Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  It might not be that simple, however. Vârkolak may indeed mean “wolf pelt,” and quite literally so—denoting the wolf pelts Balkan tribesmen ritually donned during pagan times. The words it hatched then undertook a vast mythological odyssey, for when they next appear, they describe a cosmic monster that caused eclipses by eating the sun or moon before settling back on earth and taking on the additional sense of the devouring dead.

  However it happened, vârkolak and its cognates are now thoroughly entwined with vampir and its derivatives. Only in Greece has vampir never taken root; vrykolakas has crowded it out.

  One hundred fifty years before Tozer undertook his wanderings, the renowned French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort had journeyed to the far corners of Asia Minor on a plant-collecting expedition. His three-volume A Voyage into the Levant is equal parts travelogue and exploration narrative, yet most modern readers ignore his rapturous descriptions of mountain forests ranging along the Black Sea coast and into the Caucasus. Instead, de Tournefort’s book is best remembered for its startling description of vrykolakas hysteria on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he had stopped during the winter of 1700.

  Around the time de Tournefort reached the isle, a truculent and much-disliked peasant had died. Shortly thereafter began a chain of nocturnal depredations. “[I]t was rumored,” de Tournefort wrote, “that he was seen by night walking very fast; that he came into the house, overturning the furniture, extinguishing the lamps, throwing his arms round persons from behind, and playing a thousand sly tricks.”

  Panic quickly engulfed the island. Ten days after the body had been buried, it was dug up so the local butcher might remove its heart. “The corpse,” reported the botanist, “gave out such a bad smell, that they were obliged to burn incense; but the vapour, mixed with the exhalations of that carrion, only augmented the stink, and began to heat the brain of these poor people.”

  De Tournefort continued his account:

  Their imagination, struck with the spectacle, was full of visions; some one thought proper to say that a thick smoke came from this body. We dared not say that it was the vapour of the incense. They only exclaimed “Vroucolacas,” in the chapel, and in the square before it…

  I have no doubt that they would have maintained it did not stink, if we had not been present; so stupified were these poor people with the circumstance, and infatuated with the idea of the return of the dead. For ourselves, who got next to the corpse in order to make our observations exactly, we were ready to die from the offensive odour which proceeded from it. When they asked us what we thought of this dead man, we replied that we believed him thoroughly dead; but as we wished to cure, or at least not to irritate their stricken fancy, we represented to them that it was not surprising if the butcher had perceived some heat in searching amidst entrails which were decaying; neither was it extraordinary that some vapour had proceeded from them; since such will issue from a dunghill that is stirred up….

  Despite one indignity after another being visited upon the corpse, the nightly mischief—and its attendant pandemonium—grew only worse. De Tournefort had never seen anything like it: “Every body seemed to have lost their senses. The most sensible people appeared as phrenzied as the others; it was a veritable brain fever, as dangerous as any mania or madness.” Entire families fled their houses. “Every one complained of some new insult: you heard nothing but lamentations at nightfall…[and] every morning entertained us with the comedy of a faithful recital of all the new follies which had been committed by this bird of night….”

  One exorcism after another failed to rid the town of the revenant. Finally the citizens built a pyre, and de Tournefort watched from a distance as the flames consumed the meddlesome corpse. The islanders then “contented themselves with saying that the devil had been properly caught that time, and they made up a song to turn him into ridicule…After this, must we not own that the Greeks of to-day are not great Greeks, and that there is only ignorance and superstition among them?”

  THE WANDERERS

  Two centuries later, John Cuthbert Lawson, in Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910), sought to disprove de Tournefort’s final contention. Nearly half of Lawson’s influential but little-known book, which Patrick Leigh Fermor called a “real triumph of scholarship and detailed reasoning,” is devoted to the vrykolakas. Lawson believed that the Greeks never adopted the vampir of neighboring lands because they had their own deeply rooted ideas about the walking dead. Vrykolakas, in fact, was merely a “grafting of Slavonic branches upon an Hellenic stock.”

