Origins of the Vampire
Tatiana takes a look at the history of vampirism through the lens of contagion, specifically the deadly outbreaks of White Plague that spread through Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Nosferatu – the Disease-bearer
Our fascination for things that go bump in the night dates back to the dawn of time and our desire to explain phenomena beyond our ken has led us to conjure monstrous culprits from the depths of our imagination. When epidemics of plague ravaged entire continents, it could only be the work of God –– but when smaller, mysterious, and isolated pockets of illness sprung here and there, witches, werewolves, and various declinations of undead fiends were made to carry the blame: the strigoi, the zombie, the vrykolakas, the moroi, the draugr, the ghoul. The vampire1.
The vampire as we know it appears rather late in a long lineage of unpalatable creatures, sometime during the 17th century, and more prevalently in Eastern Europe. He is no longer merely a primal incarnation of unspeakable horror, but becomes a figure intrinsically intertwined with the concept of disease. He can turn into bats, rats and dogs, he is the rabies in their bite, the bacteria carried by their fleas, he is Nosferatu –– the “disease-bearer”.2
As the Middle Ages come to an end, and cities grow, forests shrink, and science advances, the presence of the supernatural in people’s daily lives begins to fade and the influence of witches, sorcerers and sex-hungry fairies is soon dismissed as backwards superstition. Man has mastered the seas and the forests, invented intricate machines, vanquished malady, tamed animals, conquered inhospitable land, he has placed himself above nature –– above God even, in the Enlightenment’s intellectual frenzy –– and has become all powerful and untouchable. This new worldview cries out for a new kind of monster, an ancient visitor not just from beyond the grave but also from beyond modern times and the reign of Man, come to challenge the very fabric of science and civilization. The vampire is a memento mori, a reminder of our human condition and a curb to our growing arrogance: despite our faith in science and organized society –– tricking us into thinking we have outsmarted death –– we will die, and we must die3. The vampiric figure, the plague-bringer, begins to take center stage in people’s imagination as their exoticization of death evolves, reaching its fanatic peak in the Victorian era –– an era of hysterical infatuation with the occult, marked not only by epidemics of tuberculosis but also by the morbid fetishization of its symptoms: the pale skin, the waifish figure, the dark circles under the eyes, the flushed cheeks. A society that turned death into a fashion statement and illness into a standard of beauty was more than keen to welcome the figure of the vampire into its reality.
The First Vampirism Epidemic
The year is 1725, the place Kisilova, a rather poor and remote village in present-day Serbia, its name suddenly famous all over Europe, making gruesome headlines: ‘Vampire devastates village, kills nine people!’ Petar Blagojević had died, risen from the grave, and set off on a murderous rampage. Within eight days, nine villagers had died after mysterious and violent 24-hour pulmonary illnesses: vampire Petar had sat on top of them during their sleep and crushed their lungs. The panic was so great that the authorities and priesthood were summoned to dig up Petar’s corpse and investigate. What they found –– and what they did –– established the foundations of the vampire myth for generations to come. Petar’s corpse showed no signs of decomposition, his nails, hair, and beard had grown, and his mouth… was full of fresh blood. The outraged mob staked him through the heart, causing a great splash of “fresh” blood to gush from his ears and mouth.
A few months later, in another Serbian village, Arnont Paule, a dodgy adventurer, starts bragging about an encounter with a vampire on his travels, claiming he was bitten and cured himself by eating graveyard dirt. And then Arnont dies. Soon, a dozen villagers mysteriously drop dead. This case is probably the first time, because of Arnont’s stories, that vampirism is considered contagious: if Arnont was bitten by a vampire and then became one himself, then logically the dozen people that Arnont killed would also become vampires. Cue angry mob. Villagers and their pitchforks, torches, crosses, and jugs of holy water rush to the cemetery, purging every grave, beheading every corpse, and finally staking Arnont through the heart as he shrieks and vomits the blood of his victims –– a bloodbath that, again, made headlines and horrified the entire continent.
These two events, and similar cases in the following years, were the starting point of “the 1720s vampire scare”. We have proof now that vampires exist – the claim was validated by government officials and serious physicians everywhere, spreading to the educated classes throughout all of Europe and overseas to the colonies. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, nightmares of medieval peasant lore were revived and rebranded into a new kind of monstrosity, one that mingled religion and pagan beliefs with elements of science and early modern medicine.
The New England Vampire Panic
Fast forward to the 19th century, USA. New England is ravaged by the White Plague. Consumption is spreading, responsible for 20% of all deaths and wiping out entire families: scientists still haven’t put a name to the disease –– tuberculosis –– or understood its causes. They don’t know yet that it is highly contagious. Family physicians tell their patients their condition is caused by a nervous disposition, melancholy, and exposure to “bad air”. Or possibly vampires. Can’t rule out vampires. This bizarre diagnosis fueled the Victorian romanticization of consumption, le mal de vivre, associating it with art, refinement, and love. Tuberculosis was responsible for nearly half of the deaths of people ages 15-35 –– and it was the romantic death par excellence! Strange as it may seem to us, youths and maidens yearned for it, envying the sick, glorifying the dead, and idolizing the pain of those who had lost their loved ones.
