by Brian Righi
Interestingly enough, in Europe during the Middle Ages both surgeons and barbers specialized in the custom. Barbers even advertised their services by hanging a red and white striped pole outside their place of business much as they do today. The pole itself represented the stick the patient squeezed to increase the blood flow, while the red stripe was for the blood being drained and the white stripe for the tourniquet the barber used to stop the bleeding.
Here in the United States, bloodletting arrived with English settlers on the Mayflower and continued to flourish until it lost favor in the nineteenth century. In 1799, before dying from a throat infection, it’s known that George Washington was drained of nine pints of blood in a twenty-four-hour period, lending credence to the old saying that “sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.”
Thicker than Water
Since blood carried with it the profound connotations of the sacred and magical in humanity, it therefore became the link by which individuals and tribes bound themselves to one another. Before the invention of lawyers and contracts, the strongest oath a person could take was a blood oath, in which two parties mingled their blood together forming a mystical bond that could not be broken. To betray such a bond was a grievous sin and could only be equated with betraying one’s own family, which in similar fashion was also bound by a biological blood tie.
Perhaps one of the most celebrated blood bonds known to history was recorded in the thirteenth-century Norwegian saga of Orvar-Oddr. In the tale, Orvar-Oddr decides to test his fighting skills against the renowned Swedish warrior Hjalmar and sets sail for the coast of Sweden with five ships of his best fighting men. Hjalmar, upon hearing of the approaching challenger, meets him on the high seas with fifteen of his own ships, but before the battle commences he sends ten of his ships home to even the odds. For two days the mighty forces clash until the sea ran red with the blood of dying men. Eventually the two great warriors fought to a draw, and realizing they were equals ceased their fighting to swear a blood oath to one another. Beaching their ships, the two men cut themselves and let their blood flow together while reciting oaths and incantations under a piece of turf held aloft by a spear. The two champions went on to fight many battles together until Hjalmar was finally killed in combat by the berserker Arngrim and his twelve sons.
The custom between warriors to form blood bonds was not limited to the northern European peoples but was a common element in many armies the world over—including ancient Greece, where whole companies of soldiers took such oaths to forge stronger fighting units. The practice was also found throughout those living in the Balkan Peninsula during the Ottoman era, where oppressed Christian populations struggled to maintain their sense of identity.
Among the fierce horsemen of Scythia, the custom was expressed by cutting themselves and allowing their blood to flow into a cup, which when mixed with wine they drank to seal the bond. In the Asiatic cultures farther east, the act of becoming someone’s blood brother extended beyond the individual participants to include whole tribes and was seen as an effective means of bringing them into alliance with one another or to help resolve disputes. Even in today’s world, where things hardly ever seem simple, the action of two people cutting their thumbs and pressing them together can still hold much significance.
Blood Taboos
While many early cultures developed ritualized practices associated with the handling of blood, some revered its power so much that they created strict laws and prohibitions against its usage. The Israelites, for example, believed that blood contained within it the very essence or life force of a creature—its soul if you will. Though animals could be sacrificed upon the temple’s altar for the benefit of God, to actually consume blood, any blood, was a forbidden act. In the Book of Genesis 9:4, it is written that God spoke to Noah after the cataclysmic waters of the great flood had receded from the land and commanded that while he may eat the flesh of the animals, he “shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, with its blood.” This admonition continued on into Mosaic Law, which later came to govern the Hebrew tribes, making the offense punishable by death. In turn this led to kosher dietary practices designed to avoid the consumption of blood, and even early Jewish hunters were commanded to pour out the blood of their kills onto the ground and cover it with dirt before they prepared their meat.
Of even greater consequence, however, was the wanton shedding of human blood, which unless sanctioned by God, was a horrid offense to the psyche of the Hebrews. In the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain slew his brother out of jealousy it was Abel’s blood that cried out from the ground to accuse him of his sin before God. In the Hebrew Book of Numbers 35:33, this warning is sternly reinforced in the passage “You shall not pollute the land wherein you are, for blood it defiles the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, except by the blood of him that shed it.”
In similar fashion many cultures felt it was particularly taboo to shed the blood of a member of a royal line or caste, and so they went to great lengths when disposing of their royalty to ensure that this did not happen. When the Great Mongolian conqueror Kublai Khan defeated his uncle Nayan in battle in 1287 CE, it is said that he executed his familial rival by wrapping him in a carpet and beating him to death lest the blood of his imperial line should spill upon the ground. This later gave rise to the old Tartar maxim: “One Khan will put another to death to get possession of the throne, but he takes great care that the blood be not spilt. For they say that it is highly improper that the blood of the great Khan be spilt upon the ground …” (Frazer, 1923, 235).
Other methods in other cultures admitted wide variations on the theme, including strangulation, drowning, being beaten with sticks, and many more. In 1688, during a palace revolution against the King of Siam, the rebellious general placed the king after his defeat in a large metal caldron and smashed his body with wooden pestles so that none of his royal blood would strike the ground.
