Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But...

Is that a stake in what used to be your pocket or are you just pleased to be dead?

I'm not talking, like Captain Beefheart, about making love to a vampire with a monkey on my knee but instead trying to riff on a fairly lame, and very old, erection joke that cropped up during last night's excellent and informative Interview with a Vampire Expert talk with the London Fortean Society at The Bell in Whitechapel.

I'd seen the speaker, Deborah Hyde aka Jourdemayne, before (most recently talking about fairies at Greenwich Skeptics) so I knew she was good. So good, in fact, she once coaxed me into drinking a goblet of 'cat's blood'. This time her treats were a bit more tempting. The talk was primarily about folkloric, rather than literary, vampires but it was interspersed with a little quiz in which sweeties were thrown out to the crowd, one bouncing rather spectacularly off an elderly man's bald head, for identifying famous television and film vampires or the actors who played them, or the films/shows they'd appear in.

But the faces of Lestat, Nosferatu, Grandpa Munster, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman and stills from films like Salem's Lot, Fright Night, Let the Right One In, The Lost Boys, and (Salma Hayek in THAT bikini) in From Dusk Till Dawn were all something of a distraction, though a fun one, from the main course. That being the history of vampires and a mild debunking of some of the myths that surround them, not fresh blood from the neck of a virgin.

After I did a very pathetic werewolf impression (fair enough - there was no full moon), the pleasingly well attended (with no shortage of now familiar faces) vampire midweek began with me nursing a pint of Red Stripe (cards only at The Bell now, cash not accepted - the modern world, eh!?) as Deborah chucked a few questions at us, all of which had the correct answer of 'no'.

Are folkloric vampires attractive (like the ones in True Blood)? Do they only come out at night? Are they named after vampire bats? In the latter case it's actually the other way round. All three extant species of vampire bats (they're all from South America, btw) have been discovered since the idea of the vampire entered the public sphere. But how did the idea of the vampire enter the public sphere? Where, and who, did it come from?

This turned out to be a more intense history lesson than I expected. Deborah quoted from such learned (Latin always suggests learned) sounding tomes as Dissertatio de Vampiris by John Heinrich 'Zopf', 1725's Wienerisches Diarium, and 1732's Visum et Repertum and quoted Voltaire regarding the vampire as allegory (see also The Arctic Monkeys song borrowed for the title of this blog) but found her most reliable inspiration in Jan Perkowski, a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Perkowski's studies led him to discover that the word 'vampir' originates from the Bulgarian empire and that there are other, similar, words that appear in the Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croat, and Turkish languages. The original folkloric vampires are said to emanate from 18c Greece and the Balkans and current thinking is that a lot of this is down to the constantly shifting boundaries in the region in the eighteenth century created by a series of wars between the (mostly illiberal) Catholic Habsburg Austrians and the Ottoman Turks who practiced Islam but were fairly relaxed about allowing other beliefs to continue under their aegis.

The clash of these two enormous, and militaristic, empires meant life was in a state of flux for those that lived in the region. When the Habsburgs saw the former Ottoman peasants performing what they considered to be sacrilegious rituals (using a mix of Slavic flavoured Paganism, Orthodox Christianity, and Bogomilism - a neo-Gnostic/dualist sect founded in 10c Bulgaria by a priest named Bogomil that worked as a kind of grassroots Christian revivalist movement that gave Satan as much power as God) they were confused, alarmed, and somewhat appalled.

Though Orthodoxy eventually won out over both Paganism and Bogomilism, according to Perkawski in The Darkling, these practices, the ones that lead to the belief in vampires, persisted. Burials were shallow (there were no JCBs joked Deborah) and corpses were not interred inside coffins. Rocks were placed upon the grave and often stakes had been used to pierce the heart of the deceased. Or, other body parts, as we will soon discover.

Two specific cases created a lot of interest. Peter Blagojevic had not long been dead when a 1725 Wienerisches Diarium report by an Imperial Provisor of Belgrade noted some peculiarities regarding his corpse. It had not decomposed sufficiently, it had no discernible odour, and the body (apart from the nose - which had fallen off) was fresh. His hair and his nails had grown and there was fresh blood around his mouth. Blood, it was soon believed, that had come from the victims he'd been out biting in the neck during the night. Certainly, following Blagojevic's demise there had been several other unexplained deaths.

