Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  A vampire tradition may not exist in the New World, either—but that hardly renders its every element absent. Among the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes region, for example, the soul that failed to enter the next world was doomed to return and to reanimate its body. In a Cherokee legend published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1892, some folklorists perceive an explanation of tuberculosis. A “Demon of Consumption,” goes the tale, once lived in a cave and possessed an iron finger. At night he would steal out, impersonate a member of a given family, enter his house, “select his victim, begin fondling his head, and run his soft fingers through his hair until the unsuspecting victim would go to sleep. Then with his iron finger would he pierce the victim’s side and take his liver and lungs, but without pain. The wound would immediately heal, leaving no outward mark.” With no memory of the assault, the victim would go about his business, growing weaker by the day until he wasted away altogether and died.

  Stetson, too, singled out a Cherokee tale. “There are in that tribe,” he wrote, “quite a number of old witches and wizards who thrive and fatten upon the livers of murdered victims.” Like medieval demons, they gather around those on their deathbeds, tormenting and eventually killing them. But mere death does not end the agony. After burial, the Cherokee demons dig up the body, remove the liver, and feast upon it. “They thus lengthen their own lives by as many days as they have taken from his,” Stetson continued. “In this way they get to be very aged, which renders them objects of suspicion. It is not, therefore, well to grow old among the Cherokees.”

  Folklorist Stith Thompson includes this Abenaki tale in his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: An old wizard had died and was laid in the branches of a tree in a burial grove. One evening, an Indian and his wife passed by, looking for a place to spend the night. They set up camp beneath the tree and cooked their food. Glancing up, the woman “saw long dark things hanging among the tree branches.” Those were merely the dead from long ago, her husband explained. He then unaccountably fell fast asleep. But the wife, understandably, could not close an eyelid:

  Soon the fire went out, and then she began to hear a gnawing sound, like an animal with a bone. She sat still, very much scared, all night long. About dawn she could stand it no longer, and reaching out, tried to wake her husband, but could not…. The gnawing had stopped. When daylight came she went to her husband and found him dead, with his left side gnawed away, and his heart gone.

  When the body of the dead wizard was taken down and unwrapped, the “mouth and face were covered with fresh blood.”

  Shift that setting to Russia and exchange the grove for a graveyard, and you would have a classic folkloric vampire tale.

  QUICK OR DEAD?

  “Zombi!—the word is perhaps full of mystery even for those who made it,” marveled Lafcadio Hearn, who washed up on Martinique after leaving Japan. Often erroneously credited with introducing the word zombie in its present meaning into English, in an 1889 Harpers article, Hearn found that in Martinique, it applied to a wide range of goblins, specters, and other monsters of the nursery, but never to the dead. It was a word, he acknowledged, that must have “special strange meanings.”

  Our modern word zombie has certainly taken a strange odyssey. It actually appeared in English 70 years earlier, in Robert Southey’s 1819 History of Brazil. Describing an independent ex-slave republic near Pernambuco in the 1690s, Southey stated that its chief was called Zombi, which was the “name for the Deity, in the Angolan tongue.” Noting that the militantly Catholic Portuguese, colonizers of both Brazil and Angola, translated Zombi as “devil,” Southey checked certain books of religious instruction that were printed in both Portuguese and Angolan: “There I found that N’Zambi is the word for Deity.”

  From deity to walking corpse is a very large leap, but perhaps the devil has something to do with it after all; missionaries and colonial officials denigrated native gods everywhere as demons. Lexicographers have been combing the jungles of African etymology for decades, hunting for the origins of zombi. Many have sided with Southey. In Kimbundu, the language of Angola, they find the word rendered as nzambi (“god”) or zumi (“ghost” or “departed spirit”). Other linguists derive greater enlightenment from Kikongo, a related language, where zumi means “fetish” and nvumbi is a body deprived of its soul. All point to the region bracketing the mouth of the Congo River, from Angola in the south to Gabon in the north.

