Vampiric-type creatures have existed throughout many cultures for millennia. Evidence shows that such creatures have haunted the mythologies of ancient Assyria and Babylonia. But the word, “vampire”, isn’t that old in our language. Of Slavonic origin, it is thought that the oldest recording of the word “vampire” is from the eleventh century and was originally used as a proper name. This word was the Old Russian upirĭ. But, according to Brian Cooper, a scholar in Slavonic studies, there is not a clear consensus among academics regarding the etymology of the word. Indeed, Cooper believes that the connotation surrounding the word, “vampire”, has influenced much of the research into it:
In investigating the origin of the word, one must disentangle this original belief from the later accretions of vampirism, especially the blood-drinking aspects. The problem with so many proposed etymologies of the Slavonic word is that the wider trappings of vampirism have caused sight of the word and its Slavonic essentials to be lost in a forest of trees for which one cannot see the wood, a danger that was stressed right from the start of this study. (Cooper, 2005)
One possibility, according to Cooper, relates to the Slavonic vampire legend of the unclean dead. The Slavonic vampire legend is nothing like our popular modern blood-drinking vampire, but rather related to the spirits of the dead. The unclean dead are those who died prematurely or suffered an unnatural death. Because of this, these spirits long for what was lost to them in life and desire to return to earth, which makes them a potential danger to the living. Though regional beliefs vary, as the unclean dead can come in the form of ghosts or animated corpses, depending upon the region, it seems to be this basic unclean dead Slavonic belief that is the foundation for the Slavonic vampire legend.
This legend also affected burial practices. In Russia, the unclean dead were seen as spirits not able to proceed into the next world; and their corpses not buried in the earth for fear of defiling and angering it, but instead “thrown into gullies and covered with branches and the like” (Cooper, 2005).
Roman Dacia was a Roman-controlled province from 106-271 AD, in an area consisting of the regions that are now Oltenia, Transylvania, and Banat, all of which are in Romania, except for Banat, which is split between Romania, Hungary, and Serbia. Though the Romans abandoned the area in 271 AD, the peasantry remained after the Roman abandonment, which meant that the culture and Latin language persisted.
Latin was adopted as a sort of lingua franca over a wide area, and certainly some Latin words seem to have entered proto-Slavonic without any Germanic mediation. It may be that speakers of Dacian Latin, coming in contact with Slavs from their ancestral homeland north of the Carpathians … and becoming familiar with their beliefs, were led to apply to the undead the equivalent term in their own language: a form of impurus ‘unclean’. (Cooper, 2005)
By the 18th century, the Germans had borrowed the word “vampire” from the Serbs. The French would soon follow, with Dom Augustin Calmet borrowing it from the Germans in 1746 for use in his study on Slavonic vampires, followed by Voltaire in 1770.
It was also around this time that the vampire bat acquired its name, thanks to G.L. Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who gave the name to a large South American bat in Volume 10 of his Natural History. Bats had not previously been associated with vampires in folklore prior to G.L. Leclerc, comte de Buffon naming it as such, so this is when the association between bats and vampires began.
Though a few words similar to the original Old Russian word, upirĭ, were still being used—these words being the Czech oupire, spelled o-u-p-i-r-e; and the Russian upire, spelled u-p-i-r-e—the use of the Serb-borrowed vampire, where the letters v-a-m replaced the o-u of the Czech’s first syllable and the u of the Russian’s first syllable, popularized by its use by Calmet, Voltaire, and it becoming the name of a type of bat, led to “vampire” becoming the dominant form of the word by the end of the 18th century.
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The first of the two vampiric creatures we’re going to discuss that influenced the creation of the modern vampire are the vetalas. Vetalas are described by Sanskrit philologist and professor Dr. Csaba Dezső as “one of the fabulous creatures that populate the religious culture of ancient and early medieval India [and which] had an important role in tantric rituals aiming at magical powers and performed in cremation grounds.” (Dezso, 2010)
But, first, because of their role in tantric rituals, I am going to briefly discuss Tantra for those who, like me don’t really understand it, just so that we can better place the vetalas within their appropriate Tantric context.
“Tantra” is a Sanskrit word referring to an instructional text, with the root of the word, “tan”, meaning to “weave” or “compose”, according to Imma Ramos, Curator of South Asia at the British Museum. These instructional texts were usually woven into dialogues between gods and goddesses, which described rituals for calling on powerful Tantric deities. Through these rituals, which required the instruction of a guru, or teacher, one could receive all sorts of benefits, from long life and spiritual transformation to supernatural powers. (Ramos, 2020)
Tantra challenged boundaries in many ways, including challenging the existing religious and social boundaries, and it challenged cultural norms by finding the sacred in areas normally thought of as impure or taboo, such as in intoxicants and human remains.
