Vampires (2 page)

In the twentieth and twenty-first century, vampire fiction continues apace with novels such as Richard Matheson’s
I Am Legend
in the 1950s, to Anne Rice’s seminal
Vampire Chronicles
beginning in the 1970s, to today’s massively popular
Twilight
series by Stephenie Meyer. In the cinema, too, the vampire becomes a staple of the horror genre, beginning with F.W. Murnau’s cult classic
Nosferatu
in 1922, based on the Stoker novel, and continuing with such milestones as
Dracula
in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi, and the Hammer Horror series starring Christopher Lee, which commenced in 1958. We also visit the vampires of popular television, including Barnabas Collins of the ABC TV series
Dark Shadows
and Buffy Summers of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. The vampires of popular music are not forgotten, as we remember such iconic figures as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who emerged from a smoke-filled coffin on stage, complete with cape and voodoo cane, and his musical progeny Alice Cooper, stalwart of the rock’n’roll horror genre, who introduced a further element of mayhem onto the stage with mock executions by electric chair, gallows, and guillotine. In the same vein is today’s Marilyn Manson, who continues to wave the banner for heavy metal and tasteless gore, and whose antics are perennially censured by the authorities, in the finest rock tradition.

Today, it seems that our long love affair with the vampire, if it can be termed as such, looks set to continue. The vile monster from the grave that plagued the medieval imagination has, in the new millennium, been replaced by a more sympathetic, sensitive and humane character. Today, the vampire stands as a metaphor for the civilized, cultured human being who is still, at heart, prey to dark, irrational forces that he or she cannot always control. It is as if, in the figure of the vampire, the human race preserves a memory of our ancient pagan culture, and refuses to let go of it, recognizing its continuing power to express our ever-present primitive fears – and hopes – about the nature of life, death and immortality.

Many cultures around the world contain folkloric stories about human beings who die, are buried, and come back to life at night to visit loved ones. However, the particular, and often menacing, habits of the revenants that we find in stories of vampires are very specific to what is called the ‘old religion’ of the Slavs, in which the soul was believed to come back and haunt the living after death.

The Slavic ‘old religion’ pre-dates the Christianization of the Slavic countries by many years. It is a set of ancient pagan beliefs and rituals that continued to be held and practised well after Christianity was introduced in the region. Much of it was never written down, which is why the source of many of its rituals is unknown today. It centres on a number of beliefs about household spirits, some of which were considered benevolent, others which were thought of as evil. These spirits would be invoked to help with domestic and farming tasks, but they often refused to, and instead wreaked havoc and destruction. If there was bad weather at harvest time, or if accidents happened, the spirits would be blamed. In addition, there was a superstition that if a human or animal became ill, it might be explained by the presence of a spirit sucking their lifeblood away.

These often demonic spirits were, the Slavs believed, the spirits of ancestors who needed to be appeased. In pre-Christian Slavic culture, it was thought that when a person died, their soul would continue to live, and would haunt the farm, village, or town where they had spent their years on earth. This haunting might continue for a month or longer until the soul finally decided to leave the area and find rest. For this reason, families would leave a door or a window open so that the spirit could come in or out of the house at will. It was important for families to do everything they could to please the spirit, or the spirit might make their lives a complete misery.

In order to make sure that the spirit went its way as soon as possible without causing too much trouble, it was considered important that all burial rites should be carefully observed. If they were not, the soul of the departed might become ‘unclean’, and its spirit would then become malevolent. Inevitably, proper burial did not always take place: for example, if a baby or child died before it had been baptized, or if a person met a sudden or violent end, in an accident or a fight, and the body was not found in time to bury it before it decomposed. Moreover, if the person who died was a sinner – for example, a person who practised black magic, or someone who had committed a murder – his or her soul would not pass away peacefully, but might, it was believed, haunt the living for years to come. In the worst case, the unclean soul might become a vampire – that is, a wicked spirit in a decomposing body, who fed on the blood of the living.