  The best-known zombie hails from a different hemisphere entirely. It is the grisliest component in the lurid assemblage of features—including pins stuck in effigy dolls, child sacrifice, and cannibalism—that for generations constituted the popular conception of Haitian voodoo. There, the zombie is a mindless if ambulatory corpse, like those spotted working in a sugarcane field by American writer William B. Seabrook. An avowed cannibal himself—he claimed to have shared with an African chief a human rump steak that was “so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal”—Seabrook spent months in Haiti while researching his 1929 book The Magic Island.

  The zombies that Seabrook claimed to have encountered had “staring, unfocused, unseeing” eyes. Their faces were “not only expressionless, but incapable of expression,” and they harvested the cane stalks in a kind of unconscious suspended animation, showing no response even to Seabrook’s touch. Could these have been living men, put under a cataleptic spell by certain “substances,” recognized by the Haitian code pénal, that “without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less prolonged”? Perhaps. Yet in theory, at least, they also might have been reanimated corpses, bereft of speech and free will.

  In Haiti, it seems, the sorcerer can suck a man’s soul out through the crack of his door and bottle it. This proves fatal; once the victim is buried, the wizard—like the resurrectionists of 18th-century England—sneaks into the graveyard and digs him up. After due propitiations to death gods, the wizard uncorks the bottle and waves it back and forth beneath the corpse’s nose. This waft of his own soul reanimates the dead man, but the wizard then promptly applies some baleful herb to ensure he remains a mindless slave.

  Alternatively, the wizard can simply wait until somebody dies and then, like sorcerers in Gabon, revive the body by recalling its soul—which, if not still lingering inside the cadaver, is at least hovering nearby. Either way, time is of the essence: Once decomposition sets in, the dead body is useless as a slave. It might just as well be transformed into animal meat and sold in the market. Unsurprisingly, it is reputed to spoil quickly.

  Waiting to drop down upon the unwary, multitudes of bloodsucking, bloodcurdling creatures infest the forests of the African imagination—just as they do the Indian and the Malaysian. Whether or not he originated in the cult of an African snake god, the zombie is not a bloodsucker. Nor is he—despite the mindless cannibals of moviedom—a midnight predator. Rather, a zombie is simply a reanimated corpse, directed by a sorcerer. In this shaman-centered world of divisible souls and of cadavers restored to dimly fluttering life, we can glimpse yet another clue to the origins of the primitive vampire.

  The deeper in time we venture—and the farther from Eurasia—the more elusive the vampire grows. He may not appear at all times and in all places. One element, though, seems universal: The dead body must undergo a fixed sequence of changes before being reduced to its fundamental form, the skeleton. That transition, from demise to dissolution, is everywhere deemed a dangerous interlude for both the quick and the dead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE LARVAE

  IN 1781, IN THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS near what is now North Ossetia, Russia, a traveler named Stöder witnessed a gripping and no doubt ancient ceremony. A young woman had just been struck and killed by lightning. Immediately afterward, the residents of her village, heedless of the storm, rushed to her body, crying joyously and dancing in a circle around her corpse while singing a song to Elias, or Elijah the Thunderer—the ancient Indo-Europe
an god of storms and lightning, draped in the more acceptable garments of an Old Testament prophet.

  The dead girl was dressed in new clothes and placed in a coffin atop a platform. For eight days, everyone—including the girl’s parents, sisters, and husband—celebrated. A fire was kept burning, and all work was suspended. Any expression of grief was thought to be a sin against Elijah. Present at the ritual was a youth who had himself survived a lightning strike, which gave him special status as a servant and messenger of Elijah. He sang and danced, then fell into convulsions; when he opened his eyes, he told what he had seen in the heavenly company of Elijah, naming previous lightning victims who were standing at Elijah’s side.

  On the eighth day, the dead girl was laid on a new cart, pulled by a pair of oxen with white spots, and paraded through the neighboring villages, accompanied by singing youths and relatives who collected gifts of livestock and food. Then the oxen were turned loose; the patch of grass on which they stopped nearby was designated the burial spot. The coffin was placed on a rectangle of stones several feet high; next to it villagers erected a pole, on which they stretched the skin and head of a goat. Here, everyone feasted.

