CHAPTER SEVEN
ON MARCH 6, 1710, with the Sun King, Louis XIV, still on the throne of France, a discovery was made deep in the vaults of venerable Notre Dame de Paris. While constructing a new crypt beneath the nave, workers uncovered an ancient, four-tiered stone block. Supporting part of the choir and chancel, the block had been part of a pagan temple that once stood on the site. Originally dedicated to the god Jupiter by the Nautae Parisiaci—the mariners of Parisii during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius—the block depicted in bas-relief a number of gods, but none so prominently as the fearsome visage bearing the antlers of a stag. The broken inscription read, “–ernunnos.”
This was almost certainly Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Lord of the Animals, the most famous horned god in European mythology. The Christian Middle Ages, it seemed, truly rested on pagan foundations.
The image (but not the name) of Cernunnos had been known at Val Camonica in the Italian Alps, where a great antlered figure looms out from a fourth-century B.C. cave engraving, a torque necklace on his right arm and a horned serpent on his left. At Autun in France, Cernunnos bears two horned serpents. At Reims, where stags and bulls surround him, he holds a sack of coins or grain. Sometimes he appears with three faces, in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, or even, perhaps, in degraded form as Herne the Hunter, disporting with the merry wives among the oaks of Windsor Forest.
But the horned Cernunnos is most widely recognized in the features of Satan.
A once-fashionable theory suggested that the medieval witch cult was not a Satanist one—that it was not even diabolical but represented the vestiges of an old religion, displaced and driven underground by Christianity, that worshiped the horned god of European paganism. Although this thesis has come under heavy critical fire, it maintains a stubborn life, if only because it suggests that our monsters did not spring sui generis from the medieval imagination. If the demons of Christianity were perhaps the gods of a former faith—at least those not bought off with halos and sainthoods—it is to the pagan world of antiquity, and to its Indo-European underpinnings, that we now must turn.
THE HIDDEN PAST
Buried in a fourth-century Bulgarian manuscript, “Oration of St. Gregory the Theologian,” is a 15th-century insertion sometimes called The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols:
…to the same gods the Slavic people make fires and perform sacrifice, and to vilas and Mokos and the diva and Perun…and Rozanica. And to vampires and bereginas. And dancing to Pereplut, they drink to him in horns.
This puzzling fragment has been pored over and analyzed from every possible angle. What scholars surmise is this: A vilas was a kind of demon, as was a diva. Mokos was a goddess of shearing, spinning, and weaving, while Perun was the widely worshiped Slavic god of thunder and lightning. The Rozanica were the spirits of ancestors, and Pereplut was a god revered by seafarers. As for bereginas, they are believed to be an arcane riverbank entity.
But vampires—why would they have once been considered fit objects for sacrifice? Even the glimmer of an answer demands a journey deep into both the historical and the mythological past.
Somewhere out on the Eurasian steppe, no one is sure exactly where, lies the homeland of the Indo-European peoples. In this prehistoric cradle, tribes that later migrated far away from one another—giving rise in the process to such related language families as the Indo-Iranian, the Italic, the Celtic, the Germanic, and the Slavic—once shared a culture and religion. By historical times, the Greeks, Romans, and Celts, for example, had become simply local inflections of that common ancestral pattern. Their gods, too, had been customized, but in them could still be discerned the slightly distorted echoes of the distant originals.
Among all the daughters of the Indo-Europeans, the ancient Slavs have been the most challenging to trace. Think of a people about whom there are scant eyewitness accounts yet an abundance of biased, if not actively hostile, commentators. Indeed, were it not for the painstaking labors of scholars, linguists, and comparative mythologists, we would be able to glimpse today only a rustic Slavic pantheon, its idols carved from tree trunks or crudely chiseled in stone. Even so, what remains known of many Slavic gods is only their names.
One big barrier to our knowledge of Slavic deities is that the early Slavs had no alphabet. That came with the priests. Slavic tribes first came into contact with Christianity in the sixth century, when they wandered into central Europe and down into the Balkans. Not until 863, however, did Cyril and Methodius, the Slavic apostles, arrive in Moravia, the rolling region of hill and valley now part of the Czech Republic. By the time their mission was expelled for political reasons two decades later, they had created what eventually became the Cyrillic alphabet and had used it to shape what is called the Slavonic liturgy.