But Tantra also challenged the class and culture itself. According to Ramos: “Tantric initiation was open to people from different social backgrounds. This challenge to the caste system made Tantra especially appealing to women and the socially marginalised." (Ramos, 2020)
So, now onto the vetalas, one of those many “fabulous creatures”, as Dezső calls them, which inhabit ancient and early medieval religious culture. According to Dezső:
Many of these fabulous creatures belong to the common heritage of Indian religious cultures, and many of them are found in the most ancient texts and in late medieval works as well. They are constantly in contact with humans, seducing or threatening to kill them, causing illness or offering them treasures of magical power. These categories of living beings are often permeable: a being can, after death moving into any other category. Medieval Indian literature abounds in stories in which the hero’s or the heroine’s fate is followed through a great variety of rebirths, from animal to divine. (Dezso, 2010)
The vetalas belong to the more taboo class of culture in which tantra sought to find the sacred, as they are associated with human remains and cremation grounds. In both the religious and popular literature of early medieval India, the vetalas are involved with three different rituals. The most famous of these is a fire sacrifice (homa), where the mouth of a corpse is used as a firepit. The second of these rituals involves a magician raising a corpse as a sort of zombie and utilizing it as a servant. It is also said that a powerful magician can gain occult powers (siddhis) from the vetalas, though failed magicians may find themselves instead devoured by the undead creatures. And the third ritual associated with the vetalas is one where a tantric practitioner sells or barters parts of corpses (mahamamsavikraya), such as the flesh, blood, and marrow, to deities and demons, as these are some of their favorite snacks, as the tantric practitioner hopes to buy their favor. (Dezso, 2010)
And these cremation ground rituals remain an important part of Indian culture today. According to Ramos:
As a worldview, philosophy and set of practices, Tantra is as alive as ever. Sects in India, including the Aghoris, reveal the enduring power of the movement. Their practices include smearing their bodies with the ash of burnt corpses from funerary pyres … an act which is traditionally deemed polluting. For the Aghoris, transgressive practices are an expression of the Tantric assertion that all is sacred and there is no distinction between what is conventionally perceived as pure and impure, just as there is no distinction between the self and the divine. By shattering society's cultural conditioning of the mind, the Aghoris transcend ego-led emotions such as fear and aversion and instead nurture a non-discriminating attitude that draws on the repressed power of the taboo. (Ramos, 2020)
As we discussed in the very first episode of this podcast, the vetala was the subject of a collection of 25 stories called the Baital Pachisi, also known as the Vetala Panchavimshati, which was first compiled in the 11th century and written in Sanskrit. (Gross, 2020) These stories were framed within one main story involving King Vikramaditya, who, to honor a contract with a yogi, agreed to capture a vetala, as this will give the yogi success in his practice. The vetala had inhabited a corpse in the charnel ground, whereby its toes hung from its perch on the limb of a tree, a practice which will become more vampiric in later telling, when it is described as more batlike. (Gross, 2020) The vetala presents the king with a series of riddles, through which the various 24 stories in the collection are told, as the king attempts to capture the vetala through mind games. (Walter, 2004)
According to Dr. Michael Walter, Librarian of the Lumbini International Research Institute, the vetala “functions as a sly, mostly self-serving riddler. Eventually, however, he serves well the occasionally silly King Vikramaditya. In this way, they both conform to prescribed roles, since the king is, ultimately, a hero, and this “tamed” Vetala his contracted helper.” (Walter, 2004)
According to writer Emma Starer Gross, the transformation of the vetala in the story from a trickster with a capacity for good, when goodness was occasionally called for, into an evil demon lacking in nuance, came at least partially because of 19th century explorer and translator, Sir Richard Burton. That Burton only chose to include 11 of the 25 tales in the collection of stories further diminished the range of the vetala.