Blood of the Vampire
As numerous cultures struggled to define their own concepts of what blood represented to them, in Eastern Europe there seemed an overwhelming fascination with the power that lay within the blood of vampires themselves. While there were conflicting views on the topic by both church scholars and peasants alike, the blood of the vampire could be seen as either a curse or a charm depending on the region one was traveling through.
In some villages vampires were vile carriers of disease and pestilence whose very blood reeked of spiritual pollution. Before a corpse suspected of vampirism was staked, villagers often covered it with a cloth, hide, or dirt in order to avoid being splattered with its blood. Such precautions were a means of avoiding infection, which carried with it the penalty of madness, death, or vampirism if the creature’s blood touched a living human.
In other communities a vampire’s blood was the only real talisman against vampires. In Pomerania, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, it was believed that to ward off vampires one must dip the burial shroud in the revenant’s blood and squeeze its contents into a glass of brandy before being consumed. As examined in greater detail earlier in this book, another remedy consisted of digging up the vampire while it slept during the day and smearing its blood on oneself, or, as in Russia, the blood was mixed with flour and baked into bread. Once the bread was eaten, the person was then thought to be immune from vampire attacks.
Throughout human history, blood has symbolized more than just the vague concepts of life and death, but for all intents and purposes it was life and death. Its presence meant that life existed and that magic and the sacred lay just under the surface of every human being. It was the most intimate part of man. If harnessed properly, it promised power, health, luck, and protection, and for some it even greased the spiritual wheels between the world of gods and mortals.
When corrupted, however, it meant death and disease and all the dark things that people feared. The traditional vampires o
f folklore were little more than bloated corpses or evil night spirits consumed with the desire to feed on human blood in order to maintain their own corrupted existence. It is for this reason perhaps that they were feared the most, because of their ability to invade and destroy the very life essence of humanity. As the crazed character Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula so eloquently raved, “The blood is the life! The blood is the life!”
[contents]
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5
10
Stranger
Than Fiction
Throughout the pages of this book we have searched long and hard to unravel the mysteries of the dreaded creature the world has come to know as the vampire. From the sandblown ruins of ancient Mesopotamia it was seen rising on howling desert winds as an insatiable night demon; from the sweltering jungles of the east it was heard in the pounding drums of strange cults as they called out to bloodthirsty gods; and from the mist-shrouded graveyards of Eastern Europe, villagers fled in abject terror as its shambling form moved through the tombstones on dark nights.
Over the course of this harrowing journey one important observation stands out above the rest: that the vampire has not one face but many, and the form it chooses to appear in at any given time changes depending on the needs of the culture that embraces it. In 1871 the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor wrote in his definitive work Primitive Culture that “vampires are not mere creations of groundless fancy, but causes conceived in spiritual form to account for specific facts …” (Tylor 1994, 192).
It’s true that Tylor was referring specifically to primitive notions surrounding unexplained diseases, but the same principle applies to any number of natural phenomena that early men could not account for, making vampires the ultimate explanation for that which was ultimately unexplainable.
Ancient Answers
By the time vampires made their way into the cuneiform writings of the Babylonians, they were already an ancient belief among early peoples and took the forms of frightful spirits or night demons responsible for a host of evil activities. Beyond their obviously destructive traits, however, they also served to help reinforce societal norms by providing the threat of otherworldly reprisal if a taboo were broken. As examined early in this book, the ekimmu were evil spirits that resulted when someone died alone and without relatives to remember them or place the appropriate offerings of food and drink at their grave. According to many early societies, the worlds of the living and the dead were often closely intertwined and even impacted one another on a daily basis. If the living relative therefore did not provide sustenance for the dead, the spirits would grow famished and eventually turn to human blood to quench their hunger.
While a number of remedies existed to combat such spirits, it’s telling that the most effective means was simply to perform the necessary burial rites at the grave of the one suspected of being an ekimmu and thereby uphold the conventions, so necessary for survival, that bound the individual to the familial unit.
At other times vampires acted as a sort of universal scapegoat for all the natural evils that seemed to befall people, including famines, diseases, storms, nightmares, and unexplained deaths. A host of vampiric demons existed to take the blame for these tragedies, such as the Lamashtu, Lamme, gallu, and lilith.
Of all the fiends that walked through these stories, however, it was perhaps the demoness Lilith that was most feared for her role as a child killer. Infant mortality being what it was at the time, it was easier to justify how a healthy infant had died in his or her sleep by believing that an evil force crept into the room and took the child’s life. Today we call the phenomenon crib death or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and even with all our medical advances we are no closer to providing an explanation to the causes of this tragedy. In instances of miscarriages or stillbirths, where spontaneous bleeding occurs, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how the demoness became associated with blood drinking as well.
