(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire)
This article deals with vampires in folklore and legends. For treatments of the vampire legend in fiction, see vampire fiction. For the real bats that subsist on blood, see vampire bat. For other uses of the term vampire, see Vampire (disambiguation).
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings that subsist on human and/or animal lifeforce. In most cases, they are reanimated corpses who feed by draining and consuming the blood of living beings. In folklore, the term usually refers to the undead blood-drinking humans of Eastern European legends, but it is often applied to similar legendary creatures from other regions and cultures. The characteristics of vampires vary widely among these different traditions. Some cultures also have stories of non-human vampires, including real animals such as bats, dogs, spiders, and mythical creatures such as the chupacabra.
Vampires are a frequent subject of fictional books and films, although fictional vampires are often attributed traits distinct from those of folkloric vampires.
Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood from a person or animal. In folklore and popular culture, the term refers to a belief that one can gain supernatural powers by drinking human blood. The historical practice of vampirism can generally be considered a more specific and less commonly occurring form of cannibalism. The consumption of another's blood (or flesh) has been used as a tactic of psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and can be used to reflect various spiritual beliefs.
In zoology and botany, the term vampirism is used in reference to leeches, mosquitos, mistletoe, vampire bats, and other organisms that subsist on the bodily fluids of others.
Etymology
The English word 'vampire' was derived (perhaps via French vampyre) from the German Vampir, in turn thought to be derived in the early 18th century from Serbian vampir, or Hungarian vámpÃr. The Serbian and Hungarian forms have parallels in virtually all Slavic languages: Bulgarian (vampir), Czech and Slovak upÃr, Polish wapierz and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór, Russian (upyr'), Belarusian (upyr), Ukrainian (upir'), from Old Russian (upir'). (Note that many of these languages have also borrowed forms such as "vampir/wampir" secondarily from the West). The etymology is uncertain. Among the proposed proto-Slavic forms are *opyr? and *opir?. The Slavic word might, like its possible cognate that means "bat" (Czech netopýr, Slovak netopier, Polish nietoperz, Russian netopyr' - a species of bat), contain a Proto-Indo-European root for "to fly".
The first recorded use of the Old Russian form (Upir') is commonly believed to be in a document dated 6555 (1047 AD). It is a colophon in a manuscript of the Book of Psalms written by a priest who transcribed the book from Glagolitic into Cyrillic for the Novgorodian Prince Vladimir Yaroslavovich. The priest writes that his name is "Upir' Likhyi", which would mean something like "Wicked Vampire" or "Foul Vampire." This apparently strange name has been cited as an example of surviving paganism and/or of the use of nicknames as personal names. However, in 1982, Swedish Slavicist Anders Sjöberg suggested that "Upir' likhyi" was in fact an Old Russian transcription and/or translation of the name of Öpir Ofeigr, a well-known Swedish rune carver. Sjöberg argued that Öpir could possibly have lived in Novgorod before moving to Sweden, considering the connection between Eastern Scandinavia and Russia at the time. This theory is still controversial, although at least one Swedish historian, Henrik Janson, has expressed support for it. Another early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagan treatise "Word of Saint Grigoriy," dated variously to the 11th-13th centuries, where pagan worship of upyri is reported.
The first well-documented use of the word Vampire in the West was from Austrian-controlled Serbia in reports prepared by Austrian officials between 1725 and 1732 investigating reports of vampires arising from the dead to attack villagers (see below for more details).
Vampire analogies in ancient cultures
Tales of the dead craving blood are found in nearly every culture around the world, including some of the most ancient ones. Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology, and the even more ancient bloodsucking Akhkharu[citation needed] in Sumerian mythology. These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of the demons, named Lilitu, was later adapted to Jewish demonology as Lilith.
In India, tales of vetalas, ghoul-like beings that inhabit corpses, are found in old Sanskrit folklore. A prominent story tells of King Vikramaditya and his nightly quests to capture an elusive vetala. The vetala legends have been compiled in the book Baital Pachisi. The vetala is an undead creature, who like the bat associated with modern day vampirism, hangs upside down on trees found in cremation grounds and cemeteries.
The hopping corpse is an equivalent of the vampire in Chinese tradition; however, it consumes the victim's life essence (qì) rather than blood.
The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of bloodlust after slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood.
The strix, a nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood is mentioned in Roman tales. The Romanian word for vampires, strigoi, is derived from the word, as is the name of the Albanian Shtriga and the Slavic Strzyga, but the myths about those creatures are more similar to their Slavic equivalents.
