Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

  After it lay in the ground for a specific period of time, priests and family members returned to the gravesite and carefully exhumed the body to examine it for clues as to the status of the person’s soul in the afterlife. The length of time the body was required to remain in the ground varied from region to region. In some areas the period was as short as twelve months, while in others, such as Romania, children were disinterred after three years, adults after five, and the elderly after seven. In the Orthodox faith the body’s decay was synonymous with the absolution of sins, and the soul could not be free until its former shell had turned to dust. If by some unnatural means the body did not decay, the soul could become trapped within and eventually turn to vampirism for nourishment. If the processes of the body were proceeding naturally and the bones showed to be white, it marked a sure sign that the soul had entered heaven and was now at peace. Once the priests were satisfied that all was well with the deceased, the bones were washed and dressed in fresh linen before receiving a second and final burial.

  One of the fundamental differences between the Eastern and Western branches of the church was the very question of the body’s incorruptibility and how to interpret the phenomenon. For the Roman Catholic, the process was solely in the hands of God, and if a body remained undecayed after resting in the grave for a period of time it was a sign of sainthood, often accompanied by the fragrance of flowers or other pleasant odors. For the Greek Orthodox, however, it meant the body had become fouled by evil and/or that the church had placed a ban of excommunication upon the deceased so the earth would not receive it. Excommunication was a tool used by the priesthood against those who had committed grievous sins against the church and its authority, and it excluded the offender from the community of the church and therefore from God. This power, the Eastern Church insisted, was invested in them from God, as evidenced in the Book of Matthew (16:19) by the passage “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

  For all intents and purposes, excommunication was a punishment worse than death for a Christian and was frequently reserved for unrepentant criminals, heretics, suicides, sorcerers, and as in the case of the Great Schism, political enemies too. Those suffering from this ecclesiastical ban could not enter the kingdom of heaven nor would their body decompose after death unless the sentence was revoked by a pronouncement of absolution over the remains by a priest. In a manuscript discovered in the Church of St. Sophia at Thessalonica, an interesting commentary describes the conditions found in excommunicated bodies and provides insight on how the church interpreted them. Anyone, it says, who had a curse placed upon them or did not fulfill certain obligations to their parents would remain partially undecayed after death. Anyone sanctioned by the church would appear yellow and their fingers would shrivel. A body that appeared white meant that it had been excommunicated by divine law. Finally, a body that appeared black had been excommunicated by a bishop.

  Examples of such ecclesiastical curses litter the early histories of the church, including the tale of a man who converted to Christianity from Islam, but because he remained sinful and impious he was excommunicated by the church. After his death he was buried in the Greek Church of St. Peter the Apostle in Naples, where his body remained undecayed for many years. When the Metropolitan Athansius and several other churchmen visited the site, they preformed a solemn absolution over his and several other undecayed bodies held at the church, all of which immediately turned to dust.

  Another was a story recounted by the noted seventeenth-century Cambridge historian Sir Paul Rycaut, who claimed to have received it from a preacher named Sofronia in Smyrna, Turkey. According to the tale, there was once a man infamous for his many crimes living in the Despotate of Morea, which at the time was a southern province in the Byzantine Empire. After yet another heinous crime, the man fled authorities to the isle of Milos in the Aegean Sea, where he died in an excommunicated state. Following his burial, the island’s inhabitants began to complain of his apparition returning at night and haunting them in the manner of the bloodthirsty vrykolaka. According to custom, the suspected vampire’s grave was opened and the body within found to be undecayed and full of fresh blood. Initially the islanders wanted to dismember the corpse and boil the parts in wine to dislodge the evil spirit that had taken residence within, but the man’s friends objected and petitioned the church (along with a large sum of money) to grant a reprieve. A letter was then sent to Constantinople begging the Patriarch to grant the deceased an absolution and requesting that the time and date of its performance be written down as proof.

  Back on the windswept isle of Milos the coffin had been taken from the grave and filled with grapes, apples, nuts, and other food to sate the fiend’s hunger. Suddenly the coffin began to shake and rattle, to the great fear of those gathered nearby, but when they had built up enough courage to open it they found the body had turned to dust. When the letter of absolution arrived from Constantinople, the people were amazed to discover that the time and date of the absolution and the miracle were the same.

  This notion of the church’s authority over both the spiritual and corporal aspects of its subjects’ lives was used in more than just domestic examples and was often heralded as a sign that Christianity was indeed the one true religion. In the eastern approaches to the kingdoms ruled by the Orthodox Church, the presence of Islamic nations meant constant encroachments, skirmishes, and outright warfare. With armies of infidels always at its gates, the church did not hesitate to use the issue of incorruptibility as part of its propaganda campaign against Islamic nations.

