Vampires in Myth and History

Vampires in Myth and History

Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in almost every

culture around the world. Their variety is almost endless; from red

eyed monsters with green or pink hair in China to the Greek Lamia

which has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a winged

serpent; from vampire foxes in Japan to a head with trailing entrails

known as the Penanggalang in Malaysia.

However, the vampires we are familiar with today, although mutated by

fiction and film, are largely based on Eastern European myths. The

vampire myths of Europe originated in the Far East, and were

transported from places like China, Tibet and India with the trade

caravans along the silk route to the Mediterranean. Here they spread

out along the Black Sea coast to Greece, the Balkans and of course the

Carpathian Mountains, including Hungary and Transylvania.

Our modern concept of the vampire still retains threads, such as blood

drinking, return from death, preying on humans at night, etc in common

with the Eastern European myths. However many things we are familiar

with; the wearing of evening clothes, capes with tall collars, turning

into bats, etc are much more recent inventions.

On the other hand, many features of the old myths such as the placing

of millet or poppy seeds at the gravesite in order to keep the vampire

occupied all night counting seeds rather than preying on relatives,

have all but disappeared from modern fiction and film.

Even among the Eastern European countries there is a large variety of

vampires.

Slavic Vampires

The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to

Bulgaria, Serbia...

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...ging up bodies all over the place. Many scholars said vampires

didn't exist - they attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies

which causes thirst.

However, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well respected French theologian and

scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746 which

said vampires did exist. This had considerable influence on other

scholars at the time.

Eventually, Austrian Empress Marie Theresa sent her personal physician

to investigate. He said vampires didn't exist and the Empress passed

laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This

was the end of the vampire epidemics. But by then everyone knew about

vampires and it was only a matter of time before authors would

preserve and mould the vampire into something new and much more

accessible to the general public.