As an example of the prominence of similar legends in later times, it can be noted that 12th century English historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of revenants that arguably bear some resemblance to East European vampires.
India of later times is also familiar with many vampiric entities. The Bhut or Prét is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating dead bodies at night, attacking the living much like a ghoul. In northern India, there is the BrahmarakShasa, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. pishacha are other creatures who resemble vampires to an extent. Since Hinduism believes in reincarnation of the soul, it is supposed that leading an unholy or immoral life, sin or suicide, will lead the soul to reincarnate into such evil spirits. This kind of reincarnation does not arise out of birth from a womb, but is achieved directly, and such evil spirits' fate is predetermined as to how they shall achieve liberation from that yoni, and re-enter the world of mortal flesh in the next incarnation.
The most famous Indian deity associated with drinking blood is Kali, who has fangs, wears a garland of corpses or skulls and has four arms. Her temples are located near cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija who could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing him.
Folk beliefs in vampires
The vampire myth as we know it is most strongly rooted in East European (particularly Slavic) folklore. Here, vampires are usually revenants of suicide victims, criminals or evil sorcerers, though in some cases a vampire could pass his vampirism onto his innocent victims. It was also thought that a victim of a cruel, untimely or violent death was susceptible to becoming a vampire. Vampires were accused of killing people, often by drinking blood, but also by throttling, or sitting on them to prevent breathing. In this folklore, a vampire could be destroyed by cutting off its head, by driving a wooden stake into its heart, or by burning the corpse.
Slavic vampires
The vampire legends of various Slavic peoples do have some common characteristics, but are on the whole rather varied. Some of the more common causes of vampirism include being a magician or an immoral person; suffering an "unnatural" or untimely death such as suicide; excommunication; improper burial rituals; an animal jumping or a bird flying over the corpse or the empty grave (in South Slavic folk belief); and even being born with a caul, teeth or tail, or being conceived on certain days. Among the most peculiar causes are the belief of many Serbians that having red hair was a vampiric trait[citation needed], and a superstition, occurring in Bulgaria, which stated that people who talked to themselves would become vampires.
Preventive measures included piercing the body with thorns or stakes, putting sawdust in the coffin (so that the vampire awakens in the evening and is compelled to count every grain of sawdust, which occupies the entire evening, so he will die when at dawn), placing blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, and placing a crucifix in the coffin. In the case of stakes, the general idea was to pierce through the vampire and into the ground below, pinning the body down. Certain people would bury those believed to be potential vampires with scythes above their necks, so the dead would decapitate themselves as they rose.
Evidence that a vampire was active in a given locality included death of cattle, sheep, relatives or neighbours; an exhumed body being in a lifelike state with new growth of the fingernails or hair, swelled up like a drum or having blood on the mouth coupled with a ruddy complexion. A vampire could also make its presence felt by engaging in minor poltergeist-like activity and pressing on people in their sleep.
Vampires, like other Slavic legendary monsters, were afraid of garlic and various other objects, depending on the tradition. Hawthorn (among the South Slavs) and asp (among the East Slavs) were also valued as apotropaics and/or suitable material for stakes.
Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (sometimes the head would be placed between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, sprinkling holy water on the body, or exorcism. In the Balkans, a vampire could also be shot or drowned.
Some traditions spoke of "living vampires" or "people with two souls", a kind of witches capable of leaving their body and engaging in harmful and vampiric activity while sleeping.
Typology
South Slavic legends had a number of specific characteristics that set them apart from the others. Most notably, a vampire was believed to pass through several distinct stages in its development. The first 40 days were considered decisive for the making of a vampire. It started out as an invisible shadow and then gradually gained strength from the blood it had sucked, forming a (typically also invisible) jelly-like, boneless mass, and eventually building up a human-like body nearly identical to the one the person had had in life. This development allowed the creature to ultimately leave its grave permanently and begin a new life as an ordinary human. The vampire (who was usually male) was also sexually active and could have children, either from his widow or from a new wife. These could become vampires themselves, but could also have a special ability to see and kill vampires, allowing them to become vampire hunters. The same talent was believed to be found in persons born on Saturday.
A special feature of West Slavic beliefs, according to ethnologist E. Levkievskaya, is that they tend to stress that becoming a vampire is determined by fate and can be predicted on the basis of physical traits. In the East Slavic area, the northern regions (i.e. most of Russia) are unique in that their undead, while having many of the features of the vampires of other Slavic peoples, don't drink blood and don't bear a name derived from the common Slavic root for "vampire". Ukrainian and Belarusian legends are more "conventional", although in Ukraine the vampires may sometimes not be described as dead at all, or may be seen as engaging in vampirism long before death. During cholera epidemics in the 19th century, there were cases of people being burned alive by their neighbours on charges of being vampires.
