Vampire Forensics (17 page)
Authors: Mark Collins Jenkins
That belief in the demonic, married to a word associated with blood drinking and death, may have greatly propelled the transformation of
vampir
into the vampire that surfaced in the 18th century. All it needed was a corpse to wrap itself around.
Throughout this social and religious upheaval, men and women had continued dying—and their dead bodies had continued to act in strange ways, or at least were alleged to do so. A ninth-century capitulary of Charlemagne directed that “if any person, deceived by the devil, shall believe, after the manner of the Pagans, that any man or woman was a Strygis, or Stryx [night-flying bloodsucker], and was given to eat men, and for this cause should burn such person, or should give such person’s flesh to be eaten, or should eat such flesh, such man or woman should be capitally punished.”
And in the sixth century, just as the Slavs were beginning to infiltrate the Balkans, Clovis, king of the Franks, was inserting into the
Lex Salica—
the foundation of most European legal codes—explicit punishments for the desecration of the dead. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of the third to seventh centuries have been discovered to contain many prone burials—that is, burials with the corpse buried facedown. Should the cadaver then choose to wander, the thinking apparently went, it would invariably head in the wrong direction.
The British graves also hold decapitated skeletons, whose severed skulls are usually lodged between the legs or feet. Were these executions? Or were they other methods of restricting the movements of the restless dead? The bones are silent, but folklore speaks volumes. Sir James Frazer, in
The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion,
quotes an illuminating passage from an 1835 German source:
In East Prussia when a person is believed to be suffering from the attacks of a vampire and suspicion falls on the ghost of somebody who died lately, the only remedy is thought to be for the family of the deceased to go to his grave, dig up his body, behead it and place the head between the legs of the corpse. If blood flows from the severed head the man was certainly a vampire, and the family must drink of the flowing blood, thus recovering the blood which had been sucked from their living bodies by the vampire. Thus the vampire is paid out in kind.
The cradle of the vampir might very well be the Balkans of the ninth and tenth centuries. And as both a word and a concept, the vampire may very well—and quite logically, in the final analysis—be rooted in the social, political, and religious realities of the day. But if we are to follow the trail of wandering corpses to its conclusion, we must now head south, to Greece.
T
HE
Vrykolakas
One evening in the mid-19th century, Henry Tozer, an Oxford don and authority on the geography of the far-flung Ottoman Empire, arrived in the small Greek town of Aghia. The hamlet perched on the flanks of Mount Ossa, overlooking the plains of Thessaly—fabled since classical times for the Olympics, for horses, and for superstition:
During the night which we spent at Aghia the population were disturbed by apparitions of spirits, which they described as gliding about with large lanterns in their hands. These are called
vrykolaka
by the Greeks and
vurkolak
by the Turks, for both Christians and Mahometans believe in them; the name, however, is written and pronounced in a great variety of ways. It was curious to meet with them in this manner as soon as we descended into the plains of Thessaly, the ancient land of witches; but the belief in these appearances is widely spread, not only throughout Thessaly and Epirus, but also among the islands of the Aegean and over a great part of Turkey. The idea concerning them is, that some persons come to life again after death, sleep in their tombs with their eyes open, and wander abroad by night, especially when the moon is shining brightly.
The moon shining brightly, of course, suggests werewolves on the prowl. Vrykolakas
—
like the Turkish
vurkolak,
Serbian
vukodlak,
Bulgarian
volkudlak,
Albanian
vurvolak,
and similar cognates that have burrowed deep into the linguistic map of eastern Europe—has usually been interpreted as “werewolf” because it stems from a Slavic root (probably
vârkolak
)—that presumably meant “wolf pelt.” It came to be interchangeable with
vampire
the reasoning goes, only because werewolves in folklore were suspected of becoming vampires after death.
It might not be that simple, however.
Vârkolak
may indeed mean “wolf pelt,” and quite literally so—denoting the wolf pelts Balkan tribesmen ritually donned during pagan times. The words it hatched then undertook a vast mythological odyssey, for when they next appear, they describe a cosmic monster that caused eclipses by eating the sun or moon before settling back on earth and taking on the additional sense of the devouring dead.