The vampire was just one of a number of hellish spirits in Slavic mythology. For example, a Rusalka was a female, mermaid-like demon that lured men away from their wives and families. She might emerge from the water and sit singing songs in a tree, until she caught the attention of a labourer in the fields. In some myths, the Rusalka was beautiful, with long hair and luminous green eyes, while in others, she was ugly and covered in hair. She might take a man or child away to live with her on the riverbed, or appear as a Succubus, tempting a man to have sex with her over and over again, until he became utterly exhausted. In this way she would draw his life force out of him, and use it to sustain herself, in vengeance for a wrong that had been done to her in life. Whatever form she took, she was essentially an unquiet spirit who had died a violent death, for example committing suicide because of an unwanted pregnancy. The belief was that if the young woman’s death was avenged, her spirit would be able to rest at last, and would stop harassing the living. In other myths, the Rusalka could be an unbaptized child born out of wedlock, whose mother had murdered it.

The male counterpart of the Rusalka is the Vodyanoy, a river creature who looked like a naked old man with a long, shabby beard and tangled wet hair. His body was covered in slime and black fish scales, and his hands were webbed. He had a tail like a fish, and burning red eyes. He rode about on a log, looking for people to drown, and when he succeeded, dragged them down to the bottom of the river to work for him as servants. When the captured victims died, the creature was believed to store their soul in special porcelain cups. Fishermen were in great awe of the Vodyanoy, whom they considered lord of the river, and made continual sacrifices to appease him.

Domestic gods in the Slavic pantheon included the Domovoi, and his female counterpart, the Kikimora. The Domovoi was a hairy little creature, sometimes with horns, who watched over a house. If the inhabitants behaved well, and left milk and biscuits out for him, the creature would help with the farm work and household chores. He could also predict the future, and might warn a family of impending danger by pulling the hair of the woman of the house, or tell of good news such as a wedding by making strumming noises on a comb. However, if the Domovoi was angered, it could break dishes, leave muddy footprints on the floor, or make moaning noises. When this happened, the family had to work out what was going wrong, and make amends. Significantly, in terms of the vampire myth, if he was really angered, he might make threats to stifle members of the family as they slept in their beds. However, if his needs were fulfilled, the family could live peacefully with him.

The Kikimora, another house spirit, was thought to be the female spirit of an unbaptized child. She appeared as a small, skinny witch with long unkempt hair, and sometimes a humpback. In some stories, she wore dirty clothes. When angered, the Kikimora was said to keep children awake at night, tickling them or whistling in their ears. At night, she would come out from her hiding place behind the stove and sit spinning. If any human being saw her at her work, they would be likely to die shortly afterwards.

When the various Slavic populations began to be Christianized between the seventh and twelfth centuries, these old pagan beliefs did not die out. Among the rural peasantry, the ‘old religion’ continued to be observed, along with the new Christian rituals. The peasants took to Christianity with enthusiasm, adopting all the main rituals, particularly baptism, but continued to worship their ancient gods at the same time. This ‘double faith’, as it was called, angered the authorities in Slavic countries, and Christian priests were employed to stamp it out, but to no avail. It seems that the Slavic peasants saw no contradiction between the two religions, and merely added a new set of Christian beliefs to their old pagan ones. As the centuries passed, these beliefs became intertwined, so that country people often saw themselves as devout Christians, while viewing the natural world, and their place in it, as ruled entirely by demons, sprites, and spirits.

What is significant about all this in terms of the vampire myth, is how often the notion of an evil revenant spirit, somehow wronged in life and returning to wreak vengeance on the living, comes up in pagan Slavic beliefs. These spirits are most commonly thought to be the restless souls of people who, in life, were sinned against or had sinned. Christian baptism and burial comes to feature prominently in this world view as a way of making amends for such wrongs. Where these rituals have not been properly observed, special measures are thought to be needed, and this is where the strange vampire-killing rites – exhuming corpses, staking, and so on – begin to develop.

By the eighteenth century, when Christian priests were beginning to perform these special measures, usually at the request of superstitious village communities, panic broke out as they observed the strangely lifelike appearance of decomposing corpses, and reported their findings to the authorities. For the first time, the pagan notions of evil sprites, demons, vampires, etc, previously dismissed as the foolish stories of ignorant peasants, began to have some credibility. And when these accounts were published in the newspapers, the panic began to spread, so that the public’s faith in science and rationality, cornerstones of the Age of Enlightenment, was shaken to the core.