  Remarkably similar ceremonies were once reported all over the Caucasus—among the few commonalities in a fragmented region where each valley otherwise seemed to be its own tribal enclave, speaking its own language and practicing its own traditions. In some places, the lightning-seared body was left on the platform until it decomposed. In others, the body might be hung from a tree for three days while dances and sacrifices took place. Sometimes a “banquet of the thunderstruck” was held on the anniversary of the unfortunate soul’s death. And always the victim’s livestock were released into pastures, specially marked to warn the shepherds away.

  Most important, a nimbus of the holy surrounded the lightning’s victim. The survivor was endowed with prophetic powers, to be sure, but the dead were assumed to be sitting among the heavenly elite. Whether quick or dead, these people were charged with a divine energy; they were tabu, hieros, sacer, all meaning “consecrated, holy, untouchable”—and “terrifying.” For it’s not the lightning, but what it illuminates: The joy evident in the community often hid a deeper fear, because the newly dead were believed to enjoy sudden access to supernatural powers. And “primitive man,” as anthropologist Sir James Frazer put it in 1933, saw the handiwork of the dead everywhere, particularly “in earthquakes, thunderstorms, drought, famine, disease and death. No wonder that he regards the supposed authors of such evils with awe and fear, and seeks to guard himself against them by all the means at his command.”

  THE POWER OF THE PERISHED

  In Curiosities of Olden Times (1895), the English reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, best known for penning the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” quotes two lines from the priest officiating at the funeral of Hamlet’s Ophelia, who has drowned herself in a brook: “For charitable prayers / Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.”

  “Unquestionably it must have been customary in England,” Reverend Baring-Gould observes, “thus to pelt a ghost that was suspected of the intention to wander. The stake driven through the suicide’s body was a summary and complete way of ensuring that the ghost would not be troublesome.”

  Fear of the dead: Just as it has cast its dank shadow over myth and legend worldwide, so too is it apparent in the tangible artifacts of funerary practices. In graves thousands of years old, skeletons have been found staked, tied up, buried facedown, decapitated, pinned with arrows, crushed by boulders, partially cremated, or exhumed and then reburied—all well-attested ways of preempting the depredations of wandering corpses.

  The ancestors are the apotheosized dead. Having been gathered unto their forefathers, they now dwell in an idealized, timeless realm. The recently dead are another story: No matter who they are—parents, siblings, children, friends—they are often conceived as resentful, aggressive, and willing to use their newly enhanced powers against the living. As anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington wrote in 1991, “[t]he corpse is feared because, until its reconstruction in the beyond is complete, part of its spiritual essence remains behind, where it menaces the living with the threat of further death.” So mortuary rites were devised primarily to help the spirit adjust to its new status during this perilous period, to push it on down the line, and to isolate it from the living.

  Among the forest tribes of South America, dead bodies were often buried in a fetal position somewhere out in the woods. There were no cemeteries, because cemeteries “incorporate” the dead into the larger community. These tribes wished to do the opposite: They wanted to exclude the deceased, and even banish their memory. Nevertheless, the spirits of the recently dead were believed to wander about at night, sowing illness in their wake.

  Occasionally, after a member of the community died, people simply abandoned their village altogether. Sometimes they indulged in a bit of preliminary flattery instead, as among the Bororo of Mato Grosso in Brazil: A death would be followed by an elaborate, two-stage burial. First, the body was interred, and it was permitted to remain for several weeks while ritual hunts and dances took place to honor the spirit. Next, the body was exhumed and defleshed. The skeleton was then painted with urucu—a red dye from a local shrub—and plastered with feathers. In a final indignity, it was placed in a basket and cast into the river.

