Vampire Forensics (18 page)

Such agonized figures, like tragic ones, excited pity as much as horror. Only the flame—cremation as an act of mercy—can loose the bond of suffering and bring repose.

In the thousands of years that have passed since then, this sad figure has undergone a metamorphosis. The church demonized the wanderer, thus turning the original transgression of divine law into a deadly sin—and a formula for excommunication. This ecclesiastical curse then further embraced such offenses as omission of baptism, “sorcery,” apostasy, and heresy—and we have the makings of the modern vampire in Greece. When the word
vampir
first gained traction in the Balkans, the old notions surrounding the alastor were probably still entrenched, and so people resisted the new word. But those notions had considerably eroded by the time
vukodlak
and its derivatives were on the rise, and that cleared the way for the reign of
vrykolakas
.

P
OETIC
V
IEWS OF
V
AMPIRES

Might a notion such as the alastor lie deep in Slavic legend? We have no literature and no drama to guide us, so the road must wind through the forest of Slavic folklore. So dense are those rhetorical thickets, however—so full of thorns, so entangled with Nordic mythology—that many an expert has lost his way.

Some authorities doubt the undergrowth is more than several centuries old. Others suspect it is very deeply rooted indeed. The latter often turn to a pioneering folklorist of the 19th century, the man whose published collections of more than 600 folk- and fairy tales have earned him the sobriquet “the Russian Grimm.”

Born in 1826 in a village on the edge of the steppe, Alexander Afanasiev spent most of his life plowing through Moscow’s libraries before dying, penniless and racked by tuberculosis, at the age of 45. More than a mere gleaner of existing material, Afanasiev created the massive, three-volume
Poetic Views of the Slavs Toward Nature.
In this masterpiece, he traced the profusion of Slavic songs, stories, and epic tales further and further back in time until he arrived at a single, if buried, root: the nature myths of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans.

“Originally our ancestors must have understood by the name vampire,” wrote Afanasiev in the 1860s, “a terrible demon who sucks storm clouds and drinks up all the moisture in them, because in the ancient myths rain was like blood flowing in the veins of cloud spirits and animals…. The winter cold which freezes rain-clouds plunges the creative forces of nature into sleep, death, damnation. The thunder god and lightning spirits are equated to suckers of rain who hide in cloud caves and fall asleep in cloud-graves.”

If this seems fanciful, consider that poetic (or metaphorical) thought probably came more easily to steppe-dwelling people living in a prescientific age. Cloud and wind and storm; lightning, hail, and drought; sun and moon and stars might indeed have provided the cosmic patterns, the ultimate code that explained, on the principle of “as above, so below,” both natural and supernatural phenomena. We know enough about Slavic mythology to recognize an attractively animistic bent in its sacred stones, trees, rivers, and lakes; its flying grass and weeping grass and dream grass.

It might be hard to grasp Afanasiev’s assertion that the bellowing of the vampire upon being staked is the metaphorical echo of the thunderstorm’s roar, but it is not difficult to understand how crop failures, famines, and epidemics might be ascribed to such beings. “Everywhere in the Slavic lands,” Afanasiev reminds us, “the fatal activity of the plague is explained by the evil of vampires.” The region also tended to identify vampires with dragons, demons, and “gluttonous Death,” appearing with that grim trio in popular tales as eaters of human flesh.

And it’s not that much different from the Romanian belief, in the words of one folklorist, that “
varcolaci
and
pricolici
[names of mythological monsters] are sometimes dead vampires, and sometimes animals which eat the moon.”

E
LUSIVE
D
RAGONS

A century after Afanasiev coughed himself to death, respected Soviet philologists V. V. Ivanov and V. Toporov updated their tsarist forerunner. Combing through comparative mythologies and that cornucopia of folklore, they reconstructed the likely Slavic version of the cosmic battle between the Indo-European gods of storm and earth. What emerged bears a marked resemblance, with certain differences, to Afanasiev’s poetic vision.

Thousands of years ago, it seems, the Slavic tribes possessed a metaphorical understanding of the drama of storms: Perun, the god of thunder and lightning, is chasing the drag-onlike Volos, or Veles—deity of waters, fields, pastures, flocks, herds, and the underworld—who has stolen the storm god’s wife (or perhaps his cattle). Lightning-shattered stumps and splintered boulders litter the dragon’s path as he tries to elude Perun’s thunderbolts: he transforms himself into now a tree, now a rock, now a human in the course of his vain attempt. Eventually, Volos is cornered and slain, at which point the storm breaks and releases its torrents of fructifying rain.