Dilemma of the Dead
As the belief in vampire-like creatures moved west into Europe along the well-traveled caravan routes and migration paths, it transformed itself in order to find greater acceptance in the new lands in which it took root. Previous images of antagonistic spirits and night demons capable of shocking atrocities were replaced by a monster born from the worst of nightmares, a maniacal corpse bent on human blood. Yet despite the complete horror of this image, the revenants of Eastern Europe served an invaluable function for the communities that feared them, resolving dilemmas connected with improper burials, bodily decomposition, and the spread of highly contagious diseases.
Take, for instance, the differences between modern burial practices and those conducted as few as two hundred years ago. In the typical twenty-first century burial, when a person dies their body is first subjected to a postmortem examination by a coroner, known as an autopsy, to determine the cause and manner of death. The body then undergoes an embalming process during which the blood and other fluids are replaced with preservative chemicals to slow the rate of decomposition. After being dressed and placed in a metal coffin by a mortician, the body is lowered into a concrete vault four to six feet underground. Following a funeral service, the lid to the vault is sealed with long metal bars and the soil, originally excavated by heavy earth-moving machines, is piled back on top. By the end of the lengthy process the final remains are more secure than the national gold reserve at Fort Knox.
By contrast, burials in the past were nowhere near as efficient or as sanitary and required more of the community’s limited resources and manpower. Unless the deceased was a person of nobility or wealth, most gravesites were nothing more than a shallow hole scraped from the earth with the hands and shovels of loved ones. In regions where the soil was rocky or during the winter months when the ground was frozen, the task was especially difficult. Once the grave was prepared the body was washed and dressed by family members before being wrapped in a burial shroud. Coffins were of course a luxury and few could afford them, so most bodies were placed directly into the earth with dirt or sometimes rock laid over them. In some cultures the proceedings were lengthy and filled with elaborate ceremony, while in others, or in cases of murder or suicide, they were hastily conducted with little thought. During periods of deadly outbreaks, when the body count became too much to keep up with, the bodies of the victims were simply thrown into mass graves if they were buried at all.
Improper burials often led to disturbing consequences, including bodies being washed out of graves during heavy rains or attracting hungry dogs and wolves looking for a snack. Villagers passing by were commonly treated to the horrific sights of graves in disarray with headstones toppled over, half-eaten body parts here and there, and burial sites that had been clawed at as if something were trying to dig its way out.
Many of these signs came to be interpreted as evidence that evil was afoot and that a foul vampire had taken up residence among the corpses. Even when the traditional test of having a horse wander through a cemetery until it found a grave it would not cross was used, it’s easy to understand—considering that the half-exposed body smelled, the ground underfoot was unstable, and the beast could probably sense the fear of the crowd gathering around it—what the result would be.
Once a corpse was suspected of being a blood drinker, it was only a matter of time before it was disinterred and searched for signs of vampirism. Many who were unfamiliar with the way that the body breaks down often misinterpreted the natural process of decomposition for something far more sinister. For most rural communities the post-death process was a simple one: when you died, if you were a good and faithful Christian you were buried in consecrated ground where in time your body stiffened, your hair fell out, your flesh became bones and dust, your clothing rotted away, and your
soul went to heaven. In cases of reported vampire outbreaks, eyewitnesses attested that the bodies of the vampires remained preserved in an unnatural state that by all descriptions bordered on the demonic. The face was characterized as dark or ruddy-complexioned with fresh blood around the nose and mouth; and the body, flexible and swollen to the point of bursting, was stretched as tight as a drum from all the blood it had recently engorged itself with.
A careful examination of how the human body truly decomposes after death, however, sheds light on how some of these startling observations were made by witnesses. When the body’s heart ceases to pump blood through the circulatory system, gravity pulls the fluid to the lowest parts of the body. If as in many cases the corpse was buried facing downwards to prevent it from digging its way out, the blood pooled in the face, giving it a reddish appearance as the eyes protruded and the lips peeled back in a macabre sort of snarl. While rigor mortis does indeed set in initially, causing the limbs and joints to stiffen when depleted of enzymes, the condition is only temporary, and after approximately thirty-six hours the muscle fibers deteriorate, leaving the corpse as pliable as it was in life. Bacteria within the body, known as bacillus aerogenes, then begin to multiply, feeding on the internal organs and releasing a gangrenous gas that swells the body.
As this pressure builds, the body moves and shifts as the gas occasionally redistributes itself and blood and other fluids are forced out of the body’s orifices including the eyes, mouth, and nose. Later, when would-be vampire hunters attempted to drive a stake through the chest cavity of the corpse, they were often frightened by the body giving off an eerie moan, which although they attributed it to the vampire, was actually gas forced past the undecayed vocal cords by the force of the blow. It’s interesting to note that many of the early methods of dispatching vampires coincidentally inhibited the development of bacillus aerogenes and therefore seemed to have their desired results. Garlic, for instance, is an antiseptic that kills gangrene, while heat and sunlight impede bacterial growth.
