Rabid (10 page)

Gómez-Alonso’s hypothesis made headlines around the world, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney. Even
Playboy
weighed in, noting the doctor’s linking of both rabies and vampirism to hypersexuality. “Bite me!” the writer enthused. It’s easy to understand why the public’s interest was so piqued. Our myth of bloodsucking ghouls has proven remarkably durable throughout the last two hundred years of churning popular culture, sinking its teeth into everything from Victorian novels and Hollywood confections to Anne Rice’s wildly
popular novels and, of course, the multiplatform tween juggernaut that is Stephenie Meyer’s
Twilight series.
We feel we owe a hearing to any theory that might explain the origins of these surprisingly unkillable undead.

Gómez-Alonso’s paper does raise many intriguing parallels between the vampire and the sufferer of hydrophobia. First, and most obvious, both rabies and vampirism spread from organism to organism through bites: not a small coincidence in man, an animal that does not instinctively use its teeth in aggression. Also, the throes of a rabies infection usually involve facial spasms, which can render an appearance—as a 1950 French medical text described it—of “the teeth clenched and the lips retracted as those of an animal.” Vampires were believed to possess the ability to become dogs at will, and in this form they would often kill the other dogs nearby. Male rabies patients, as
Playboy
was so excited to learn, are sometimes given to undue sexual abandon; vampires, meanwhile, rose from their graves to engage in sexual conquest. And finally, the life span of a vampire was said to be forty days, similar to the average duration of human rabies infections from the time of bite until death.

The doctor points out in passing that rabies might also account for the werewolf, or lycanthrope, that mythical human who changes wholly or partially into a wolf and preys upon his neighbors. Gómez-Alonso does not provide specifics, but the broad strokes of the comparison are obvious: the biting, the clenching teeth, the animal transformation, are all even more pronounced in the myth of the wolf-man. The parallel to rabies is, if anything, even more direct with lycanthropy, which is nothing more nor less than a man seized with an animal nature.

How much credence should we give to the link between rabies and the undead? In his paper, Dr. Gómez-Alonso goes so far as to assert that the vampires and werewolves in historical accounts were
literally
rabid humans, their symptoms misunderstood as supernatural by an
unscientific populace. In propounding this theory—in attempting to explain away folkloric evil through science—the doctor joined a noble tradition that extends back at least to Europe’s great vampire boom, in the early part of the eighteenth century, when supposedly true-life tales of vampires from the East chilled the drawing rooms of England, Germany, and particularly France, where, as Voltaire famously wrote, “nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735.” This was the self-described age of reason, after all, and its eminent minds, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, brooded over how seemingly respectable people could display such credulity toward popular hysterias. Thus even during the vampire’s heyday, men of reason gamely tried to offer scientific explanations; some saw vampires as victims of food poisoning or as opium fiends.

When one digs into historical accounts, however, such literalistic explanations seem far-fetched, to say the least. Werewolves, during the sixteenth century, were apprehended and would seem entirely lucid (and fully human) during what by accounts were lengthy interrogations and trials—not something that a rabies sufferer could have accomplished. In the accounts of vampires from the eighteenth century, observers would disinter real corpses that appeared, in the light of day, to be entirely dead, not writhing in any sort of rabic agony. And there is the unavoidable fact that rabies, for all the violence of its manifestation in humans, rarely prompts them to bite and also does not shed abundantly in their saliva as it does with dogs. Simply put, humans do not spread rabies.

Yet Dr. Gómez-Alonso’s theory, if questionable in its literal meaning, taps into a deeper metaphorical truth. So many of our most enduring horrors, the vampire and the werewolf included, have common narrative elements that derive naturally (in both senses of that word) from rabies. Just browse the horror-movie section of your local video store and see what’s on offer. It’s villains pouncing from the darkness, biting, lunging, tearing with claws. It’s contagion: a malevolence that creeps from victim to victim, spreading through bites, kisses, licks. It’s
a familiar creature—a trusted soul, often residing within one’s own inner circle or even within one’s home—that becomes surprisingly and unaccountably infected by a savage animal evil. Going as far back as the days of
lyssa,
and even before, these fiendish tropes have been forever intertwined with rabies, a constant presence across continents and across eras. Indeed, for most of human history, among those who knew little or nothing of medicine, rabies was merely another horror story in the same genre: a scream heard today in the next town over, quite possibly to resound in one’s own town tomorrow.

In our more enchanted, pre-cinematic past, these types of stories spread not from the capacious minds and marketing budgets of Hollywood but out of tales told from house to house, town to town. These horrors were often related with the visceral sense (believed by both parties) that the menace in question was real and imminent. Stories evolved, too, as they spread, and so we can consider what remained after centuries of such “audience testing” as having a perverse sort of evolutionary fitness. It was not just the vampires and werewolves as such but a more generalized obsession with vicious half-human creatures, with dogs and wolves amok: girls (and boys) gone wild, familiar canids gone wrong.

The question, then, is not
who
the werewolves of the sixteenth century were, or the vampires of the eighteenth; the former were obviously victims of mass hysteria, the latter clearly corpses. The more relevant question is
why:
Why should it have been widely believed, and widely feared, that men were stalking the land as wolves? What is so terrifying about the vampire, a creature that, despite its human form, bites at the flesh of its victims? Why do dark forces so often manifest themselves in the shape of a dog? To such questions, our answer is the same as that of the good doctor Gómez-Alonso. The animal infection—the zoonotic idea—is mankind’s original horror, and its etiology traces back inevitably to the rabies virus. Before our saga of the world’s most diabolical virus careens into the nineteenth century, it is worth stopping for a moment to catalog the
manifestations of this horror, from demon dogs to wolfish men and everything in between.