The most famous Serbian vampire was Sava Savanovic, famous from a folklore-inspired novel by Milovan Glišic.
Romanian vampires
Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that Romanian and Slavic vampires are similar. Romanian vampires are called Strigoi, based on the ancient Greek term strix for screech owl, which also came to mean demon or witch.
There are different types of Strigoi. Live Strigoi are live witches with two hearts and/or two souls. They have the ability to send out their souls at night to meet with other Strigoi or suck the blood of livestock and neighbours. Dead Strigoi are reanimated corpses that also suck blood and attack their family. Live strigoi turned into the other variety after death, but there were also many other ways of becoming a dead strigoi. Another type of vampire, or perhaps another term for a vampire in Romanian folklore is Moroi.
Romanian tradition described a myriad of ways of becoming a vampire. A person born with a caul, an extra nipple, a tail, or extra hair was doomed to become a vampire. The same fate applied to the seventh child in any family if all of his or her previous siblings were of the same sex, someone born too early, and someone whose mother had encountered a black cat crossing her path. If a pregnant woman did not not eat salt or was looked upon by a vampire or a witch, her child would also become a vampire. So would a child born out of wedlock. Others who became vampires were those who died an unnatural death or before baptism. Finally, being bitten by a vampire could have the same result.
The vampire would make its present felt by poltergeist-like activity such as throwing things around in the house. It would attack family members and livestock. Sudden deaths could be a sign that a vampire was around. Graves were often opened three years after the death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.
A vampire in the grave could be detected by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse with a red face, or a corpse with one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were identified by distributing garlic in church and observing who would refuse to eat it.
To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body, followed by decapitation and sometimes by placing garlic in the mouth. As recently as the 19th century, the precaution of shooting a bullet through the coffin was taken. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and administered to family members as a cure.
Vampires were believed to be especially active in the winter, and more specifically on the eve of two religious holidays, the Feast of St. George and the Feast of St. Andrew. Bram Stoker makes reference to this in his novel Dracula (1897) when Jonathan Harker is warned that at midnight “all the evil things in the world will have full sway.†During these nights, the people kept their houses lit and used apotropaics such as thorns, crosses and garlic to prevent the vampires from entering their homes. Cattle were also rubbed with garlic.
Roma vampire beliefs
Even today, Roma frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by the Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which the Szgany Roma served Dracula, carrying his boxes of earth and guarding him.
One form of vampire in Romani folklore is called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire is believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person. A mullo was often a relative who had caused their relative's death, or who did not properly observe the burial ceremonies, or kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them as was proper.
Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would eventually exhaust the husband.
Anyone who had a horrible appearance, was missing a finger, or had appendages similar to those of an animal, was believed to be a vampire. If a person died unseen, he would become a vampire, likewise if a corpse swelled before burial. Dogs, cats, plants or even agricultural tools could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood.
To get rid of a vampire, one could hire a Dhampir (the son of a vampire and his widow) or a Moroi to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, Gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, as well as decapitating or burning the corpse.
According to the late Serbian ethnologist Tatomir Vukanovic, Roma people in Kosovo believed that vampires were invisible to most people, but could be seen "by a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday who wear their drawers and shirts inside out." Likewise, a settlement could be protected from a vampire "by finding a twin brother and sister born on a Saturday and making them wear their shirts and drawers inside out...This pair could see the vampire out of doors at night, but immediately after it saw them it would have to flee, head over heels."
Greek vampires
Belief in vampires (usually called ß?????a?a?, vrykolakas, though reportedly referred to as ?ata?a??de?, katakhanades, on Crete[24]) was common in Greece until the 20th century. Greek customs may have propagated this belief, notably a ritual that entailed exhuming the deceased after three years of death. If the body was fully decayed, the remaining bones were put in a box by relatives and wine poured over them, a priest would then read from scriptures. However, if the body had not sufficiently decayed, the corpse would be labelled a vampire.
According to Greek beliefs, vampirism could occur through various means: excommunication or desecrating a religious day, committing a great crime, or dying alone. Other more superstitious causes include having a cat jump across the grave, eating meat from a sheep killed by a wolf or having been cursed. It was also believed in more remote regions of Greece that unbaptized people would be doomed to vampirism in the afterlife.
