Vampires

by Charlotte Montague

  As well as these female demons, there are other ancient mythological creatures who share some characteristics with the vampire. One of these is the Strix, whose Latin name comes from the Greek word for owl. The Strix was a legendary figure from Ancient Roman culture, which was based on the European Scops owl. This small, insect-eating owl was feared as a creature of ill omen, and when it appeared at night, giving its characteristic low whistling call, it was thought that any human in the vicinity would experience death, either his or her own, or that of a loved one.

  The shape-shifting Strigoi

  The legendary Strix differed from the Scops owl in that it was said to be a creature who drank the blood of human beings, and ate their flesh. The legend of the Strix is that their mother, Polyphonte, a companion of the goddess Artemis, fell in love with a wild bear and bore him two sons. These sons hunted human beings to survive, feeding on their flesh, and as a punishment, were turned into animals. One of them became a Strix, a nocturnal bird of ill-omen, and ‘a harbinger of war and civil strife to men’. It was thought that the Strix disembowelled its victims, which could include human infants. Later, in medieval times, the Strix was reputed to be an evil female demon. In Romania, it gave its name to the strigoi, or vampire. In this version of the legend, the figure is the troubled soul of a dead person who has taken the form of a wild animal.

  In some cases, the strigoi could even be a living person with superpowers, such as the ability to transform him or herself into a shrieking bird.

  Marrying a corpse

  In Romanian folklore, a person could become a strigoi if he or she died before they were married. Bizarrely, in these cases, the corpse of the dead person might be married to another unmarried living person, in the belief that such a union could stop this from happening. However, in some cases, it was thought, the strigoi might return and try to have sexual intercourse with their former husband or wife. To avoid this possibility, the corpse of the unmarried person might be pierced with a stake, and the usual rites for dispelling vampires observed.

  In addition, there were other specific remedies to discourage the corpse from changing shape and becoming a strigoi. One of these was to bury a bottle of wine at the graveside, dig it up a month or two later, and then drink it with the relatives of the deceased. Those who had drunk the wine, it was believed, would not be visited by the strigoi.

  Thus it was that the mythological figure of the Strix, or night owl, that made its first appearance in the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, migrated down the centuries into different cultures, becoming the strigoi of medieval Romanian folklore. As with the stories of bats and werewolves, ancient and medieval peoples observed the behaviour of the animals around them, especially those mysterious animals that were only seen at night, and built legends around them to explain their habits and explore their alien way of life. In this way, these animals played their part in the complex development of human civilization and its relationship to the natural world.

  African vampires

  Evil creatures who have morphed from human form into evil nocturnal birds are also a feature of non-European cultures. In West Africa, the Asanbosam, or Sasabonsam, is a legendary figure in the folklore of the Ashanti people. Myths about this creature occur in Ghana, Togo, and the Ivory Coast. The Asanbosam is a vampire-like animal that is said to live in trees and swoop down to attack people. Legend has it that this monster has iron claws and iron teeth, and preys on human beings and other animals, ripping them to shreds in order to drink their blood and devour their flesh.

  Another blood-sucking creature from Ashanti folklore is the Obayifo. This is a kind of witch who is able to inhabit the body of a living human being. The obayifo comes out at night, and is said to be visible by its luminous armpits and anus. It is always on the look-out for food, and is said to hang around the house when cooking is going on. It is believed to be able sometimes to enter the bodies of animals so as to attack human beings.

  The Obayifo is particularly feared for its ability to suck the blood out of children from afar, also being able to draw the life force out of farm land so that it yields no harvest. It is thought to suck sap out of plants to assuage its thirst, and is often held responsible for diseases in crops. In cases of cocoa blight, for example, the Obayifo will be blamed. In order to combat the monster’s destructive influence, an Okomfo, or witch doctor, will perform various rituals to banish it, and will be supported by the entire tribe in his endeavours. Among some African peoples, the Obayifo is known as the Asiman, and similar stories are told about its evil doings.

  The Aboriginal Yara-ma-yha-who

  In Australia, the mythical figure of the bloodsucking Yara-ma-yha-who would often be invoked by Aboriginal people to stop their children from wandering off on their own. This creature was said to be a small monkey or frog-like man with a large head, whose body was covered in red hair. Its face was dominated by a very wide mouth, and on the tips of its fingers and toes it had suckers like an octopus. It lived in trees, waiting for its victims to stop and rest in the shade, whereupon it would leap down to attack. Placing its suckers on the victim’s skin, it would drain all the blood out of his or her body. It would then swallow the victim whole, wash down the meal with a drink from a nearby river, and then lie down to take a nap.

  The next step of the story is a strange one, and demonstrates the gentle, humorous nature of much Aboriginal folklore. According to the legend, after a few hours the Yara-ma-yha-who would wake up and regurgitate its victim alive and unharmed. The only telltale sign of such an attack would be that the victim became a little shorter than before. If a person was attacked several times, he or she might also become a Yara-ma-yha-who, living in trees and waiting to attack innocent victims, especially children.