  That stock is still visible on a breathtaking Aegean island. Modern Santorini is a busy tourist resort, yet there was a time when its cliffs were famed more for their vrykolakes (the plural form) than for their commanding ocean views. To “send vrykolakes to Santorini” was the local equivalent of “bringing coals to Newcastle.” That’s because the dry, volcanic soils of Santorini are naturally preservative. Corpses buried there do not decompose as quickly as they do elsewhere.

  Jesuit priest François Richard, who lived on Santorini in the 17th century, described dead bodies that “after fifteen or sixteen years—sometimes even twenty or thirty—are found inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or rolled along, sound like drums…” This quality gave the cadavers the name by which they were once known in Greece: tympaneous, or “drumlike.” That, as well as other dialectal names—fleshy and gaper among them—appear to have survived in the Aegean Islands for a time, but on the mainland—down which the Slavic tide had rolled in the sixth century—vrykolakas reigned supreme. Eventually the islands, too, gave in and adopted that term.

  But why not vampir?

  Stripping the Christian and Slavic overburdens off the original Greek idea, John Lawson concluded that the Greeks did not adopt vampir because of its associated savagery. In their tradition, the walking dead were not always malicious. A good example of this crops up in a well-known fragment from Phlegon’s Mirabilia, a compendium of ghost stories written in the second century A.D. Though its beginning has been lost, the story—which Phlegon claimed to have witnessed—is set in Tralles in Asia Minor, in the house of Demostratus and Charito, whose daughter Philinnion has been dead for six months. Young Machates has been staying in their guest room, however, and he has been receiving nocturnal visits from an unknown lover, who has left her gold ring and breast band behind.

  The visitor is Philinnion, of course. When her parents discover the tokens and eventually behold their dead daughter on one of her midnight manifestations, she upbraids them for spoiling her happiness—and promptly relapses into a corpse. The family vault is then opened, but Philinnion’s spot is empty—save for an iron ring and gilt cup that Machates had given her. Unnerved, the townsfolk transport her corpse beyond the city limits. There, after making suitable propitiations to pagan divinities, they burn it.

  Yet Philinnion is no Carmilla; there is no hint that her midnight visits are predatory. Because the despairing Machates commits suicide, the Mirabilia fragment strikes us as a story of star-crossed lovers, tomb and all.

  Yet most ancient Greek revenants, it appears, returned from the grave to demand—or to wreak—vengeance. Alastor means “avenger,” a kind of male version of Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, and describes a supernatural figure often compared with the Erinyes, or furies. Greek literature and drama abound with alastors avenging such indignities as neglected burial rites, but the creatures are usually bent on blood vengeance. Nevertheless, Lawson has spied, behind the avenging fury that is the alastor, an even older figure: Alastor, he surmised, might originally have meant “wanderer,” not “avenger.”

  “‘To wander unburied,’” Lawson brooded, “could there be a simpler description of a revenant?”:

  Does not the whole misery of the unburied dead consist in this—that they must wander? It is almost inconceivable then that the name Alastor, “wanderer,” should have been originally applied only to a single class of the wander
ing dead—to those whose wanderings were directed towards vengeance, and not also to those whose wanderings were more aimless, more pitiable, whose whole existence might have been summed up in that one word “wandering.”

  As late as the 17th century, Father Richard related the story of a Santorini shoemaker named Alexander who returned from the grave to “frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he was seen no more.” In one corner of the island, Father Richard continued, “these vrykolakes have been seen not only at night but in the open day, five or six together in a field, feeding apparently on green beans.”

  This touching glimpse of the vegetarian dead might strike a responsive chord in readers attuned to the more sensitive vampires of today. But in eras past, such stories, recounted at night beside a dying hearth, would have had an eerie, unsettling effect. For these figures were Lawson’s “wanderers,” trapped in a limbo between worlds, condemned to expiate some crime, or bound by some curse. And in the ancient way of thinking, there seemed no end of potential causes for such curses: sudden or violent death, suicide, lack of proper burial rites, unavenged murder, sorcery, or perjury. Lucian of Samosata, in the first century A.D., mused in his Philopseudes that perhaps the “only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death—anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way—but…the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander.”

