1918 The Vampire Legend Its Origin And Nature

# The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature

IN the world of demons there is no ﬁgure so terrible, yet possessed of such a fearful fascination, as the vampire, who combines within himself the natures of both man and demon. For he is of the great army of those vengeful dead who overshadow the existence Of peasant or barbarian, awaiting him at the darkest bend in the highway or in the gloomiest depths of the jungle to work him woe. The origin of the belief in vampirism has been sought in a score of theories, some of which are overburdened with the weight of scientiﬁc and antiquarian argument and illustration, while others are eloquent of the credulity of their authors. The theory which is presented for the ﬁrst time in this article is based on a consideration of the laws of folklore and comparative religion, yet differs essentially from others which have the authority of these sciences behind them....

## Author

James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence (25 November 1874 – 3 March 1955) Was A Scottish Journalist, Poet, Author, Folklorist And Occult Scholar. Spence Was A Fellow Of The Royal Anthropological Institute Of Great Britain And Ireland, And Vice-president Of The Scottish Anthropological And Folklore Society. He Founded The Scottish National Movement.

In This Time Spence's Interest Was Sparked In The Myth And Folklore Of Mexico And Central America, Resulting In His Popularization Of The Mayan Popol Vuh, The Sacred Book Of The Quiché Mayans (1908). He Compiled A Dictionary Of Mythology (1910), An Encyclopedia Of Occultism And Parapsychology (1920) And Numerous Additional Volumes.

Turning His Interest Closer To Home, He Investigated Scottish Folklore. An Ardent Scottish Nationalist, He Unsuccessfully Contested A Parliamentary Seat For Midlothian And Peebles Northern At A By-election In 1929. He Also Wrote Poetry, Collected In 1953.

Spence Wrote About Brythonic Rites And Traditions In Mysteries Of Celtic Britain (1905). In This Book, Spence Theorized That The Original Britons Were Descendants Of A People That Migrated From Northwest Africa And Were Probably Related To The Berbers And The Basques.

## Text

IN the world of demons there is no ﬁgure so terrible, yet possessed of such a fearful fascination, as the vampire, who combines within himself the natures of both man and demon. For he is of the great army of those vengeful dead who overshadow the existence Of peasant or barbarian, awaiting him at the darkest bend in the highway or in the gloomiest depths of the jungle to work him woe. The origin of the belief in vampirism has been sought in a score of theories, some of which are overburdened with the weight of scientiﬁc and antiquarian argument and illustration, while others are eloquent of the credulity of their authors. The theory which is presented for the ﬁrst time in this article is based on a consideration of the laws of folklore and comparative religion, yet differs essentially from others which have the authority of these sciences behind them.

If we approach the subject from the point of view of folklore we must ask ourselves: Does the belief in vampirism have a universal application—in other words, is it discovered in widely separate parts of the globe, and do the particulars of these beliefs, in the several localities where they are encountered, bear any resemblance to one another? The answer to this is certainly in the afﬁrmative, for we ﬁnd the idea of vampirism, or allied and variant beliefs, in all lands where the people have not yet ﬁnally emerged from barbarism or a condition of backwardness. It has frequently been asserted that the true home of the vampire superstition is the Balkan Peninsula, and that the Southern Slavs are the real originators of the belief. This erroneous notion is due to its prevalence in those regions at a time when it had scarcely been studied, or even encountered, in other lands. That the Balkans have an evil reputation for vampirism when compared with other European countries there is no room for dispute, and to those who have read the classic on the subject, that fascinating and wonderful collection of vampiric incident found in the second volume of Calmet’s Phantom World (from which it is easily seen that Bram Stoker drew the inspiration for his masterpiece Dracula), it will be unnecessary to speak of the abundant nature of the proofs that the idea luxuriated in Southern Slavdom, or of the value of a thorough knowledge of Balkan belief as a groundwork in the scientiﬁc study of the vampire legend.

Taking the Balkans, then, as the territory in which the vampire was ﬁrst studied, as the nucleus of European vampirism, do we ﬁnd the superstition as current in that region of such a character as to justify us in regarding it as a standard by which we may measure all other superstitions of the same class? Positively we do, for not only do we have the largest amount of data from Balkan sources, but so abundant is the material to our hands that we are in danger of embarrassment by reason of its very wealth in incident and detail. But through the entire mass runs such a strain of consistency as will assure the practised folklorist that he is dealing not with the phenomena of isolated invention, but with a reasoned folk-belief, evolved through the power of age-long credence into a highly specialized idea, with which are connected numerous circumstances of constant and positive recurrence.

