I AM VAMPIRE!HEAR ME ROAAARRR
17:05 Jul 22 2010
Times Read: 778
What's In a Word?
How "vampire" came to mean anything not under the sun
As I describe in several of these articles, particularly Communing With Vampires, the V-word has created far more dissension than unity among those people who have adopted it as a personal identification. There seem to be no end to the debates about what the word "vampire" really means--in its original form, in everyday usage, or in the sense of a "real" vampire. Rampant misinformation about folklore, "vampire myths" and "logical explanations for vampires" is commonplace even among academic writers, far more in popular books and on the Internet. The word "vampire" has become an incredibly loaded and charged word in English, especially in the United States, with connotations that are literal, historical, literary, metaphorical, criminological, psychological, paranormal, occult, political and personal. Many people seem to have a high investment in claiming the word "vampire" and exclusively determining its meaning. Even vampire fans and scholars, let alone vampire-identified people, often seem emotionally attached to the correctness of their definition and the wrongness of other points of view, to an irrational extreme. Because of all this, it's worth taking a few minutes to review just exactly where the English word "vampire" came from, what it originally meant, and how it's wound up with so many different meanings that it's now almost meaning-less.
Contrary to the popular idea of "a universal vampire myth" going back to the dawn of time (which I'll discuss below), the history of vampires--the word and the phenomenon--begins in a very specific time and place: Eastern Europe around the mid-1600's.
At that time, there began to be a number of localized "panics" in Eastern Europe and Greece, in which people in various towns and villages went more-or-less berserk and became convinced that they were being haunted, harassed and sometimes, killed by something that resembled a person who had recently been buried. Contrary to numerous popular "logical explanations," these "panics" were not caused by a failure to understand how bodies normally decay, or ignorance about diseases, or anything similar. The "panics" almost all happened in places where the religion was (or was very influenced by) Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christianity had very specific teachings about the relationship of the soul to the body after death, its connection to the physical body, and the immense importance of correct funeral rituals and the condition of the soul when the person died. These teachings fitted into an overall worldview in which there was a "right order of things," an ancient and almost universal concept. Violate that "right order" and all manner of disastrous and chaotic events could follow, especially around matters of birth, death and the afterworld.
The "panics" invariably happened after the community started to experience waves of unexplained paranormal phenomena. These waves happen constantly, everywhere, and have been explained in different ways by different cultures. The events almost never involved people actually thinking something bit them and drank their blood. vampire hauntings included poltergeist-like phenomena (dishes smashed, noises, furniture thrown around, people being dumped out of bed onto the floor, food being eaten or destroyed), apparitions (people saw the recently deceased skulking around), night-hag phenomena (people waking up with a sense of a heavy weight on their chest, a sensation of smothering, terror, and often a vision of a looming dark shape in their room), incubus/succubus visitations (people experienced a complete sexual encounter with something that wasn't human), and sometimes, further deaths (due to either a known disease or a mysterious wasting away). In Europe between approximately 1650 and 1800, these "flaps" or clusters of paranormal events were attributed to vampires.
When the community had grown terrified enough, it would begin digging up graves, starting with the first person whose apparition had been seen. In some cases, hysteria was so high that the local people convinced themselves that the body was in a state that was "unnatural" (basically, undecayed) although objective witnesses who were not Eastern Orthodox Christians and not affected by the hysteria reported that the body seemed pretty seriously decayed to them. (For one such example, see the well-known case reported by de Tournefort.) One of the reasons for this delusion by hysterical witnesses is that in Eastern Christianity, it was believed that the body would stay undecayed if the soul was restless, excommunicated, or otherwise not in a state of Grace. Since the person who'd been exhumed was walking around and making trouble, the victims expected the body to correspond with the obvious state of the soul, and that's what they saw, no matter what their noses and eyes told them. Western Christianity did not teach this about lost souls and their bodies, and in fact, it was saints and the very holy who remained "incorrupt" after death in Western tradition. There was no native vampire belief in countries where Roman-Catholicism was the predominant religion, because of this. These vampire panics continued intermittently for about a century and then seemed to die down and recede. In the meantime, they were observed and written about by a number of academics, clerics, authorities and travelers, all of whom were bemused by what they saw.
Although there were a number of names for these revenants, "vampire" is the one that got into English and stuck there. Why, and where this word really came from, is a matter of great disagreement, and I recommend an essay on the topic by Katharina M. Wilson in Alan Dundes' The Vampire: A Casebook to anyone who is interested. Whatever this bogeyman was called in the local language, it was usually one of numerous related words derived from Slavic and that often had a close relationship to words meaning "werewolf."