Having been compiled in the 11th century, the Baital Pachisi had gone through numerous translations, revisions, and adaptations throughout the centuries—so the story started to deviate a bit from its Sanskrit origins. There are demons in Indian culture that have vampiric characteristics; for example, in Tamil folklore there is a demon called a pey, who turned into an old woman to attempt to suck a goat’s blood. (Ferro-Luzzi, 1998)
However, Burton’s translation of vetala into vampire not only allowed the vetala to supersede in popularity all other Indian vampiric creatures, but allowed some of the vetala’s traits, as adapted by Burton, to permeate vampire mythology. According to Gross: “the illustrations that accompanied his text showed a taloned creature with pointed ears, bulging eyes, leathery wings, and a long tail —thus transforming the vetala into the malevolent monster it is depicted as today.” (Gross, 2020)
Burton never pretended that his translation, which he retitled Vikram and the Vampire, was a faithful retelling of the Baital Pachisi, stating in his introduction: “It is not pretended that the words of these Hindu tales are preserved to the letter.... I have ventured to remedy the conciseness of their language, and to clothe the skeleton with flesh and blood.” (Gross, 2020)
I wish he would have just said he loosely adapted it, or that it had inspired him. Because, especially now, when we’re at a time when England, among other current and former colonial powers, is having to reassess and reckon with its colonial past, for the English Richard Burton to feel the need to actually remedy the language involved in a text which was already almost 8 centuries old at the time, and which is ingrained in the culture and identity of a people of a country which was colonized at the time of Burton’s publication, feels very smug.
Nonetheless, Burton was criticized for the very loose adaptation, with N.M. Penzer, an independent scholar and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, writing: “This is putting it very mildly. What Burton has really done is to use a portion of the Vetāla tales as a peg on which to hang elaborate ‘improvements’ entirely of his own invention.” (Gross, 2020)
According to Gross, Bram Stoker had a great interest in Indian mythology and folklore, and in the Baital Pachisi, in particular. While I’d already suggested Stoker took Dracula hanging like a bat from Burton’s adaptation of the Baital Pachisi in episode 1 of this podcast, Gross further suggests that Stoker also took Dracula’s “reptilian-like climbing abilities, his powers, and his centuries of wisdom” from Burton’s description of the vetala. (Gross, 2020)
From episode 01 of this podcast:
The other vampiric creature that had an impact on our modern concept of vampires are of Greek origin. They are the vrykolakes:
The vrykolakas is the evil. No, I never heard of a vrykolakas drinking blood. These [devils] … kill people. He looks like a man, like a dog, like anything. He comes out at night. When people die of a contagious disease, and no one will go near them and they bury them without a priest, without anything, they become vrykolakes. (Lee, 1942)
This is the testimony of an Arcadian immigrant to the United States, as recorded by the late Greek-American anthropologist, Dr. D. Demetracopoulou Lee. Vrykolakes, the plural of vrykolakas (Lee, 1942), are Greek mythological creatures, described by the late Dr. Lee as “the animated corpse which can leave its grave every day except Saturday” (Lawson, 1910). According to Dr. Lee, they are considered one of the many supernatural spirits in Greek culture, non-human beings which are generally referred to as stoechoia.
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The Vrykolakas superstition had a strong impact on the development of vampires in western literature and horror. In 1809, 21-year-old Lord Byron, along with his good friend from Cambridge, the politician John Hobhouse, 1st Baron Broughton, embarked on a tour of Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece, and Turkey (Smith, 2010). It was during these travels that Byron would become introduced to the vrykolakas superstition. According to 19th century British geographer, Henry Fanshawe Tozer: “Lord Byron mentions in one of the notes to “The Giaour” that he saw a whole family terrified by the scream of a child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation” (Tozer, 1869). It’s clear that the vrykolakas superstition influenced Byron in his writing of “The Giaour”, the popularity of which, in turn, influenced subsequent British writers, which we’ll discuss in more detail at the end of this episode.
If you are interested in reading Tozer's complete account of their travels, you can find it here: https://archive.org/details/researchesinhigh02toze/page/n7/mode/2up
According to the early 20th century Greek scholar and Fellow at Pembroke College, John Cuthbert Lawson, the Greek concept of vrykolakes was developed through Slavic influence on and mingling with Hellenic culture, including in the word “vrykolakas” itself (Lawson, 1910); though Henry Fanshawe Tozer claims that the existence of the similarly-themed Greek creatures, katakhanas, illustrates that the Greeks developed the concept independently (Tozer, 1869). Lawson argues that the word was borrowed from a Slavic language other than Serbian, and that its Slavonic meaning is parallel to our word, werewolf. In the examples recorded by various sources, including Lee and the 17th century French botanist, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (Tournefort, 1718), only males are described as becoming vrykolakes (the plural of vrykolakas ends with an “es”, rather than an “as”), though I’m unsure if this is simply coincidence and just happens to be the examples used in the telling of the stories, or if females are unable to become this type of undead spirit, as well.