Of course, because it is an eternally recurring combat, Volos never really dies. As lord of the underworld, he is leader of all the chthonian powers; each year, as autumn turns to winter, he allows the dead to return to the world above for a few days, where they may visit the living, whom they approach while singing songs about how far they have traveled and how muddy was the way. Where Perun was the warrior’s god, Volos was that of the plowman and herdsman. Where Perun offered an honorable death in battle, the wily Volos offered those who broke their sacred oaths death by pestilence or disease.

So instead of a wandering figure, we have encountered a myth. But let’s return one final time to that enigmatic reference, in
The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols
, about ancient sacrifices being offered to “vampires and
bereginas.”

Perhaps some grain of truth lurks behind that 15th-century emendation. The protovampire might indeed have arisen from a deep-seated ancestor cult, as that document suggests. Exactly how they might have done so we shall probably never know. Might it have something to do with a belief in reincarnation? If so, that early conception would have changed over time. Perhaps these protovampires first devolved into the mysterious bereginas, those hovering riverbank spirits—and then were generalized as
rusalki,
the “souls of the dead.” That would lead, naturally enough, to the “souls of the dead who died a violent death”—and we are back on familiar ground.

Or perhaps not. Either way, for those who seek the origins of the vampire legend, one source of that stream—possibly the major contributor, possibly not—surely springs from the Balkans during the years in which they were Christianized, the years when such dualistic heresies as the Bogomils left their deep impression, and the years when religious and political struggle inflicted such lasting wounds.

Traces of that original cosmic myth have also survived. Where the Vardar River cuts through the heart of mountain-rimmed Macedonia, cradle of vampir, stands the city of Veles, surely an echo of the dragon Volos. High above it towers the peak of St. Elias the Thunderer. Not far by eagle’s wings, along the rugged Greek-Bulgarian border, vampires were once called
drakus,
or dragons. When the Roman legions crossed the Danube to invade Dacia (modern Romania), they encountered Dacian cavalry carrying
dracos,
or dragon standards.
Draco
became
dracul
in Romania, where once there dwelt a folkloric dragon that, assuming the shape of a man, seduced women and spirited them away to its underworld lair, where only a hero could rescue them.

All over ancient Thrace (in what is now Bulgaria) lived a people neither Greek nor Slavic—an enigmatic people devoted to blood sacrifices and incantations; to music and feasting and rhytons overflowing with wine, and they were said to know the secrets of immortality. All over that land, exquisite votive tablets once honored an unnamed figure today called simply the Thracian Hero or the Thracian Rider. A mounted figure who might represent either a military leader or the god of thunder, he is clearly depicted as a mighty drinker and an even mightier hunter, a lord of the animals, and a slayer of wild boars, wolves, and dragons. Not surprisingly, his image—horse rearing and lance (was it once a lightning bolt, or is it a stake?) spearing the prostrate foe—was eventually absorbed into that of St. George, whose own cult spread as far as England and whose smoke-blackened icons are found in churches all over the Balkans and deep into Russia. St. George himself had been assimilated to a vegetation god, for his feast day on April 23 was celebrated everywhere as a victory of surging spring over the forces of winter, darkness, and death. And as every folklorist knows, vampires are said to be most active on St. George’s Eve.

By the Middle Ages, the god Volos, too—at least the aspect of him that guarded flocks and herds—had acquired a halo, and became venerated everywhere in Christendom as St. Blaise, patron saint of wild animals. Yet, whereas the host of lesser deities scurried into the forest to survive as ogres and goblins, Volos’s infernal face was absorbed, alongside that of his Celtic counterpart Cernunnos, into the horned figure of the devil.

E
NIGMATIC
O
RIGINS

On May 28, 1891, on Denmark’s wet and windy Jutland Peninsula, peat cutters near the hamlet of Gundestrup found a great silver bowl of antique design buried in the bog. After the Gundestrup Cauldron was brought to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, it quickly became obvious that the bowl had been deposited in the bog as a votive offering or hidden there for safekeeping and never reclaimed. With its exquisite braid of mythological figures, the cauldron threw open the doors of an iconographic treasure-house.