The original lycanthrope, from whose name the term derives, was Lycaon, the mythical first king of Arcadia. As the legend went, Zeus himself had descended to lodge in Lycaon’s palace, and the king decided upon a wicked test of his guest’s divinity. The king killed a boy and served him to Zeus at the table. On beholding the unappetizing cut he had been served, the god, immortally offended, slew fifty of Lycaon’s sons with lightning bolts. Then, for good measure, he changed Lycaon into a wolf—a transformation that Ovid, in his
Metamorphoses
, describes in undeniably rabid terms:

Such an account conveys the Homeric
lyssa,
the infection with wolfish rage, except in this case the wolfishness is rendered quite literally. Likewise, many other ancient accounts of men becoming wolves, or of men possessed by animals, seem to stem from the inhuman ferocity with which some warriors were said to comport themselves in battle. Old Norse gives us the legend of the berserkers, ferocious fighters who wore the skins of bears or wolves atop their armor. Their rage was seen as a species of demonic possession, during which time they became immune to pain; one description of their prebattle mien has
them foaming at the mouth, barking like wolves, chewing on the rims of their shields and sometimes gnawing them clean through. Similarly, centuries of Irish lore tell of the Laighne Faelaidh, a race of men who take the form of wolves whenever they please, killing cattle and devouring the flesh raw. A number of ancient Indo-European tribal names, such as the Luvians, the Lucanians, and the Hyrcanians, mean some variant of “wolf-men.”

Some of the ancient accounts of wolf-men, and dog-men, shade into simple xenophobia. When Herodotus writes of the Neurians—a tribe in what is now eastern Europe, each member of which “changes himself, once in the year, into the form of a wolf,” remaining thus for several days before changing back—it reads as the assertion less of a fearsome ferocity than of a subhuman curiosity. Another ancient chronicler, Ctesias of Cnidus, offers an account of a half-human tribe in India: “It is said that there live in these mountains dog-headed men; they wear clothes made from animal skins, and speak no language but bark like dogs and recognize one another by these sounds…. They couple with their women on all fours like dogs; to unite otherwise is a shameful thing for them.” Strabo, a geographer from the first century
B.C.
, wrote of the Cynamolgi, an Ethiopian tribe numbering some 120,000 dog-headed men who spoke in barks. Similarly, the Ch’i-tan, a tenth-century people in what is now Manchuria, believed that one of the regions to their north was “the Kingdom of Dogs,” whose inhabitants “have the bodies of men and the heads of dogs. They have long hair, they have no clothes, they overcome wild beasts with their bare hands, their language is the barking of dogs.” With some regularity did medieval maps place
cynocephali,
or “dog-headed men,” in the edges of the known world, a practice carried out not just by Christian cartographers but also by their Muslim opposite numbers.

The easy explanation for such beliefs, and for the werewolf legend as well, is that these folk traditions employed the dog (and the wolf, her fierce or rabid cousin) as an expression of the so-called Other: that is, as a means by which to attribute a subhumanity to foreigners, outlaws,
adherents to strange and scary creeds, and so on. And that explanation no doubt carries some truth. But isn’t it telling that the animal chosen for “otherness” is, in fact, the opposite of strange? Indeed, what makes the demon dog such a powerful source of dread is precisely how familiar, in all senses of that word, the canine presence can be. When human beings keep dogs by choice, the dogs become our constant, often silent companions, living with us inside our strongholds. We become complacent about the animal nature that lurks in them still. But with the intrusion of rabies (or a passing squirrel, for that matter), such slavering essence can return with sinister immediacy.

Since dogs and humans possess an almost biological familiarity, having coevolved over millennia, even a strange and semi-wild dog today will take liberties with an unfamiliar human that other creatures will not. Barbara Allen Woods, a folklorist at the University of California in the late 1950s, built a taxonomy for the thousands of different European oral legends in which the devil appears in dog form. Regarding one such legend type, in which a demonic dog stalks a traveler, she observes:

Ironically, the noted sixteenth-century demonologist Nicholas Remy turned this same reasoning on its head, in attempting to explain why evil spirits assume the form of dogs in the first place: “When [demons] go with anyone on his way, they most often take the form of a dog, which may follow him most closely without raising any suspicion of evil in the onlookers.” Dogs have earned our trust, and we are used to their (sometimes unsolicited) companionship; what better vessel, in Remy’s view, for a demon to exploit?

Woods’s catalog is full of folktales in which a devil dog appears at moments of particular wickedness. A demon dog is encountered at a haunted place, such as a grave site, a churchyard, or a ruined castle. Or the appearance of the dog portends a death, even encourages someone to commit suicide. Humans shoot bullets at the demon dog, but it cannot be wounded. Dogs perch at the feet of cardsharps whose winnings flow from pacts with the devil. A dog lurks in front of a child’s coffin and prevents his receiving a proper Christian burial.

Often the demon dog can be creepily communicative. A Danish boy in Frlund, when reading his parents’ copy of a forbidden magic book, is interrupted by a noise in the hall. He opens the door to find a large black poodle, which gazes at the boy “with strange pleading eyes.”
*
In one Swiss legend, two men see a dog watching a dance and
ask why he is there. The dog replies, matter-of-factly, that a fight is about to break out and someone will be killed; he, the devil, intends to claim that soul. In a similar Swedish tale, the dog is considerably more articulate. Two brothers from Sandåkra, after they commit perjury and escape detection, promise each other that whichever dies first shall return as a ghost, in order to tell the other what he has learned of the afterlife. Soon after the death of one brother, the second finds a large black dog sitting on the steps of his cottage. Knowing it is his brother, he asks the dog what he has found. “That which is once forsworn is eternally lost,” replies the dog glumly. The living brother decides he must confess to his crime.