Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (22 page)

After burial, zombie makers had their assistants pull victims out of their graves and then beat them fiercely to drive their old spirit away. This was followed by binding the exhumed person to a cross, baptizing them with a new zombie name, and force-feeding them
with a paste made from sweet potato, cane syrup, and
Datura stramonium,
one of the most hallucinogenic plants known.

Davis suggested in the
Journal of Ethnopharmacology
in 1983 that these ghastly experiences, combined with the potent initial poisoning, created a state of psychosis that literally transformed people into zombies who would do anything they were told by their masters. This, he argued, explained why voodoo magic was widely perceived as raising the dead and why Hurston was right. People literally were being buried alive and then dragged back to the living world as zombies.

But what of vampires? The early stories about these monsters do not support the “buried alive” theory very strongly, and there are no indications of poisons or zombie makers being involved with vampire creation. The vampire historian Paul Barber points out in his book
Vampires, Burial, and Death
that none of the early vampiric accounts actually describe vampires digging themselves out of graves, a fact that William of Newburgh’s stories support. The protovampires just tend to emerge from the grave. This hints that early proponents of the vampire myth might have been making up this element of vampire behavior to explain something they were seeing in the world around them.

Today, if a person in a family falls ill with a contagious and potentially lethal disease, doctors usually have the knowledge to identify it, prescribe treatment, and suggest quarantine measures if they are needed. In the days before modern medicine, when understanding of infectious disease transmission was rudimentary, people exposed to lethally contagious individuals had a good chance of following their friends to the grave. But they would not have done so immediately. Viruses and bacteria take time to spread through the body before having noticeable negative effects. This delay, which is known in the medical community as the incubation period, varies with the
disease and can range from hours for some gut and respiratory infections to years for viruses like HIV. In most cases, though, incubation for diseases is a matter of days.

Imagine what people in those days saw after a loved one died from a highly lethal and contagious disease, like tuberculosis or a nasty strain of influenza. First, those who had lived with the diseased individual would fall ill upon the completion of the incubation period and run a high risk of dying. Then, those who had tended to these diseased individuals would also fall ill and transmit the disease before dying. One death would follow another in a dominolike progression. In a morbid sense, these patients were literally killing their friends and relatives, but from their deathbeds rather than from the hereafter. However, because of the incubation period, it wasn’t clear to anyone how the disease was being passed along.

Driven into a panic by plagues of contagious diseases, people desperately sought an explanation. This search for answers even appears in William of Newburgh’s story: The monster “filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.” People were already somewhat aware of what was going on, but rather than pointing the finger at microscopic pathogens (which would have been impossible since microscopes were not even in use until the mid-1600s), they came up with the idea of the dead returning to kill off their friends and family. This led someone at some point to open up a grave and have a look. Shocked by the discovery of a bloody-mouthed corpse with a bloated belly, claws, and fangs, a connection was likely made between this horrific sight and the plague of death spreading throughout the community.

This seems logical, but it raises a question about timing. Why does the fear of vampires begin during the 1100s, when William of Newburgh was writing? Highly lethal and contagious diseases were hardly new things. In fact, Ian Barnes at Royal Holloway, University of London, published a study in the journal
Evolution
in 2011 revealing that infectious disease has played a key role in human evolution for centuries. Remarkably, this study found that humans who have been dwelling in places where population densities have been high for a long time carry genes that are particularly good at granting resistance
to certain contagious diseases. This makes sense since places with higher population densities would have more humans available (and living in closer proximity) for diseases to infect and thus tend to be reservoirs where the infections could linger for long periods.
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People who carried genes that coded for immune systems strong enough for them to survive this pathogenic onslaught proliferated while those who did not, died out. The study specifically notes that people from Anatolia in Turkey, where dense settlements have been around for nearly eight thousand years, carry a gene granting an innate resistance to tuberculosis, a disease that wreaked havoc in ancient cities. In contrast, people with almost no history of dense urban living, like the Saami from northern Scandinavia and the Malawians in Africa, do not show similar genetic resistance.

So it seems unreasonable to argue that people started digging up graves and inventing vampires as monsters only to explain the spread of contagious disease. If this were the whole story, vampires would be expected to have emerged as monsters much earlier. There had to have been other factors associated with the rise of the modern vampire, and clues to what these might have been can be found in one of the stranger vampire traits.

According to some folktales, vampires are repelled by garlic, and for the most part this idea has remained tethered to the monsters for
centuries. While modern enthusiasts of Gothic horror accept this trait as simply part of what vampires are, if you stop to think about it, being repelled by garlic is a rather bizarre quality to associate with a monster. The threat of sunlight makes the most sense. Evil things tend to be active in the dark and thus sunlight should naturally harm them. However, early vampire lore does not present sunlight as a threat. It is garlic that gets mentioned.

Garlic has a history of being used to protect the innocent from the forces of evil. The Egyptians believed that it could repel ghosts, and in Asia, garlic has long been smeared on the bodies of people to prevent them from being targeted by the spells of witches and wizards. Is there logic to this?

Some studies have shown that garlic fights infection, reduces blood pressure, and lowers cholesterol. For this reason, you could argue that any monster conjured up to explain inexplicable diseases, including vampires, came to be viewed as “fended off” by garlic because it was helping to boost immune system function. However, there is a problem. The scientific community is nowhere near any sort of consensus on the powers of garlic because its effects are, at best, weak. So one has to wonder: If modern researchers testing garlic’s potential in controlled laboratory settings are having trouble determining if it really grants substantial benefits, were ancient people able to detect benefits at all? Or was there something else going on?