The original vampires were seldom described as drinking blood, although that was reported some of the time. Vampires were the hungry dead. They came back to eat, and they ate and drank all kinds of things, both normal food and noxious substances like excrement. It was generally assumed that they would drink the blood of both animals and people, especially babies and children, if they could get it. If their visitations resulted in weakness, illness, or death, it was usually assumed that the vampire was drinking blood. The stories about them filled in that detail, and some local words were coined in later centuries that indicated this (for example blut-sauger in German, sugnwrgwaed in Welsh, both literally meaning "bloodsucker"). Direct accounts of attacks by victims, however, seldom described a clear perception of being bitten or sucked on for blood, the way fictional stories later imagined.
Besides food and drink, vampires also had insatiable appetites for sex. Not only would they return to sleep with their bereaved spouses or lovers, they would "pester" strangers, including virginal girls and nuns. Vampires often were far from unattractive. They were commonly people who had died untimely, violent, or "unnatural" deaths in the prime of life. They returned from the grave craving the physical pleasures that a premature death had denied them. What made vampires truly horrible was that they came back from the dead at all, that they could physically affect people and things (ghosts usually could not), and that they were hungry.
Vampires hardly ever "haunted" for very long after their deaths. Unlike ghosts, who could go on appearing for century after century, vampires were usually detected and stopped very quickly. In some cultures, they were actually thought to have a "lifespan" after which they'd cease to be a problem. In only a few cultures did vampires continue appearing for long periods of time. In a couple of traditions, the vampire was thought capable of wandering from village to village indefinitely, appearing just like a normal human being, even marrying and raising children and then moving on. This led to folklore, especially among Romany people and in Greece, about families who had "vampire ancestors" and hence were gifted at detecting and destroying malevolent vampires. There were also many traditions about "living vampires," who usually were called by special names of their own and were thought to be non-human people living in human communities. "Living vampires" had magical powers, behaved like supernatural vampires at night, and often were thought to return from the grave as full-fledged supernatural vampires after they died. Folklore about werewolves, vampires and "witches" overlapped and blurred together considerably in Eastern Europe.
Whether vampires were literally believed to be walking corpses is unclear. People in the grip of a "panic" weren't too sure, themselves, and their statements are contradictory. On the one hand, vampires weren't just ghosts--they were able to physically affect the material world too easily. On the other hand, they got inside locked and closed buildings like a wraith, appeared and disappeared without explanation, and then there was that little problem of how they got in and out of a sealed grave. So, the most general explanation was that vampires were souls that could project themselves out of their body, materialize to a certain degree, get what they wanted and then return to the body, which meanwhile stayed right in its grave. But people were a little confused about this.
Once the "panics" died back and stopped happening, vampires shifted from being a directly-observed, paranormal phenomenon to pure folklore. The stories about them now become fairy-tales, rather than first-person paranormal accounts, and the characteristics of the vampire became stylized. You can see this change in any of the anthologies of vampire folklore--such as Raymond T. McNally's A Clutch of Vampires. There are two main categories of vampire folklore: one of them consists of reported observations during panics, and one consists of fairy-tales, which are stylized and often embellished and retold long after anyone believed there was such a thing as a vampire in reality. It's like the difference between the accusations made during witchcraft persecutions, by people who truly believed in witches and believed that what they were saying was actually happening, to them, right now--and the witches who appear as villains in a Grimm's fairy-tale, told centuries after nobody believed in witches at all.
English speaking cultures--like almost everyone else outside of Eastern Orthodox Christian lands--had no true vampire belief, although they certainly had ghosts and revenants. The word "vampire" was used in reports and skeptical analyses of the Eastern European panics, and it seems to have gotten into English from such reports, around 1650. It first appears in writing in 1734. But this was well into the Enlightenment, so the idea of the walking dead was seen as highly superstitious. By the 1740's, "vampire" was already being used as a metaphor. In English, the word "vampire" acquired an analogous meaning: something that was evil, grasping, greedy, and that lived on the lives and blood of other people--such as a lawyer or a landlord, for example.
And this is where the story gets very complicated, because once "vampire" was a metaphor, and nothing else, it was free game for anyone to play with. Poets and writers got hold of it, and began to imbue the concept of "vampire" with all kinds of allegorical subtexts, frequently related to sex and sexuality. The whole dynamic of having power over another, of using another's vital resources and energy, of dominating and submitting sexually, of extending one's own existence at the expense of others...all of this began to be woven into the literary concept of a "vampire." Vampires became immortal--because if you can die and return to earth, neither alive nor dead, and remain undecayed indefinitely, then obviously you're beyond the process of aging and illness that afflict living mortals. And gradually, vampires were seen as living exclusively on blood, because the whole mystique of blood in Western Christian traditions was tied into the idea of a magic elixir that was the source of life and could keep the dead alive. The hungry dead who devoured anything they could get became fastidious immortals who drank only blood--forbidden in the Old Testament, said to give immortality by Christ in the New. By 1897 when Stoker published Dracula, the literary vampire was something those terrified Eastern Europeans 150 years earlier would never have recognized. Stoker, from his dramatic Irish imagination (he was a theatre agent, after all) and Roman Catholicism, actually invented many of the vampire characteristics that immediately became "vampire rules" in English literature. These include vampires not having a reflection, a vampire's having to be invited into a house before it could enter, the vampire's great strength, vampire mind-control powers, and the vampire needing special soil or earth to sleep in--all pure inventions by Stoker.
