way to verify or disproove this theory.

Fountain of blood when staked

As a body decomposes, the internal organs rot first because the food that is fermenting there continues fermenting and gases produced cannot get out. As a result, a body can swell like a balloon. Put pressure on this and the pressure will find a way to be released.

Finding vampires in graves

When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found the cadaver in a "healthy state" and beautiful, meaning that the corpse was a well-fed vampire. Folkloric accounts almost universally represent the vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of vampires in literature and film. In the past, people were often malnourished and therefore thin in life. Corpses swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso. The implication was that the corpse was not famished and, because blood was sometimes found in the corners of the mouth, it was assumed that the alleged vampire had been drinking blood. Natural processes of decomposition, absent embalming, tend to darken the skin of a corpse — hence the black, blue, or red complexion of the folkloric vampire.

Drinking blood

There have been a number of murderers who performed this seemingly vampiric ritual upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered, for example. Legends that Erzsébet Báthory, a medieval Hungarian aristocrat, murdered hundreds of women in bizarre rituals involving blood, helped mold contemporary vampire legends.

Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism (or Renfield's syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman in the novel by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from animals or humans.

Vampire bats

Bats have become an integral part of the vampire myth only recently, although many cultures have myths about them. 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 and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos"[2]. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld.

The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. The bats were named after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.

Vampires in fiction

Lord Byron introduced many common elements of the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813). These include the combination of horror and lust that the vampire feels and the concept of the undead passing its inheritance to the living.

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian England where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.

See vampire fiction for more information.

The Vampire subculture

The vampire subculture describes a contemporary subculture marked by an obsessive fascination with, and emulation of, contemporary vampire lore, including everything from fashion and music to, in the more extreme cases, the actual exchange of blood. Members of the subculture ("vampirists") often prefer the spelling "vampyre" to distinguish themselves from the "fictional" vampire while simultaneously lending a Victorian flair to their activities. These contemporary consumers of blood typically appeal to myths about vampires for legitimacy.

For more information, see vampire lifestyle.

Modern Real Vampirism

Partially overlapping the vampire subculture, you will also find persons who believe themselves to truly be vampiric, requiring blood or psychic energy from other people to maintain their health. These folks have created a subculture of their own which is not reliant on modes of dress, music, or behavior, but instead offers support, networking and guidance for those who believe themselves to be vampires. Among the ethics generally held by this subculture are taking small amounts of blood or energy only from willing donors, and keeping their beliefs under the media's radar as much as possible.

External links

Staking Claims: The Vampires of Folklore and Fiction from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
Vampires from: The New England Skeptical Society
An extensive list of vampire movies.
Professor Elizabeth Miller has written books and articles on Stoker's Dracula and Vlad Tepes.
Knots, Threads, Spinning, and Vampires
Vampiric Studies is a site by Catherene NightPoe containing a vast amount of information regarding vampires.
Sanguinarius.org is an information and support site for modern real vampires.