10 - Vampires: Devils in Human Form

Belief in vampires, those bloodthirsty entities that prowl by night in human form, is so maliciously arid malignantly related to witchcraft, that to a marked degree they may be classed as interchangeable. As a prime case in point, one good way to become a vampire is to start out as a witch or warlock and stay with it, with death representing a very trifling transition from the one status to the other.

There are, of course, other and perhaps worse ways of becoming a vampire; and the subject has so many facets that it unquestionably exceeds the bounds of witchcraft and becomes a part of ghostlore. However, witches have ghostly privileges on occasion, so there, again, the twain meet, or at least cross orbits. But a vampire, in the most popularly accepted sense, belongs to ghostdom because it represents the spirit of a dead person who has returned to the realm of the living. However, unlike a ghost, which is a mere phantom that assumes human semblance, the vampire has the same body that it had in life. Hence, vampires are neither dead nor alive, but living in death, so they have accordingly been termed the "Undead," and as such, their functions can be horrendous indeed. Yet with all the lore that has come to light on vampires, it was not until 1733 that John Henry Zopfius, a renowned German scholar, summarized their case as follows:

Vampires come out of their graves at night time, rush upon people sleeping in their beds, suck out all their blood and destroy them. They attack men, women and children, sparing neither age nor sex. Those who come under their malign influence complain of suffocation and a great loss of spirits; soon afterward, they expire. Some of them, being asked at the point of death what is the matter with them, give reply that they suffer in the manner related from people lately dead. ...

Upon which, the bodies of those people, being dug out of their graves, appear in all parts, as the nostrils, cheeks, breast and mouth to be turgid and full of blood. Their countenances are fresh and ruddy; their nails and hair, very much grown. Though they have been much longer dead than many other bodies which are completely putrefied, not the least sign of corruption is visible upon them. Those persons who are destroyed by them, also become vampires after their death; hence to prevent such an evil from spreading, it becomes necessary to drive a stake through the dead body, from whence on such occasion, the blood flows as if the person were still alive. Sometimes the body is dug out of the grave and burned to ashes, whereupon, all disturbances cease.

The description as given by Zopfius was based on his study of vampirism in Hungary and Serbia from the Middle Ages; but it goes farther back. The vampire legend can be traced from ancient Babylonia and Assyria to the later days of imperial Rome, with their stories of the so-called demons, or Lamias, who took human form and thrived on either the blood or the vigor of their chosen victims. Hecate, the Roman goddess so closely associated with witchcraft, was identified with vampirism as well, forming another link between the two. When such pagan beliefs carried over to the Christian Era, it was simpler to blame them on the Devil, rather than charge them off to mere superstition. That was notably true in the Roman province of Dacia, which occupied the area of modern Rumania and the adjacent mountain region of Transylvania.

There, the natives already believed that death was merely a transition from one state of existence to another, so they found the vampire concept quite acceptable. In the centuries that followed, Dacia became a crossroad of barbarian invasions that overran the Roman Empire, but a stalwart portion of the populace managed to retain their individuality along with Roman culture and civilization.

This was accomplished in part by the setting up of feudal systems, particularly in the more rugged regions, under the leadership of chieftains known as voivodes, who were recognized as rulers, governors, or officials of lesser degree, according to the time and circumstance. Though they paid tribute to Hungary and were nominally under that nation's control, many of the voivodes enjoyed special privileges, which were the equivalent of independence.

However, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the victorious Turks moved northward and began appointing voivodes of their own choice. One of these was Vlad IV, son of a very ferocious voivode, whose example he decided to surpass. Having won the confidence of the Turks, he began slaughtering persons who opposed him by driving stakes through their bodies and feasting among his victims. As a result, he became known as Dracul, a word meaning devil, and he also won himself the title of Vlad the Impaler.

Even the Turkish sultan was so shocked by this that he sent an emissary to order Vlad to desist. True to his Dracul reputation, Vlad impaled the envoy along with a new crop of victims. That brought the sultan with such a huge army that Vlad cleared out before he arrived, leaving behind a veritable forest of staked out bodies of men, women and children. A new voivode, Radu, was appointed and held office for a dozen years; but following that, Vlad the Impaler once again became voivode of the Walachian province where he had committed his merciless crimes.

This made an odd preamble to the theory of vampirism that was to develop so strongly during the following centuries. The obvious question, of course, is just why Vlad, alias Dracul, a living monster, should have driven stakes through living forms of ordinary mortals, when that treatment was usually reserved for the dead bodies of suspected vampires? A grimly plausible answer might be that Vlad himself was actually a vampire and, as a member of the Undead, delighted in doing to the living what they should have done to him.

Nearly three hundred years elapsed between the time of Vlad the Impaler and John Henry Zopfius, whose scholarly comments on vampires have already been noted. Throughout that period, legends, lore and rumors were tempered with observable facts to shape apparently solid theories regarding vampires. Unlike the early proponents of witchcraft, who were ready not only to credit any wild claims but outmatch them with wilder notions of their own, students of the vampire situation were skeptical in their approach and guarded in their opinions. This probably averted appalling consequences of the sort brought on by the authors of Malleus Maleficarum and other maudlin literary outbursts.