Along with the literary vampire, the vampire metaphor had also been borrowed by 19th century occultists to describe a different idea. Occultists began to write about something called a "psychic vampire," an entity that stole pure "life force" from its victims. At first, "psychic vampires" were believed to be low-level "astral entities" with no relationship to human beings. Over time, this changed, and human beings began to be seen as sometimes acting as "psychic vampires." Some occultists theorized that human beings became "psychic vampires" when one of those pesky astral entities became attached to them. In the early 20th century, the potential for human beings to be "psychic vampires" without any help was seen, and there were a few short stories exploring this notion (for example, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1896 short story, "Good Lady Ducayne" [PDF]). However, until the turn of the century, "psychic vampire" was a concept mostly known in occult circles. To the average person, the word "vampire" had a very specific meaning: a human being, who had died, who was now supernaturally animated and couldn't be "killed" except by certain methods, and who drank blood as nourishment.
Vampire scholarship changed that. There was a tendency among late-19th century and early 20th century scholars (such as Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough) to try to "unify" diverse information into connected theories or concepts. In 1896, folklorist George R. Stetson penned "The Animistic Vampire in New England" for the journal, The American Anthropologist. A few decades later, Dudley Wright published The Book of Vampires, and the granddaddy of the vampirologists, Montague Summers, produced his works, The Vampire in Europe and The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. These writers, and others, established the notion that "every culture has a form of vampire belief," that "vampires" were a universal, even archetypal human superstition, and that they were found world- and history-wide, buried in every body of myth, hidden in every holy book, lurking behind every fairy-tale.
But these scholars were absolutely wrong. The folklorists managed this feat by taking each separate element of the Vampire Metaphor and using it to qualify as a "type of vampire" absolutely anything whatsoever that fitted even one aspect of the definition. Any supernatural being that drank blood, anything that physically came back from the grave, any entity or revenant that was "hungry" or that pestered the living for sex, was labeled "a type of vampire." The intensely Euro-centric folklorists disregarded the fact that the individual cultures concerned had complex histories and belief systems to which these "types of vampire" really belonged. They all got lumped together, and suddenly the word "vampire" included at least half of the myths, legends, and folklore ever known on the planet. Child-killing demons, blood-drinking gods, hungry ancestor spirits, cannibalistic demons, fierce animal ghosts, night-hag entities, incubi/succubi, the restless dead, plague demons...these and many other very culture-specific beliefs, all with their own context and history, suddenly became part of the definition of "vampire."
Wrong or not, the arguments of the folklorists appealed to the imagination of English-speaking people. We already had the literary Vampire Metaphor, now over a century old and rich with psychological wish-fulfillment: immortality, eternal youth, power, sexuality, the thrill of the forbidden. Now we suddenly had educated scholars telling us that everyone the world over and to the dawn of time had believed in vampires. Inherent in that (supposedly) Historical Fact was a subtle suggestion: "if all human beings everywhere believed in vampires...then maybe, just maybe...there might be something to it. Maybe it's really true. Maybe it's possible to be immortal. After all, could all those people have been wrong?" And so the notion that "all cultures had a vampire belief" was embraced not only intellectually but emotionally, and is now part of the Canon of Conventional Wisdom. It has rarely been attacked critically by any writer since Summers--his books are the basic references for every compendium of vampire folklore right up to Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book, and they all copy his basic format.
After the 1930's, fiction writers were eager to get away from cobwebby old "clichés" and invent fresh speculations about vampires. The Vampire Metaphor grew, and changed, and grew some more, having been completely liberated from the old definitions. Fictional vampires were freed of the old restrictions, but burdened with new ones. Filmmakers, in need of vivid visual imagery, gave us some of them. F. W. Murnau invented the previously-unknown idea that vampires would melt in sunlight for his 1922 film "Nosferatu." It was such a dramatic image, and so psychologically charged, it almost instantly became vampire canon. The fictional vampire, even more than the folklore vampire, could literally be anything--anything at all. Certain things were constants--blooddrinking and some kind of supernatural nature being the two main ones. But even those weren't rules. Science-fiction vampires (aliens, "vampire diseases") and fictional "energy vampires" were accepted.