These recurring circumstances may be grouped as follows: An individual of adult age dies. Shortly afterwards another, frequently a relative, grows pale, lean and attenuated, and, after lingering for a while, also dies, the immediate cause of death being malnutrition and anaemia. Still others fall ill, and declare their indisposition to arise from the repeated nocturnal visits of one of the deceased persons, who, they aver, fastens his lips to their necks or breasts, which he ﬁrst punctures with his front teeth, and sucks their blood until they fall back in a state of utter exhaustion or insensibility. Two minute punctures are usually, but not invariably, found on the neck or breast of the patient. The characteristic physical condition associated with the story of these nocturnal visitations manifests itself in considerable numbers of persons in the same locality, and at last the ravages caused by the malady become so widespread that public opinion is aroused and an inquiry is demanded into the circumstances of the mysterious plague, the nature of which, however, does not appear to be in doubt among the peasantry who suffer from its ravages. The inquiry is duly held, and local evidence points to the person ﬁrst deceased as the originator of the outbreak, the general opinion being that he has infected those who have died as the result of his visit with vampirism, so that they, too, have become active agents in the destruction of the bodies and the souls of perhaps scores of people in the vicinity. The court of inquiry orders the exhumation of one or more of the bodies of the deceased. On the order being carried into effect, the corpses are found to be fresh and gorged with blood, either lying with the eyes open and having-an aspect of evil intelligence and great malevolence, or breathing, but in a state of deep trance. The hair is observed to have grown, as have the two front teeth, which present a ﬁnely sharpened appearance, and the cofﬁn is frequently almost ﬁlled with blood. The blood of the vampire, too, is in a ﬂuid state like that of a living person. The penal measures which follow are various, but the most general are the driving of a sharpened stake through the body of the corpse (during which operation it vents a piercing shriek of the most blood-curdling description), its decapitation and the placing of its head by its side. Alternatively a nail may be driven through the temple, but should such measures prove unavailing, resort must be had to the agency of ﬁre, and the corpse of the vampire totally consumed, as providing the only certain assurance that it will trouble the neighbourhood no more.

Preventive measures very frequently, indeed almost inevitably, accompany the more radical work of extirpation, and are as a rule engaged in beforehand. Thus wreaths of garlic are suspended above the doors of the houses in the village or over the beds of the villagers, that vegetable being considered as especially obnoxious to the vampire. Those gifted with the faculty of discerning the maleﬁcent spirit in one of the several disguises he is privileged to take during the day-time may see him in a large, blue ﬂy which haunts the pantry where fresh meat lies, or as a ﬂoating speck of dust, and may succeed in capturing him in a bottle, into which ammonia or some equally pungent substance is introduced for his destruction. A sure indication of the presence of a vampire in a grave is to place a virgin youth upon a black stallion without a speck of white and which has never been to stud, and to bid the lad ride the animal about the suspected burying-ground, that spot at which it halts and refuses to advance any farther being the certain lurking- place of a vampire.

We may instance a certain outbreak of vampirism which is attested, as are numerous, others, by the officials who directed an inquiry into it. The case in question was vouched for by two officers of the Tribunal of Belgrade, and by an ofﬁcer of the Emperor’s troops at Graditz, who was an eye-witness of the proceedings. In the early part of the eighteenth century there died in the village of Kisilova, three leagues from Graditz, a peasant farmer of sixty-two. Three days after he had been buried, he appeared in the night to his son, and asked for food. The son supplied him with food, which he ate and then disappeared. On the following day the young man acquainted his neighbours with what had occurred. Several days later he was found dead in his bed, and on the same day several other people in the village suddenly fell ill, and died within short intervals of one another. The local bailiff transmitted an account of what had happened to the Tribunal of Belgrade, which dispatched two of its ofﬁcers to the village, along with an executioner, to examine into the affair. The imperial ofﬁcer who wrote the account of the proceedings made the journey from Graditz to examine the matter from motives of personal curiosity. A number of graves were opened, and when the Commissioners exhumed the body of the man with whom the villagers believed the outbreak to have originated, they found him with his eyes open and possessed of a ﬁne, natural colour, breathing, although motionless. The executioner drove a stake through his heart, and the corpse was then reduced to ashes, on a funeral pyre. No mark of vampirism was found either on the body of the son or on any of the other persons who had died during the outbreak, and they were re-interred.