  As has been pointed out by many commentators, the Yara-ma-yha-who is not strictly a vampire, since there is no suggestion that the creature is a revenant from the grave, or an undead soul of any sort; however, the blood-sucking behaviour of the Aboriginal sprite has much in common with the European tradition of the Strix and Strigoi, and with other folkloric sprites and demons from around the world, which have close parallels to the mythic tradition of the vampire.

  The Female Demons

  Ancient mythology is full of legends about female demons that prey on men and children. A recurring theme is that these demons have suffered barrenness in a former life, and so in the afterlife appear as a ghoul, taking their revenge by attacking children at night, while they are asleep, and devouring them. In many of the stories, the demons also seduce men, stealing them away from their wives, and sucking their blood, which helps to sustain their ghostly existence in the afterlife.

  The Succubus

  The parallels with vampires are obvious. Medieval folklore also contains accounts of the Succubus, a vampire-like creature who takes the form of a woman. The Succubus appears to a man at night, usually in a highly seductive form, and forces him to have repeated sexual intercourse with her, until he is drained of strength, or sometimes even dies. She may also feed on his blood, which is her way of taking his life force from him.

  As with the tales of female vampires, what we encounter in the parallel myths and legends of such creatures is a universal anxiety about female sexuality. The fear is that if a woman fails to marry or to bear children in her lifetime, her jealousy will reach such proportions that, in the afterlife, she will reappear as a Succubus or Lamia, using her powerful feminine charms to corrupt other women’s husbands, and destroying their offspring in revenge for her own barrenness.

  Lamia the child eater

  Lamia is a figure from Ancient Greek mythology, who appears in the writings of Diodorus Siculus, a historian from the first century bc. Diodorus recounts that Lamia was the daughter of King Belus of Egypt. In other accounts, she is reported to be the daughter of Poseidon, the god of the sea.

  Whatever her provenance, her main claim to fame is that she had an affair with the god Zeus, bearing him several children. This apparently
enraged Zeus’s wife Hera to the point where she murdered Lamia’s children. In response, Lamia lost her mind and set off to wander the earth, preying on the children of other women, particularly newborn infants. She would attack them at night, carrying them off to a lonely place and devouring them. Diodorus reports that this vile habit distorted her face, so that instead of being a beautiful, young woman, she became a hideous hag. However, in other retellings of the myth, Lamia retains her beauty in the upper half of her body, while in the lower, she grows a penis, which she hides by draping a snakeskin around her loins.

  With these often quite gruesome tales, the ancients conjured up the image of a woman who, denied the pleasures of motherhood, morphs into a man, adopting the violent, destructive qualities and aggressive sexual drives traditionally attributed to masculinity. Interestingly, in nearly all versions of the story, this unhappy state of affairs is initially occasioned by another woman, the jealous Hera. It is Hera who condemns Lamia to a life of torment by murdering the illegitimate children she has borne as a result of her affair with Zeus. Much later, in Roman times, the poet Horace went further, suggesting that Hera may have actually forced Lamia to eat her own children, rather than simply murdering them. And there is also a legend that Hera cursed Lamia with the inability to close her eyes, so that she could find no rest, and was forever unable to dispel the vision of her dead children’s faces from her consciousness.

  Drinking infants’ blood

  In some accounts of the story, Zeus takes pity on Lamia and gives her the ability to take her eyes out, so that she will be able to rest. According to some sources, this also gives her the gift of prophecy. However, Lamia continues to live a nightmare existence, seemingly unable to stop herself from preying on sleeping infants and stealing them away to drink their blood and eat their flesh.

  In the following centuries, the more sympathetic aspect of Lamia’s history as a bereaved mother dropped away, and she became the personification of feminine vice. Instead of being a single historical figure, her name came to be interchangeable with that of the Succubus and the harlot, and she eventually became synonymous with any seductive woman with evil intent. She was depicted as a creature whose bare-breasted upper half took the alluring form of a beautiful woman, and whose lower half was that of a snake. This was a symbolic representation of her duplicity and hypocrisy, and once again, indicated the fear that female sexuality, once freed from the bonds of motherhood and wifely duty, would prove a destructive, evil force to the rest of society.

  Snake form

  In 1819 the English poet John Keats wrote a narrative poem entitled Lamia, telling the story of how the god Hermes restores the serpentine Lamia to her human form. A Corinthian youth, Lycius, falls in love with her, and the couple are betrothed. At their wedding, however, a sage, Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s true identity. She immediately reverts to her snake form, and the bridegroom promptly dies of grief. This poem did much to highlight the image of the Lamia in Victorian culture, and became one of Keats’ most famous poems, chiming as it did with the repressive Victorian view of female sexuality.

