It might be a doubtful point; it is certainly an enigmatic object. So is the Assyrian cylinder seal, dating to around 2000 B.C., that depicts a naked female straddling a prostrate male while another man, wielding what looks like a stake but could be a dagger, advances threateningly upon the woman. This seal might have been the amulet of a man “troubled by nightly emissions,” in Campbell Thompson’s decorous phrase. It, too, would ward off a succubus by depicting the fate that lay in store for her.
The surviving bits of literature recovered so far are full of such warnings, spells, and exorcisms. The deserts bounding the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Assyria were fearsome enough places without doubling as the abodes of demons and the dead. These included the mysterious Seven Spirits, suckers of blood and eaters of flesh, and the dreaded ekimmu or elimmu, ghosts of men whose bodies lay abandoned in desert or marsh. Deprived of the proper burial rituals, they wander between worlds, hungry and thirsty, preying on passersby. They seem to be of ancient provenance; in Sumerian demonology, Professor Samuel Hooke noted, “the dead who had not had funeral rites performed for them were greatly feared.”
And then there was Lilith, who clawed her way up the demonological ladder until, by the Middle Ages, she was Queen of the Succubi, if not the consort of the devil himself. Lilith began inauspiciously enough, though, possibly as the Sumerian wind spirit (from lil, “wind”), one of the legions that arose in the solitary wastes of the desert. She got an early boost in status when she married Adam—this was before Eve, at least according to Hebrew folklore—but was eventually exiled back to the desert. There she took up residence, said the Prophet Isaiah, with jackals and ostriches and vultures. Once her name became confused with the Hebrew layal (“night”), Lilith became a hairy, night-flying monster—the very epitome of the female sexual predator. Solomon thought the Queen of Sheba’s hairy legs betrayed her as Lilith in disguise, and indeed, in this hirsute role, she has wormed her way through poetry, drama, and fiction.
But if Lilith morphed into a literary archetype, another demonic Hebrew child killer, the estrie, managed to retain her original vampiric attributes. At the burial of a woman believed liable to become an estrie after death, the body was examined to see if its mouth was open. That, as we have seen, was an infallibly ominous sign—and if the mouth was in fact open, it was promptly stuffed with dirt.
Deeper in the deserts of Arabia, a demon in the shape of a beautiful enchantress was said to open graves to feed on fresh corpses. She was called the algul— origin, understandably, of the English word ghoul. Islam may have banished such monsters to the farthest liminal margins, but it could not eradicate the fear of them. An isolated grave found in an Ottoman cemetery on the Greek island of Mytilene, and dating to the late 18th or early 19th century, contained a skeleton with nails driven through its neck, pelvis, and ankles. Muslim custom calls for the imam to remain at the tomb when a funeral is over, to coach the dead man in the replies he should make to the Questioners—the angels Mounkir and Nekir—who have entered the grave to interrogate him about his faith. Even in Islam, the soul after death retains some mysterious connection with its body, and is thought to linger with it until after its burial.
No place in the ancient world, however, was more obsessed with death than Egypt. Possessing the most elaborate funerary complex of them all, as the pyramids have reminded countless generations of visitors, the Egyptians so purified, embalmed, mummified, memorialized, and mythologized their dead that surely they must have told tales of their occasional return. Yet, despite Egypt’s reputation as the wellspring of all magic, all mystery, all black arts; despite its subsequent role in the literature of mystery and romance; and despite claims to the contrary, no trace of vampires has been found in the country’s extensive archaeological records.
The reason: The Egyptians performed their mortuary labors too well. Many of the earliest mummies were decapitated, eviscerated, hacked into pieces, and then reassembled and wrapped in linen, rendering the body uninhabitable. Furthermore, they built for the ages. All those necropolises in the desert, all that “care that the Egyptians took to bury their dead in tombs deep in the ground and in the sides of mountains,” as pioneering Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge wrote in 1883, may have been the equivalent of constructing containment domes around some very dangerous force: “The massive stone and wooden sarcophagi, the bandages of the mummy, the double and triple coffins, the walled-up doors of the tomb, the long shaft filled with earth and stones, etc., all were devised with the idea of making it impossible for the dead to reappear upon the earth.”