But the vampire was not always so easily accounted for, and Charles de Achertz in his Magia Posthuma (Olmutz, I706), relates a case which occurred in the village of Blow near Kadam in Bohemia. The vampire in this instance was a shepherd, and the villagers, being convinced of his vampiric condition, exhumed his body and drove a stake through it. But he jeered at them from his grave, and told them that they “were very good to give him a stick with which to defend himself from the dogs." That same night he went about his dreadful work with redoubled violence, and strangled several persons. His body was delivered to the executioner, who placed it in a cart for the purpose of conveying it beyond the village to a spot where he intended to burn it. But on the way it emitted the most piercing screams, struggling and twisting its limbs like a living person, and when it was again pierced with stakes quantities of bright, vermilion blood ﬂowed from it. At last it was consumed. and with its burning the visitation came to an end.

The critics of his day took Calmet greatly to task because of his neglect of that part of the belief which accounts for the manner in which vampires are supposed to leave their graves, carrying their burial clothes with them. The soil of the grave, it was pointed out, was invariably undisturbed and the vampire entered through doors and windows without opening or breaking them. At the date at which this criticism was made the theory of the precipitation of matter had not yet been formulated, but that it had been a part of folk-belief for countless ages is well known to modern students of magic and folklore. The circumstance that the cofﬁn was frequently ﬁlled with blood when opened and the body of the vampire himself in an apparently living condition is fully attested by the signed evidence of the competent Imperial ofﬁcials who examined a number of cases. Must we take the “legend” literally? If not, how are we to discount the ofﬁcial evidence? It must be admitted that if we are to take it at its actual face value vampirism must take its place among those super-normal phenomena regarding which evidence is daily accumulating—phenomena which, after all, are no more marvellous than the hundred other marvels of science which we never. cease to regard without a sense of astonishment. Many, however, will hesitate before adopting conclusions so subversive of our present scientiﬁc faith.

Ere we present our theory of vampirism, which is best illustrated by the circumstances of the superstition as found in the Balkans, let us glance at the vampire idea as it is encountered in other lands, and especially in savage or barbarian countries. The root of the name is undoubtedly South Slavonic, and we have in Russian the allied form uapir, which signiﬁes “drinker." Aksakof and Ralston have done much to bring the facts of Russian vampirism to light, but the theory of the former able student of folklore that the vampire was a species of demonic symbol of the rain-cloud, smacks too much of. the Mullerian school of mythic interpretation to satisfy the modern inquirer. Russian vampirism, then, may be regarded as similar in all its essentials to the Balkan superstition. In Greece, Armenia, Turkey, Syria, Persia, India, Burma, we ﬁnd the belief in vampires almost, if not quite, as strong as in the Balkans. But—and this is a reservation of importance—the superstition is not met with in any country or among any people where sepulture of the dead is not practised in some manner.

Let us examine two out of the many variants of the vampire tradition which especially may assist us in arriving at a conclusion regarding the belief as a whole. In the Malay Peninsula, where we ﬁnd a population of a fairly advanced type, a peculiarly fearsome version of the superstition exists. The natives believe that deceased witches or sorcerers arise from their graves at night and scour the country in search of victims whose blood they may suck. But these dead magicians are not equipped with all the corporeal members, like the vampires of other lands. To a head is attached only an aesophagus and stomach, which, popular belief suggests, is all the sorcerer-vampire requires to enable him to satisfy his ghastly cravings. An illustration of still greater analogical value comes (as do many of the most valuable variants in folklore) from the American continent. In ancient Mexico the vampire was identiﬁed with the mother who died in child-bed, and who, wrathful and distressed at separation from her infant, roamed the highways at night, seeking for those upon whom she might wreak her vindictive spite.

The doors, and interstices in the native huts were sealed up so that she might not enter, but, did she obtain ingress, the children of the family were certain to perish of the blight she cast upon them. Her appearance, if we may judge of it from certain clay ﬁgures and paintings which are believed to represent her, was ghastly and terrifying in the extreme, for her face was painted white, and her hair arranged in snake-like folds, reminiscent of the serpentine locks of the Furies of Latin tradition. In order to placate her the Mexicans bestowed upon her the name of Ciuapipiltin {Vila Note: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Myths\_of\_Mexico\_and\_Peru.djvu/208} or Ciuateteo (“Right honourable mother"), and shrines which contained substantial food-offerings were commonly placed at the juncture of four cross-roads, in order that, when she had satisﬁed that ravenous hunger which is characteristic of the malevolent dead, she might not be able to ﬁnd her way back to the haunts of men, or that (as the expressive Scots term has it) she might be ”wandered." But she was not the only vampire known to Mexican mythology, for, as in ancient Gaul and old Germany, all sorcerers were regarded as vampires, and one of the questions which the examining Spanish priests invariably put to the natives of whose Christianity they were doubtful was: “Art thou a sorcerer? Dost thou suck the blood of others?"