  In the sixteenth century, the German classical scholar and historian Martin Crusius circulated a report regarding Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453. At the time there appeared in the court of Mehmed II a number of men versed in Greek and Arabic literature who were investigating the claims made by the Christian church. After tales of Greek priests halting the decomposition of corpses reached these investigators’ ears, the sultan insisted that the Patriarch Maximus of Constantinople produce evidence of their authenticity. Not wanting to incur his new ruler’s wrath, Maximus hastily convened a council of priests who managed to produce the undecayed body of a woman who had been excommunicated by the previous patriarch for terrible crimes. Once handed over to the sultan’s officers, the body of the woman was placed within a bound coffin marked by the sultan’s seal and guarded by his soldiers. After three days, the priests gathered beside it and chanted a liturgy while the patriarch recited an absolution. Following the service, the coffin was opened and the body within found to be nothing more than dust and bones. The sultan was said to be so amazed by this turn of events that he exclaimed to his officers that such proof could only mean that Christianity was the one true religion.

  Another tale highlighting the political and religious tensions between Christianity and Islam at the time concerns a bishop who pronounced the ban of excommunication upon a man who died and remained uncorrupted. The bishop, being deceived by Satan, so the story goes, renounced his faith and converted to Islam. The Patriarch of Constantinople summoned the former bishop and requested that he remove the ban so that the man’s soul might find release. At first he refused, claiming that it was a Christian matter and since he was no longer a Christian he would have nothing to do with the rites of absolution. The patriarch pleaded nevertheless, and the former bishop relented and performed the rites over the corpse of the excommunicated man, which turned to dust as soon as he was finished. Amazed by what he had just witnessed, he immediately fled to the chief magistrate of the district and related the facts as he had witnessed them. Recanting his Islamic conversion, he proclaimed aloud to all that Christianity was the true religion. Although he was warned by his fellow Turks of the consequences should he continue speaking thus, he only grew bolder in his witnessing. Eventual
ly the former bishop was arrested and executed, but all the while he maintained his faith and was said to have died happily.

  A Double-Edged Sword

  Regardless of its value as a political tool, there were instances in which propagating the belief in vampires also meant taking responsibility for the outcome—and as with any well-sharpened sword, if not used properly the welder could find it cut both ways. In certain isolated incidents, the presence of a suspected vampire in the community was blamed on the local clergy, whose obvious curse, the villagers reasoned, had created the monster. In one story, a bishop was traveling through the Despotate of Morea when he was accosted by highwaymen on a secluded section of road. The robbers quickly relieved the bishop of all his worldly goods and made off, but before too long they began to worry that the man of faith might excommunicate them and therefore doom them to become vampires. Fearing the worst, they reasoned there was only one way to set things right, and so overtaking the bishop once again, they murdered him along the roadway.

  A more modern example occurred during the Theriso uprising on the island of Crete in 1905. A native of the municipality of Theriso became gravely ill one day, and it was assumed by many that he was the victim of a curse by the local priest. Friends and relatives of the victim threatened the priest that if he did not remove the curse and the man died that the priest would soon follow. Unfortunately, the man grew worse and died, and true to their word a group gathered before the church, dragged the hapless priest outside, and shot him to death.

  Soon after the reports of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz appeared in newspapers in the early 1700s and the vampire craze reached a fever pitch, the Roman Catholic portion of the church began to lose interest in the topic. The two cases launched a heated debate in the German Lutheran and Catholic universities as to whether vampires truly existed. Cardinal Schtrattembach, the Roman Catholic bishop of Olmütz, turned to Rome for guidance on how the vampire reports flooding in should be handled. Rome then turned the matter over to Archbishop Giuseppe Davanzati, of Trani, Italy, who had spent many years studying the problem and had written an influential work entitled Dissertazione sopra i Vampiri on the subject in 1744.

  Davanzati, like many others involved in the German debates, had taken a rather skeptical view of the topic and advised Rome that the reports emanating from Eastern Europe were a mixture of superstitious imaginings and latent pagan customs. While these influences in and of themselves may still be the work of the devil, he reasoned, the church’s true role should be directed towards the poor soul making the claims rather than the vampire itself. The church found this reasoning to be sound, and from thenceforth adopted it as policy.

  While vampires and vampirism waned among the churches of the west, they continued to find support with the Orthodox traditions of the east for some time to come. Even today, cloudy visages of its past stain the more obscure rituals of the Eastern church, even if some of the meaning has been lost, and from time to time news reports crop up detailing an incident among some isolated community regarding a belief in vampires. Throughout its long and storied history, the church’s view of vampires has changed according to the age it found itself in, but there is no denying its involvement in the folklore of the creatures.

  Yet even as the church encouraged the view that it was the people’s champion against all that was evil in the world, somewhere along the way it discovered a powerful and dangerous tool in its struggle against the vampire. A little bit of fear, it quickly learned, went a long way in controlling the masses, and what better way to fill the coffers and bring in the flock each Sunday then to encourage the notion that vampires indeed existed. On the one hand, the church appeared to offer a solution to the vampire plagues and vowed to fight the creatures at every turn, while on the other hand it breathed new life into it for its own ends. Who knows if the legends of the vampire would even exist today if it hadn’t been for the church? Ironic that what the church sought to destroy, it only ensured for generations to come.