Foul odors created by corpses were often covered up by powerful smells like that produced by garlic, and there is some literature suggesting that, along with strong-smelling flowers, garlic was used at funerals where the corpse was getting a bit stinky. This may have been how it came to be connected with protecting people from the evil and the walking dead. Yet a most intriguing explanation for garlic being associated with vampires stems from the field of neurology.

During the 1600s, many Romanians believed that rubbing garlic around the outside of the house could keep the undead away, that holy water would burn them like boiling oil, and that throwing a vampire’s
sock into a river would cause the menace to enter the water searching for the sock and be destroyed.
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Intriguingly, Juan Gómez-Alonso, a neurologist at the Hospital Xeral in Vigo, Spain, points out that these three things all have a connection to rabies.

In a report published in the journal
Neurology
in 1998, Gómez-Alonso explains that while the rabies virus can cause animals to become increasingly paralyzed as it spreads, in afflicted humans it can have a frightening effect on the mind leading to a condition known among medical practitioners as furious rabies. As the virus attacks their nervous system, patients become restless; some leave their beds and wander the surrounding area. They have trouble swallowing, frequently drool bloody saliva, become fiercely dehydrated and very thirsty. Worse, they often suffer from persistent feelings of terror and have a tendency to become angry and aggressive. Most important, furious rabies frequently attacks the section of the brain controlling how the body manages emergency respiratory activities like coughing and gasping.

Nerve cells in the lining of the nose, throat, larynx, and windpipe become extremely sensitive to noxious fumes and liquids. For this reason, patients with furious rabies suffer from spasms and extreme fear when they are forced to endure exposure to pungent odors (like that of garlic) or are presented with water (remember, they are desperately thirsty but cannot swallow). What do these spasms look like? When confronted, rabies patients tend to make hoarse gasping noises, clench their teeth, and retract their lips like animals.

Rabies has another connection to vampires based upon the way it is transmitted. Unlike, for example, influenza and tuberculosis, which are spread invisibly by particles in the air, rabies is primarily transmitted through bites. Most infections in people occur when a
rabid animal breaks human flesh with its teeth and contaminates the wound with the infected saliva. The animals that most commonly spread rabies to humans in this way are dogs, wolves, and bats, all of which have a history in legends of being associated with vampires (bats are more recent than dogs and wolves, but all have been connected to the monsters for a while). Human-to-human transmission of rabies is all but unheard of today; however, historical accounts of people being bitten by rabid individuals do exist, and it seems likely that incidents of authorities or doctors being bitten while trying to subdue or capture rabid patients have taken place. In this case, the bite wound would heal as the rabies virus incubated inside the newly infected person’s body. The individual who made the bite would die, but in time a new monster would be born.
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Rabies is spread not only through bites. It can also be spread through sexual activity. Furious rabies can cause hypersexuality and leave people with powerful feelings of sexual excitement. Men with the condition can develop erections that last for several days, and one individual is documented as having had sexual intercourse thirty times in a twenty-four-hour period before the disease claimed him.
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With such powerful sexual stimulation at work and with patients so severely mentally compromised, it is hardly surprising the rabies literature reports violent rape attempts being common.

However, as tempting as it might seem to make a direct connection between rabies and vampires, rabies is very much a disease of the living and does not suggest that anything is returning from the grave. This does not disqualify rabies from being involved with the evolution of vampires. The virus probably did inspire the concept of vampirism spreading via bite and then merged with the perception that vampires were bloodsuckers. It is the undead element of vampires that rabies does not resolve, but, as mentioned earlier, there are
many contagious diseases, like tuberculosis and influenza, that could explain how people came to believe that the dead were returning from the grave to claim their loved ones.

In the end, the fears that ultimately led to the rise of vampires as they are known today may have come from people trying to make sense of two disease epidemics that took place roughly simultaneously. Tuberculosis was at epidemic levels in Europe throughout much of the 1700s just as a major rabies epidemic struck the wild dogs and wolves of the region. In one case, in 1739, a rabid wolf in France bit seventy people, and in another case, in 1764, forty people were bitten. To what extent these bites led to cases of rabid people biting one another is unknown, but if such a situation did develop at the same time as a town was suffering a tuberculosis epidemic, fears from each medical condition could have become intertwined. Even so, the idea of a curse turning man into a monster appeared long before vampires.

Rabies, like influenza and tuberculosis, is well known to have been around since the dawn of humanity. Studies analyzing the evolutionary history of the virus show that it has existed in its present form for thousands of years. And before it came to be associated with vampires, the virus probably was part of the werewolf myth. The suggestion that vampires might have actually evolved from werewolves will certainly irk the fans of the
Underworld
and
Twilight
stories, where vampires and werewolves are mortal enemies, but a close look at the earliest literary descriptions of werewolves makes it tantalizing to consider a connection.

The
Satyricon,
believed to have been written by the Roman Petronius around AD 64, contains one of the earliest descriptions of a werewolf transformation. The tale is told by a man named Niceros traveling along a road with a soldier he has recently met. Along the way they stop in a graveyard at night. “We set out about cock-crow,
the moon was shining as bright as midday, and came to where the tombstones are. My man stepped aside amongst them, but I sat down, singing, and commenced to count them up. When I looked around for my companion, he had stripped himself and piled his clothes by the side of the road. My heart was in my mouth, and I sat there while he pissed a ring around them and was suddenly turned into a wolf! Now don’t think I’m joking, I wouldn’t lie for any amount of money, but as I was saying, he commenced to howl after he was turned into a wolf, and ran away into the forest.” Not long after, Niceros finds that all of the sheep at a nearby farm have been slaughtered by a wolf. Later, the soldier, now transformed again into a human, is discovered unconscious and under the care of a doctor.