Vampire Forensics (22 page)

Sacrifice enshrined the most ancient of bargains. The gods might hurl their thunderbolts, but men propitiated (and even manipulated) them with offerings of life and its vehicle, blood. Pagans did not need to read in Deuteronomy that “the blood is the life” to realize the essential truth of that statement. Blood—lose enough of it and you die. That was as obvious to the primitive as it is to the 21st-century physician. Blood, served by the heart, must be the seat of vitality.

Roman gladiators gulped the blood of fallen opponents, thereby doubling their strength. Ancient Europeans poured blood into graves to slake the thirst of the dead. In the
Odyssey,
Odysseus placates those in Hades by slitting the throats of sheep and letting the blood soak into the earth. The blood of martyrs, of patriots, of innocents and kings—all had magical healing powers. In some places, a single drop of blood is believed to possess power enough to reanimate old bones. The sacred smolders in bone, too—but not like it does in blood.

The fierce Botocudos of Brazil were said to open wounds in their victims and drink their blood before killing them. The Tongaranka of New South Wales would not bury a body without arranging for a male relative to stand over the grave and submit to a beating with the sharp edge of a boomerang; his blood then flowed over the corpse. Zapotec priests in Mexico sacrificed their blood by cutting themselves with stingray spines or blades of obsidian; they believed that blood, like wind or lightning, had
peè—
a life force that manifests itself in flowing movement.

Blood consecrated in ritual sacrifice—whether that of a human or an animal—was deemed to be doubly charged with the sacred. By consecrating the bread and wine, the Catholic priest transubstantiates it to the body and blood of Christ. But in earlier centuries, the consumption of consecrated blood, like lightning strikes in the Caucasus, led to prophecy. “In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos,” Sir James Frazer wrote in
The Golden Bough,
“a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a woman…tasted the blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the priestess of the earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into the cave to prophesy.” And among the Achomawi Indians of California, the shamans would drink the blood of the sick; not only did it contain the seeds of the malady, but the shaman’s attendant spirits were thirsty and he needed their help.

Before there were priests, there were shamans—the name, derived from a Siberian Tungusic word, now generally applies to folk healers and religious specialists in tribal cultures worldwide. Whether man or woman, the shaman is a prophet, a seer, and a metaphysical traveler, able to speak the language of animals, turn into a bird, become invisible, enter other people’s dreams, and—able to manipulate the cyclical process of death and rebirth—visit the land of the dead.

The English astronomer and mathematician Thomas Harriot, in the 1580s, might almost have been describing just such an eerie visit when he related what he had been told by a Native American residing near Roanoke Island in eastern North Carolina:

If not a journey and return, it might be a symbolic death and resurrection: “Among the Eskimos,” Rushton Dorman wrote, “if a man wished to become of the highest order of priests, it was requisite that he should be drowned and eaten by sea-monsters; then, when his bones were washed ashore, his spirit, which had spent all this time gathering information about the secrets of the invisible world, would return to them, and he would rejoin his tribe.”

Such journeys and rejuvenations empowered the shaman to battle demons, witches, and vampires on an equal footing. For in his concomitant role of medicine man or witch doctor, the shaman was also charged with protecting the community from death and disease.

One field of battle was the human body—dead, alive, or somewhere in between. The shaman would exorcise whatever unclean spirits were parasitically consuming the flesh and blood of a person from within. He would also contest the possession of fresh corpses. Among the Karens of Burma, an enemy shaman might steal the soul of a sleeper—much as the African shaman does to obtain a zombie—and then slip it into a corpse. The dead body returns to life, while the living one perishes without awakening.

In the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, a wizard of the Banks Islands might project his soul into a fresh cadaver and then consume whatever traces of life he finds lingering there. Batak witch doctors in the highlands of Sumatra lock horns with evil spirits for possession of a corpse. Among their principal weapons in the struggle: garlic.

In the Balkans, there were once several classes of shamanic figures—if, that is, the dead could be enlisted in that role. The
kresnik
was a reanimated corpse who rose from the grave not to prey on the living, but to help fight evil forces. His clashes with the Serbian vukodlak, for example, might reflect a buried memory of ancient battles between enemy shamans. “Quite similar beliefs and practices,” writes Slavic scholar Bruce McClelland of the University of Virginia, “surround a broadly dispersed group of folkloric figures in southern and central parts of Europe who all functioned on the positive side of the village social ledger yet nevertheless were themselves associated, in the Christianizing mind, with their very enemies—witches, sorcerers, vampires.”

Such shamans or seers of the Slavic world might have played an important if now buried role in the evolution of the vampire legend. Because the shaman could project his soul on visits to the underworld, revive the dead, enter other people’s dreams, steal their souls, raise storms, promote fertility, rout famine and disease, and slay monsters, he was a type of St. George, the protector of so many rural communities. But after Christianity deprived this village defender of his arsenal and cast him in the role of witch or wizard, his adversaries—the bringers of pestilence, plague, and death—were left holding the field, so to speak, free to stalk the European imagination. This guardian figure, though, has occasionally been resurrected in such figures as Abraham van Helsing of Stoker’s
Dracula—
to say nothing of that stalwart defender of Sunnydale, California, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

F
OREVER
U
NDEAD

By 1913, even Sigmund Freud was speculating about why there had once been such a widespread fear of the dead. In
Totem and Taboo,
the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis took up the ideas of a German classicist named Rudolf Kleinpaul, who maintained that primitive people believed the dead—even deceased loved ones—sought to drag the living to the grave. Perhaps this is why the emblem of death has always been a skeleton; it symbolizes the departed’s double status as both slain and slayer. Over time, that conception narrowed until the hostile dead were restricted to souls entitled to feel resentment: murder victims, young brides, and others cut off in their prime or living unfulfilled lives.