After 886, when Bulgaria’s Khan Boris I welcomed the refugees of the Moravian mission, the Balkans, especially Macedonia, became the true cradle of the Slavonic rite. From there, that liturgy spread to Serbia and Romania. By 988, it had reached Russia, where the statue of Perun was toppled from its site overlooking Kiev, dragged by horse to the Dnieper, given a thorough beating, and dumped into the river.
Although the church bestowed literacy, churchmen were never sympathetic to pagan “superstitions.” This makes it hard to distinguish the authentic elements of medieval chronicles. The last of the Baltic Slavs were finally converted to Christianity early in the 15th century, yet the Prussian Chronicle, written about 1520 by a Dominican priest named Simon Grunau, gives such a fanciful account of the Slavs’ chief pagan shrine that scholars still debate its veracity. According to Grunau, the idols were hung high in a sacred oak; they included a Perun-like god of thunder—all angry visage and curly beard—and a death god, all pallid countenance with green beard, a thirst for human blood, and a garland of human and animal skulls.
The Russians, for their part, were often accused of practicing a “mixed faith”—acting piously Christian in church but stubbornly pagan in woods and field. After centuries of listening to imprecations thundered down on “heretics,” many Russian villagers came to clump all their suspicious dead under the single label of eretiks. They knew little and cared less about doctrinal disputes, and it was simpler to keep the properly Orthodox dead in hallowed ground and to consign the eretiks to the margins.
Eretiks comprised not just schismatics and Old Believers—those who objected to the 17th-century liturgical reforms—but “sorcerers” as well. A whiff of ominous familiarity shrouds those “sorcerers,” especially those purported to leave their graves at night to roam the village and to eat people. A vampire, it seems, smells just as vile by any other name.
Eretiks, then, might encompass all the dangerous dead. The means of dispatching one for good likewise has a familiar cast: Open the grave, roll the corpse over, drive an aspen stake through it, and perhaps burn it as well. (In one village, it sufficed to give the body “a thorough thrashing” by horsewhip.) Beset by a prolonged drought, a village might exhume an eretik who had once been suspected of sorcery, dash the remains with water, or toss them into the Volga. During one such ritual, villagers beat the skull of a corpse while crying out, “Bring rain!”
In parts of Russia, the vampire —upir, in Russian—had clearly been subsumed under the broader category of spiritual outlaws dubbed heretics. Possibly that relationship began the other way around: The word heretic, along with pagan, may once have been subsumed beneath vampire—which may originally have had no supernatural connotations whatsoever.
Linguists seeking the origins of the word vampire have been shaking the etymological bushes for clues for at least a century. Vampir, upir, upyr, upior, and other cognate forms from around the Slavic world were long thought to have stemmed from the root word uber—Turkish for “witch.” That seemed logical, given the number of authorities who suspected vampires of having hatched in the Balkans, so long under the sway of the sultan. Although other linguists favored an entirely Hungarian origin or argued that the root of vampire was the Greek word pi— “to drink”—many scholars, including the influential Montague Summers, embraced the Turkish theory.
The consensus today, by contrast, is that vampire is almost undoubtedly Slavic. The root, as far back as it can be traced, seems to be a medieval Serbian word; when anglicized, it came to resemble something like vampir. Originating perhaps in the heart of the Balkans, the word gradually diffused throughout the Slavic world. Each local adaptation gave the word its own slight new twist.
The thorniest question of all, however, persists: What did vampir originally mean?
The earliest written evidence of vampir—oupir or upir, as it happens—appears in the margin of a manuscript called the Book of the Prophets, a copy of a work whose original dates to 1047. Its contextual significance is cryptic in the extreme; an Orthodox monk from Novgorod uses it to describe some personal shortcoming of his.
Then again, there is that mention, in The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols, of sacrifices made to “vampires and bereginas.” Since the reference is probably a 15th-century insertion, it may not shed much light on the original meaning of vampir. Yet the association with sacrifice, however tenuous, remains a tantalizing clue.
Its rampant polytheism aside, paganism was vilified for its blood and orgies—that is, for its public sacrifices and riotous feasting. Blood sacrifice—the cutting of an animal’s throat at the altar to propitiate a divinity—was forbidden in Scripture. On the other hand, it formed a central rite in nearly every religion of pagan Europe.