NIGHT IN THE KAMPONGS
From Burma to the farthest-flung islands of the Malay Archipelago, in jungles where head-hunting once thrived and were-tigers and were-buffalo and even were-elephants once stalked, the rank flourish of tropical vegetation competes with a riot of supernatural bloodsucking creatures. When their tales were told at night in the scattered kampongs, or villages, protective screens of jeruju thorn might be drawn closer around the community’s most vulnerable: pregnant women, infants, and young mothers.
In Malaysia, it is told, a mother once died of grief after giving birth to a stillborn. Her spirit flew up into a tree and became a langsuir, a cormorantlike vampire that eats fish and spitefully sucks the blood of other newborns through a hole in the back of her neck. By day, however, she continued to be the very picture of a beautiful Malay woman, with long, black hair and a green dress. The stillborn child, for its part, became a pontianak— a terrible little bloodsucking vampire that often assumes the form of an owl. Unless certain now-familiar steps are taken with their corpses, all mothers who die in childbirth, and all babies who are stillborn, are in the danger of becoming langsuir and pontianak. Needles must be jabbed in their palms, eggs lodged beneath their arms, and glass beads inserted in their mouths to block the entry or exit of spirits. Folklore being what it is, however, the roles have been reversed on crowded Java. There, the langsuir has become the stillborn child, and the pontianak the inconsolable, vengeful mother heard wailing in the night.
Stillborn children, dying newborns, mothers expiring while giving birth or before they can be ritually purified—such tragedies must have been all too common at one time, so deeply have they impressed themselves upon the folklore. Stories of dead mothers and children returning and, having been robbed of life and offspring themselves, enviously destroying those of others, convey an almost unbearable psychological truth. Yet, the local mythology saw even healthy, growing children as vulnerable, too. They might be attacked by the bajang, a malevolent spirit clearly based on the secretive, nocturnal civet of the jungle canopy. When captured in a hollow bamboo stalk, the bajang can become a wizard’s familiar—and even his legacy, passed down from one generation to the next in a wizard family.
The most dreaded and lurid supernatural predator of mothers and infants in Malaysia is the horrible penanggalen, a monster reduced to its gory minimum: a fanged female head trailing only stomach and intestines. These vile viscera glow behind it at night like a macabre comet, sometimes sparkling like fireflies. Given this ghastly vision, it’s easy to understand how and why only a screen of jeruju thorn might have the power to entangle and halt the demon.
When the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in the 1500s, they found a population terrified of aswangs— supernatural creatures that were a blend of vampire, witch, and some kind of were-animal. The aswang that flew in the night was decidedly a bloodsucker, using its long tongue to prick the jugular vein of the unwary sleeper, but during the day, it was a beautiful woman leading an ordinary village life; she achieved her supernatural powers, as did medieval witches, by rubbing herself with a special ointment.
To ward off an aswang attack—and, incidentally, to carve out more room on the communal sleeping mat—you might rub garlic in your armpits. In some places, the aswang is called mandurugo, or “bloodsucker.” Beautiful and enticing by day, a winged monstrosity by night, the mandurugo preys on a succession of young men.
The Spanish also encountered a belief in the danag. Once a cultural hero as the goddess who gave humankind the gift of taro, the danag had since been demoted to a bloodsucking demon.
Such creatures both resemble the European vampire and differ from it. They suck blood. They bring death by disease. They prey upon the vulnerable. And they are often mixed up with witches and wizards. The aswang, the mandurugo, and the danag are also associated with such nocturnal aviators as the owl and the flying fox, or kalang, a fearsome-looking bat with a wingspan of six feet that Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus unjustifiably named Pteropus vampyrus in 1758, though it actually eats nothing but fruit.
