Short Book Excerpts

For books that feature a few bits of vampire lore but vampires are not really the subject matter of the book.

## Demonology and Devil Lore

This menace shows that the Chaldæan and Babylonian belief in the vampyre, called Akhkharu in Assyrian, was fully developed at a very early date. Although the Hunger-demon was very fully developed in India, it does not appear to have been at any time so cannibalistic, possibly because the natives were not great flesh-eaters. In some cases, indeed, we meet with the vampyre superstition; as in the story of Vikram and the Vampyre, and in the Tamil drama of Harichándra, where the frenzied Sandramáti says to the king, 'I belong to the race of elves, and I have killed thy child in order that I might feed on its delicate flesh.' Such expressions are rare enough to warrant suspicion of their being importations. The Vetala's appetite is chiefly for corpses. The poor hungry demons of India--such as the Bhút, a dismal, ravenous ghost, dreaded at the moon-wane of the month Katik (Oct.-Nov.)--was not supposed to devour man, but only man's food. The Hindu demons of this class may be explained by reference to the sráddha, or oblation to ancestors, concerning which we read directions in the Manu Code. 'The ancestors of men are satisfied a whole month with tila, rice, &c.; two months with fish, &c. The Manes say, Oh, may that man be born in our line who may give us milky food, with honey and pure butter, both on the thirteenth of the moon and when the shadow of an elephant falls to the east!' The bloodthirsty demons of India have pretty generally been caught up like Kali into a higher symbolism, and their voracity systematised and satisfied in sacrificial commutations. The popular belief in the southern part of that country is indicated by Professor Monier Williams, in a letter written from Southern India, wherein he remarks that the devils alone require propitiation. It is generally a simple procedure, performed by offerings of food or other articles supposed to be acceptable to disembodied beings. For example, when a certain European, once a terror to the district in which he lived, died in the South of India, the natives were in the constant habit of depositing brandy and cigars on his tomb to propitiate his spirit, supposed to roam about the neighbourhood in a restless manner, and with evil proclivities. The very same was done to secure the good offices of the philanthropic spirit of a great European sportsman, who, when he was alive, delivered his district from the ravages of tigers. Indeed all evil spirits are thought to be opposed by good ones, who, if duly propitiated, make it their business to guard the inhabitants of particular places from demonic intruders. Each district, and even every village, has its guardian genius, often called its Mother.

* Demonology and Devil-Lore
* by Moncure Daniel Conway
* Publisher: New York; Henry Holt and Company
* page 49
* Hosted at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/40686/pg40686.txt

The demon that 'lurks in graveyards' is universal, and may have suggested cremation. In the East it is represented mainly by such forms as the repulsive ghoul, which preys on dead bodies; but it has been developed in some strange way to the Slavonic phantom called Vampyre, whose peculiar fearfulness is that it represents the form in which any deceased person may reappear, not ghoul-like to batten on the dead, but to suck the blood of the living. This is perhaps the most formidable survival of demonic superstition now existing in the world.

A people who still have in their dictionary such a word as 'miscreant' (misbeliever) can hardly wonder that the priests of the Eastern Church fostered the popular belief that heretics at death changed into drinkers of the blood of the living. The Slavonic vampyres have declined in England and America to be the 'Ogres,' who 'smell the blood of an Englishman,' but are rarely supposed to enjoy it; but it exposes the real ugliness of the pious superstitions sometimes deemed pretty, that, in proportion to the intensity of belief in supernaturalism, the people live in terror of the demons that go about seeking whom they may devour. In Russia the watcher beside a corpse is armed with holy charms against attack from it at midnight. A vampyre may be the soul of any outcast from the Church, or one over whose corpse, before burial, a cat has leaped or a bird flown. It may be discovered in a graveyard by leading a black colt through; the animal will refuse to tread on the vampyre's grave, and the body is taken out and a stake driven through it, always by a single blow. A related class of demons are the 'heart-devourers.' They touch their victim with an aspen or other magical twig; the heart falls out, and is, perhaps, replaced by some baser one. Mr. Ralston mentions a Mazovian story in which a hero awakes with the heart of a hare, and remains a coward ever after; and in another case a quiet peasant received a cock's heart and was always crowing. The Werewolf, in some respects closely related to the vampyre, also pursues his ravages among the priest-ridden peasantry of the South and East.