However it happened,
vârkolak
and its cognates are now thoroughly entwined with
vampir
and its derivatives. Only in Greece has
vampir
never taken root;
vrykolakas
has crowded it out.
One hundred fifty years before Tozer undertook his wanderings, the renowned French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort had journeyed to the far corners of Asia Minor on a plant-collecting expedition. His three-volume
A Voyage into the Levant
is equal parts travelogue and exploration narrative, yet most modern readers ignore his rapturous descriptions of mountain forests ranging along the Black Sea coast and into the Caucasus. Instead, de Tournefort’s book is best remembered for its startling description of vrykolakas hysteria on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he had stopped during the winter of 1700.
Around the time de Tournefort reached the isle, a truculent and much-disliked peasant had died. Shortly thereafter began a chain of nocturnal depredations. “[I]t was rumored,” de Tournefort wrote, “that he was seen by night walking very fast; that he came into the house, overturning the furniture, extinguishing the lamps, throwing his arms round persons from behind, and playing a thousand sly tricks.”
Panic quickly engulfed the island. Ten days after the body had been buried, it was dug up so the local butcher might remove its heart. “The corpse,” reported the botanist, “gave out such a bad smell, that they were obliged to burn incense; but the vapour, mixed with the exhalations of that carrion, only augmented the stink, and began to heat the brain of these poor people.”
De Tournefort continued his account:
Their imagination, struck with the spectacle, was full of visions; some one thought proper to say that a thick smoke came from this body. We dared not say that it was the vapour of the incense. They only exclaimed “Vroucolacas,” in the chapel, and in the square before it…
I have no doubt that they would have maintained it did not stink, if we had not been present; so stupified were these poor people with the circumstance, and infatuated with the idea of the return of the dead. For ourselves, who got next to the corpse in order to make our observations exactly, we were ready to die from the offensive odour which proceeded from it. When they asked us what we thought of this dead man, we replied that we believed him thoroughly dead; but as we wished to cure, or at least not to irritate their stricken fancy, we represented to them that it was not surprising if the butcher had perceived some heat in searching amidst entrails which were decaying; neither was it extraordinary that some vapour had proceeded from them; since such will issue from a dunghill that is stirred up….
Despite one indignity after another being visited upon the corpse, the nightly mischief—and its attendant pandemonium—grew only worse. De Tournefort had never seen anything like it: “Every body seemed to have lost their senses. The most sensible people appeared as phrenzied as the others; it was a veritable brain fever, as dangerous as any mania or madness.” Entire families fled their houses. “Every one complained of some new insult: you heard nothing but lamentations at nightfall…[and] every morning entertained us with the comedy of a faithful recital of all the new follies which had been committed by this bird of night….”
One exorcism after another failed to rid the town of the revenant. Finally the citizens built a pyre, and de Tournefort watched from a distance as the flames consumed the meddlesome corpse. The islanders then “contented themselves with saying that the devil had been properly caught that time, and they made up a song to turn him into ridicule…After this, must we not own that the Greeks of to-day are not great Greeks, and that there is only ignorance and superstition among them?”
T
HE
W
ANDERERS
Two centuries later, John Cuthbert Lawson, in
Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion
(1910), sought to disprove de Tournefort’s final contention. Nearly half of Lawson’s influential but little-known book, which Patrick Leigh Fermor called a “real triumph of scholarship and detailed reasoning,” is devoted to the vrykolakas. Lawson believed that the Greeks never adopted the vampir of neighboring lands because they had their own deeply rooted ideas about the walking dead. Vrykolakas, in fact, was merely a “grafting of Slavonic branches upon an Hellenic stock.”
