Traditional and Modern Vampire Mythology by Max Capacity

This is a term paper that Max wrote at community college for his anthropology of religion class. I had previously posted it on Mark Rogers, Super Guy as my own work, with Max's permission. He didn't want to take the credit, but I think he should. So here, for our Analog Medium readers during the great month of October, is a real look at Traditional and Modern Vampire Mythology. - [Mark]

Traditional and Modern Vampire Mythology
by Max Capacity
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.


Works Cited

Barber, Paul. "The Real Vampire." Natural History October 1990: p77-81. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Cabrillo College Library, Aptos, CA. 27 July 2005.

"The Dracula Syndrome." Discover Mar 1999: p24. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Cabrillo College Library, Aptos, CA. 27 July 2005.

Ferguson, Sue. "Undead and Unseen." Maclean's 6/6/2005: pv46-47. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Cabrillo College Library, Aptos, CA. 27 July 2005.

Johnson, Marilyn, Clifford, Geoffrey. "Dracula is Dead and Well and Attracting Tourists to Transylvania." Life November 1994: p66-71. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Cabrillo College Library, Aptos, CA. 27 July 2005.

"The Science of Hallowe'en." Economist 10/31/98: p89. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Cabrillo College Library, Aptos, CA. 27 July 2005.