In pride of place within the bowl sits the antlered Cernunnos, holding a torque in his right hand and a ram-headed serpent in his left. Surrounded by a stag, bulls, wolves, lions—and even a dolphin—he is the epitome of the lord of the beasts. Directly opposite is Taranis, Celtic counterpart to Perun. Taranis was a god of thunder, but also (like Volos) of the underworld. Figured elsewhere around the bowl are gods and scenes of war and sacrifice, all elegantly executed in silver.

Rising from the gloom and the muck of the Iron Age, summoning forth images of druidical sacrifices in a conjured European past, the Gundestrup Cauldron has captivated—and puzzled—generations of scholars. For one thing, the closest site of commensurate silversmithing skills lay far to the southeast, in Thrace. For another, the cauldron featured clumsily rendered elephants. They were usually explained away as a reference to the 37 elephants that Hannibal carried across the Alps with him in the summer of 218 B.C. The spectacle of those fabulous beasts tramping across southern Gaul, it was thought, would surely have fed the Celtic imagination for years.

Nobody over the past century has denied the possibility of an Eastern influence on the cauldron’s iconography. Scrutinizing the figures, some scholars have pointed out that Taranis bears a striking resemblance to Vishnu. The figure bathing alongside the elephants recalls Lakshmi, a Hindu goddess of good fortune. The figure with the paired birds and nursing child suggests Hariti, Hindu protectress of children. And Cernunnos might be less and more than he appears, too: Legs folded yoga-style beneath him, he resembles not only Buddha but also the seated figure of a horned god, surrounded by a lion, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a bull, depicted on a seal found in the Indus Valley and dating from the third or fourth millennium B.C.

Nevertheless, the cauldron was almost certainly made in Thrace, and by Thracian silversmiths. Only they could have borrowed elements from a pancultural fund of iconography, so to speak, that their imaginations could tap. Iron Age silversmiths might have been predominantly itinerant craftsmen, a valued and protected guild or caste that wandered over the ancient world, practicing an awe-inspiring and ritually sacrosanct art.

Such roving castes of craftsmen—alongside holy men, merchants, and soldiers—were the principal vehicles of cultural diffusion. They carried with them not only the germs of epidemic diseases, perhaps, but also an eclectic jumble of religious images and practices, gods and goddesses, idols and demons and rituals—and they sowed these all across Europe and the Near East. If inspiration for the decoration of a Celtic cauldron came 5,000 miles from India, might not certain attributes of the vampire have crossed those same steppes, deserts, and mountains?

D
AWN ON THE
R
IVER
G
ANGES
—it might have been a thousand years ago, or today, or the 1890s, when American traveler Eliza Scidmore first gazed on the Hindu holy city of Benares:

The thousands of worshipers might not have finished their oblations before the first white-shrouded, flower-bedecked corpse arrived. Perhaps only an hour or two had passed since the final moments when, ceremonial cow tail in hand, its spirit had loosed its hold and slipped back into the cycle of reincarnation. Brought on a bamboo bier by dirge-singing mourners, the corpse would be laid on the bottom step of the
ghats
so that its feet might be lapped by the Ganges. Only an hour or two more might pass before the body was ceremonially immersed in the river and then placed on the pyre.

The rising smoke might conceal what happened next; if not, the chief mourner might be seen prodding the burning skull with a bamboo pole and waiting for it to crack in the flames—a sign that the vital winds collected there had been released.

The scene is so spectacular that it is easy to miss the invisible. Just as all of India seems to flock to Benares, so too do its legions of devils, demons, and such terrifying figures as Kali—the bloodstained, skull-bedecked goddess of death, plague, and annihilation. The river stairways known as ghats are supernaturally charged places, as are cremation grounds all over the Indian subcontinent. In the countryside, you don’t go near them unless absolutely necessary; they are always located at the margins, as far from the village as possible.

From the dying man’s last moments to the ceremony of his incorporation into the ancestors 12 days later, the burial rituals serve a twofold purpose: They ease the passage of the dying and guard his soul along its way while wrapping a sheath of sanctity around the corpse, even though that won’t be around for long.

According to Hindu mythology, supernatural scavengers are everywhere. Those that haunt cremation and burial grounds are loosely called Indian vampires, and they exist in bewildering varieties. Almost everywhere in India, both in villages and in the surrounding forests, stand small shrines called
bhandara
. These are for the
bhutas
(usually translated as “living beings”), and offerings of grain are made there each morning and evening to placate them.