Now, the Mexican superstition of the vampire mothers ha connections with other folklore phenomena which cannot fail to be of considerable analogical value, for on one hand it links with Burmese and other superstitions regarding the dangerous character of the dead mother who is thus separated from her child, and on the other with the ancient English practice of burying the bodies of suicides at four cross-roads, “with a stake in their insides,” as Tom Hood says, in order that they might not arise, and if they should succeed in doing so, that they might be puzzled or “wandered” by the choice of four highways for their hauntings. But why take so much trouble to “keep down” a mere suicide?

Let us glance back for a moment through the dusks of antiquity to examine ancient methods of burial. Let us observe the sepulchral practices of ancient Egypt and Babylonia. In the Nile country the tomb of the dead, from pre-dynastic times until at least the Ptolemaic period, was regarded as the house of the ka or double of the deceased, that is not of the ba, or soul, but of the astral body. Like the living it required sustenance, and for its support the ﬁlial son (as in modern China) periodically supplied a plentiful measure of food and drink. Did he fail to do so he was not only branded as unﬁlial by the tenets of his religion, but it was believed that his father's ka starved in its tomb, a wistful and hungry ghost, which, at last, was compelled by starvation to walk the desert and content itself with such scraps of garbage as it could pick up.

An almost identical belief obtained in Babylonia and Assyria. The ﬁne passage which concludes the wonderful epic of Gilgamesh makes allusion to the fate of the neglected dead, and Babylonian sorcery is full of the hungry ghost who wanders the ways of men unfed and untended. These ideas had, of course, a much older tradition behind them, for if we examine the tombs of the neolithic period we ﬁnd that its dead were well supplied with meat and drink, not necessarily for the use of the soul on its last journey, as has so often been stated. It has recently been contended with reason that the weapons of the dead found in ancient tumuli were not supplied for the uses of the soul in the “happy hunting-grounds," but to enable it to ﬁght the demons who swarmed around it in its new dwelling-place. What applies to weapons, of course applies to food, and we are probably justiﬁed in concluding that the idea of a journey to a specialized heaven is one of relatively late origin, and that the tomb was regarded in very early times as the true home of the dead, whence the astral counterpart might issue almost at will.

We ﬁnd evidence of the continuation of this idea in much later times. The work of Michael Rauff, De Masticatione Mortuarum in Tumulis (*Concerning the Dead who Chew in their Graves”),* shows that the notion of the hungry dead survived the mediaeval period. Rauff states that it was customary in some places to put a piece of earth under the chin of the dead person, or a small piece of money and a stone in the mouth, or even to tie a handkerchief tightly round the throat to prevent this practice. This idea was, of course, nothing but a relic of the much older belief that the dead required food, and that if its supply were discontinued they went hungry. “A hungry man is an angry man” all the world over, and what, then, is a hungry astral body, equipped with all the material desires of the living and actuated by all the discontented regretfulness and malevolence of the dead ? What else but a vampire, a cannibalistic spirit, uniting vengeance with the disappointed lust for sustenance? And vengeance on whom? On those relatives, preferably on those sons, whose duty it was to see that it' did not go hungry. We have seen that in the generality of cases it was to its relatives that the Balkan vampire returned. Balkan belief says nothing about the necessity for feeding the dead, and that portion of the original legend must be regarded as a piece of pagan practice which disappeared upon the introduction of Christianity. But it admits the hungry nature of the dead and thus implies that at one time it was the native practice to supply them with provender. It will be remembered, too, that in the case of the peasant of Kisilova the vampire at ﬁrst made no attack upon his son, but simply requested food, and we have other instances in which the haunting spirit merely joins the family at table, with, however, disastrous results to most of them - results which the Egyptian moral code would have regarded as a righteous punishment for ﬁlial neglect.