Lawson's complete text, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals, can be found here: https://archive.org/details/modern-greek-folklore/page/n373/mode/2up?q=assignable
Though no longer resembling the person who the vrykolakas was in life, the reanimated corpse that becomes the vrykolakas still has some of the features of the living person he had once been, such as his voice. In some of the recorded folklore, the vrykolakas is discovered to be an undead creature by a friend or family member recognizing the voice of the deceased. Though they can be recognized in this manner, vrykolakes are not always visible to the average person and are mainly seen by the alaphroiskiotoi, which are described by Dr. Lee simply as “the light-shadowed”. As evidenced by the testimony that I quoted from the Arcadian immigrant, vrykolakes can also change form, including by entering the bodies of animals, mostly described to be that of cats and dogs. In one testimony, it is the cat or dog is who is responsible for creating the vrykolakas, by passing by the corpse and cursing it with a demon soul. (Lee, 1942)
From the testimony recorded by Lee, which was conducted in 1934 and whose subjects were primarily Arcadian emigres to the United States, vrykolakes do not seem to be able to be killed through the standard use of weapons, such as guns; but may be destroyed by being eaten by the shadow or spirit of a wolf, which is summoned by creating the outline of a wolf outside of a church and spreading earth from under this outline to the grave of the undead. He may also be destroyed by fire and by lightning strikes. (Lee, 1942)
Though the testimony that I previously read states, “These [devils] … kill people”, in most of Dr. Lee’s recorded testimony, vrykolakes seem to act in more mischievous ways, such as destroying or consuming all of a household’s provisions. They also call the names of the living and make loud noises. One vrykolkas even whinnied at the living person he encountered, as his corpse had been passed over by a mule before it had been buried (Lee, 1942). De Tournefort, who had been the chief botanist to the French king, calls vrykolakes “bullbeggars” who commit “monkey tricks”, further stating: “it was as good as a Comedy to us every Morning, to hear the new Follies committed by this Night-Bird; they charg’d him with being guilty of the most abominable sins” (Tournefort, 1718). For those unfamiliar with the term, bullbeggars, as I was, they are akin to boggarts, goblins, and bugbears—basically mischievous creatures who can cause terror.
Lawson gives a list of the types of individuals generally believed in most regions of Greece to be more likely to be susceptible to becoming a vrykolakas upon death. This list includes those who did not receive a proper burial; those who suffered a sudden and/or violent death; children who were stillborn (which I’m assuming is because they did not have the opportunity for baptism before death) or children born on religious festivals; those who were cursed; those who were excommunicated from the Church; those never baptized or were an apostate; those who were evil or immoral in life, especially those involved in sorcery; and those whose dead bodies were passed over by a cat or other animal. This last item sheds light on the earlier discussed testimony recorded by Dr. Lee regarding a body being passed over by a mule before its burial and it subsequently becoming a vrykolakas, which whinnied at the living person it encountered.
I quickly want to add that I am about to quote from a story de Tournefort wrote about his experience on Mykonos, which was published in English in 1718, and when doing so, for both clarity and ease of reading, I have updated around five of the archaic words he uses. If you want to read the original language, please click here: https://archive.org/details/voyageintolevant01tour/page/102/mode/2up
In his travels, which occurred over 200 years before Lee’s interviews, de Tournefort and his colleagues were witnesses to a mass hysteria on the island of Mykonos, involving the supposed vrykolakas created from the corpse of a man who had been “ill-natured and quarrelsome” in life and who had been murdered in the fields, with the perpetrator having never been found. (Tournefort, 1718)
As with one of the rituals for creating a vetala, which required a corpse that was hanged or impaled, an unnatural and violent death seems to be a common theme in the creation of these undead creatures. That the man was described by de Tournefort as ill-tempered also adds to the probability that this man would become a vrykolakas. Having become a vrykolakas, the creature now sought to cause mischief. According to de Tournefort:
Two days after his being bury'd in a Chapel in the Town it was [rumored] that [the corpse] was seen to walk in the night with great haste, that he tumbled about Peoples Goods, put out their Lamps, [grasped] them [from] behind and a thousand other [monkey] Tricks. At first the Story was receiv'd with Laughter; but the thing was look'd upon to be Serious, when the better sort of People began to complain of it. (Tournefort,1718)
Additionally, apparently the vrykolakas also had the effrontery to drive his old path and would not heed anything told to him. So, the monks and priests stated it was necessary to wait nine days from the date of the corpse’s internment to say a mass in the chapel, where the corpse lay. This mass was to drive the demon from the corpse. Then, to make doubly sure the demon had been expelled, they removed the heart from the corpse and burned it on the seashore. Unfortunately, according to de Tournefort, the butcher, who performed this duty and is described as an “old, clumsy fellow”, sliced open the corpse’s abdomen instead of his chest, feeling around in its entrails, before “at last, somebody told him he should cut up the diaphragm." (Tournefort, 1718)
De Tournefort describes how, during this procedure, he witnessed the hysteria spread within the room, with people tricking themselves into believing they were seeing and experiencing supernatural occurrences with the body :
… the Corpse stunk so abominably that they were obliged to burn Frankincense; but this smoke mixing with the [emissions] from the Carcass, increas'd the Stink, and began to muddle the poor [people’s minds]. Their Imagination, struck with the Spectacle before them, grew full of Visions. It came into their [heads] that a thick Smoke arose out of the Body; we [dared] not say it was the Smoke of the Incense.