A hundred cases of vampirism and grave desecration –– often condoned by state, science, and clergy –– were reported in New England during the 19th century, and many more may have easily gone undocumented. Reviewing one case after another, I was surprised to find that they were all identical, as if these myths and rumors were so contagious that they infected the very psyches of the ill. The scenario was always the same: one family member died of consumption, then a few months later, after a long and mysterious illness, another would die, followed at interval by most of the other members of the family. Before dying, all were “visited” by one of the deceased –– a dark shadow bearing resemblance to a mother or a sister had come at night to “draw out their breath”. Often, these visits occurred in strange dreams or haunted the mind: the vampire’s connection to its prey was so strong that the bloodsucking could remain purely telepathic.
Rhode Island, 1892. The case of Mercy Brown is the last and most famous one to make the headlines. Mercy, a young girl of nineteen, dies of consumption, the third victim of the Brown family after her mother and her older sister. The grieving father, desperately clinging to the waning life of his sole surviving offspring –– his young son Edwin –– is finally persuaded by his friends to open up the family vault and examine the corpses of his wife and daughters, hoping to locate the culprit among them. Mercy’s dead body is found perfectly preserved, her heart still full of blood. By that time, the medical world had seen a major shift: in 1882, physician Robert Koch had published his research on microbiology providing evidence that tuberculosis was contagious. Two doctors tried to reason with Mr Brown, explaining that his daughter’s remains had been preserved due to the frost of an abnormally cold winter, but it was too late, panic had already poisoned everyone’s psyche and superstition had prevailed: the poor girl’s heart was cut out, burnt, and its ashes were made into a tea that was given to the sick boy. The townsfolk were appeased; the boy died anyway.
These gruesome incidents and strange rituals were omnipresent in New England for a whole era, leaving an indelible mark on the imagination and daily lives of several generations. The case of Mercy Brown in particular was a chief inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, written five years after the fact. Following Koch’s research, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray in 1895, enabling doctors to diagnose the disease and observe its progression. Tuberculosis began to decline, and with it, vampirism forsake the realm of reality to go thrive in art and literature –– and soon in cinema, where vampire movies still remain the most popular sub-genre of supernatural horror.
And Yet.
If you’re wondering why I am obsessed with vampires and are attributing my sphere of interest to my coming of age in the Twilight era, I am sorry to disappoint you. It all started during my first trip to Romania, my mother’s homeland, when I was 14 years old. My knowledge of Romanian was sub-par and I was set on improving it, so as soon as we arrived in Bucharest, while my mother unpacked, I turned the TV on and flipped through the channels to get a sense of the culture and the language. I landed on a news report. A very shabby cemetery in a village, a flock of Orthodox priests spraying holy water around them, a few ancient toothless women in black garb wailing and crossing themselves, a gang of mustached angry-looking men, and that word repeated over and over again –– vampir. I assumed I had misunderstood, but I still called my mother over and asked her what was going on. She shrugged, “Oh, yeah, another case of vampirism,” to which I answered WHAT DO YOU MEAN? She said, “don’t worry they got the guy, it’s all good.” What guy? “The vampire responsible for the trouble in the village, they got him. Staked him. It’s fine.” Seeing the look of horror on my face, she added, “don’t worry, this only happens in the countryside.” My mother was dead serious (forgive the pun). I learned many things on that trip. I learned that Eastern Europe is not exactly “Europe”, it’s its own thing, and that my mother turned into a different person in her homeland, someone who wasn’t just my mother anymore. She went back to that little girl she once was, growing up in extreme poverty in a country cut off from the world, where the veil between reality and the supernatural was very, very thin. We explored parts of the country together, for breakfast I saw her bite into an onion as if it were an apple, I saw open caskets dragged by horses on the side of the highway, and my mother shrugged again. We visited our ancestral village –– a stone’s throw away from Vlad Dracula’s Poenari Citadel –– and had our fortunes read in our palms and our coffees by witches who were my great-aunts and great-cousins. I got spat on a lot –– to keep the evil eye away –– and given all sorts of amulets. Garlic hung from the roofs of people’s homes. I got sick with a migraine and suddenly I was lying in the dark with old women all around me, chanting prayers, performing magic rituals with matchsticks, and the oldest, most toothless of them all gave me a cross-shaped lick on my forehead. They told me pretty young girls with green eyes were the devil’s favorite and tied a red ribbon around my wrist for protection. This was all… normal. My mother laughed at my bewilderment “yes, maybe it is a bit strange,” she conceded.
The etymology of “vampire” is unclear, though the word seems to derive from the Old Slavic umpyr, an undead creature worshipped in the 12th century in modern day Russia.
From the Ancient Greek word nosophoros. Knowledge of the etymology most likely led F. W. Murnau in his 1922 film to give his vampire the appearance of a rodent and bring along with him a swarm of rats, spreading the plague throughout the town. Another suggested etymology for the term Nosferatu is the Romanian word nesuferitul, “the insufferable one”.
The latin quote memento mori is often translated as “remember you will die” though a more accurate translation would be “remember to die”.
I was impressed with your mum.
Biting into an onion, like an apple!