On the shores of the Baltic, where paganism lingered longest, oxen and sheep were regularly sacrificed as late as the 12th century. So too were prisoners of war and (according to the Saxon priest Helmold, author of Chronicle of the Slavs) Christians, whose blood was said to particularly please the gods. “[A]fter the victim is felled,” Helmold wrote of sacrifices in general, “the priest drinks of its blood in order to render himself more potent in the receiving of oracles. For it is the opinion of many that demons are very easily conjured with blood.”
And the orgies? Pagan feast days were infamous for their licentiousness, and pagan marriage ceremonies—especially ancient fertility rituals—verged on the truly orgiastic. What’s more, pagans favored barbarous initiation ceremonies, and with good reason, they were reputed to believe in reincarnation—anathema to the Church.
All of this strongly suggests that the word vampir arose in the crucible of the Balkans at a time when Christianity was locked in combat with paganism. If vampir does indeed spring from an obscure root word meaning “to drink,” it’s only a short logical leap to the understanding that it was likely first used as an epithet flung at those blood-drinking pagans who, tenacious of custom, refused the uncertain embrace of the Church. This may also help explain why the word lingered so long as a proper name in Russia, where an 11th-century nobleman from Novgorod went by the name Prince Upir—Prince Vampire.
By the same token, warg— the Nordic word for “wolf,” as every Tolkien reader knows—might at one time have been used to denote outlaws. Transformed thereby from men into wolves—in the eyes of the law, at any rate—the outlaws could be killed on sight. This allegorical shape-shifting may have given rise to the “wild man of the woods” figure so common in medieval folklore, contributing to a range of myths from Robin Hood to werewolves.
Might natural outlaws, then—anathematized, excommunicated, and exiled to the forest—have metamorphosed over the centuries into supernatural ones? If so, the vampir may have been moved along that path by a heresy—one similarly centered in southern Serbia and Macedonia, where between the 10th and 14th centuries, there flourished a little-known sect called the Bogomils.
EVEN THE DEMONS FLED
Arising in the highlands of Armenia, the sect of the Bogomils was one in a long line of dualist religions—faiths that condemn all matter as evil and revere all spirit as good. Named for one of their early priests, the Bogomils first entered Bulgaria, perhaps pushed west off the stark Iranian plateau by the armies of Islam, before making the Balkans their redoubt. From there they spread into Russia, central Europe, and even France, where they became known as the Albigenses.
The Bogomils, in turn, had been inspired by the Paulicians, an even more obscure Armenian sect, whose leaders the Byzantine emperors had burned at the stake for heresy. These dualistic movements threatened the Church not only because their adherents fiercely opposed anything hierarchical or liturgical, but also because they bore a disturbing resemblance to the Gnostic heresy that had split the early Christian community.
Despite being persecuted, the Bogomils exerted an insidious influence on the growing Slavic Church. After Russia embraced Orthodoxy in 988, Bulgarian priests—many of them tinged with more than a little Bogomilism—were numerous among its formative clergy. The same thing happened all over eastern Europe. Even after Bogomilism had been condemned as heresy and stamped out, the movement’s dualistic imprint endured deep in the fabric of Orthodoxy, especially in its attitude toward the dead.
Bogomils had claimed that demons fled from them alone but inhabited all other men. These demons were said to instruct their hosts “in vice, lead them to wickedness and after their death dwell in their corpses.” No surprise, then, that in 1143, two Orthodox bishops in Asia Minor were accused of being Bogomils after they “dug up bodies in the belief that they were possessed of demons and unfit for burial.”
That belief in the demonic, married to a word associated with blood drinking and death, may have greatly propelled the transformation of vampir into the vampire that surfaced in the 18th century. All it needed was a corpse to wrap itself around.
Throughout this social and religious upheaval, men and women had continued dying—and their dead bodies had continued to act in strange ways, or at least were alleged to do so. A ninth-century capitulary of Charlemagne directed that “if any person, deceived by the devil, shall believe, after the manner of the Pagans, that any man or woman was a Strygis, or Stryx [night-flying bloodsucker], and was given to eat men, and for this cause should burn such person, or should give such person’s flesh to be eaten, or should eat such flesh, such man or woman should be capitally punished.”
