Vampires (13 page)

Today, the legend of the Chupacabra continues. Sightings are often reported, the creature being said to resemble many different animals, including rats, bats, kangaroos, and of course, hairless dogs. In some cases, there have been reports of the creature looking like a dinosaur.

Not only this, there are also some theories that the Chupacabra may be a pet who has escaped from a race of aliens. Such creatures are known to UFO enthusiasts as ‘Anomolous Biological Entities’ or ABEs. It is argued that they have been created by alien beings who have developed ways of linking the genetic data of different organisms, creating hybrid creatures that may belong to extraterrestrial environments.

Not surprisingly, such theories are in general viewed with some scepticism. However, the persistent attacks on livestock, in which the animals are bitten at the chest and neck, and completely drained of blood, have to date still not been explained in a persuasive fashion. These continue to occur in different parts of the world, much to the consternation of farmers and rural dwellers in these areas.

Thus, until somebody comes up with a rational explanation for these mystifying attacks, the legend of the Chupacabra will continue to live on as one of the most intriguing urban myths of our time.

On of the most ancient forms of female vampire is the Cihuateteo, a legendary figure from Aztec mythology. The Aztecs created a great and lasting empire from their heartland in Mexico up until the sixteenth century, when the area was colonized by the Spanish. Their spiritual, religious and artistic culture was highly developed and complex, and they worshipped a huge pantheon of gods, many of them conceived as extremely violent and hostile to human beings. As in many primitive cultures, these all-powerful gods needed to be propitiated, and sacrifices – including the sacrifice of human children – were made to them at different times of year to ensure their peaceful coexistence with the mortal world.

Among these deities was the Cihuateteo (also known as the Civateteo or Cihuateotl). She was the spirit of a woman who had died in childbirth. The Aztecs believed that giving birth to a child was a type of battle, in which the woman became a warrior. When a woman died in this way, she would be honoured as a fallen martyr, and worshipped accordingly.

However, the Cihuateteo’s spirit was not a benign presence in the world, and in the afterlife, a victim of childbirth would go on to haunt the living. In particular, she would come out when the sun set in the west, and wait at crossroads in the darkness of night to attack her victims. She was known for her ability to seduce any man so that he left his wife and family and became her sexual slave. In addition, she was thought to steal young children away from their mothers, and cause whole families and communities to succumb to sickness and disease. In particular, if individuals suffered epileptic fits, or showed signs of mental illness, this would often be put down to the malign influence of the Cihuateteo.

The Cihuateteo was much feared throughout the region, and was thought to become particularly dangerous at certain times of year, when she would leave her home in the sky and come down to the human world to cause misery and chaos. In some Aztec belief systems, the Cihuateteo was thought to be an emissary from Mictlan, the lowest level of the underworld, where the dead lived. In others, she was believed to be the handmaiden of the goddess Tlazolteotl. Tlazolteotl was a deity believed to have a dual role: on the one hand, she presided over the world of filth, vice, and adultery, and on the other, she had the power to purify individuals from their sins and heal the ills, including disease and family strife, caused by their sexual misdeeds.

We can see images of the Cihuateteo today in various sculptures that date from the Mesoamerican civilization. In some cases, she is represented as having the face of a skeleton. Sometimes, her head is decorated with a garland of skeletons, and she may have a necklace of human hands. She is also depicted on some occasions as having talons like a bird of prey instead of hands. Her mouth may be open, so as to suck the blood of young infants from them, or she may show rows of sharp teeth, with which to tear apart the blood of her victims. Often, she sits on an altar of human skeletons, as befits her position as emissary from the home of the dead.

It is fascinating to note the way in which similar images occur in the folklore of different regions, and at different periods in history, across the world. For example, in the legend of the Cihuateteo, we find many links with the mythology of the European vampire: for example, the idea of the revenant or ghost who has suffered in life, and who comes back to wreak revenge on the living. And there are other points of similarity in this ancient Aztec story: for instance, the idea of bloodsucking and flesh eating; of sexual seduction, to the point where the victims forget or deny their family ties; of the spreading of communicable diseases, often fatal ones; and of the revenant inhabiting the souls of the living, so that they become mad and lose their reason entirely. In addition, we find particular details that each civilization has in common, such as the idea that evil spirits haunt crossroads. These are ideas that appear to occur in mythologies across the world, regardless of cultural and religious divides.

This similarity between the various folkloric cultures of the world was observed by the psychiatrist Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud’s. He built a theory around it, which he termed ‘the collective unconscious’. According to this idea, all humanity shares ‘a reservoir of the experiences of our species’ that is expressed in folklore, and in the archetypal figures within it, such as, in this instance, the bereaved mother. Just as Freud argued that each and every one of us has an unconscious (that is, a part of the mind that we are not fully aware of, and that drives our behaviour) Jung believed that the human race also shares a communal unconscious, which fuels the creation of folk tales, religion, and art. Freud himself did not share this belief in a collective unconscious, and the two psychoanalysts fell out over this and many other issues.

However, work in these fascinating fields continued, and soon particular images and figures from ancient folklore began to be discussed in the world of psychiatry. In the early part of the twentieth century, the figure of the vampire became the subject of an interesting correspondence between Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his British biographer and follower, Ernest Jones.

Freud had argued, though not in any great depth, that belief in ‘hostile demons’ has a psychological cause: namely, that when a beloved person dies, negative feelings towards them are repressed, and that these feelings come back to haunt the living – whether family, friends, or lovers – in dreams. Ernest Jones took up this theme in a groundbreaking essay on the vampire, published in German in 1912. He argued that the image of the vampire was a ‘projection’ – an embodiment of the living person’s ambivalent feelings, both of hatred and love, towards the dead person. It is for this reason that the vampire is said to return to visit the home of its nearest relatives.

In addition, Jones maintained that the vampire ‘belief complex’, as he termed it, was a form of regression to an early infant state. This state he described as ‘an infantile sadistic-masochistic phase of development’ in which the young child expresses anger towards his parents, especially his mother, by biting. He argued that when the child grows up and the parent dies, he or she may begin to feel unconsciously guilty about these early hostile feelings (and others accrued along the way), and may therefore begin to ‘project’ these feelings onto the dead parent, imagining that the parent will come back in a hostile guise to wreak revenge.

In addition, he maintained that the mixture of emotions conjured up by the folkloric image of the vampire is expressed by the ‘sucking’ aspect of the child’s experience, which symbolizes love, and nurturing; and that furthermore, there is a ‘biting’ aspect, which represents hatred, or at any rate some kind of destructive, violent impulse.

This argument may perhaps seem tortuous, but in later studies on the psychology of sexuality, psychoanalysts such as Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein took up the theme of Jones’ early paper on the vampire. In their descriptions of infant development, they discussed the way that, once the baby’s teeth come through, it begins to find pleasure not just from sucking at its mother’s breast, but from biting it as well. (It is often, at this stage, when the biting becomes excessive, that the mother will understandably decide to wean the baby.) Depending on how successfully the baby and mother negotiate these important developmental stages, the infant will mature normally, or become fixated, to a lesser or greater degree, at the oral stage. This kind of fixation leads to various types of unhealthily rigid personality traits, mental imbalance, or, in the worst case, severe psychological illness.

Thus, according to this psychological reading, the vampire stands as a represen-tation of humanity’s fixation on the primitive oral stage of development, in which pleasure is received by sucking, biting, chewing, and so on. Our interest in, and excitement about, vampires, is to do with this early memory of infancy, and may also be an attempt to overcome the ambiguities occasioned by such powerful, contradictory emotions.