… Several there present averr'd, that the Wretch's Blood was extremely red: the Butcher swore the Body was still warm; whence they concluded, that the Deceas'd was a very ill Man for not being thorowly dead, or in plain terms for suffering himself to be re-animated by Old Nick; which is the notion they have of a Vroucolacas. They then roared out that Name in a stupendous manner. Just at this time came in a Flock of People, loudly protesting they plainly perceived the Body was not grown stiff, when it was carry'd from the Fields to Church to be bury'd, and that consequently it was a true Vroucolacas…
I don't doubt they would have sworn [the corpse] did not stink, had we not been there; so amazed were the poor People with this Disaster, and so infatuated with their Notion of the Dead's being re-animated. As for us who got as close to the Corpse as we could, that we might be more exact in our observations, we were almost poison'd with the intolerable Stink that issu'd from it. When they ask'd us what we thought of this Body, we told them we believed it to be very thorowly dead: but as we were willing to cure, or at least not to exasperate their prejudiced Imaginations, we represented to them, that it was no wonder the Butcher should feel a little Warmth when he grop'd among the Entrails that were then rotting; that it was no extraordinary thing for it to emit Fumes, since Dung turn'd up will do the same; that as for the pretended Redness of the Blood, it still appear'd by the Butcher's Hands to be nothing but a very stinking nasty Smear. …
… [Nonetheless,] the Vroucolacas was incorrigible, and all the Inhabitants were in a strange Consternation … he was accus'd of beating Folks in the night, breaking down Doors, and even Roofs of Houses; clattering Windows; tearing Clothes; emptying Bottles and Vessels. 'Twas a most thirsty Devil! I believe he did not spare any body but the Consul in whose House we lodg'd.
Nothing could be more miserable than the Condition of this Island; all the Inhabitants seem'd frighted out of their senses; the wisest among them were stricken like the rest: 'twas an Epidemical Disease of the Brain, as dangerous and infectious as the Madness of Dogs. Whole Families quitted their Houses, and brought their Tent-Beds from the farthest parts of Town into the publick Place, there to spend the night. They were every instant complaining of some new Insult; nothing was to be heard but Sighs and Groans at the approach of Night: the better sort of People retired into the Country.
… [H]aving stuck I know not how many naked Swords over the Grave of this Corpse, which they took up three or four times a day, for any Man's Whim … the only way left was to burn the Vroucolacas [entirely]; that after so doing, let the Devil lurk in it if he could; that 'twas better to have recourse to this Extremity, than to have the Island totally deserted: And indeed whole Families began to pack up, in order to retire to Syra or Tinos.
The Magistrates therefore order'd the Vroucolacas to be carry'd to the Point of the Island St. George, where they prepar'd a great pile with Pitch and Tar, for fear the Wood, as dry as it was, should not burn fast enough of itself. What they had before left of this miserable Carcass was thrown into this Fire, and consumed presently: 'twas on the first of January 1701. We saw the Flame as we return'd from Delos: it might justly be call'd a Bonfire of Joy, since after this no more complaints were heard against the Vroucolacas; they said that the Devil had now met with his match, and some Ballads were made to turn him into Ridicule. (Tournefort, 1718)
While the folklore collected by Dr. Lee from 20th-century Arcadia and de Tournefort’s early 18th-century experience in Mykonos describe the vrykolakes as merely mischievous creatures, other parts of Greece present them as far more dangerous. 17th century theologian and keeper of the Vatican Library , Leo Allatius, wrote in a letter to the papal doctor, Paulus Zacchias (Hartnup, 2004), of a more threatening vrykolakas existing on the Greek island of his birth, Chios:
The vrykolakas is the body of a man of evil and immoral life—very often of one who has been excommunicated by his bishop. Such bodies do not like those of other dead men suffer decomposition after burial nor turn to dust, but having, as it appears, a skin of extreme toughness become swollen and distended all over, so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin becomes stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck gives out the same sound; from this circumstance the vrykolakas has received the name τυμπανιαῖος (“drumlike”).
