Vampires (11 page)

Ancient mythology is full of legends about female demons that prey on men and children. A recurring theme is that these demons have suffered barrenness in a former life, and so in the afterlife appear as a ghoul, taking their revenge by attacking children at night, while they are asleep, and devouring them. In many of the stories, the demons also seduce men, stealing them away from their wives, and sucking their blood, which helps to sustain their ghostly existence in the afterlife.

The parallels with vampires are obvious. Medieval folklore also contains accounts of the Succubus, a vampire-like creature who takes the form of a woman. The Succubus appears to a man at night, usually in a highly seductive form, and forces him to have repeated sexual intercourse with her, until he is drained of strength, or sometimes even dies. She may also feed on his blood, which is her way of taking his life force from him.

As with the tales of female vampires, what we encounter in the parallel myths and legends of such creatures is a universal anxiety about female sexuality. The fear is that if a woman fails to marry or to bear children in her lifetime, her jealousy will reach such proportions that, in the afterlife, she will reappear as a Succubus or Lamia, using her powerful feminine charms to corrupt other women’s husbands, and destroying their offspring in revenge for her own barrenness.

Lamia is a figure from Ancient Greek mythology, who appears in the writings of Diodorus Siculus, a historian from the first century bc. Diodorus recounts that Lamia was the daughter of King Belus of Egypt. In other accounts, she is reported to be the daughter of Poseidon, the god of the sea.

Whatever her provenance, her main claim to fame is that she had an affair with the god Zeus, bearing him several children. This apparently enraged Zeus’s wife Hera to the point where she murdered Lamia’s children. In response, Lamia lost her mind and set off to wander the earth, preying on the children of other women, particularly newborn infants. She would attack them at night, carrying them off to a lonely place and devouring them. Diodorus reports that this vile habit distorted her face, so that instead of being a beautiful, young woman, she became a hideous hag. However, in other retellings of the myth, Lamia retains her beauty in the upper half of her body, while in the lower, she grows a penis, which she hides by draping a snakeskin around her loins.

With these often quite gruesome tales, the ancients conjured up the image of a woman who, denied the pleasures of motherhood, morphs into a man, adopting the violent, destructive qualities and aggressive sexual drives traditionally attributed to masculinity. Interestingly, in nearly all versions of the story, this unhappy state of affairs is initially occasioned by another woman, the jealous Hera. It is Hera who condemns Lamia to a life of torment by murdering the illegitimate children she has borne as a result of her affair with Zeus. Much later, in Roman times, the poet Horace went further, suggesting that Hera may have actually forced Lamia to eat her own children, rather than simply murdering them. And there is also a legend that Hera cursed Lamia with the inability to close her eyes, so that she could find no rest, and was forever unable to dispel the vision of her dead children’s faces from her consciousness.

In some accounts of the story, Zeus takes pity on Lamia and gives her the ability to take her eyes out, so that she will be able to rest. According to some sources, this also gives her the gift of prophecy. However, Lamia continues to live a nightmare existence, seemingly unable to stop herself from preying on sleeping infants and stealing them away to drink their blood and eat their flesh.

In the following centuries, the more sympathetic aspect of Lamia’s history as a bereaved mother dropped away, and she became the personification of feminine vice. Instead of being a single historical figure, her name came to be interchangeable with that of the Succubus and the harlot, and she eventually became synonymous with any seductive woman with evil intent. She was depicted as a creature whose bare-breasted upper half took the alluring form of a beautiful woman, and whose lower half was that of a snake. This was a symbolic representation of her duplicity and hypocrisy, and once again, indicated the fear that female sexuality, once freed from the bonds of motherhood and wifely duty, would prove a destructive, evil force to the rest of society.

In 1819 the English poet John Keats wrote a narrative poem entitled
Lamia
, telling the story of how the god Hermes restores the serpentine Lamia to her human form. A Corinthian youth, Lycius, falls in love with her, and the couple are betrothed. At their wedding, however, a sage, Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s true identity. She immediately reverts to her snake form, and the bridegroom promptly dies of grief. This poem did much to highlight the image of the Lamia in Victorian culture, and became one of Keats’ most famous poems, chiming as it did with the repressive Victorian view of female sexuality.

Today, in modern Greece, the story of the Lamia still persists as part of the folklore of the country. Children are admonished that unless they behave, the dreaded Lamia will come to take them away. If an infant dies suddenly, in what we now call a cot death, the incident is sometimes described as being the result of strangulation by the Lamia. And if a woman fails to keep her house clean and tidy, her housework will be criticized as ‘Lamia’s sweeping’. Greedy or stupid women are also dubbed Lamia. Thus, in modern times, as well as in the past, the Lamia has become the symbol of all that is hated and feared in the figure of the unattached, undomesticated woman who has rejected motherhood.

Lilith, a snake-like character from Hebrew mythology briefly mentioned earlier, is very much akin to the Lamia, and as the centuries progress, the two become interchangeable. She began life in 4000 bc as one of several wind or storm demons in Mesapotamia. These demons were said to bring disease, illness, and death. Lilitu, as she was called, was a Succubus who appeared to men in their dreams, and was known for her lustful ways. It was believed that she caused men to have nocturnal emissions, thus draining away their strength. She was often depicted as having talons and wings, like a bird, and living in the desert. She would leave her lair at night, whenever a sandstorm blew up, to prey on men and generally wreak havoc with human lives. Some believed she was the handmaiden of other deities, such as the Sumerian goddess of fertility, Inanna, and her Assyrian counterpart Ishtar; others, that she was an unclean woman or prostitute, a harbinger of death and disease.

There are many fascinating versions of the story in early Hebrew texts, some of which contradict the creation myth. In one story, the
Alphabet of Ben Sira
, Lilith appears as the first wife of Adam. When Adam demands that she lie beneath him during sexual intercourse, she refuses, saying that God created them both equal. She then flies off and consorts with demons, producing demonic children, one hundred of whom die every day. In other stories, such as those of the Kabbalah, Lilith herself turns into a serpent, and it is she who tempts Adam and Eve with the apple, causing their banishment from the Garden of Eden.