And though “it is impossible,” as authors Stella Martin and Denis Walls put it, “to ascertain whether orang minyak (oily men) were human or fictional,” many women might find them creepily reminiscent of real-life vampires they have known: “These naked and reputedly handsome men molest unsuspecting women in their homes at night and if caught either slip out of their captors’ hands or, according to some, turn into butterflies or rats.”
TALES FROM CHINA AND JAPAN
In a land as ancient as China, where ancestor worship has been so prominent for so long, tombs and cemeteries are ubiquitous. The bodies that are laid there—or rather stood, as Chinese cadavers were often buried vertically—were also swathed in shrouds and wrapped with as many protective rituals as man was capable of inventing. For the Chinese double soul—p’o was earthy, made of shadowy yin, while hun was spirit, full of bright yang—had worked harmoniously in life but then separated at death: While the hun departed for heaven, the p’o remained with the body and ultimately returned to earth.
But leave a corpse too long exposed to sunlight (or, for the sake of ambience, to moonlight) and the p’o might absorb too much yang. The moon has always been a source of occult energy (in Europe, moonbeams were said to induce lunacy, but in China, its energy is that of yang) — thus the belief that, should moonbeams strike a fresh corpse, yang might seep into it and overwhelm the p’o. This might reawaken a need for continuing sustenance once in the grave—a need that can be met only by feeding on the corpses nearby or, failing that, by feeding on living people. In the latter case, you get a ch’ing shih— a Chinese vampire.
And what a vampire: With its red, staring eyes, fetid breath, talonlike fingernails, and cerements covered with the fungus of the grave, it preys on those who pass too close to graveyards at night. The only ways to stop its depredations are to be more prompt in the observances of ancestor worship (moonlight as well as neglected ritual being equally powerful progenitors of a ch’ing shih) or, as a last resort, to burn the body. It may also be the case that a demon has simply possessed a fresh cadaver; either way, as an animated corpse, it closely resembles the European vampire.
Two subtle variations: The ch’ing shih doesn’t infect its victims with its own taint, and it doesn’t swoop down upon them—it can only hop.
It is tempting to seek a channel of cultural transmission, perhaps back and forth along the immemorial Silk Road, where merchants might have carried legends and tales of the walking dead by telling them at night by campfire light or under the roof of caravanserais long gone to dust. But that path is probably too difficult to follow. In any event, to the west of China are those inhospitable figures: the Nepalese Lord of Death, perched on a pile of skeletons, with a crown of skulls and a necklace of severed hands; and the Mongolian Lord of Time, surrounded by bones and rotting corpses.
Tibet is no less forbidding. In 1931, French traveler Alexandra David-Neel witnessed a sort of vampire role reversal: A Tibetan shaman was wrestling with a corpse. He lay on it and, in effect, kissed it, at the same time repeating a magic formula. The corpse tried to throw him off, but the shaman clung fast and eventually succeeded in biting off the cadaver’s tongue. At that, the corpse collapsed back into lifelessness and left a potent talisman—the severed tongue—in the shaman’s possession. That doesn’t sound very European.
Looking east from China, though, it’s hard to find a vampire at all. After 1854, when Japan was first opened to the world, a flood of curious Westerners descended upon the Land of the Rising Sun and, spellbound by what they found, began interpreting this ancient culture to readers back home. Among them was Algernon B. Mitford, later Baron Redesdale, whose 1871 book, Tales of Old Japan, would prove to be an enduring classic. Among the stories Mitford included was one he called “The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima.”
The Prince of Hizen has fallen in love with a “lady of rare beauty, called O Toyo” who, unknown to him, is throttled to death by a giant cat and buried beneath the veranda. The cat then assumes O Toyo’s beautiful form and, lamia-like, begins preying on the prince while he sleeps. When eventually discovered, the beautiful woman transforms back into a cat, springs onto the roof, and gets away.