… This monster is said to be so destructive to men, that appearing actually in the daytime, even at noon—and that not only in houses but in fields and highroads and enclosed vineyards—it advances upon them as they walk along, and by its mere aspect without either speech or touch kills them. (Lawson, 1910)
Bodies that did not decompose in what was considered the normal or natural manner or at the normal rate were automatically suspected of being subject to the work of the devil, as the nomocanon of the Greek Church states: “and the dead man—one who has been long dead and buried—appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ...” Such corpses, being a perfect vessel for the work of the devil, supplies a perfect scapegoat for the deaths of people who died of unknown causes. Allatius explains that as the devil enters the body, the reanimated corpse, begins wandering around primarily during the night, knocking on the doors of the households and calling out the name of one its inhabitants. If the inhabitant answers the call, he or she will die the next day. The vrykolakas, however, never calls twice; therefore, the members of the households wait until the second call before they reply—to ensure the that the caller isn’t a vrykolakas. (Lawson, 1910)
After the victim of an unknown cause of death was found, tombs were dug up to find the undead culprit, identification of such being based on its state of decomposition. When such a corpse was discovered, Allatius states, “it is taken out of the grave, the priests recite prayers, and it is thrown on to a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished the joints of the body gradually fall apart; and all the remains are burnt to ashes....” (Lawson, 1910)
Allatius supports his statements by citing the nomocanon, which, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a “Byzantine collection of ecclesiastical legislation … and civil laws … related to the Christian Church … [which] served as legal text in the Eastern church until the 18th century” (Britannica, 2008). But John Cuthbert Lawson, points out the inconsistency of the statements contained within the nomocanon, for it at once states that vrykolakes are merely imaginary and do not actually exist, and yet follows with a statement that when such corpses are found, it is the work of the devil, and requires priests chanting invocations of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the performance of memorial services. So, you know, vrykolakes don’t exist, but when you come across one, it’s the work of the devil.
However, Dr. Heta Bjorklund, a classical scholar, warns that Allatius draws from sources which date from various centuries, as collected by the Vatican Library, and are not reflective of 17th century views or folklore. (Björklund, 2017)
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According to Lawson’s writings, it seems that when vrykolakes do kill, it is often by frightening the living to death. Lawson also records testimony from the head of a monastery in the Cretan district of Sphakiá and published in 1888 which states that a vrykolakas, which the head of the monastery describes as a “blood-thirsty monster”, may seat himself on a sleeping individual, with the enormity of the vrykolakas’ weight suffocating or crushing the sleeping individual, who may in turn become a vrykolakas himself. (Lawson, 1910)
But if they don’t suck the blood or in any way feed off of their victim, how are vrykolakes really vampires? This may be explained by Lawson’s research discussing the evolution of the word, vrykolakas, and the juxtaposition of its meanings and their eventual merger, with one superseding the other.
According to Dr. Florin Curta, a scholar of the history and archaeology of the Middle Ages, by 550 C.E., Greece was in a state of decline, having been greatly affected by the plague, while Corinth and other cities had been leveled by an earthquake. With its impoverished regions having fewer fortifications than the rest of the Balkans, it was prime for invasion. And, so, the Slavs, along with the Avars, began raiding the region. By the early 7th century, Crete had been attacked and multiple regions, such as Thessalia, Hellas, and the Aegean Islands, had been plundered. But the medieval text, the Chronicle of Monemvasia, also states that by this time, the Slavs had settled in Greece. (Curta, n.d.)
With their arrival, the Slavs brought with them superstitions regarding vampires and werewolves. Lawson claims that before the arrival of the Slavs, the Greeks already held superstitions regarding reanimated corpses. Then, with the Slavs’ arrival and growing influence on Greek culture, the Greeks began to adopt and adapt various elements from the Slavs, including the word “vrykolakas” in its original Slavic sense of word, which meant “werewolf”. Interestingly, the Greeks did not adopt the Slavic word, “vampire”. That the Greeks adopted the word “vrykolakas”, while not incorporating the word “vampire” into their language, illustrates that one concept already existed prior to the Slav’s arrival; therefore, there was not a need for the Greeks to adopt the word, “vampire”.