And in the sixth century, just as the Slavs were beginning to infiltrate the Balkans, Clovis, king of the Franks, was inserting into the Lex Salica— the foundation of most European legal codes—explicit punishments for the desecration of the dead. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of the third to seventh centuries have been discovered to contain many prone burials—that is, burials with the corpse buried facedown. Should the cadaver then choose to wander, the thinking apparently went, it would invariably head in the wrong direction.
The British graves also hold decapitated skeletons, whose severed skulls are usually lodged between the legs or feet. Were these executions? Or were they other methods of restricting the movements of the restless dead? The bones are silent, but folklore speaks volumes. Sir James Frazer, in The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion, quotes an illuminating passage from an 1835 German source:
In East Prussia when a person is believed to be suffering from the attacks of a vampire and suspicion falls on the ghost of somebody who died lately, the only remedy is thought to be for the family of the deceased to go to his grave, dig up his body, behead it and place the head between the legs of the corpse. If blood flows from the severed head the man was certainly a vampire, and the family must drink of the flowing blood, thus recovering the blood which had been sucked from their living bodies by the vampire. Thus the vampire is paid out in kind.
The cradle of the vampir might very well be the Balkans of the ninth and tenth centuries. And as both a word and a concept, the vampire may very well—and quite logically, in the final analysis—be rooted in the social, political, and religious realities of the day. But if we are to follow the trail of wandering corpses to its conclusion, we must now head south, to Greece.
THE Vrykolakas
One evening in the mid-19th century, Henry Tozer, an Oxford don and authority on the geography of the far-flung Ottoman Empire, arrived in the small Greek town of Aghia. The hamlet perched on the flanks of Mount Ossa, overlooking the plains of Thessaly—fabled since classical times for the Olympics, for horses, and for superstition:
During the night which we spent at Aghia the population were disturbed by apparitions of spirits, which they described as gliding about with large lanterns in their hands. These are called vrykolaka by the Greeks and vurkolak by the Turks, for both Christians and Mahometans believe in them; the name, however, is written and pronounced in a great variety of ways. It was curious to meet with them in this manner as soon as we descended into the plains of Thessaly, the ancient land of witches; but the belief in these appearances is widely spread, not only throughout Thessaly and Epirus, but also among the islands of the Aegean and over a great part of Turkey. The idea concerning them is, that some persons come to life again after death, sleep in their tombs with their eyes open, and wander abroad by night, especially when the moon is shining brightly.
The moon shining brightly, of course, suggests werewolves on the prowl. Vrykolakas — like the Turkish vurkolak, Serbian vukodlak, Bulgarian volkudlak, Albanian vurvolak, and similar cognates that have burrowed deep into the linguistic map of eastern Europe—has usually been interpreted as “werewolf” because it stems from a Slavic root (probably vârkolak)—that presumably meant “wolf pelt.” It came to be interchangeable with vampire the reasoning goes, only because werewolves in folklore were suspected of becoming vampires after death.
It might not be that simple, however. Vârkolak may indeed mean “wolf pelt,” and quite literally so—denoting the wolf pelts Balkan tribesmen ritually donned during pagan times. The words it hatched then undertook a vast mythological odyssey, for when they next appear, they describe a cosmic monster that caused eclipses by eating the sun or moon before settling back on earth and taking on the additional sense of the devouring dead.
However it happened, vârkolak and its cognates are now thoroughly entwined with vampir and its derivatives. Only in Greece has vampir never taken root; vrykolakas has crowded it out.
One hundred fifty years before Tozer undertook his wanderings, the renowned French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort had journeyed to the far corners of Asia Minor on a plant-collecting expedition. His three-volume A Voyage into the Levant is equal parts travelogue and exploration narrative, yet most modern readers ignore his rapturous descriptions of mountain forests ranging along the Black Sea coast and into the Caucasus. Instead, de Tournefort’s book is best remembered for its startling description of vrykolakas hysteria on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he had stopped during the winter of 1700.
Around the time de Tournefort reached the isle, a truculent and much-disliked peasant had died. Shortly thereafter began a chain of nocturnal depredations. “[I]t was rumored,” de Tournefort wrote, “that he was seen by night walking very fast; that he came into the house, overturning the furniture, extinguishing the lamps, throwing his arms round persons from behind, and playing a thousand sly tricks.”