  Such agonized figures, like tragic ones, excited pity as much as horror. Only the flame—cremation as an act of mercy—can loose the bond of suffering and bring repose.

  In the thousands of years that have passed since then, this sad figure has undergone a metamorphosis. The church demonized the wanderer, thus turning the original transgression of divine law into a deadly sin—and a formula for excommunication. This ecclesiastical curse then further embraced such offenses as omission of baptism, “sorcery,” apostasy, and heresy—and we have the makings of the modern vampire in Greece. When the word vampir first gained traction in the Balkans, the old notions surrounding the alastor were probably still entrenched, and so people resisted the new word. But those notions had considerably eroded by the time vukodlak and its derivatives were on the rise, and that cleared the way for the reign of vrykolakas.

  POETIC VIEWS OF VAMPIRES

  Might a notion such as the alastor lie deep in Slavic legend? We have no literature and no drama to guide us, so the road must wind through the forest of Slavic folklore. So dense are those rhetorical thickets, however—so full of thorns, so entangled with Nordic mythology—that many an expert has lost his way.

  Some authorities doubt the undergrowth is more than several centuries old. Others suspect it is very deeply rooted indeed. The latter often turn to a pioneering folklorist of the 19th century, the man whose published collections of more than 600 folk- and fairy tales have earned him the sobriquet “the Russian Grimm.”

  Born in 1826 in a village on the edge of the steppe, Alexander Afanasiev spent most of his life plowing through Moscow’s libraries before dying, penniless and racked by tuberculosis, at the age of 45. More than a mere gleaner of existing material, Afanasiev created the massive, three-volume Poetic Views of the Slavs Toward Nature. In this masterpiece, he traced the profusion of Slavic songs, stories, and epic tales further and further back in time until he arrived at a single, if buried, root: the nature myths of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans.

  “Originally our ancestors must have understood by the name vampire,” wrote Afanasiev in the 1860s, “a terrible demon who sucks storm clouds and drinks up all the moisture in them, because in the ancient myths rain was like blood flowing in the veins of cloud spirits and animals…. The winter cold which freezes rain-clouds plunges the creative forces of nature into sleep, death, damnation. The thunder god and lightning spirits are equated to suckers of rain who hide in cloud caves and fall asleep in cloud-graves.”

  If this seems fanciful, consider that poetic (or metaphorical) thought probably came more easily to steppe-dwelling people living in a prescientific age. Cloud and wind and storm; lightning, hail, and drought; sun and moon and stars might indeed have provided the cosmic patterns, the ultimate code that explained, on the principle of “as above, so below,” both natural and supernatural phenomena. We know enough about Slavic mythology to recognize an attractively animistic bent in its sacred stones, trees, rivers, and lakes; its flying grass and weeping grass and dream grass.

  It might be hard to grasp Afanasiev’s assertion that the bellowing of the vampire upon being staked is the metaphorical echo of the thunderstorm’s roar, but it is not difficult to understand how crop failures, famines, and epidemics might be ascribed to such beings. “Everywhere in the Slavic lands,” Afanasiev reminds us, “the fatal activity of the plague is explained by the evil of vampires.” The region also tended to identify vampires with dragons, demons, and “gluttonous Death,” appearing with that grim trio in popular tales as eaters of human flesh.

  And it’s not that much different from the Romanian belief, in the words of one folklorist, that “varcolaci and pricolici [names of mythological monsters] are sometimes dead vampires, and sometimes animals which eat the moon.”

  ELUSIVE DRAGONS

  A century after Afanasiev coughed himself to death, respected Soviet philologists V. V. Ivanov and V. Toporov updated their tsarist forerunner. Combing through comparative mythologies and that cornucopia of folklore, they reconstructed the likely Slavic version of the cosmic battle between the Indo-European gods of storm and earth. What emerged bears a marked resemblance, with certain differences, to Afanasiev’s poetic vision.