While the belief in lycanthropy was an old Hellenic superstition, by the time of the Slavs’ arrival, the Greeks belief in the concept had waned to such an extent that it was necessary to adopt the Slavic word for it when they were reintroduced to the concept via the Slavs. But the Greeks had no need for the word, “vampire”, as they already had a word for the undead: revenants. As vampires and revenants both involved reanimated corpses, the Greeks regarded vampires as simply a more ruthless version of their own concept of revenants. The character and motivations of these vampiric revenants, however, are drastically different from the Greeks’ traditional revenants:
[Revenants] acted, it was held, as reasonable men, not as ferocious brutes. This did not of course exclude the idea that a revenant might return to seek revenge where vengeance was due; he was not necessarily peaceable; but if he exacted even the life of one who had wronged him, the act of vengeance was reasonable. (Lawson, 1910)
However, the Slavonic version of vrykolakes were creatures who, while alive, functioned as werewolves, but upon their death, transformed into vampires. This difference in character and function required the Greeks to distinguish between the two types of revenants, the reasonable type and the vampiric type. As Lawson explains:
The conduct of a reasonable being could not be expected after death from one who in his lifetime had suffered from lycanthropic mania … Thus one class of revenants came to be distinguished in the now composite Greek superstition by its wanton and blood-thirsty character; and in order to mark this distinction in speech … the Greeks, it would seem, began to call one who from a were-wolf had become a genuine vampire by the same name after as before death, vrykolakas, while to the more reasonable and human revenants they still applied some such term as … ‘drumlike.’ (Lawson, 1910)
But by the 17th century, the two versions of the undead revenants held by the Greeks, the reasonable, non-violent type and the vicious, vampiric type, began to merge—with the vampiric type superseding the previous, non-violent type of revenant. As the superstitions regarding vrykolkes spread, the superstition of revenants gradually faded. By the time of Leo Allatius’ writings in the late 17th to early 18th century, the superstition of non-violent reanimated corpses, having been known as revenants, had been completely supplanted by the dangerous vampiric vrykolakas. As Lawson elaborates: “…it [was] abundantly clear that the common-folk had come to suspect all revenants alike of predatory propensities.” (Lawson, 1910)
The church had always held that the excommunication of an individual was irrevocable even in death, and that such an imprecation interrupted and prevented the natural process of decomposition. As Fr. Richard of Santorini noted, when sentencing one to be excommunicated, the process even ends with the phrase: “and after death to remain indissoluble”. But with the spread of the vampiric superstition, the Church did not want to find itself responsible for having created such creatures by suspending the process of decomposition by means of excommunication; however, it also did not want to alter the peril of excommunication by removing the threat of the body remaining, in Fr. Richard’s words, “indissoluble”.
According to Lawson:
[The Church’s] only course therefore was to emphasize what seems indeed to have been always the authorised doctrine of the Church, that excommunicated persons remained indeed incorrupt and ‘drum-like,’ but were not, like vrykolakes, subject to diabolical re-animation. It is Father Richard’s acceptance of this clerical view which explains why, writing as he did some few years after Leo Allatius, he distinguished the two words which Leo had treated as synonymous, making resuscitation the criterion of the vrykolakas and stating that the ‘drum-like’ body, though withheld from natural decay, lay quiet in its grave. But the ecclesiastical doctrine made no impression upon the popular belief; to this very day the common-folk regard any corpse which is found incorrupt as a potential vrykolakas, and excommunication is everywhere numbered among the causes of vampirism. (Lawson, 1910)
By the time of Lawson’s writings in 1910, the name of revenants no longer existed in most districts, the superstition having been superseded by the vampiric vrykolakes. Werewolves, who, per the Slavic superstition, vrykolakes were said to be in life, before transforming into vampires upon death, had also been supplanted by their vampiric, post-mortem selves. The vrykolakas superstition had finally evolved to one resembling our modern understanding of vampire: violent, undead, shapeshifting beings. And with the superstition of this now vicious form of revenant spreading and evolving throughout the Greek region came claims involving the vrykolakes taking blood from their victims.
This is illustrated by social anthropologist, Dr. Juliet du Bouley’s descriptions of the vrykolakas superstition that was present in the small village of Ambéli, located in the Macedonian region of Greece. (Ambeli, n.d.) While the folklore recorded by Lee and Lawson describes vrykolakas as creatures who are more mischief-making and terror-causing than blood-thirsty, du Boulay describes creatures which have evolved to align a bit more with our modern interpretation of vampire:
it is this reanimated body which, resisting the normal course of decay, returns to the living and appearing in any chosen form—human or animal—drinks the blood of its own kin. … But it is, however, also made clear that the action which turns the dead into a vampire is precise, time-limited, and has an immediate and tangible result … although there is an implicit understanding that the sinful dead are in some way related negatively to the living, this is in no sense comparable to the terrible return of the vampire to its kin in its active search for blood. … I once heard it said that vampires go “wherever they are sent”, but as is normally affirmed and as a proverb quoted later also indicates, the predominant belief is that vampires always return to their own kin. Coming in any guise, human or animal, they return to attack either their own family or their own flocks, damaging and eventually killing them—an action often described as “suffocating’—by going up the nose and drinking their blood. (Boulay, 1982)
And, so, we find ourselves circling back to face the vrykolakas described by Lord Byron in “The Giaour”, with his use of the archaic word “corse” to mean corpse:
But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, though cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem. (Byron, 1814)
In the summer of 1816, three years after “The Giaour” was published, a contest was held on a stormy night at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. This contest was held between members of a party consisting of Lord Byron, Percy Shelly, his soon-to-be wife, Mary Godwin, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s lover, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s friend, the physician John William Polidori. This stormy evening of stories, devised to pass the time, produced the influential novel Frankenstein and the short story The Vampyre (Buzwell, 2013). Just imagine what your group of friends and family could accomplish on a stormy evening if you didn’t have so much good television to binge …. Or so many good podcasts which to listen.