Because the bhutas are malevolent goblins roaming the village, these offerings cannot be neglected. Otherwise, the bhutas may turn spiteful, blasting crops and livestock and visiting diseases upon the village children. Their cult is therefore observed with great ceremony: festivals, dances, and even blood sacrifices. Large temples known as
bhutastan
often house the statues of especially important bhutas.

Yet, peel back a layer, and the bhutas emerge not as gods or demons but as spirits of the dead—
bhuta
can be translated more precisely as “someone who was” or, roughly, “the departed.” In some sense, then, bhutas are spirits that still cling to this world. In this aspect, they have a familiar provenance: They are the spirits of those who died untimely or violent deaths, who killed themselves, who were denied proper funeral rites, or who otherwise died unfulfilled. Meeting several such qualifications magnifies one’s odds of becoming a bhuta.

More ominously, it seems that a bhuta can preempt a living body (and occasionally a dead one) to fulfill its desires. Bhutas lurk not only around cemeteries and cremation grounds but also in ruined temples and other places where owls—held in superstitious dread in India—might be found. So greatly feared are bhutas that their name encompasses a host of demonic beings, among them the
brahmapa-rush,
which drinks blood from its victim’s skull while dancing with his intestines wrapped about its head like a turban. Like Western vampires, bhutas are said to cast no shadow, but garlic won’t deter them—burning turmeric is the apotropaic ritual of choice.

Bhutas, however, have become confused and conflated with
pretas
. In one form or another, the preta has resonance all over Asia, where it often means “deceased.” In China, according to Gerald Willoughby-Meade,
preta
means the “suffering soul of a suicide seeking a substitute.” But
preta
implies a process more than a completion, so it might be better rendered as “one in transition.” The preta is the form the soul takes on its journey to the ancestors, or
pitrs
(“protectors” or “fathers,” akin to the Latin
pater,
“father”). It can take a baffling number of forms—as innumerable as seem to be the stages in Hindu soul making. The preta from a deformed child, for example, can be as small as your thumb. Yet, all pretas are potentially dangerous, and they must be propitiated by constant observation of extended funerary rites. These help them on their journey so that one day, they too can partake of the evening
bali,
or offering, which is always thrown to the south—the abode of the dead.

Another Indian embodiment of the unsatisfied dead takes a more recognizable form.
Vetalas,
which resemble giant vampire bats, were made known to the West by Sir Richard Francis Burton’s
Vikram and the Vampire; or, Tales of Hindu Devilry.
This collection of stories within a story was the polyglot Burton’s loose translation of the Hindu classic
Baital Pachisi,
which features an eloquent, tale-spinning vetala who greets the legendary king Vikram while hanging upside down from a tree. His fellow vetalas, however, prefer banqueting on corpses stacked at the cremation grounds or reanimating those buried in cemeteries.

On central India’s broad Deccan Plateau, you commonly encounter stones (some painted a lurid red) that have been raised expressly for the use of vetalas; the vetalas serve as village guardians, and from these perches, their eerie singing may perhaps be heard.

Among the most hideous and reviled of Indian vampires are
pisachas,
or “flesh-eaters.” These spirits—of criminals, liars, adulterers, or the insane—likewise loiter at cremation grounds, but they are far more insidious than bhutas or vetalas. They can enter a living person’s open mouth and lodge in the intestines, where they banquet on feces—all of which sounds symbolic of disease, especially given that the great cholera, one of history’s most horrible epidemics, was traced to India.

Then there are the
rakshasas,
or “destroyers.” All blood and fangs, these shape-shifters might take the form of an owl, a dog, a cuckoo—or perhaps even the form of an absent lover or husband. A rakshasa has fiery red eyes and a long tongue, the better to prey on newborn infants and their mothers. They fear fire and mustard but not garlic.

Rakshasas were also once mystifyingly called “confounders of the sacrifice.” Yet, peel back another layer: That epithet may be ancient indeed—dating, some experts believe, to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in India. Coming off the dry, windswept plateaus of Iran and Afghanistan, the invaders drove away the Indian subcontinent’s aboriginal inhabitants, who took to the jungles and became guerrilla fighters. Like Robin Hood and his men, the guerrillas evaded capture in their leafy new home and struck without warning—like forest demons.

In the
Rig Veda,
Indra, the thunder god, is implored to seek out and destroy these followers of an old religion, as their raids have been disrupting the elaborate sacrifices of the new one. There is some evidence that the word
pisacha
may once also have applied to tribes living in northern India. Thus, rakshasa, pisacha, and
vanara
(monkey-men), like vampir and warg-wolf, originally might have had no supernatural significance whatsoever. Perhaps they were instead ethnic epithets, once hurled in hatred.