That stock is still visible on a breathtaking Aegean island. Modern Santorini is a busy tourist resort, yet there was a time when its cliffs were famed more for their
vrykolakes
(the plural form) than for their commanding ocean views. To “send vrykolakes to Santorini” was the local equivalent of “bringing coals to Newcastle.” That’s because the dry, volcanic soils of Santorini are naturally preservative. Corpses buried there do not decompose as quickly as they do elsewhere.
Jesuit priest François Richard, who lived on Santorini in the 17th century, described dead bodies that “after fifteen or sixteen years—sometimes even twenty or thirty—are found inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or rolled along, sound like drums…” This quality gave the cadavers the name by which they were once known in Greece:
tympaneous,
or “drumlike.” That, as well as other dialectal names—
fleshy
and
gaper
among them—appear to have survived in the Aegean Islands for a time, but on the mainland—down which the Slavic tide had rolled in the sixth century—vrykolakas reigned supreme. Eventually the islands, too, gave in and adopted that term.
But why not
vampir?
Stripping the Christian and Slavic overburdens off the original Greek idea, John Lawson concluded that the Greeks did not adopt
vampir
because of its associated savagery. In their tradition, the walking dead were not always malicious. A good example of this crops up in a well-known fragment from Phlegon’s
Mirabilia,
a compendium of ghost stories written in the second century A.D. Though its beginning has been lost, the story—which Phlegon claimed to have witnessed—is set in Tralles in Asia Minor, in the house of Demostratus and Charito, whose daughter Philinnion has been dead for six months. Young Machates has been staying in their guest room, however, and he has been receiving nocturnal visits from an unknown lover, who has left her gold ring and breast band behind.
The visitor is Philinnion, of course. When her parents discover the tokens and eventually behold their dead daughter on one of her midnight manifestations, she upbraids them for spoiling her happiness—and promptly relapses into a corpse. The family vault is then opened, but Philinnion’s spot is empty—save for an iron ring and gilt cup that Machates had given her. Unnerved, the townsfolk transport her corpse beyond the city limits. There, after making suitable propitiations to pagan divinities, they burn it.
Yet Philinnion is no Carmilla; there is no hint that her midnight visits are predatory. Because the despairing Machates commits suicide, the
Mirabilia
fragment strikes us as a story of star-crossed lovers, tomb and all.
Yet most ancient Greek revenants, it appears, returned from the grave to demand—or to wreak—vengeance.
Alastor
means “avenger,” a kind of male version of Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, and describes a supernatural figure often compared with the
Erinyes,
or furies. Greek literature and drama abound with alastors avenging such indignities as neglected burial rites, but the creatures are usually bent on blood vengeance. Nevertheless, Lawson has spied, behind the avenging fury that is the alastor, an even older figure:
Alastor,
he surmised, might originally have meant “wanderer,” not “avenger.”
“‘To wander unburied,’” Lawson brooded, “could there be a simpler description of a revenant?”:
Does not the whole misery of the unburied dead consist in this—that they must wander? It is almost inconceivable then that the name
Alastor,
“wanderer,” should have been originally applied only to a single class of the wandering dead—to those whose wanderings were directed towards vengeance, and not also to those whose wanderings were more aimless, more pitiable, whose whole existence might have been summed up in that one word “wandering.”
As late as the 17th century, Father Richard related the story of a Santorini shoemaker named Alexander who returned from the grave to “frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he was seen no more.” In one corner of the island, Father Richard continued, “these
vrykolakes
have been seen not only at night but in the open day, five or six together in a field, feeding apparently on green beans.”
This touching glimpse of the vegetarian dead might strike a responsive chord in readers attuned to the more sensitive vampires of today. But in eras past, such stories, recounted at night beside a dying hearth, would have had an eerie, unsettling effect. For these figures were Lawson’s “wanderers,” trapped in a limbo between worlds, condemned to expiate some crime, or bound by some curse. And in the ancient way of thinking, there seemed no end of potential causes for such curses: sudden or violent death, suicide, lack of proper burial rites, unavenged murder, sorcery, or perjury. Lucian of Samosata, in the first century A.D., mused in his
Philopseudes
that perhaps the “only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death—anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way—but…the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander.”