Panic quickly engulfed the island. Ten days after the body had been buried, it was dug up so the local butcher might remove its heart. “The corpse,” reported the botanist, “gave out such a bad smell, that they were obliged to burn incense; but the vapour, mixed with the exhalations of that carrion, only augmented the stink, and began to heat the brain of these poor people.”
De Tournefort continued his account:
Their imagination, struck with the spectacle, was full of visions; some one thought proper to say that a thick smoke came from this body. We dared not say that it was the vapour of the incense. They only exclaimed “Vroucolacas,” in the chapel, and in the square before it…
I have no doubt that they would have maintained it did not stink, if we had not been present; so stupified were these poor people with the circumstance, and infatuated with the idea of the return of the dead. For ourselves, who got next to the corpse in order to make our observations exactly, we were ready to die from the offensive odour which proceeded from it. When they asked us what we thought of this dead man, we replied that we believed him thoroughly dead; but as we wished to cure, or at least not to irritate their stricken fancy, we represented to them that it was not surprising if the butcher had perceived some heat in searching amidst entrails which were decaying; neither was it extraordinary that some vapour had proceeded from them; since such will issue from a dunghill that is stirred up….
Despite one indignity after another being visited upon the corpse, the nightly mischief—and its attendant pandemonium—grew only worse. De Tournefort had never seen anything like it: “Every body seemed to have lost their senses. The most sensible people appeared as phrenzied as the others; it was a veritable brain fever, as dangerous as any mania or madness.” Entire families fled their houses. “Every one complained of some new insult: you heard nothing but lamentations at nightfall…[and] every morning entertained us with the comedy of a faithful recital of all the new follies which had been committed by this bird of night….”
One exorcism after another failed to rid the town of the revenant. Finally the citizens built a pyre, and de Tournefort watched from a distance as the flames consumed the meddlesome corpse. The islanders then “contented themselves with saying that the devil had been properly caught that time, and they made up a song to turn him into ridicule…After this, must we not own that the Greeks of to-day are not great Greeks, and that there is only ignorance and superstition among them?”
THE WANDERERS
Two centuries later, John Cuthbert Lawson, in Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910), sought to disprove de Tournefort’s final contention. Nearly half of Lawson’s influential but little-known book, which Patrick Leigh Fermor called a “real triumph of scholarship and detailed reasoning,” is devoted to the vrykolakas. Lawson believed that the Greeks never adopted the vampir of neighboring lands because they had their own deeply rooted ideas about the walking dead. Vrykolakas, in fact, was merely a “grafting of Slavonic branches upon an Hellenic stock.”
That stock is still visible on a breathtaking Aegean island. Modern Santorini is a busy tourist resort, yet there was a time when its cliffs were famed more for their vrykolakes (the plural form) than for their commanding ocean views. To “send vrykolakes to Santorini” was the local equivalent of “bringing coals to Newcastle.” That’s because the dry, volcanic soils of Santorini are naturally preservative. Corpses buried there do not decompose as quickly as they do elsewhere.
Jesuit priest François Richard, who lived on Santorini in the 17th century, described dead bodies that “after fifteen or sixteen years—sometimes even twenty or thirty—are found inflated like balloons, and when they are thrown on the ground or rolled along, sound like drums…” This quality gave the cadavers the name by which they were once known in Greece: tympaneous, or “drumlike.” That, as well as other dialectal names—fleshy and gaper among them—appear to have survived in the Aegean Islands for a time, but on the mainland—down which the Slavic tide had rolled in the sixth century—vrykolakas reigned supreme. Eventually the islands, too, gave in and adopted that term.
But why not vampir?
Stripping the Christian and Slavic overburdens off the original Greek idea, John Lawson concluded that the Greeks did not adopt vampir because of its associated savagery. In their tradition, the walking dead were not always malicious. A good example of this crops up in a well-known fragment from Phlegon’s Mirabilia, a compendium of ghost stories written in the second century A.D. Though its beginning has been lost, the story—which Phlegon claimed to have witnessed—is set in Tralles in Asia Minor, in the house of Demostratus and Charito, whose daughter Philinnion has been dead for six months. Young Machates has been staying in their guest room, however, and he has been receiving nocturnal visits from an unknown lover, who has left her gold ring and breast band behind.