A corpse in the grave was typically believed to be undecomposed and swollen "like a drum"; however, the appearance of vampires outside of the grave varied throughout Greece. They were usually thought to be indistinguishable from living people, giving rise to many folk tales with this theme.[25] However, this was not the case everywhere: on Mount Pelion vampires glowed in the dark, while on the Saronic islands vampires were thought to be hunchbacks with long nails; on the island of Lesbos vampires were thought to have long canine teeth much like wolves.
Vampires could be harmless, sometimes returning to support their widows by their work. However, they were usually thought to be ravenous predators, killing their victims who would be condemned to become vampires[citation needed] (though blood-drinking in particular was not a prominent part of the legends). Vampires were so feared for their potential for great harm, that a village or an island would occasionally be stricken by a mass panic if a vampire invasion were believed imminent. Nicholas Dragoumis records such a panic on Naxos in the 1930s, following a cholera epidemic.
Varieties of wards were employed for protection in different places, including blessed bread (antidoron) from the church, crosses and black-handled knives.[citation needed] To prevent vampires from rising from the dead, their hearts were pierced with iron nails whilst resting in their graves, or their bodies burned and the ashes scattered. Because the Church opposed burning people who had received the myron of chrismation in the baptism ritual, cremation was considered a last resort.
Some common traits of vampires in folklore
It is difficult to make a single description of the folkloric vampire, because its properties vary widely between different cultures. It tends to share many features with evil spirits in general.
The appearance of the European folkloric vampire contained mostly features by which one was supposed to tell a vampiric corpse from a normal one, when the grave of a suspected vampire was opened. The vampire has a "healthy" appearance and ruddy skin, he is often plump, his nails and hair have grown and, above all, he is not in the least decomposed. The creature's appearance outside of its grave may be more or less different from that of a "normal" human body, depending on the region that the legend orginates from.
The most common ways to destroy the vampire are driving a wooden stake through the heart, decapitation, and incinerating the body completely. Ways to prevent a suspected vampire from rising from the grave in the first place include burying it upside-down, severing the tendons at the knees, or placing poppy seeds on the ground at the gravesite of a presumed vampire in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting. Chinese narratives about vampire-like beings also state that if one comes across a sack of rice, he will have to count all of the grains. There are similar myths recorded on the Indian Subcontinent. South American tales of witches and other sorts of evil or mischievous spirits or beings have a similar aspect to it.
Apotropaics, i.e. objects intended to inhibit or ward off vampires (as well as other evil supernatural creatures), include garlic, sunlight, a branch of wild rose, the hawthorn plant, and all things sacred (e.g., holy water, a crucifix, a rosary). In similar stories of other regions, other plants and objects of holy or mystical properties sometimes function as apotropaics. In Eastern legends, vampiric creatures are often warded by holy devices such as Shinto seals. Aloe vera plant hung backwards behind the door or near it has the same function in South American superstition. Holy places such as churches may also be inaccessible for vampires.
Vampires are sometimes considered to be shape-shifters not limited to the common bat stereotype depicted in cartoons and movies. Rather, they are said to morph into a wide variety of animals such as wolves, rats, moths, spiders, and so on.
Some vampires in European folklore are said to cast no shadow and no reflection, perhaps arising from folklore regarding the vampire's lack of a soul. However this was not universal as the vrykolakas/tympanios (Greece) did supposedly cast shadows and reflections.
Some traditions hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited, although they only have to be invited once after this they can come and go as they please without further permission.
Eighteenth century vampire controversy
During the 18th century, there was a major vampire scare in Eastern Europe. Even government officials frequently got dragged into the hunting and staking of vampires.
The panic began with an outbreak of alleged "vampire" attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg Monarchy from 1725 to 1734. Two famous vampire cases (which were the first to be officially recorded) involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole from Serbia. As the story goes, Plogojowitz died at the age of 62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the next day. Plogojowitz soon returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood. In the other famous case, Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who allegedly was attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people began to die, and it was widely believed that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbours.
These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials examined (and wrote reports of) the cases and the bodies, and books were published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics of so-claimed vampire attacks, with locals digging up bodies. Many scholars said vampires did not exist, and attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies. Nonetheless, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French theologian and scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746, which was at least ambiguous concerning the existence of vampires, if not admitting it explicitly. He amassed reports of vampire incidents and numerous readers, including both a critical Voltaire and supportive demonologists, interpreted the treatise as claiming that vampires exist. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote on the vampires:
These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer.