“But originally,” Freud reported Kleinpaul as stating, “all of the dead were vampires, all of them had a grudge against the living and sought to injure them and rob them of their lives. It was from corpses that the concept of evil spirits first arose.”

If so, that concept would have traveled a very long way before leaving its first tracks in the historical record.

Humankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture some 8,000 years ago gave rise to settlements, and with settlements came epidemics. As Edward Jenner, the “father of immunology,” wrote in 1798, “The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases.” Even the earliest sedentary communities were more infested with intestinal worms and parasites than were nomadic bands. The arrival of an unknown microbe could easily destabilize whatever tenuous equilibrium had been established between a community and its parasites.

In a world where supernatural agency ruled everything, where the dead played a pivotal role, such invisible parasitism demanded a scapegoat—and what better figure could early cultures imagine than a walking corpse, death literally stalking the land? From an epidemiological point of view, then, the vampire—so long twinned with epidemic disease—is a pathology of civilization: Both require settled communities, where humans dwell cheek by jowl and a cemetery is always conveniently nearby.

Yet, an incommensurably long time had passed before agriculture arose. Whenever and wherever symbolic meaning evolved in our life as a species, monsters hatched alongside it. Whether the sense of an all-encompassing supernatural is a hominid inheritance or was born with
Homo sapiens,
it was operative by the time of the “creative explosion” 30,000 years ago, when the figures of bison and aurochs were being painted on cave walls in Spain and France. After all, “[t]here were shamans before there were gods,” as American anthropologist Weston La Barre declared in 1970. These shamans were the “masters of animals” during the long eons of the Paleolithic hunt, and quite likely, they were the first to consecrate beasts with the energy of
tabu.
Animals would therefore have readily provided the forms and figures of our earliest monsters. Dread of the ominous night-flying owl, for example, apparently helped engender the ancient Greek
Strix,
a mythic death-bird that became, in turn, a nocturnal devouring monster to the Romans—and, along the way, likely contributed to the evolving vampire legend, too.

Demons long associated with such common physiological episodes as night terrors or sleep paralysis probably have an equally ancient lineage. Occurring just on the verge of slumber, night terrors manifest themselves as a suffocating pressure on the chest—with the result that the sleeper erupts in panicked wakefulness. In Germanic folklore, they have long been attributed to the Old Hag who sits on sleepers’ chests. In other places, the perpetrator is the original “night mare” (from
*mer-,
a reconstructed Indo-European root meaning “to harm”) or the female succubus and the male incubus—demons said to have sexual intercourse with sleepers. Such fiends no doubt contributed their share to what became the vampire as well.

We have seen how the roots of the Slavic vampire—the most important and influential member of his species—might lie in obscure ancestor worship, quite likely involving fear and propitiation of the dead. We have also glimpsed, in the wandering figure of the alastor, the possible precursor of the Greek vrykolakas. But far older conceptions might lie beneath even these archaic notions, obscured by layers too deep for us to discern.

Nevertheless, if there is such a thing as an archetype of the vampire, it may resemble the Larvae of ancient Rome. These terrifying specters of the hungry dead haunted and injured their living relations—and appeared in the form of horribly decaying corpses. (
Larva
means “mask,” which is why Linnaeus adopted it in 1691, to describe the juvenile stage of insects that “mask” the adult form, as the caterpillar does the butterfly.) The same figure surfaces half a world away, in Australia’s Arnhem Land, where the dead of the Gunwinggu people are said to undertake a long journey to reach their tribal waterhole, or Dreaming Center. Most of them eventually arrive, but the
mam
are malevolent spirits that have strayed off the path. Dangerously unpredictable because their brains have rotted away, they too appear as skeletal corpses, hung with strips of decaying flesh and announced by a putrid stench.

In Sulawesi, one of the large islands of Indonesia, the dead of the Toradja people are greatly feared. “They persistently return from the underworld in all manner of fearful guises,” reported anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, “and their presence can be detected by smells of decomposition or low grumbling sounds. Their touch burns the skin, their breath causes dizziness, and they frequently frighten people at night.”

The Larvae, the mam, and the phantoms of the Toradja—these are but three examples of what seems to be a very ancient conception of the walking dead. Quite likely we have wended our way about as far beneath the trampled clay as we are ever likely to get. Yeats’s vampires, with their wet mouths and bloody shrouds, are securely in their coffins. Yet the figure that haunted the imagination of poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) might still be out and about. Baudelaire’s disquieting “Metamorphosis of the Vampire” aptly recapitulates our journey in this book, beginning with the night world’s demon lover, “expert in voluptuous charms,” and ending with dawn’s revelation that she is, after all, but a corpse, a “slimy rotten wineskin, full of pus.” As Kleinpaul and Freud suspected—and as the evidence from archaeology, folklore, and forensics strongly suggests—the corpse is the larva, spawned in the grave and nourished on bodily corruption, from which the figure of the vampire most likely hatched, before metamorphosing over the centuries into that caped and fanged figure found waiting expectantly on your doorstep.

Yet, something more fearful still may lurk behind, or within, the decaying corpse. The most abiding emblem of that corruption is not the skeleton but the worm—that squirming, wriggling, vermiform voluptuary that in reality is the maggot but in symbol is the seed of all-devouring death.

English poet William Blake understood this dynamic all too well when he wrote “The Sick Rose” in 1798. Vampires may have come out of the coffin, but in Blake’s lament, disease remains as insidious as ever: