In The Blood - Part Three

Feeding Practices

Another critically important characteristic of the vampire was its selective feeding practices. Traditional vampiresses seemed to have fed exclusively on either children or members of the opposite sex. As illustrated, peasants had all sorts of unusual concoctions and rituals for defeating the creatures. They progressed from the simple one outlined earlier to much more bizarre and complicated ceremonies. A traditional Lithuanian vampire tale (or a quasi-vampire tale, more appropriately, since there is never any direct reference to vampirism; yet the distinguishing characteristics contained within make it all to clear the young woman described suffered from either vampirism or something incredibly similar) goes something like this:

A poor farmer has a beautiful young daughter who he is unable to marry off, because every young suitor who tries to spend the night with her is found dead the next morning. The hero of the story hears of both the daughter and her father's offer of three hundred gold coins to whomever can survive but a single night with the girl. Before attempting to bed with her, he seeks out the advice of an old crone in the forest, who gives him a magic bridle. When he approaches the girl, she tries to attack him but he throws the bridle on her, turns her into a horse, and rides her through the countryside until he has worn her out and she dies of exhaustion. The farmer is enraged at the young man and orders him to bury her. Fortunately, before he attempts to do so he again seeks the advice of the old crone, who gives him a prayer book and a candle to protect himself from her evil.

That night, the girl rises from the dead and calls for help, and a horde of little devils answers the call and swears to exact vengeance on the young man. He has however, on the advice of the old crone, drawn a circle around himself with candle wax. The demons are unable to see him due to the protection of this circle, and as soon as the rooster crows the girl again drops dead. The same thing happens on the following night, but on the third night the devils finally catch him and are about to burn him when God manages to convince the rooster to crow early, which forces the imps to return to wherever they came from.

There are clear-cut religious overtones in the fable, all of which suggest that the girl is somehow in league with the Devil. However, it is the end of the story that makes it rather clear that the girl is either a vampire or something like one:

[The old woman] gave him a hammer and a stake made out of mountain ash. 'If the girl tries to get up on her way to the cemetery, you just drive the stake into her heart.' The farmer's daughter lay in a coffin which had been put on the harrows and covered with nine hoops of iron. The young man straddled one of the iron hoops–pooff!–and it broke. When he rode on a little farther, the second and third hoops broke. All the hoops had broken, one after another, by the time he reached the cemetery, and the farmer's daughter tried to get up, but the young man grabbed the hammer, hit the stake, and drove it into her heart. The farmer's daughter fell back into her coffin, never more to rise. Now she was really dead.

The use of a wooden stake through the heart, usually of pine or ashwood, clearly links this story to the vampire mythology. That particular method of destruction is most commonly called for wherever vampires are to be encountered, although wards can often vary dramatically in their composition. It should be noted that there are twelve recorded variants of this story, some in Russian, some in Estonian, and, most interestingly, one in Icelandic. The fact that there is a version of this fable (called 'The Farmer's Daughter who was a Witch' in the source cited above) in Icelandic peasant lore suggests that the tale may originally have been a Norse one, or at least picked up by the Varangians when they settled the Lithuanian-Ukrainian region in the ninth century and from there transmitted through Scandinavia to Iceland. This would predate the conversion of the Lithuanian people to Christianity by five hundred years. It is no small detail, then, that a German variant of the same tale is explicit in identifying the girl (who is, in this version, the daughter of a king and queen) as killing the soldiers guarding her body 'bloodily' (i.e., analogous to the suitors in the prior tale).

Even more noteworthy is the detail that he saved the girl from the vampiric curse by biting down on her forefinger 'vigorously', again on the advice of a wise old person. This tale is said to have over sixty variants in both Germany and France. The primary difference here is the introduction of blood into the story. While it is very likely that one of these tales arose from the other, the fact that the Lithuanian tale, probably a pagan one, omits the blood references is extremely significant. While blood folklore, as we have seen earlier, is central to any society whether ultra-primitive or completely industrialized, blood figures centrally in the very nature of the Christian religion. There is, in Norine Dresser's work entitled American Vampires, a very useful paradigm to illustrate this. A young woman, believing herself to be an actual 'vampire' (meaning she feels she must ingest human blood in order to remain healthy), tells of a very religious upbringing in which she was educated in a Catholic school. She fondly remembers all of the beautiful artwork at the school, in stained-glass windows and on plaster statues, of a bleeding Christ dying on the cross, nails through his wrists and the wounds of the sword in his belly.

The central story of Christianity, of course, is the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of the son of God. Jesus dies on the cross, bleeding for all the sins of man, and after a short spell of death rises from the grave and transcends, joining his Father in heaven. Blood is thus symbolically associated with many different themes here: death and rebirth, suffering and eternal life, pain and everlasting peace. Blood has always figured strongly in Jewish folklore as well. Bram Stoker was certainly onto something when, in his novel Dracula, he had the Count quote the Old Testament, "the blood is the life." The rite of circumcision, for example, partly centers around the effusion of an infant boy's blood (and is one of the central foci of medieval blood accusation).

In addition, there is the midrash (rabbinical fable) of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who was cast out from the garden because she refused to assume a subordinate sexual position. Lilith was transformed into a nocturnal monster who mated with animals and sought out the children of Adam and Eve, killing them vengefully and consuming their flesh.

 

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