The question remains: In what manner did the vampire legend (if legend it be) obtain such a strong hold in the Balkan Peninsula, and how was it enabled to ﬂourish in that region so long? The answer to this is probably to be found in the singular practice of the Greek Church in connection with the blessing of the corpse, and the great occult inﬂuence wielded by that church in the Slav countries from Byzantine times onwards. In Greece the vampire legend ﬂourished exceedingly until quite recent times, and even to-day is by no means extinguished in such parts of the country as are remote from beaten tracks. The Greek name for the vampire is vroucolac or broucolanc, and at the end of the eighteenth century this Hellenic demon had so entrenched himself in the superstition of the people as to endanger most seriously the peace of whole communities. A vrouolac in the island of Mycone so terrorized the neighbourhood that hundreds quitted it, or else ﬂed from their houses, the windows of which had been broken by the violence of the demon, who, not content with draining the veins of half the people of the island, consumed nearly the entire wine supply! Continual masses proved of no avail, and at last, with much fear and trembling, the authorities proceeded to the exhumation of the corpse, which was burned to the accompaniment of an unparalleled scene of excitement depicted in the graphic pages of Tournefort, who was an eye-witness of the proceedings. The Greek vampires, indeed, far surpassed those of the Balkans in the violence of their ravages, which can be studied in the pages of Dom Calmet. But it is not so much with the vroucolac that we have to deal as with the religious practices Which fostered the belief in him. Tournefort relates that in the Greek Archipelago the people ﬁrmly believed that it was only in the Greek Church that excommunication preserved the body entire and unputreﬁed. Some ascribed it to the bishop’s sentence, others thought that the devil entered into the body of the excommunicated person and re-animated him, so that he became an evil spirit incarnate. The Greek priesthood, it is well known, from early periods of their schism with Rome, asserted that the divine authority of their bishops was manifested by the fact of the persons who died under their sentence of excommunication resisting the decomposing inﬂuences of death, while the Latin Church could not prevent its excommunicated persons from mouldering into dust. Preservation, according to the Greeks, was essential to the repose and happiness of the spirit, and was clearly a tenet borrowed from the practice of ancient Egypt, which almost certainly reached Byzantium from that great mother of mystic practice, Alexandria.

If we combine this circumstance with those which we have already presented, we may be, perhaps, not very distant from a solution of the origin of the vampire legend the gloomiest yet perhaps the most worthy of exploration of all the ancient and shadowy caverns in the dark realm of demonology. The vampire is the spiteful dead in active vengeance, no longer the warning ghost, but the neglected astral shape resolved upon restoration and reprisal.

## Publication History

* [Magazine Form] The Occult Review Vol 27 No 3 March 1918
* [Book Form] The Occult Review Vol XXIX: January-June 1919
* Title: The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature
* By: Lewis Spence
* Editor: Ralph Shirley
* Publisher: W. Rider And Son, London
* Original From: University Of Minnesota
* Digitized: Mar 21, 2014
* Pages (Text) 137-145

## Links

* http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/occult\_review/
* https://books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&id=JG9AAQAAMAAJ&dq=Occult+Review+Volume+27&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Vampire
* Hilariously, they've slapped the tags for Public Domain on it, but still have the pdf behind a paywall. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=umn.31951000842887p;page=ssd;view=plaintext;seq=145;num=137

### Further Reading

* https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Spence%2C%20Lewis%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Lewis%20Spence%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Spence%2C%20Lewis%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Lewis%20Spence%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Spence%2C%20L%2E%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Lewis%20Spence%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Spence%2C%20Lewis%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Lewis%20Spence%22%29%20OR%20%28%221874-1955%22%20AND%20Spence%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29
* https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5707
* https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchType=7&searchId=4021&maxResultsPerPage=100&recCount=100&recPointer=0&resultPointer=0&headingId=31777311

## Citations

**APA:** Spence, L. (1918, March). The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature. The Occult Review, 27(3), 137–145. https://books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&id=JG9AAQAAMAAJ&dq=Occult+Review+Volume+27&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Vampire .

**MLA:** Spence, Lewis. “The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature.” The Occult Review, Mar. 1918, pp. 137–145, books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&id=JG9AAQAAMAAJ&dq=Occult+Review+Volume+27&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Vampire . Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.

**Chicago:** Spence, Lewis. “The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature.” The Occult Review 27, no. 3, March 1918. https://books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&id=JG9AAQAAMAAJ&dq=Occult+Review+Volume+27&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Vampire .

**Harvard:** Spence, L. (1918) “The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature,” The Occult Review, March, pp. 137–145. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&id=JG9AAQAAMAAJ&dq=Occult+Review+Volume+27&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Vampire (Accessed: February 22, 2021).

**Vancouver:** Spence L. The Vampire Legend : Its Origin And Nature. The Occult Review [Internet]. 1918Mar [cited 2021Feb22];27(3):137–45. Available from: https://books.google.com/books?newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&id=JG9AAQAAMAAJ&dq=Occult+Review+Volume+27&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Vampire