Despite all the fictional variations, and some feints at showing the vampire's point of view, or making him an "antihero," vampires remained villainous. For a real person to be equated with a "vampire" was not a flattering thing. Psychological literature used the "vampire" label to refer to very disturbed individuals who drank blood or practiced cannibalism. Usually these individuals were serial killers, rapists, or other brutal criminals, but sometimes they were simply pathetic people who craved blood so much they'd gnaw on themselves or cut partners during sex. In addition to this, there had been various stories for centuries about anti-social groups that allegedly drank human blood in rituals (Medieval Jews were accused of this as well as 20th century Satanists--among many others), usually that of babies and children. But these people were rarely called "vampires," and their blooddrinking was just one of many unfriendly things they were accused of doing. As books about "real vampires" began to be published in the 1960's, they usually combined folklore compendiums drawn from Summers with accounts of historical figures or well-known criminals who claimed to drink human blood. These were the people labelled "real life vampires" at first.
Around 1970 or so, it began to gradually come out that some people--not criminals, not emotionally disturbed, although usually somewhat eccentric--living outwardly ordinary lives, reported a craving to drink blood. These people began to be written about, or to talk about themselves more openly, and slowly the idea grew that there might be "real vampires"--living human beings who needed to drink blood for some reason.
Just as this idea began to percolate around, the fictional Vampire Metaphor took a shift that had not been seen before. The fictional vampire began to display a new face: that of a sympathetic hero instead of a villain. The vampire started to appear as something with desirable advantages, and a very appealing image for those who felt unusual or out of place. This led to a new phenomenon: identification with the fictional vampire (without being a highly disturbed person identifying with a destructive, evil image, like the little boy in Richard Matheson's 1951 short story "Drink My Blood"). Vampire-identifiers ranged from people who just wrote fiction and fantasized, to people who role-played vampires, to full-blown Lifestylers--people who believed that by imitating the vampire, they might actually manifest some of the desired traits. Meanwhile, blood drinkers, who had previously been viewed as bizarre and "evil," had a whole new paradigm for what they might be.
By the end of the 1990's, the idea of a "psychic vampire" had also gone through some changes. Formerly seen as occult villains of the worst sort (what could be lower and viler than someone who steals the very life force from another person?) or clinging, selfish, using manipulators (as outlined in LaVey's The Satanic Bible), "psychic vampires" gained a new dignity. Suddenly they were people who needed extra energy because there was something wrong with them, and they weren't "evil" but afflicted. And some "psychic vampires" began to see themselves as the "true vampires," people who didn't just call themselves that because they liked to drink blood, but who were genuinely different.
All of which leads to the difficulties we confront in the twenty-first century, when it comes to discussing people who in any sense identify themselves as, or with, "vampires." We have:
A word that has been extended to include so many folkloric traditions that it has almost lost any meaning at all;
A Vampire Metaphor that is now so complex and so flexible that it lends itself to almost any creative variation, speculation, invention or addition, provided only that it make at least some logical sense;
An image of "vampires" that is sympathetic and positive enough to allow non-pathological people to identify with it, and that contains powerful wish-fulfillment elements such as invulnerability, beauty, power, sexuality unrestrained by consequences, freedom from death, pain and illness, and the potential for wisdom;
and a nascent "real vampire" subculture that contains everything from blood drinkers and blood fetishists to natural psychics and mediums who identify as "psi-vamps," occultists and mystics to role-players and Lifestylers...
...and they all can present equally valid reasons for claiming to be "the real vampires," thanks to the fact that "vampire" can be and has been used to mean so many different things. No matter which subgroup uses the word, anyone who tries to pronounce themselves "a real vampire" or "true vampire" or something similarly distinguished, will be accused of trying to appropriate the word for themselves and claiming to be "more vampire than thou," and a fight will ensue. The whole complicated concept of "vampire" is far too powerful to relinquish without a fight--and far too amorphous and all-inclusive to win a fight over. And so, people reluctantly grab onto a piece of it, and grudgingly allow others to have their piece of it, while privately telling themselves that they're the real "real vampires," and that the rest of the subgroups are nothing but a bunch of wannabes, role-players, delusionals and fakes.
It's because of this unsolvable dilemma that I have completely given up on defining, or assigning, the term "vampire" to any group or subgroup within the self-described "Vampiric Community"--including my own. It is a Gordian knot that can't even be cut--merely walked away from. In the best tradition of the Vampiric Community itself, which has coined so many neologisms, labels, technical terms, and fine subdivisions that a Vampiric Community glossary runs for several pages, I have chosen my own descriptive terms for the groups I'm going to describe. I didn't invent them all--some are certainly already in use. But I'm saying farewell to the V-Word. In "Vampiric Semantics," I present an overview of the terminology I'll be using on this website from now on.
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COMMENTS
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Angelus
00:09 Jul 26 2010
fascinating.