*
“A spirit . . .
. . . . . .
The undulating and silent well,
And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom,
Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,
Held commune with him; as if he and it
Were all that was.”
-SHELLEY’S
Alastor
“Thy red lips, like worms,
Travel over my cheek.”
—MOTHERWELL.
Vampires
have been invading our dreams
(and our culture's collective consciousnesses)
for centuries, now.
*
The idea of a collective consciousness was first presented by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1893.
In the 1970s, scientists began to suggest this collective consciousness could be developed and spread through species non-explicitly; through telepathic or ‘supernatural’ means.
-consciousness
(DrLori):
Actually, the duty of the living to keep the dead at rest is centuries-old, and there are exceptions. Cremation and/or feeding the dead to carrion (aka sky burial) is an effective way to destroy a body and set free its spirit. Disclaimer: not all sky burials automatically release the spirit and some cultures that practice it also have methods for avoiding ghosts (#notallskyburials)...but we’re getting a little too anthropological here. There were island cultures in the Pacific and elsewhere that collected the skulls of ancestors and kept them around to they could watch over the extended family. Even in Rome, through the 19th century, certain families would go into the catacombs around the vernal equinox to polish certain skulls that belonged to ancestors. Burial customs are fascinating, almost as fascinating as the traditions that gave rise to such customs, but we’re not interested in them tonight. Tonight it’s all about the dead that won’t stay dead and, in particular, the vampire.
Every culture seems to have had vampires:
“I am a part of the part, which at first was the whole.”
GOETHE.—Mephistopheles in Faust.
*
Legends of vampires
have existed for millennia; cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demonic entities and blood-drinking spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century Southeastern Europe,[1] particularly Transylvania as verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire itself. Belief in such legends became so rife that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires -wikipedia
*
Edited to include:
"The Sefer Hasidim, a book on Jewish piety, stated:
"1465 There are women that are called estrie... They were created at sunset [before the first Sabbath before creation]. As a result of this, they are able to change form. There was one woman who was a estrie and she was very sick and there were two women with her at night; one was sleeping and one was awake. And the sick woman stood up and loosened her hair and she was about to fly and suck the blood of the sleeping woman.."
.wikipedia.org/...
"One of the most common types of vampires was
Lilith
(Eruvin 100b; Niddah 24b; Shabbos 151b)"
shaelsiegel.blogspot.com/...
"Vampires and Witches in Sefer Hasidim"
"As we know, the Torah in Shemot (22:17) commands us not to allow witches to live. Rambam (Hil. Sanhedrin 4:3) views this as a biblical prohibition imposed on Beit Din. In Devarim (18:10-11) the Torah lists a variety of wizards to be avoided: “There shall not be found among you any one who passes his son or his daughter through the fire, one that uses divination, a soothsayer, an enchanter, a sorcerer, or a charmer, or one that consults a ghost or familiar spirit, or a necromancer.” The Sifrei and later commentators explicate the differences between these categories. All this is well known.
Not many know that the Sefer Hasidim, among other things, relates a number of incidents involving witch-like creatures called “estries,” who suck the blood of their victims. They fly, assume different forms and continue to attack victims even after they have been killed and buried. Perhaps most curiously, the remedy for a victim of an estrie is to eat from her bread and salt, which somehow acted as an antidote to her bites.
The passages below are my own translations; the original Hebrew sources are listed below. For a discussion of the sources, see J. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition (New York, 1939), pp. 38-39.
Guest post by R. Eli D. Clark
Rabbi Eli D. Clark lives in Bet Shemesh, Israel. He served as Halakha editor of the Koren Sacks Siddur and also practices international tax law."
torahmusings
And this google link:
google.com
*
In his 1931 treatise On the Nightmare,
Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones asserted that vampires are symbolic of several unconscious drives and defence mechanisms. Emotions such as love, guilt, and hate fuel the idea of the return of the dead from the grave. Desiring a reunion with loved ones, mourners may project the idea that the recently dead must in return yearn the same. wikipedia.
*
(DrLori):
Vampires of folk tradition are not at all the elegant and menacing figures of literature that we think of today. Our conception of the vampire primarily comes from Eastern European folk tradition, although, as Angmar wrote above, blood-drinking revenants appear world-wide. And European vampire traditions center around how to identify a vampire and who is going to become a vampire (hint: you’re pretty much marked at birth) . Most of the corpse-identification traditions center around an imperfect understanding of human decomposition in cool temperatures. (Another hint: this link is pretty graphic, so don’t follow it if you tend toward queasiness.)
Since, by the 19th Century, it was generally understood even in Transylvania that, if you had a rash of mysterious deaths in your town, digging up random bodies looking for a livid one was bad form, and frowned upon by the Church to boot, so another method of vampire detection was developed. This one required that a priest lead a white filly ridden by a virgin girl or boy over the graves in the cemetery. The grave that the horse refused to cross, or shied at, or just flinched over—that was the one that could be dug up by respectable people.
For the record, vampires persist as a phenomenon in Romania to this day. Search Youtube and you’ll find news clips of recent vampire huntings, even though the Romanian government disavows them and most townspeople are reticent and unwilling to talk.
The Vampire as Metaphysical
*
Add the Greek prefix "meta-" (beyond) to the base "physical" (nature), and you get metaphysical — a near synonym to the Latin-based word "supernatural." Both concern phenomena that are outside everyday experience or knowledge.
vocabulary
*
Off Lilith!" ,
-the Kabbalah
MacDonald:
The jagged outline of a bat-like wing, torn and hooked. Came a cold wind with a burning sting—and Lilith was upon me. Her hands were still bound, but with her teeth she pulled from my shoulder the cloak Lona made for me, and fixed them in my flesh. I lay as one paralysed.