  Thousands of years ago, it seems, the Slavic tribes possessed a metaphorical understanding of the drama of storms: Perun, the god of thunder and lightning, is chasing the drag-onlike Volos, or Veles—deity of waters, fields, pastures, flocks, herds, and the underworld—who has stolen the storm god’s wife (or perhaps his cattle). Lightning-shattered stumps and splintered boulders litter the dragon’s path as he tries to elude Perun’s thunderbolts: he transforms himself into now a tree, now a rock, now a human in the course of his vain attempt. Eventually, Volos is cornered and slain, at which point the storm breaks and releases its torrents of fructifying rain.

  Of course, because it is an eternally recurring combat, Volos never really dies. As lord of the underworld, he is leader of all the chthonian powers; each year, as autumn turns to winter, he allows the dead to return to the world above for a few days, where they may visit the living, whom they approach while singing songs about how far they have traveled and how muddy was the way. Where Perun was the warrior’s god, Volos was that of the plowman and herdsman. Where Perun offered an honorable death in battle, the wily Volos offered those who broke their sacred oaths death by pestilence or disease.

  So instead of a wandering figure, we have encountered a myth. But let’s return one final time to that enigmatic reference, in The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols, about ancient sacrifices being offered to “vampires and bereginas.”

  Perhaps some grain of truth lurks behind that 15th-century emendation. The protovampire might indeed have arisen from a deep-seated ancestor cult, as that document suggests. Exactly how they might have done so we shall probably never know. Might it have something to do with a belief in reincarnation? If so, that early conception would have changed over time. Perhaps these protovampires first devolved into the mysterious bereginas, those hovering riverbank spirits—and then were generalized as rusalki, the “souls of the dead.” That would lead, naturally enough, to the “souls of the dead who died a violent death”—and we are back on familiar ground.

  Or perhaps not. Either way, for those who seek the origins of the vampire legend, one source of that stream—possibly the major contributor, possibly not—surely springs from the Balkans during the years in which they
were Christianized, the years when such dualistic heresies as the Bogomils left their deep impression, and the years when religious and political struggle inflicted such lasting wounds.

  Traces of that original cosmic myth have also survived. Where the Vardar River cuts through the heart of mountain-rimmed Macedonia, cradle of vampir, stands the city of Veles, surely an echo of the dragon Volos. High above it towers the peak of St. Elias the Thunderer. Not far by eagle’s wings, along the rugged Greek-Bulgarian border, vampires were once called drakus, or dragons. When the Roman legions crossed the Danube to invade Dacia (modern Romania), they encountered Dacian cavalry carrying dracos, or dragon standards. Draco became dracul in Romania, where once there dwelt a folkloric dragon that, assuming the shape of a man, seduced women and spirited them away to its underworld lair, where only a hero could rescue them.

  All over ancient Thrace (in what is now Bulgaria) lived a people neither Greek nor Slavic—an enigmatic people devoted to blood sacrifices and incantations; to music and feasting and rhytons overflowing with wine, and they were said to know the secrets of immortality. All over that land, exquisite votive tablets once honored an unnamed figure today called simply the Thracian Hero or the Thracian Rider. A mounted figure who might represent either a military leader or the god of thunder, he is clearly depicted as a mighty drinker and an even mightier hunter, a lord of the animals, and a slayer of wild boars, wolves, and dragons. Not surprisingly, his image—horse rearing and lance (was it once a lightning bolt, or is it a stake?) spearing the prostrate foe—was eventually absorbed into that of St. George, whose own cult spread as far as England and whose smoke-blackened icons are found in churches all over the Balkans and deep into Russia. St. George himself had been assimilated to a vegetation god, for his feast day on April 23 was celebrated everywhere as a victory of surging spring over the forces of winter, darkness, and death. And as every folklorist knows, vampires are said to be most active on St. George’s Eve.