The visitor is Philinnion, of course. When her parents discover the tokens and eventually behold their dead daughter on one of her midnight manifestations, she upbraids them for spoiling her happiness—and promptly relapses into a corpse. The family vault is then opened, but Philinnion’s spot is empty—save for an iron ring and gilt cup that Machates had given her. Unnerved, the townsfolk transport her corpse beyond the city limits. There, after making suitable propitiations to pagan divinities, they burn it.
Yet Philinnion is no Carmilla; there is no hint that her midnight visits are predatory. Because the despairing Machates commits suicide, the Mirabilia fragment strikes us as a story of star-crossed lovers, tomb and all.
Yet most ancient Greek revenants, it appears, returned from the grave to demand—or to wreak—vengeance. Alastor means “avenger,” a kind of male version of Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, and describes a supernatural figure often compared with the Erinyes, or furies. Greek literature and drama abound with alastors avenging such indignities as neglected burial rites, but the creatures are usually bent on blood vengeance. Nevertheless, Lawson has spied, behind the avenging fury that is the alastor, an even older figure: Alastor, he surmised, might originally have meant “wanderer,” not “avenger.”
“‘To wander unburied,’” Lawson brooded, “could there be a simpler description of a revenant?”:
Does not the whole misery of the unburied dead consist in this—that they must wander? It is almost inconceivable then that the name Alastor, “wanderer,” should have been originally applied only to a single class of the wandering dead—to those whose wanderings were directed towards vengeance, and not also to those whose wanderings were more aimless, more pitiable, whose whole existence might have been summed up in that one word “wandering.”
As late as the 17th century, Father Richard related the story of a Santorini shoemaker named Alexander who returned from the grave to “frequent his house, mend his children’s shoes, draw water at the reservoir, and cut wood for the use of his family; but the people became frightened, exhumed him, and burned him, and he was seen no more.” In one corner of the island, Father Richard continued, “these vrykolakes have been seen not only at night but in the open day, five or six together in a field, feeding apparently on green beans.”
This touching glimpse of the vegetarian dead might strike a responsive chord in readers attuned to the more sensitive vampires of today. But in eras past, such stories, recounted at night beside a dying hearth, would have had an eerie, unsettling effect. For these figures were Lawson’s “wanderers,” trapped in a limbo between worlds, condemned to expiate some crime, or bound by some curse. And in the ancient way of thinking, there seemed no end of potential causes for such curses: sudden or violent death, suicide, lack of proper burial rites, unavenged murder, sorcery, or perjury. Lucian of Samosata, in the first century A.D., mused in his Philopseudes that perhaps the “only souls which wander about are those of men who met with a violent death—anyone, for example, who hanged himself, or was beheaded or impaled, or departed this life in any other such way—but…the souls of those who died a natural death do not wander.”
Such agonized figures, like tragic ones, excited pity as much as horror. Only the flame—cremation as an act of mercy—can loose the bond of suffering and bring repose.
In the thousands of years that have passed since then, this sad figure has undergone a metamorphosis. The church demonized the wanderer, thus turning the original transgression of divine law into a deadly sin—and a formula for excommunication. This ecclesiastical curse then further embraced such offenses as omission of baptism, “sorcery,” apostasy, and heresy—and we have the makings of the modern vampire in Greece. When the word vampir first gained traction in the Balkans, the old notions surrounding the alastor were probably still entrenched, and so people resisted the new word. But those notions had considerably eroded by the time vukodlak and its derivatives were on the rise, and that cleared the way for the reign of vrykolakas.
POETIC VIEWS OF VAMPIRES
Might a notion such as the alastor lie deep in Slavic legend? We have no literature and no drama to guide us, so the road must wind through the forest of Slavic folklore. So dense are those rhetorical thickets, however—so full of thorns, so entangled with Nordic mythology—that many an expert has lost his way.
Some authorities doubt the undergrowth is more than several centuries old. Others suspect it is very deeply rooted indeed. The latter often turn to a pioneering folklorist of the 19th century, the man whose published collections of more than 600 folk- and fairy tales have earned him the sobriquet “the Russian Grimm.”