According to some recent research, and judging from the second edition of the work in 1751, Calmet was actually somewhat sceptical towards the vampire concept as a whole. He did acknowledge that parts of the reports, such as the preservation of corpses, might be true.[28] Whatever his personal convictions were, Calmet's apparent support for vampire belief had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.
Eventually, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerhard van Swieten, to investigate. He concluded that vampires do not exist, and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the vampire epidemics. By then, though, many knew about vampires, and soon authors would adopt and adapt the concept of vampire, making it known to the general public.
New England
During the late 18th and 19th centuries the belief in vampires was widespread in parts of New England, particularly in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut. In this region there are many documented cases of families disinterring loved ones and removing their hearts in the belief that the deceased was a vampire who was responsible for sickness and death in the family (although the word "vampire" was never used to describe him/her). The deadly tuberculosis, or "consumption" as it was known at the time, was believed to be caused by nightly visitations on the part of a dead family member (who had died of consumption him/herself). The most famous (and latest recorded) case is that of nineteen year old Mercy Brown who died in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892. Her father, assisted by the family physician, removed her from her tomb two months after her death. Her heart was cut out then burnt to ashes. An account of this incident was found among the papers of Bram Stoker and the story closely resembles the events in his classic novel, Dracula.
Modern belief in vampires
Belief in vampires persists to this day. While some cultures preserve their original traditions about the immortal, most modern-day believers are more influenced by the fictional image of the vampire as it occurs in films and literature.
In the 1970s, there were rumours (spread by the local press) that a vampire haunted Highgate Cemetery in London. Amateur vampire hunters flocked in large numbers in the cemetery. Several books have been written about the case, notably by Sean Manchester, a local man who was among the first to suggest the existence of the "Highgate Vampire" and who later claimed to have exorcised and destroyed a whole nest of vampires in the area.
In the modern folklore of Puerto Rico and Mexico, the chupacabra (goat-sucker) is said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated animals, leading some to consider it a kind of vampire. The "chupacabra hysteria" was frequently associated with deep economic and political crises, particularly during the mid-1990s.
During late 2002 and early 2003, hysteria about alleged attacks of vampires swept through the African country of Malawi. Mobs stoned one individual to death and attacked at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, based on the belief that the government was colluding with vampires.
In Romania during February of 2004, several relatives of the late Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it.
In January 2005, rumours began to circulate that an attacker had bitten a number of people in Birmingham, England, fueling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets. However, local police stated that no such crime had been reported. This case appears to be an urban legend.
In March 2007, self-proclaimed vampire hunters broke into the tomb of Slobodan Miloševic, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, and staked his body through the heart into the ground. Although the group involved claimed this act was to prevent Miloševic from returning as a vampire, it is not known whether those involved actually believed this could happen or if the crime was simply politically motivated.
Natural phenomena that propagate the belief in vampires
Pathology and vampirism
Folkloric vampirism has typically been associated with a series of deaths due to unindentifiable or mysterious illnesses, usually within the same family or the same small community. The "epidemic pattern" is obvious in the classical cases of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole, and even more so in the case of Mercy Brown and in the vampire beliefs of New England generally, where a specific disease, tuberculosis, was associated with outbreaks of vampirism (see above).
In his book, De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1725), Michaël Ranft makes a first attempt to explain folk's belief in vampires in a natural way. He says that, in the event of the death of every villager, some other person or people - much probably a person related to the first dead - who saw or touched the corpse, would eventually die either of some disease related to exposure to the corpse or of a frenetic delirium caused by the panic of merely seeing the corpse. These dying people would say that the dead man had appeared to them and tortured them in many ways. The other people in the village would exhume the corpse to see what it had been doing. He gives the following explanation when talking about the case of Peter Plogojowitz: "This brave man perished by a sudden or violent death. This death, whatever it is, can provoke in the survivors the visions they had after his death. Sudden death gives rise to inquietude in the familiar circle. Inquietude has sorrow as a companion. Sorrow brings melancholy. Melancholy engenders restless nights and tormenting dreams. These dreams enfeeble body and spirit until illness overcomes and, eventually, death."
Some modern scholars have argued that vampire stories may have been influenced by a rare illness called porphyria. The disease is a blood disorder that disrupts the production of haem. Porphyria was thought to be more common than elsewhere in small Transylvanian villages (roughly 1000 years ago) where inbreeding probably occurred. The haem group, found in every blood cell in the human body, is excited by electrons, but in a controlled fashion. However, the haem groups in porphyria sufferers causes uncontrollable tissue, bone and skin damage, made worse when the person comes into contact with sunlight.[clarify] This would have given the porphyria sufferer a very pallid skin colour, with teeth that appear larger than normal, due to the porphyria damaging the gum tissue and causing it to recede. These people would have been very anemic, and drinking (animal) blood was a traditional treatment for anemia.