Byron had been influenced in his writing that evening by his reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Christabel”, about the mysterious, mesmeric Geraldine. I often see Geraldine described as a vampire, as she seems to drain the innocent Christabel of her life force; however, Greg Buzwell, the Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives at the British Library, describes Geraldine instead as a Lamia, a vampiric-type of serpent in disguise. We discussed Lamia on the previous episode, episode 7, “Lilith Fair: The Origin of Female Vampires”. Byron ended up producing a fragment of a vampire story that evening.
_-_Vampyre,_1819.jpg)
It was from this fragment of a story that John William Polidori wrote his influential short story, “The Vampyre.” (British Library, 2023) But according to the late Dr. Patricia L. Skarda, a Professor of English at Smith College (Legacy, 2014)), Polidori was also greatly influenced by “The Giaour” in his writing of “The Vampyre”, basically repeating multiple incidents from Byron’s poem to build his story.
Skarda, it is clear, views Polidori as a hanger- on in a group of much more talented cool kids. According to Skarda, because Polidori lacked Byron’s talent, he created “The Vampyre” by basically stealing the fragment of one of Byron’s stories, the vampire story, and then filling in details he obtained through plagiarizing elements from another of Byron’s stories, his poem, “The Giaour”:
Polidori harvests images and phrases and setting from Byron’s “Giaour” for the Ianthe in his “Vampyre” not merely because Byron’s fields were fertile but because Polidori could not find his own. … Polidori[,] [because of] his own inadequacies … [dipped] again [into] Byron’s “Giaour” for more tropes and incidental details. (Skarda,1989)
Polidori’s “The Vampyre” proved to be a sensation and was highly influential, inspiring a wave of imitations. If it is indeed true that Byron’s “The Giaour” directly influenced many of the elements within Polidori’s “The Vampyre”, then not only was “The Giaour” one of the earlier Western works of fiction to deal with vampiric themes, but because of its direct influence on Polidori’s “The Vampyre”, it’s had a strong influence on the modern concept of vampires, including on Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, which, according to Buzwell, had been influenced by Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” (Buzwell, 2014)
What seems to link the “unclean dead” of the Slavonic vampire legend, the vetalas, and the vrykolakes, is that what causes the person to become one of these undead creatures is the inability to rest in peace and pass into the next world. Throughout all three of these cultures, it seems in most cases to be caused by the person suffering an unnatural death, though in some cases, it also seems to be caused by the person having lived such a wicked life that resting in peace is impossible. For the person who died an unnatural death, it is that loss that feeds the need to return to the earth and to regain what was stolen. And that is what feeds the fear for the living. Because it is always the fear of the unknown. The potential of what such creatures could want, or take, from the living.
It's not surprising that in the 19th century, a time during which there was so much early and unnatural death, that both writers and the public would find a fascination in this type of folklore. And, perhaps, the initial interest that led to the popularization of such stories was a need to explore the realm and the possible ramifications of an unnatural death—and thereby gain a sense of control.
It’s interesting that, as vampires are as popular now as ever, our popular culture is also fascinated with unnatural deaths more than ever: James Dean, Sharon Tate, Tupac, and the Titanic, for example—deaths that are young, before their times, and/or from unnatural causes. Princess Diana, and her tragic death at the young age of 36, has practically her own industry revolving around her with the many books and documentaries constantly being produced. As advanced as we may feel we’ve come since the writings of Burton or Byron, we still feel an innate sense of longing to fix that which seems wrong, which is the loss of those who die prematurely or suffer an unnatural death. And so we dwell on these “unclean dead”. Which is why this type of folklore will continue to inspire. And why vampires will continue to suck.
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Works Cited
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