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  As a general rule, however, when man meets vampire, one of them will die. While the means whereby vampires kill men are fairly limited, the means whereby men kill vampires are diverse.

  —Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial,

  and Death: Folklore and Reality

  4

  Let’s Get Ready

  to Rumble

  Clad in dark sunglasses and a long leather overcoat, the man stood amid the circle of snarling vampires with a sneer of contempt upon his face. Neither side moved for what seemed an eternity until suddenly the lone vampire hunter shrugged off his long overcoat to reveal an arsenal of bristling weaponry. Covered in dark body armor, he sported a Benelli M3 shotgun with a pistol grip, a MAC-10 machine pistol, a bandoleer of silver stakes, and a deadly silver-bladed boomerang, but the killing instrument for which he was best known and feared was the razor-sharp sword of Damascus steel strapped to his back. A vampire snarled, baring her pointed canines, and charged in a blur of speed just as the vampire hunter drew his shotgun and fired. In the chaos that ensued, all hell broke loose as the vampire hunter battled his way through the crowd of vampires in a personal quest for revenge against the beasts that killed his mother.

  The 1998 blockbuster movie Blade introduced audiences to the fictional vampire hunter of the same name and helped to usher in a new archetype of vampire hunter that reached superhero proportions. Before the dawn of the new vampire hunter, the heroes of most vampire tales and movies usually consisted of more human characters, such as Bram Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing, who struggled against the creature with the more traditional weapons of cross and stake. In both cases, the avenging figures were mere protagonists in a fictional work, but the question remains as to how the common villager armed and defended himself against such a deadly foe. If so, then do the vampire hunters that fill our modern movies, comic books, and novels have a basis of reality resting somewhere in history’s dark past?

  Deadly Defenses

  To discover the answers to these and other questions we can turn back to the eyewitness accounts that surfaced during the great vampire scares of the eighteenth century. Although it’s easy to lose sight of in the horrific details that fill the reports, it’s important to note that they do in fact present two very fascinating sides of the same coin. On one we are given the bloody scenes of death and destruction that best characterize the habits and nature of the undead revenant, while the other offers a glimpse as to just how far a frightened mob will go to stamp out the evil menace.

  Cases such as those of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, described in chapter 2, clearly demonstrate how a group of common villagers, armed with only rudimentary shovels, torches, and a handful of wooden stakes, can indeed force the hunter to become the hunted. Turning the tables on one of history’s most infamous creatures was by no means an exact science, however, and it was achieved through a variety of methods that varied from culture to culture and depended to a large degree on the religious beliefs of the population and the resources at hand. Make no mistake about it though, in the centuries-old battle against the undead, man was by no means defenseless.

  Protective Talismans and Wards

  Perhaps one of the oldest weapons at man’s disposal was the widespread use of talismans and other wards, ranging anywhere from magical amulets and sacred symbols to some of the most ordinary objects the peasants could get their hands on. Objects such as crucifixes, mirrors, horseshoes, scissors, fishing nets, holy water, precious metals, and common herbs were just some of the items topping the list. As different as they may seem, what they all held in common was a supernatural ability to repel evil or bring good fortune.

  Two of the most potent wards in the folklore of the vampire are items that can still be found in most household kitchens today and were not only employed against bloodsucking revenants but also witches, demons, and other evil spirits. The first is a simple species of on
ion known by the Latin name Allium sativum or, for the rest of us, garlic. Marked by a distinctively pungent smell, it was first used as a charm among the Egyptians, who hung wreaths of it next to the beds of their children to chase off a type of vampiric night spirit known for stealing the breath of infants as they slept. In China and other parts of Asia, garlic was smeared on the foreheads of children to keep them from falling prey to similar creatures, and in the West Indies it was an important ingredient in magical spells to protect from evil. Amid the lands of Eastern Europe, garlic was eaten as everyday protection against vampires and was rubbed on the doors and windowsills of houses, the gateposts of farms, and the horns of cattle.

  If garlic reached a bit of an obsession for some, then at times it could even be taken too far, such as on January 9, 1973, when an article appeared in the London Times titled “Immigrant’s Fears of Vampires Led to Death.” The article described a sixty-eight-year-old Polish man in Stoke-on-Trent named Demitrious Myiciura, who died in his sleep after accidentally choking on a piece of garlic. It appears that he placed a sliver of it in his mouth before going to bed and also smeared it on the bedroom’s windowsills and stuffed it in the keyhole of his door. As an added precaution, he placed bags of salt near his head and between his legs. His landlady later told investigators that the man believed vampires were trying to get him.