  “There is almost no end to the expedients adopted for getting rid of the dead,” marveled Reverend Baring-Gould:

  Piles of stones are heaped over them, they are buried deep in the earth, they are walled up in natural caves, they are enclosed in megalithic structures, they are burned, they are sunk in the sea. They are threatened, they are cajoled, they are hoodwinked. Every sort of trickery is had recourse to, to throw them off the scent of home and of their living relations.

  The wives, horses, dogs slain and buried with them, the copious supplies of food and drink laid on their graves, are bribes to induce them to be content with their situation. Nay, further—in very many places no food may be eaten in the house of mourning for many days after an interment. The object of course is to disappoint the returning spirit, which comes seeking a meal, finds none, comes again next day, finds none again, and after a while desists from returning out of sheer disgust.

  The primary defense against such malevolent spirits was a good offense—that is, the proper care of their dead bodies. “It is affirmed that persons who have been struck dead by lightning do not decay, and for that reason the ancients neither burnt them nor buried them,” wrote Benedictine exegetist Dom Augustin Calmet in the 18th century. The “reason they are not subject to corruption is because they are as it were embalmed by the sulphur of the thunder-bolt, which serves them instead of salt.”

  But “unenlightninged” bodies are subject to corruption, and the history of disposing of such noxious corpses is novel indeed. It has ranged from exposing them to scavengers, to burning them to cinders, to burying them in the ground, to simply eating them. The sequence has varied from place to place; most cultures have had recourse to some mixture of all these elements.

  Not that it has helped them understand one another. Two and a half millennia ago, the Greek historian Herodotus told how King Darius of Persia once gathered some Greeks who practiced cremation of their dead and asked what it would take to eat them instead:

  They said that no price in the world would make them do so. After that, Darius summoned those of the Indians who are called Callatians…[who did practice funerary cannibalism] and…asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire. They shouted aloud, “Don’t mention such horrors!” These are matters of settled custom, and I think Pindar was right when he says, “Custom is king of all.”

  DEATH LIFTS US UP WHERE WE BELONG

  Several centuries ago, when travelers returned from the Caucasus Mountains and reported having seen dead bodies carefully laid in tree branches, they were describing a tradition that was already venerable when
the kings of ancient Colchis—keepers of the Golden Fleece—ruled the area. Deliberate exposure is perhaps humankind’s oldest way of disposing of cadavers.

  Chimpanzees, when faced with the corpse of a fellow chimp, prod it gingerly a bit and then take to their heels, abandoning it to forest scavengers. Early hominids probably fared no better. “When they died,” archaeologist Timothy Taylor wrote in 2002, “there was little to stop ape-men, ape-women, and ape-children from being torn to pieces. The dead were edible. Vultures, hyenas, crocodiles, rodents, insects, fish and bacteria each took the meat, blood, and fat they wanted. What remained was scattered and trampled, then shattered and powdered by wind and rain.”

  At some point in the distant past, our forebears made a virtue—or something like it—of necessity deliberately by exposing human bodies to scavengers. Not just any scavengers, however. Nearly everywhere there was a decided preference for birds of prey, no doubt because they descend from the heavens. Whether standing in the desiccating wind of the Dakota prairie or hanging from the branches of an Australian eucalyptus, exposure platforms therefore served a dual purpose: They kept terrestrial scavengers at bay and brought the body nearer to heaven, where the vultures wheeled.

  At Çatal Hüyük, a Neolithic village excavated in southern Turkey, 8,000-year-old wall paintings seem to depict vultures alighting on headless corpses. The “birds” might instead represent women dressed as vultures, however, engaging in some long-forgotten funerary rite. If so, they may be prototypes of the classical harpies (called snatchers in Greek)—ravenous, loathsome mythological birds with the faces of women. Certainly vultures carried an association with the divine into historical times. The Vaccaei, for example, who inhabited parts of Spain and Portugal during the third century B.C.E., sneered at those who succumbed to disease; let them be cremated. Death in battle was the nobler quietus; the bodies of those so righteously slain should be entrusted to nothing less than vultures.