Certain forms of porphyria are also associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders. However, suggestions that porphyria sufferers crave the heme in human blood, or that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a severe misunderstanding of the disease.
Another disease that has been linked with vampire folklore is rabies. Dr Juan Gomez-Alonso, a neurologist at Xeral Hospital in Vigo, Spain, examined this in a report in the journal Neurology. The susceptibility to garlic and light could be due to hypersensitivity, which is a symptom of rabies. The disease can also affect portions of the brain that could lead to disturbance of normal sleep patterns (i.e., becoming nocturnal) and hypersexuality. Legend once said a man was not rabid if he could look at his own reflection, which relates to the legend of a vampire not having a reflection. Wolves and bats, which are often associated with vampires, can be carriers of rabies. The disease can also lead to a drive to bite others, and to a bloody frothing at the mouth.
Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism (or Renfield's Syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman, Renfield, in the novel by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from animals or humans.
There have been a number of murderers who performed seemingly vampiric rituals upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered. Similarly, in 1932, an unsolved murder case in Stockholm, Sweden, was nicknamed the "Vampire murder", due to the circumstances of the victim’s death.
Finding "vampires" in graves
When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found that the cadaver did not look as they thought a normal corpse should. This was often taken to be evidence of vampirism. However, corpses decompose at different speeds depending on temperature and soil composition, and some of the signs of decomposition are not widely known. This has led vampire hunters to mistakenly conclude that a dead body had not decomposed at all, or, ironically, to interpret signs of decomposition as signs of continued life.
Corpses swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and blood tries to escape the body. This causes the body to look "plump", "well-fed" and "ruddy" - changes that are all the more striking if the person was pale or thin in life. In the Arnold Paole case, an old woman's exhumed corpse was judged by her neighbours to look more plump and healthy than she had ever looked in life. It should be noted that folkloric accounts almost universally represent the alleged vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of vampires in literature and film. Darkening of the skin is also caused by decomposition.
Blood can often be seen emanating from nose and mouth of a decomposing corpse, which could give the impression that the corpse was a vampire who had recently been drinking blood. The staking of a swollen, decomposing body could cause the body to bleed and also force the accumulated gases to escape the body. This could produce a groan when the gases moved past the vocal chords, or a sound reminiscent of flatus when they passed through the anus. The official reporting on the Peter Plogojowitz case speaks of "other wild signs which I pass by out of high respect".
After death, the skin and gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even teeth that were concealed in the jaw. This can produce the illusion that the hair, nails, and teeth have grown. At a certain stage, the nails fall off and the skin peels away, as reported in the Plogojowitz case - the dermis and nail beds emerging underneath were interpreted as "new skin" and "new nails". Finally, decomposition also causes the body to shift or contort itself, adding to the illusion that the corpse has been active after death.
It has also been hypothesized[citation needed] that vampire legends were influenced by individuals being literally buried alive, due to primitive knowledge in medicine. In some cases where people reported sounds emanating from a specific coffin, it was later dug up and fingernail marks were discovered on the inside from the victim trying to escape. In other cases the person would hit their heads/noses/faces and it would appear that they had been "feeding".
Vampire bats
Bats have become an integral part of the traditional vampire only recently, although many cultures have stories about them. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. Conversely, the Gypsies thought them lucky and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos". In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld. The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their legendary vampires. The bats were named after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.
Vampires in fiction and popular culture
Vampire fiction and Vampire films
Lord Byron introduced the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813), but it was his personal physician John Polidori who authored the first "true" vampire story called "The Vampyre". The vampire of the story, Lord Ruthven, the first of our now familiar romantic vampires, is partly based on Byron. The "ghost story competition" that spawned this piece was the same one that motivated Mary Shelley to write her archetypal monster novel Frankenstein.
Other examples of early vampire stories are Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel and Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire story, Carmilla.
Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive version of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common. Stoker's writings are also adapted in many later works. In modern popular culture, vampires are featured in many popular novels and book series by authors such as Anne Rice.
Vampires have also proved to be a rich subject for the film and gaming industries. Dracula is a major character in more movies than any other bar Sherlock Holmes (see Dracula in popular culture). Television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, video game series such as Konami's Castlevania and role-playing games such as Vampire: the Masquerade have been especially successful and influential.
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