In 1732, Arnold Paole, like Blagojevic a Serbian hajduk, (who had been many years dead at this point) was exhumed by observers from the Austrian empire. Paole had lived his later years convinced that he, himself, had been the victim of a vampire attack and when he died, as was the case with Blagojevic, many others in his village soon followed him to the grave (including a baby who was soon pulled from said grave and eaten by dogs). Years later his corpse remained undecayed, there was fresh blood around his mouth, nose, eyes, and ears, and when a stake was driven through his heart he was heard to groan audibly.

In these, and other, cases themes emerge. Death (obviously), epidemics, and decomposition (or lack of it). Some theories (rabies and porphyria for example) are easily dismissed, the symptoms and behaviours of the sufferers/victims simply don't match up, while others like plague and tuberculosis are marginally more plausible. Deborah closed off her talk by talking about the ways we try to guard ourselves (or the way we think those in the past tried to guard themselves) against vampires.

Burning corpses is both difficult and expensive (remember, many of the people involved in these stories are considered 'peasants' and would not have had the means to do this) but face down burial for suspected vampires was believed to be a more effective deterrent. The theory being that when they 'woke up' they'd start to fight their way out of their grave only to bury themselves further into the soil. Practical measures for impractical problems.

Does staking work? Sort of. But not in the way we think. It was never a matter of putting a stake through a suspected vampire's heart but simply a case of pinning a person to the ground. Through the heart was a perfectly good way of doing this but so was through the abdomen, stomach, or chest.

What about placing a big pile of loose rocks atop a grave? Like staking and face down burial, another practical measure. This time to prevent wolves digging up the corpses for a midnight snack. The use of garlic and salt as deterrents doesn't seem to have any belief in fact whatsoever except that, in the former case, some people (and thus, surely some vampires) don't like the smell of it. Deborah mentioned, as an aside, she'd visited the restaurant of Al Lewis (who played Grandpa Munster) in New York and it served remarkably garlic heavy pasta.

With these vampire myths pooh-poohed, Deborah was soon to look at more rational reasons for some notable vampiric traits. By this point she was allowing Occam's razor to give us all a really close shave, closer than a Gillette Fusion 5. Decomposition takes place at variable rates depending on the body and the ground its interred in among other factors and rigor mortis takes place soon after death but stops after a while. This explains why some cadavers were not as decayed, or indeed stiff, as people might expect.

Some things were stiff though. The euphemism 'wild signs' referred to a post-death boner (and hopefully explains the fairly off-colour and slightly crap joke I kicked this whole thing off with). So, the length of one's penis may grow after dying but not your hair and nails. They stop growing. But, because your skin recedes this gives an illusion of growth so that's that bit explained then.

There was a rumour that corpses had been sighted 'chewing' in the grave, that some dead bodies had devoured the linen they'd been buried in and then their own fingers, bellies, or entrails. This macabre observation is most likely a result of a misunderstanding. It's known that these body parts are usually the first to decompose so the old fashioned technique of immobilising the corpse's mouth by inserting a brick inside it (!) would be a complete waste of time.

A Q&A followed the break in which questions were asked about modern day belief in vampires (in Romania some were concerned that the body of Ceausescu would rise from the grave to reek further havoc following his execution on Xmas Day, 1989), the possibility of inanimate objects being vampiric (melons being the most likely suspects, apparently), and the belief (held by some Greeks and Serbs) that redheads are probably vampires.

Of course, it's all nonsense (there is not one recorded example in history of a single person being killed by a vampire, though there is one case of a man dying trying to protect himself from vampires using a cocktail of garlic, excrement, salt, and urine) but it's fun nonsense and it sheds light (which wouldn't bother a folkloric vampire but may upset a literary one) on things that aren't nonsense. Folk beliefs, a psychology of the human mind, the history of an entire region, and, most of all, our amazing human ability to weave ever more strange and fascinating narratives (as well as books, films, tv shows, and songs) from the base materials of life. I'll raise a goblet of cat's blood to both that and to the very wonderful Deborah Hyde.

"The bats have left the bell tower. The victims have been bled. Red velvet lines the black box. Bela Lugosi's dead. Bela Lugosi's dead. Undead. Undead. Undead" - Bela Lugosi's Dead, Bauhaus.