Born in 1826 in a village on the edge of the steppe, Alexander Afanasiev spent most of his life plowing through Moscow’s libraries before dying, penniless and racked by tuberculosis, at the age of 45. More than a mere gleaner of existing material, Afanasiev created the massive, three-volume Poetic Views of the Slavs Toward Nature. In this masterpiece, he traced the profusion of Slavic songs, stories, and epic tales further and further back in time until he arrived at a single, if buried, root: the nature myths of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans.
“Originally our ancestors must have understood by the name vampire,” wrote Afanasiev in the 1860s, “a terrible demon who sucks storm clouds and drinks up all the moisture in them, because in the ancient myths rain was like blood flowing in the veins of cloud spirits and animals…. The winter cold which freezes rain-clouds plunges the creative forces of nature into sleep, death, damnation. The thunder god and lightning spirits are equated to suckers of rain who hide in cloud caves and fall asleep in cloud-graves.”
If this seems fanciful, consider that poetic (or metaphorical) thought probably came more easily to steppe-dwelling people living in a prescientific age. Cloud and wind and storm; lightning, hail, and drought; sun and moon and stars might indeed have provided the cosmic patterns, the ultimate code that explained, on the principle of “as above, so below,” both natural and supernatural phenomena. We know enough about Slavic mythology to recognize an attractively animistic bent in its sacred stones, trees, rivers, and lakes; its flying grass and weeping grass and dream grass.
It might be hard to grasp Afanasiev’s assertion that the bellowing of the vampire upon being staked is the metaphorical echo of the thunderstorm’s roar, but it is not difficult to understand how crop failures, famines, and epidemics might be ascribed to such beings. “Everywhere in the Slavic lands,” Afanasiev reminds us, “the fatal activity of the plague is explained by the evil of vampires.” The region also tended to identify vampires with dragons, demons, and “gluttonous Death,” appearing with that grim trio in popular tales as eaters of human flesh.
And it’s not that much different from the Romanian belief, in the words of one folklorist, that “varcolaci and pricolici [names of mythological monsters] are sometimes dead vampires, and sometimes animals which eat the moon.”
ELUSIVE DRAGONS
A century after Afanasiev coughed himself to death, respected Soviet philologists V. V. Ivanov and V. Toporov updated their tsarist forerunner. Combing through comparative mythologies and that cornucopia of folklore, they reconstructed the likely Slavic version of the cosmic battle between the Indo-European gods of storm and earth. What emerged bears a marked resemblance, with certain differences, to Afanasiev’s poetic vision.
Thousands of years ago, it seems, the Slavic tribes possessed a metaphorical understanding of the drama of storms: Perun, the god of thunder and lightning, is chasing the drag-onlike Volos, or Veles—deity of waters, fields, pastures, flocks, herds, and the underworld—who has stolen the storm god’s wife (or perhaps his cattle). Lightning-shattered stumps and splintered boulders litter the dragon’s path as he tries to elude Perun’s thunderbolts: he transforms himself into now a tree, now a rock, now a human in the course of his vain attempt. Eventually, Volos is cornered and slain, at which point the storm breaks and releases its torrents of fructifying rain.
Of course, because it is an eternally recurring combat, Volos never really dies. As lord of the underworld, he is leader of all the chthonian powers; each year, as autumn turns to winter, he allows the dead to return to the world above for a few days, where they may visit the living, whom they approach while singing songs about how far they have traveled and how muddy was the way. Where Perun was the warrior’s god, Volos was that of the plowman and herdsman. Where Perun offered an honorable death in battle, the wily Volos offered those who broke their sacred oaths death by pestilence or disease.
So instead of a wandering figure, we have encountered a myth. But let’s return one final time to that enigmatic reference, in The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols, about ancient sacrifices being offered to “vampires and bereginas.”
Perhaps some grain of truth lurks behind that 15th-century emendation. The protovampire might indeed have arisen from a deep-seated ancestor cult, as that document suggests. Exactly how they might have done so we shall probably never know. Might it have something to do with a belief in reincarnation? If so, that early conception would have changed over time. Perhaps these protovampires first devolved into the mysterious bereginas, those hovering riverbank spirits—and then were generalized as rusalki, the “souls of the dead.” That would lead, naturally enough, to the “souls of the dead who died a violent death”—and we are back on familiar ground.
