Thinking about Vampires

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Any book on vampires has to be limited.  I first read Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth back in 2009.  It has lots of information, but it was long enough ago that much of what I’d learned had grown fusty with age.  I began re-reading it as Halloween approached, and am glad I did.  The thing about vampires, however, is that you do have to compare sources.  Like many explorations of the vampire, Beresford’s notes that there are ancient analogues, but nothing precisely like we think of vampires today.  From my own perspective, I tend to think that our modern vampires, like our demons, come from movies.  Starting with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, but more clearly from Tod Browning’s Dracula, our idea of what vampires are have been mediated by the silver screen.

This book ranges widely across time, region, and genre.  It discusses early reports that clearly considered vampires an actual threat, as well as movies made purely for entertainment.  One thing that I noticed this time around is that the author, being British, seems not to have noticed the tremendous influence Dark Shadows had on the popularity of vampires prior to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.  I suspect that soap operas were not widely known internationally, and even if they were, they were likely not taken too seriously.  Dark Shadows was different, however, and it made vampires chic in a way they simply weren’t before the early seventies.  At least in the United States, Barnabas Collins helped define the vampire.

Beresford makes the point that there is no single defining characteristic that applies to all vampires.  Early European vampires didn’t necessarily drink blood—they were revenants (they’d returned from the dead) but they weren’t always after blood.  In the nineteenth century bloodlust became the defining feature of vampires.  There are historical points on which to quibble with the argument here, but overall this book is a good overview of how ideas like vampires have been around for quite some time.  As someone who specialized in ancient literature for a good part of my life, I would not have called the various ancient analogues pointed out “vampires.”  Beresford is making the case that they lay the groundwork for what later became vampires.  And Vlad Tepes of Wallachia played his part as well.  As did the ancient Greeks.  It seems to me there’s more rich ground to explore here and this book provides a very good starting place.

Staking a Claim

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Okay, I confess. When I learned my recent host in London lived in Highgate, my thoughts immediately went to the Highgate Vampire. I first learned about the Highgate Vampire from Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, a book that spoke to me at some inexplicable level. Claims had been made that an actual vampire roamed the north of London in the 1970‘s. My first thought was utter skepticism—one of the reasons that I was never afraid of vampires is that I knew they couldn’t possibly be real. The mythical world of a fundamentalist allows deity, devil, angels, and demons. No more, no less. The vampire, as a supernatural creature largely dreamed up by John William Polidori and Bram Stoker, was a literary monster only. As a doctoral student in Ancient Near Eastern religions, I learned that the prototype of the vampire went back to Sumer, the earliest civilization known. Still, I wasn’t worried. The Sumerians also believed in night hags and dragons and had no crucifixes to keep the beasts down. Then I learned about the Highgate Vampire.

I have just finished reading Sean Manchester’s most recent iteration of his account of slaying the Highgate Vampire. Manchester, a bishop in the Old Catholic Church and a descendant of Lord Byron—Polidori’s close associate—claims to have staked the vampire in the backyard of a haunted mansion in Hornsey. This transpired in 1973. There’s one born every minute, right? But then, there are the claims of physical evidence: exsanguinated foxes, photographs of rapidly decomposing corpses, the obvious ardor of Manchester’s personal account. The mental jarring was extreme—surely a priest would never fabricate such a tale? Surely the vampire is a fictional creature with no place in a rational world? Why did Manchester’s account resemble Jonathan Harker’s diary so much?

So, we were staying in Highgate, London. The first morning as the sun rose, I dragged my family to Highgate Cemetery. I hadn’t read Manchester’s account yet, and Beresford’s book was almost three years back in my memory. Looking through our pictures, there I found it—the tomb in which Manchester claims to have originally discovered the black coffin with the actual vampire inside. Whether fictional or not, I was in the presence of the vampire. The overcast sky, ivy coated tombstones, the jet-lag—all combined to provide the atmosphere for the impossible. I have no idea what really happened in London when I was a child in school, but I have learned that many adults will gladly drain off the very lifeblood of others in order to attain their own benefit. From the days of Sumer to the present, growing in number there have been vampires among us. Our lives are much more comfortable if we simply refuse to believe.

Religion or Death

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Researching traditions about death can lead to some occluded avenues shunned by many Ancient Near East scholars (generally anything after about the rise of the Roman Empire is irrelevant). It has long been my contention that death and religion are intricately intertwined, well nigh incapable of being teased apart. I’m also very interested in the research of writers on popular culture. Findings, no matter how erudite, if they don’t reach the public will only fail to impress. Mary Roach, ever masterful, wrote a morbidly fascinating account of the afterlife, so to speak, of corpses. This work (Stiff) was followed shortly by Spook — her foray into the science of ghosts. Anyone who can have you mortified one minute and laughing out loud the next deserves to be read.

Can't have one without the other

Can't have one without the other

I recently finished Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth (Reaktion, 2008). I was pleasantly surprised that Beresford ambled back to the Neolithic Period in his quest for vampire origins. A number of unexpected facts jumped out at me from his pages — vampires historically have very few traits that last through the folklore about them over the ages. Primarily all they share is being improperly dead. This horrific concept is among the most deeply rooted of human terrors. We prefer the properly dead who stay dead, thank you. Whether revenant or still alive, the vampire somehow threatens the lives of the living and must be dispatched by making him (or her) properly dead.

More rat than bat

More rat than bat

Having been a youngster and woefully unaware of international news at the time, I had never heard of England’s Highgate Vampire of the 1970s. A disjointed and confusing account involving an actual vampire-hunting Catholic priest, a rival vampire-hunting occultist, and ending with the actual staking of a corpse (in 1970! CE!), the tale in Beresford’s book is almost incredible. A little web research demonstrated that the story still has a much wider following than this blog will ever have. Overall, however, it convinced me that my inklings of the danse macabre between religion and death were as accurate as a vampire hunter’s stake.