In The Blood - Part Two

SANGUINARIUS–Vampiri et commutatio sanguini

It seems that every pre-Christian society on Earth has had some version of the legendary vampire tale as part of the repertoire of its common storyteller. Examples of vampires as a symbol in social legend can apparently be traced as far back as ancient Assyria, where excavations have unearthed vampires depicted on pottery art, including an apparent etching of a vampire copulating with a man. The idea of the vampire as a perverse sexual symbol shall be discussed later.

In fact, belief in the vampire seems so utterly universal that it is sometimes difficult to research "non-literary" examples of vampire folklore, because of the bewildering variety of names used to describe the creature. In Russian, there are the terms upir, and upyr. In Albania there is the shtriga, in Greece alone the ghello, drakos, drakaena, and the lamia, the vrykolakes, brykilakas, barbarlakos, borborlakos, and the bourdoulakos. From Sanskrit come the terms katakhanoso and baital. In Poland dwelled the upiory, in Germany the blutsäuger, in China the giang shi, and in pre-Columbian Peru the canchus and the pumapmicuc.

Obviously, due to the limited contact between these widely-differing cultures, the vampire legends among them differ significantly as well. However, from the outset, it shall be necessary to separate the traditional mythology from the modern Hollywood redefinition of the undead bloodsucker. In particular, this article shall explore the traditional concept of the vampire as viewed by the societies of eastern and southeastern Europe. The reasoning behind this is that, while the modern perception of vampires is derived from popular literature and the cinema, that perception, in fact, was drawn from the traditional Balkan stories of the monsters. Therefore, our own society in some ways does derive its perception of the vampire from traditional peasant folklore, but certainly not in others.

The differences are quite striking. For example, in peasant Russia the vampire was able to walk the earth in broad daylight–according to legend, he rose at noon and could feed from the populace until midnight, when he was forced to return to his grave. In addition, many of the modern conceptualizations simply do not appear in medieval tales, or if they do they are too sketchy or ambiguous to assume they were directly derived from the folklore of the distant past.

The Balkan vampire was often a hideous beast, far from the princely count depicted in Dracula or later. The cape, tuxedo, jewelry, and grand estate which occupy much of the cinema vampire's inventory were inserted into the legend by none other than Bram Stoker (1847–1912) himself; this one author has done more to mutate the peasant tales than anyone else in history (aside from contributions by LeFanu, author of the earlier Carmilla, or arguably from much-later additions to the genre made by Anne Rice and other similar authors).

Obviously no malice need be felt toward the man, since he hardly erased the earlier tales from the unconsciousness of European society; they are, in fact, still widely told and believed by rural populations throughout the Balkans and into Poland and Russia. The following twentieth-century tale, recorded as coming from the mountains of northern Albania, serves as a good example of the real vampire (i.e., the true traditional perception of the creature):

 

I sat by many an open hearth, and heard of Kilmeni life. Much we talked of that dire being the Shtriga, the vampire woman that sucks the blood of children, and bewitches even grown folk, so that they shrivel and die. All Kilmeni, and indeed all the tribes, believe in her. She may live in a village for years undetected, working her vile will... [They] have a sure way of catching her. It is to keep the bones of the last pig you ate at carnival, and with these to make a cross on the door of the church upon Easter Sunday... Then if the Shtriga be within, she cannot come out, save on the shoulders of the man that made the cross... She, and she alone, can heal the victim, who withers and pines as she secretly sucks its blood.

This peasant belief is a fine example of the nature of the vampire throughout the Balkans. Several excellent points are above illustrated; the vampire of eastern Europe was, traditionally, either a very old or a very young woman. There are only rare examples of male vampires, and when they turn up their characteristics are usually quite different. The vampire was most often not a noble; on the other hand, they tended to be on the opposite end of the social strata-hermits and the homeless were quite often put on trial for vampirism in medieval Europe.

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