Already the very life seemed flowing from me into her, when I remembered, and struck her on the hand. She raised her head with a gurgling shriek, and I felt her shiver. I flung her from me, and sprang to my feet.
She was on her knees, and rocked herself to and fro. A second blast of hot-stinging cold enveloped us; the moon shone out clear, and I saw her face—gaunt and ghastly, besmeared with red.
"Down, devil!" I cried.
Where are you taking me?" she asked, with the voice of a dull echo from a sepulchre.
-Lilith (1895)
gutenberg
*
There is no love that is not an echo.
-Adorno
Le Fanu:
The room was lighted
by the candle that burnt there all through the night,
and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed,
a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then,close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.
-Carmilla (1871)
publicbookshelf
*
Up rose Lenore as the red morn wore
From weary visions starting
-gottfried august bürger
1773
Stoker:
"Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”
-Dracula (1897)
gutenberg
*
For she would willingly bring her life to anchor
at the end of its voyage the gloomy harbour of death.
Opening chorus of Hippolytus -Euripedes.
Wharton:
“I wanted to see the place,” he merely said.
The Deacon cleared his throat. “Just take a look . . . yes . . . We thought so . . . But I guess there won’t be anything to see . . . ” He attempted a chuckle.
The other did not seem to hear him, but laboured on ahead through the pines. The three men came out together in the cleared space before the house. As they emerged from beneath the trees they seemed to have left night behind. The evening star shed a lustre on the speckless snow, and Brand, in that lucid circle, stopped with a jerk, and pointed to the same light foot-prints turned toward the house — the track of a woman in the snow. He stood still, his face working. “Bare feet . . . ” he said.
The Deacon piped up in a quavering voice: “The feet of the dead.”
Brand remained motionless.
“The feet of the dead,” he echoed.
-Bewitched(1925)
adelaide.edu
(DrLori):
Vampires exploded into English consciousness during the Victorian era. Bram Stoker’s Dracula might not have been the first Western European treatment of vampirism, but it was the best-written one, and it sparked a cultural wave. Stoker had traveled in Eastern Europe, and combined potent bits of vampire folklore with Victorian anxiety about masculinity, purity and cultural superiority. It was, in short, a hit, and soon everyone was writing about vampires.
Vampirism in Western Europe hit its stride at the start of the cinematic era, and birthed hundreds of movies, making a star of Bela Lugosi and adding to Christopher Lee’s resume.
What these literary treatments had going for them was a perfect combination of gothic horror and social anxiety. You can read (and watch) most early vampire novels and films as seduction and/or rape texts. The protagonist exposes his beloved to the vampire, who takes interest in her. Then our hero tries (unsuccessfullly) to save his beloved from the depredations of the seductive vampire. The scene of the attack is always a bedroom, and the focus remains on a fang penetrating tender flesh (can you get any more phallic?); blood is left on the sheets, the woman in a rapturous faint and the men, who always arrive too late, averting their eyes while they cover her up decently before an investigation can proceed. From there, the narrative shifts to 1) exterminating the threat before it becomes widespread, before “Dracula” can recruit his vampire army, and 2) redeeming the ravished beloved so she can marry our hero. Once touched by the vampire, poor Mina is defiled; the consecrated Host (Body of Christ) burns her forehead and marks her; with just….one…more…. visit from the Count, poor Mina will be damned. She’ll also die a spinster—what could be worse?
Despite the fact that at the time women were considered the primary audience for novels in general, horror stories were pitched to male audiences, being generally too explicit and violent for the gentle sex. Which means that I’m not suggesting female readers wanted or even recognized vampire stories as rape texts. Instead, I think the stories express male anxiety and serve as a response to a social construct that saw women as passive objects, and valuable only in terms of purity, innocence and weakness.
What makes the novels genuinely scary is what makes the vampire genuinely scary: a mix of the exotic with real menace. What’s at stake is not just death, but eternal damnation—virtuous men and women being seduced from their proper lives by an alluring fleshly temptation, being claimed by that temptation willing or not, and dragged into torment and possibly hell. Lucy dies and cannot be at rest until her corpse is “killed” again. A vampire is attractive, mesmerizing, tempting….and destructive.
I don’t think vampires would have taken root in our imaginations if they had not first been planted in Victorian soil. It was the Victorian Age, with its rigid social structures and repressive cultural expectations (virginity before marriage, covering a woman’s body even while emphasizing and exaggerating her shape and sexuality, strict codes of behavior for men: placing “nice” girls on pedestals and worshiping them while at the same time visiting brothels, etc.) Not for nothing was bdsm raised to an art and the high water-mark for numbers of brothels reached in London and New York during the late Victorian period. All those repressed desires had to go somewhere: in popular fiction, it went into what would become gothic literature, and its exploration of darkness and the forbidden.
Links:
The History of Vampires:
History
The Vampire Project
Vampire literature
Vampire.
Vampire grave
The Bloody Truth About Vampires
(Artist links):
Christopher Lopa scrappyboy.
(Goth/gothic literature links):
*
*
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
-Mearns
*
Next week we’ll talk about why modern vampires suck,
and how they got that way.
(Part 2:
"Why is the modern Vampire so incredibly boring?")