In Germany, though the more horrible forms of the superstition are rare, the 'Nachzehrer' is much dreaded. Even in various Protestant regions it is thought safest that a cross should be set beside every grave to impede any demonic propensities that may take possession of the person interred; and where food is not still buried with the corpse to assuage any pangs of hunger that may arise, a few grains of corn or rice are scattered upon it in reminiscence of the old custom. In Diesdorf it is believed that if money is not placed in the dead person's mouth at burial, or his name not cut from his shirt, he is likely to become a Nachzehrer, and that the ghost will come forth in the form of a pig. It is considered a sure preventative of such a result to break the neck of the dead body. On one occasion, it is there related, several persons of one family having died, the suspected corpse was exhumed, and found to have eaten up its own grave-clothes.

Dr. Dyer, an eminent physician of Chicago, Illinois, told me (1875) that a case occurred in that city within his personal knowledge, where the body of a woman who had died of consumption was taken out of the grave and the lungs burned, under a belief that she was drawing after her into the grave some of her surviving relatives. In 1874, according to the Providence Journal, in the village of Peacedale, Rhode Island, U.S., Mr. William Rose dug up the body of his own daughter, and burned her heart, under the belief that she was wasting away the lives of other members of his family.

* Demonology and Devil-Lore
* by Moncure Daniel Conway
* Publisher: New York; Henry Holt and Company
* pages 50-52
* Hosted at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/40686/pg40686.txt

## Witchcraft in old and New England

William Laudun, a brave English knight, came to Gilbert Foliot, then Bishop of Hereford (as he was from 1149 to 1162), and asked counsel: "A Welsh wizard (maleficus) recently died in my town. Four nights later he came back, and he keeps coming every night, calling by name certain of his former neighbors, who instantly fall sick and die within three days, so that but few of them are left." The bishop suggested that the evil angel of this dead villain had perhaps reanimated his body, and advised the knight to have it dug up and beheaded, and then buried again after the grave had been sprinkled copiously with holy water. All this proved of no avail, and at length the name of Sir William himself was called. Seizing his sword, he pursued the demonic corpse to the churchyard, and, just as it was sinking into the grave, cleft its head to the neck. There was no further trouble. We have here, to all intents and purposes, a case of vampirism, and it is noteworthy that the vampire was a wizard in this life. Other instances of vampirism in the twelfth century are recorded by William of Newburgh.

* Witchcraft in old and New England
* by George Lyman Kittredge
* Publisher Harvard university press
* page 43
* Contributor/Digitized: State Library of Pennsylvania
* Hosted at: https://archive.org/details/witchcraftinoldn00kitt\_0/page/42/mode/2up

The German vampire who so impressed the imagination of Henry More, varied his more ghoulish pranks by draining the cows dry. Witches may take away the milk of a nursing mother; they may even suck her breasts till the blood comes — just as they can make a cow give bloody milk. Sometimes, too, they suck the blood of infants. Such were the striges of antiquity, who were hags or demons in bird form.

* Witchcraft in old and New England
* by George Lyman Kittredge
* Publisher Harvard university press
* pages 166-167
* Contributor/Digitized: State Library of Pennsylvania
* Hosted at: https://archive.org/details/witchcraftinoldn00kitt\_0/page/166/mode/2up

The Canon Episcopi, we observe, has in and for itself nothing to do with witchcraft. The women whom it contemplates are merely deluded creatures whose sin consists in their faith in a heathen goddess, their willingness to attend her in aerial frolics, and their acceptance of dream phenomena, in this regard, as genuine experiences. In short, they have relapsed to paganism. But they are not witches, even in intent. Their imagined flight involves no purpose of evil magic: they have neither the power nor the wish to kill their neighbors or blight their crops or send the murrain upon their cattle. In the mind of the folk, however, the coursers with Diana became crossed or confused with another breed of uncanny - creatures — the striges, vampire-hags who ranged the air by-night and slaughtered new-born infants or sucked their blood. Such beings were immemorial figures of the popular creed, and they have continued to haunt men's minds to the present day.

* Witchcraft in old and New England
* by George Lyman Kittredge
* Publisher Harvard university press
* pages 224-225
* Contributor/Digitized: State Library of Pennsylvania
* Hosted at: https://archive.org/details/witchcraftinoldn00kitt\_0/page/244/mode/2up