A decade after Zopfius had summed the vampire situation as he saw it, Dom Augustin Calmet, a French author, took a decidedly more conservative stand. Confronted by a deluge of data concerning a completely new type of ghost or specter - the vampire - reported from Hungary and adjacent lands, Dom Calmet asked this question: How could a corpse, encased in a coffin beneath five feet of earth, return to the upper air and cause all the remarkable effects attributed to it?

And if that were not enough, how could it return to the same grave and be found fresh and full of blood, exactly like a living body? Could such corpses penetrate the earth without disturbing it, just as water filters through the soil, or vapors arise from the ground? If so, since their bodies were spectral, how could they suck the blood of human beings? Finally, assuming that all these phenomena were actual, Dom Calmet felt that he and all other investigators of the subject would be snagged in a total dilemma if they even asked whether such apparitions were purely natural or utterly miraculous.

With the passing years, hundreds of new reports offered answers that were even more fantastic than the questions themselves, leaving the final verdict more baffling than ever. In 1897, an author named Bram Stoker penned a weird novel entitled Dracula, featuring a monstrous villain who was undoubtedly patterned after the real life Dracul of four centuries before. The important point was that though Stoker's story was fictional, it gave an accurate summation of the supposed facts pertaining to vampires up to that date, all fully acceptable to persons believing in the existence of such entities; for example: Vampires can live indefinitely, becoming younger with time, provided they obtain the proper blood diet, on which alone they feast, partaking of no other food. Vampires cast no shadows, nor can their reflections be seen in mirrors. They have tremendous physical strength and can transform themselves into such creatures as wolves or bats; and exert command over foxes, owls, rats, mice and even moths. They can become small enough to slip beneath the crack of a door; and finally, they can filter in and out of anywhere by reducing themselves to a mere mist, or disintegrating temporarily into particles of elemental dust resembling rays of moonlight. As a link to witchcraft, vampires also can control such elements as storms, hail, thunder and fog, up to a limited range.

To offset these noteworthy advantages, vampires, like many evil things, lose their power by daylight. They cannot effect their changes between sunrise and sunset, except at high noon. They can rest only in the shelter of their graves, or coffin-homes; and their return there may be blocked by running water, or the flow of a tide. Vampires cannot enter a house unless invited by someone living there; but once inside, they can go and return at will. A branch of wild rose on a coffin prevents a vampire from leaving it and they are allergic to the buckthorn and laurel, while garlic is universally recognized as a vampire repellent.

Vampires, like other demons, shrink from all sacred objects and relics. The fragrance of incense used in religious ceremonies may also render them powerless. Forces of evil, being negative, just can't win out over forces of good, which are positive. That, at least, is the theory, and it is a sound one inasmuch as it is first necessary to admit that good exists in order to be bad.

It is claimed that a prowling vampire can be destroyed by being shot in the heart with a silver bullet, except in the light of the full moon, which will restore and double the vampire's vigor. But the stake through the heart is a standard remedy, provided that it is driven with a single blow. Choice of wood is also important, with aspen, maple, hawthorn and buckthorn regarded among the best.

Decapitation is another recommended method and one that some regard as the best. The act should be done with the sharp edge of a grave digger's spade rather than with a sword or other such implement. Often, two methods are used together, such as driving the stake and chopping off the head. This gives double assurance that the task has been done. Sometimes, the vampire screams like a living person while these processes are under way, but that may be mere deception, calculated to make the destroyers desist. Occasionally, vampires who have prowled for a century or more and have been sparing in their blood feasts, are apt to crumble into dust almost immediately. In that case, there is no doubt that they have been destroyed, but the surest method is by using fire; for once a vampire's body has been burned to ashes, the fiend has nothing left in which to prowl.

There are other ways to become a vampire besides having been bitten by one. People of extremely evil or malevolent natures have a good chance of automatically becoming vampires, just like witches and warlocks. In fact, some students of the subject incline to the opinion that witch burning is not just a disposal of a witch of the past, but a precaution against a vampire of the future. Tradition has it that suicides are very apt to become vampires; and the same rule may apply to some persons who die by unexpected violence. The inference in both cases is that the persons involved should have normally lived longer than they did and therefore crossed over into a state of Undead.

Other traditional ways whereby vampires may be engendered is for a cat to approach or spring across a body before it has been buried; and the same may apply if a bird flies over the body. Here, the link with witchcraft is definite indeed, as witches often have cats as familiars, or can turn themselves into cats or birds as well. Hence a cat or bird in the presence of a corpse is probable proof that a witch is at work, hoping to engender a vampire by spellbinding the person's body and soul together. A cat, however, might even be the Devil in disguise, come to claim its own.

Rather than theorize further on such possibilities, it is preferable to consider them in the light of actual reports on vampires and their insidious activities. These will be treated in detail in the next chapter, taking a variety of cases in somewhat chronological order. These, however, simply represent highlights of vampirism over the years. Many others that were equally spectacular have been omitted purely because they might prove redundant; while some that were very well-attested fall into routine categories. The important point to keep in mind is that the samplings given represent only a fractional percentage of those available, making vampires and vampirism a comprehensive subject in its own right.