But not for long.
In classic fairy tale fashion, the cat “fled to the mountains, and did much mischief among the surrounding people, until at last the Prince of Hizen ordered a great hunt, and the beast was killed.”
That is one of the few vampire stories found in the monster-rich folklore of Japan. Fragments, and occasionally entire poems, from ancient Japan mention encounters with dead people out walking, and one poem in particular somehow protects its bearer should he meet up with such a strolling corpse. Yet these are only vestiges. Sepulchers from the Jomon period (4000 to 250 B.C.) have been opened in which skeletons were curled up, stretched out, or had stones placed on chest or head. Archaeologists still puzzle over some bodies buried in fetal positions, wondering whether they signify a return to the womb or represent precautions taken against the return of dead people. Even touching a decomposing corpse demands a purification rite, and Yomi, the Japanese land of the dead, is the decomposing corpse writ large: a domain of impurity that, like most underworlds, is also the source of eventual regeneration.
Yet, the exquisite refinement that is uniquely Japanese extended even to the ancient tomb. Mitford noted how the “rich and noble are buried in several square coffins, one inside the other, in a sitting position; and their bodies are partially preserved from decay by filling the nose, ears, and mouth with vermilion. In the case of the very wealthy, the coffin is completely filled in with vermilion.”
Japanese folklore had its share of demons, baby eaters, and ghouls, as Lafcadio Hearn made known in his In Ghostly Japan. The 19th-century literary critic and travel writer also belonged to that first generation of Westerners enraptured by Japan. Yet, he discovered something ineffably eerier in the appearance of a fleet of miniature “ghost ships.” During the Bon—a three-day festival of the dead held each year in late summer—tiny ship models, each bearing their own little working lanterns, were set afloat on the sea at night. Hearn swam out into the ocean to observe the spectacle firsthand:
I watched those frail glowing shapes drifting through the night, and ever as they drifted scattering, under impulse of wind and wave, more and more widely apart. Each, with its quiver of color, seemed a life afraid,—trembling on the blind current that was bearing it into the outer blackness…. Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating further and further one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colors, must melt forever into the colorless Void….
Even in the moment of this thought I began to doubt whether I was really alone,—to ask myself whether there might not be something more than a mere shuddering of light in the thing that rocked beside me: some presence that haunted the dying flame, and was watching the watcher. A faint cold thrill passed over me,—perhaps some chill uprising from the depths,—perhaps the creeping only of a ghostly fancy. Old superstitions of the coast recurred to me,—old vague warnings of peril in the time of the passage of Souls. I reflected that were any evil to befall me out there in the night,—meddling, or seeming to meddle, with the lights of the Dead,—I should mys
elf furnish the subject of some future weird legend.
So he whispered a hurried Buddhist farewell, then struck out for the shore.
RARE SIGHTINGS
Voyage across the vast Pacific, and the vampire gets only more elusive. In Melanesia, where chiefs were once buried standing up with just their heads emerging from the sand, the dead are envisioned as eating lizards and excrement, among other unpleasantness. In New Caledonia, the dead are likely to return in deceptive form, like that of a living man, but they can be detected at night because they snore, or by the more reliable sign that their body disappears and leaves only the head visible. In north Malekula, the dead are ever present, their skulls arranged on a flat stone in the men’s lodge, where people invoke them by spitting continuously in their direction.
Though such examples can be dug up indefinitely, few vampires are found.
Anthropologist George R. Stetson discovered evidence in Captain Cook’s voyages that, as Stetson put it, the “Polynesians believed that the vampires were the departed souls, which quitted the grave…to creep by night into the houses and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, who afterward died.” Other scholars, by contrast, have come up empty-handed. As in so many cultures worldwide, however, those of the South Seas warn the living that ominous occurrences should be expected when burial rituals for the dead are not observed, or if their resting places are disturbed later on.
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