  Today, in modern Greece, the story of the Lamia still persists as part of the folklore of the country. Children are admonished that unless they behave, the dreaded Lamia will come to take them away. If an infant dies suddenly, in what we now call a cot death, the incident is sometimes described as being the result of strangulation by the Lamia. And if a woman fails to keep her house clean and tidy, her housework will be criticized as ‘Lamia’s sweeping’. Greedy or stupid women are also dubbed Lamia. Thus, in modern times, as well as in the past, the Lamia has become the symbol of all that is hated and feared in the figure of the unattached, undomesticated woman who has rejected motherhood.

  The storm demon Lilith

  Lilith, a snake-like character from Hebrew mythology briefly mentioned earlier, is very much akin to the Lamia, and as the centuries progress, the two become interchangeable. She began life in 4000 bc as one of several wind or storm demons in Mesapotamia. These demons were said to bring disease, illness, and death. Lilitu, as she was called, was a Succubus who appeared to men in their dreams, and was known for her lustful ways. It was believed that she caused men to have nocturnal emissions, thus draining away their strength. She was often depicted as having talons and wings, like a bird, and living in the desert. She would leave her lair at night, whenever a sandstorm blew up, to prey on men and generally wreak havoc with human lives. Some believed she was the handmaiden of other deities, such as the Sumerian goddess of fertility, Inanna, and her Assyrian counterpart Ishtar; others, that she was an unclean woman or prostitute, a harbinger of death and disease.

  The disobedient wife

  There are many fascinating versions of the story in early Hebrew texts, some of which contradict the creation myth. In one story, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith appears as the first wife of Adam. When Adam demands that she lie beneath him during sexual intercourse, she refuses, saying that God created them both equal. She then flies off and consorts with demons, producing demonic children, one hundred of whom die every day. In other stories, such as those of the Kabbalah, Lilith herself turns into a serpent, and it is she who tempts Adam and Eve with the apple, causing their banishment from the Garden of Eden.

  In the Middle Ages, Lilith was said to have married the King of Demons, Asmodeus, spreading chaos and misery at every opportunity. If a man became impotent, or a woman was found to be infertile, or a child died in infancy, Lilith would be blamed. Up until the eighteenth century, this superstition persisted: a magic circle would be drawn around the bedroom when a mother gave birth, and both mothers and babies would be given amulets to protect them. The names of the three angels who had tried to take her back to Adam – Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangelof – would also be invoked to keep her away.

  Mother deity

  Later, in the Romantic period, the German writer Goethe returned to the subject of Lilith in his great play Faust, characterizing her as a sorceress who suffocates men by winding her long hair tightly around them. In the Victorian period, the poet Robert Browning took a different approach, emphasizing that Lilith has an abject attachment to Adam, crawling like a snake to him and promising to be his slave.

  In contemporary times, there has been a re-evaluation of Lilith. Some view her as an early mother goddess overseeing and celebrating an essentially feminine sphere of sexuality and fertility, on a par with positive nurturing deities such as the Egyptian goddess Isis. According to this view, the rise of patriarchy provoked a demonization of women, so that instead of being an essentially benevolent female force, Lilith becomes a destructive demon. Perhaps the most balanced way to view her, from our current perspective, is as a counterpart to such deities as the Indian goddess Kali, who has great sexual power that can be wielded for both positive or negative use. Significantly, this more subtle interpretation links with today’s approach to the vampire myth, which stresses the creature’s sympathetic, as well as destructive, aspects.

  The Chupacabra

  Unlike most of the mythical creatures described in this section, the Chupacabra is not part of ancient folklore. Rather, it is a monster of modern times, what we might describe, in contemporary terms, as an ‘urban legend’. From the 1970s on, there were rumours of a goat-eating beast roaming the remote areas of the world and killing small animals, but reported sightings of this mysterious vampire-like animal reached their height in the 1990s. At this time, the Chupacabra, as it came to be called, was blamed for killing various kinds of livestock in many parts of the Americas, as far as Mexico in the south and Maine in the north.

  To date, there has been no confirmed scientific evidence that such a monstrous creature exists. However, some animals have been seen (and in some cases shot, or their corpses found) and identified as aberrant types of coyote or dog. Nonetheless, in many communities, particularly those of Latin America, the Chupacabra continues to be feared as a horrifying monster that will attack smaller animals such as goats, emptying thei
r entire bodies of blood.

  The goat sucker

  In Spanish, Chupacabra literally means ‘sucker of goats’. The name has been attributed to Silverio Perez, a well-known TV host, comedian, and musician from Puerto Rico. He coined the term after seeing reports in the newspapers about the deaths of livestock and the suspicion that a vampire-like creature had been responsible for killing them. The name caught on, and today, it has become much used throughout the Americas.

  In the early 1990s in Puerto Rico, there were rumours of a strange beast that had been seen in remote parts of the country. It was said to be a large, lumbering creature the size of a bear, with a row of spines along its entire back, from neck to tail. It also, according to some reports, had large, vicious-looking fangs. Other accounts described the animal as a reptile-like creature with leathery greenish-grey skin and quills running down its back. In other descriptions, the reptile’s body was covered in scales.