These aboriginal tribes supposedly would have worshiped the deities of forest, mountain, stream, and hill: wolves, tigers, birds, and snakes. These deities either survived in the remoter villages, becoming protective spirits that lodged in sacred trees to which offerings were made, or were banished to the cremation grounds as cannibalistic demons.

But do these creatures correspond with European vampires? They seem to share a family tree but hang from a different branch. In India, however, you can usually find what you want if you look for it hard enough. If your pregnant wife dies during the Dewali festival or while ritually unclean, you had better bury her facedown, nail her fingers to her thumbs, and pile her grave with stones and thorns; otherwise, she will return as a churel and attack her family. That sounds more familiar.

Yet, some traces of Indian vampire lore may have been carried to Europe after all.

W
ANDERING
V
AMPIRES

Gypsies were perhaps the original bohemians. In 1423, King Sigismund of Bohemia gave a band of “outlandysshe” wanderers from “Egypt” the letter of safe conduct—and a name and reputation—that they carried all over Europe.

They had long been blacksmiths, tinkers, knife grinders, and horse traders, as well as dancers, musicians, and fortune-tellers. Black of eye and black of hair, gypsies (or Romani, as they call themselves) entered 15th-century Europe from Asia Minor just ahead of the Ottoman wave. Though they would eventually spread as far as the British Isles and then around the world, they roamed the Balkans and eastern Europe in such numbers that an 18th-century traveler to Transylvania compared them to “locusts” swarming over the land. Their clannish, secretive ways lent them an aura of superstition; they gained a reputation for being a caste apart, masters at harnessing or propitiating occult forces. And despite the widespread belief that they had come from Egypt, their original home was India.

For good reason—they once were enslaved in Romania and were nearly exterminated by the Nazis in World War II—the Romani have remained reclusive and wary. Their
kris,
or unwritten code, and their ever-changing Romani tongue have been constant bonds shared by widely dispersed bands. At the same time, their wanderings have accentuated the human tendency to diversify, making gypsies a challenge to linguists and anthropologists alike. Additionally, many of their customs are imbued with—perhaps contaminated by—those of the lands in which they sojourned.

The gypsy attitude toward the dead became less diluted than their other beliefs. They recognized two categories of dead people:
Suuntsé
were “saints” in paradise and need not be feared, whereas
mulé
died unnaturally, unexpectedly, or prematurely. In the animistic world of the gypsies, however, all death resulted from deliberate evil, so the latter category included just about everyone.

Never mind other people’s ghosts or vampires; gypsies could pass untroubled nights in outsiders’ graveyards. It was the
mulo
they feared. After a death in a gypsy camp, the tent where the corpse was laid would be carefully guarded so nothing untoward could affect it; meanwhile, the campfires outside were stoked high to scare off any ghosts. Every burial rite was observed to the letter, with the dead man’s possessions—even his money—being destroyed to rob a potential ghost of any reason to pursue its former clan members and to exact its revenge for negligence or theft. The destruction extended even to the departed’s home: The ritual of the burning wagon was once a spectacular gypsy custom.

Some say the mulo walks abroad by day; others that he moves only at night and must return to his grave by cockcrow. Either way, he can also be active precisely at noon, when nothing casts a shadow—a sort of witching hour in reverse. Not quite a reanimated corpse but not exactly a ghost either, the mulo is something in between—a kind of posthumous double that, though tethered to the grave, can nonetheless wander at will. Though the mulo is greatly feared for his often brutally sexual depredations, he is almost never a bloodsucker. In fact, his adventures are comically folkloric. Many aspects of his legend have been gathered from those of the vampire—the sharpened hawthorn stake, decapitation, and burning, to name just a few of the various methods used to well and truly dispatch him. This makes it likely that, as far as vampires are concerned, the gypsy got more than he gave.

On the other hand, there are those offerings. Yes, the mulo can wander, but he must always return to the grave—there to be propitiated with offerings of food and milk in a rite that might be as old as India. So, too, might be the belief in its universality. Vampirism, to the gypsy, is a principle of nature, as applicable to animals and plants as it is to humans. Pumpkins and melons, to name the two most famous examples, often turn into vampires.

All things, it seems, are full of more than just gods.