Vampire

*The British and American vampire is borrowed from the Slavic original, the vampir.*

A **vampire** is a being from folklore that subsists by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. Across Europe, vampires are undead beings that often visited loved ones and cause mischief or deaths in the neighborhoods they inhabited when they were alive. They frequently gaunt and pale.

The western European borrowing from the Slavic vampir is somewhat different and more refined, often being a nobleman who has sought immortality.

Have no reflection (in mirror, water) and no shadow. Unable to reproduce as they undead, even though they are conscious and immortal.

## History

The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of *The Vampyre* by John Polidori; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel *Dracula* is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend. The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, and television shows. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre.

In 1597, King James wrote a dissertation on witchcraft titled *Daemonologie* in which he wrote the belief that demons could possess both the living and the dead. Within his classification of demons, he explained the concept through the notion that incubi and succubae could possess the corpse of the deceased and walk the earth. As a devil borrows a dead body, it would seem so visibly and naturally to any man who converses with them and that any substance within the body would remain intolerably cold to others which they abuse.

From 1679, Philippe Rohr devotes an essay to the dead who chew their shrouds in their graves, a subject resumed by Otto in 1732, and then by Michael Ranft in 1734. The subject was based on the observation that when digging up graves, it was discovered that some corpses had at some point either devoured the interior fabric of their coffin or their own limbs. Ranft described in his treatise of a tradition in some parts of Germany, that to prevent the dead from masticating they placed a mound of dirt under their chin in the coffin, placed a piece of money and a stone in the mouth, or tied a handkerchief tightly around the throat.[82] In 1732 an anonymous writer writing as "the doctor Weimar" discusses the non-putrefaction of these creatures, from a theological point of view.[83] In 1733, Johann Christoph Harenberg wrote a general treatise on vampirism and the Marquis d'Argens cites local cases. Theologians and clergymen also address the topic.[84]

Some theological disputes arose. The non-decay of vampires' bodies could recall the incorruption of the bodies of the saints of the Catholic Church. A paragraph on vampires was included in the second edition (1749) of *De servorum Dei beatificatione et sanctorum canonizatione*, On the beatification of the servants of God and on canonization of the blessed, written by Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV). In his opinion, while the incorruption of the bodies of saints was the effect of a divine intervention, all the phenomena attributed to vampires were purely natural or the fruit of "imagination, terror and fear". In other words, vampires did not exist.[86]

Dom Augustine Calmet, a French theologian and scholar, published a comprehensive treatise in 1751 titled *Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants* which investigated the existence of vampires, demons, and spectres. Calmet conducted extensive research and amassed judicial reports of vampiric incidents and extensively researched theological and mythological accounts as well, using the scientific method in his analysis to come up with methods for determining the validity for cases of this nature. As he stated in his treatise:

They see, it is said, men who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, make them ill, and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves from their dangerous visits and their hauntings by exhuming them, impaling them, cutting off their heads, tearing out the heart, or burning them. These revenants are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches; and such particulars are related of them, so singular, so detailed, and invested with such probable circumstances and such judicial information, that one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that these revenants come out of their tombs and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them.

Calmet had numerous readers, including both a critical Voltaire and numerous supportive demonologists who interpreted the treatise as claiming that vampires existed. In the *Philosophical Dictionary,* Voltaire wrote:

*These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer.*

The controversy in Austria only ceased when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the claims of vampiric entities. He concluded that vampires did not exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies, sounding the end of the vampire epidemics. Other European countries followed suit. Despite this condemnation, the vampire lived on in artistic works and in local superstition.

## Etymology

Vampiric entities have been recorded in most cultures; the term *vampire*, previously an arcane subject, was popularized in the West in the early 19th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans. The *Oxford English Dictionary* dates the first appearance of the English word *vampire* (as *vampyre*) in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled *Travels of Three English Gentlemen* published in *The Harleian Miscellany* in 1745. Vampires had already been discussed in French and German literature. After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires". These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity. The English term was derived (possibly via French *vampyre*) from the German *Vampir*, in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian *vampir* (Cyrillic: вампир).