Or perhaps not. Either way, for those who seek the origins of the vampire legend, one source of that stream—possibly the major contributor, possibly not—surely springs from the Balkans during the years in which they were Christianized, the years when such dualistic heresies as the Bogomils left their deep impression, and the years when religious and political struggle inflicted such lasting wounds.
Traces of that original cosmic myth have also survived. Where the Vardar River cuts through the heart of mountain-rimmed Macedonia, cradle of vampir, stands the city of Veles, surely an echo of the dragon Volos. High above it towers the peak of St. Elias the Thunderer. Not far by eagle’s wings, along the rugged Greek-Bulgarian border, vampires were once called drakus, or dragons. When the Roman legions crossed the Danube to invade Dacia (modern Romania), they encountered Dacian cavalry carrying dracos,or dragon standards. Draco became dracul in Romania, where once there dwelt a folkloric dragon that, assuming the shape of a man, seduced women and spirited them away to its underworld lair, where only a hero could rescue them.
All over ancient Thrace (in what is now Bulgaria) lived a people neither Greek nor Slavic—an enigmatic people devoted to blood sacrifices and incantations; to music and feasting and rhytons overflowing with wine, and they were said to know the secrets of immortality. All over that land, exquisite votive tablets once honored an unnamed figure today called simply the Thracian Hero or the Thracian Rider. A mounted figure who might represent either a military leader or the god of thunder, he is clearly depicted as a mighty drinker and an even mightier hunter, a lord of the animals, and a slayer of wild boars, wolves, and dragons. Not surprisingly, his image—horse rearing and lance (was it once a lightning bolt, or is it a stake?) spearing the prostrate foe—was eventually absorbed into that of St. George, whose own cult spread as far as England and whose smoke-blackened icons are found in churches all over the Balkans and deep into Russia. St. George himself had been assimilated to a vegetation god, for his feast day on April 23 was celebrated everywhere as a victory of surging spring over the forces of winter, darkness, and death. And as every folklorist knows, vampires are said to be most active on St. George’s Eve.
By the Middle Ages, the god Volos, too—at least the aspect of him that guarded flocks and herds—had acquired a halo, and became venerated everywhere in Christendom as St. Blaise, patron saint of wild animals. Yet, whereas the host of lesser deities scurried into the forest to survive as ogres and goblins, Volos’s infernal face was absorbed, alongside that of his Celtic counterpart Cernunnos, into the horned figure of the devil.
ENIGMATIC ORIGINS
On May 28, 1891, on Denmark’s wet and windy Jutland Peninsula, peat cutters near the hamlet of Gundestrup found a great silver bowl of antique design buried in the bog. After the Gundestrup Cauldron was brought to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, it quickly became obvious that the bowl had been deposited in the bog as a votive offering or hidden there for safekeeping and never reclaimed. With its exquisite braid of mythological figures, the cauldron threw open the doors of an iconographic treasure-house.
In pride of place within the bowl sits the antlered Cernunnos, holding a torque in his right hand and a ram-headed serpent in his left. Surrounded by a stag, bulls, wolves, lions—and even a dolphin—he is the epitome of the lord of the beasts. Directly opposite is Taranis, Celtic counterpart to Perun. Taranis was a god of thunder, but also (like Volos) of the underworld. Figured elsewhere around the bowl are gods and scenes of war and sacrifice, all elegantly executed in silver.
Rising from the gloom and the muck of the Iron Age, summoning forth images of druidical sacrifices in a conjured European past, the Gundestrup Cauldron has captivated—and puzzled—generations of scholars. For one thing, the closest site of commensurate silversmithing skills lay far to the southeast, in Thrace. For another, the cauldron featured clumsily rendered elephants. They were usually explained away as a reference to the 37 elephants that Hannibal carried across the Alps with him in the summer of 218 B.C. The spectacle of those fabulous beasts tramping across southern Gaul, it was thought, would surely have fed the Celtic imagination for years.
Nobody over the past century has denied the possibility of an Eastern influence on the cauldron’s iconography. Scrutinizing the figures, some scholars have pointed out that Taranis bears a striking resemblance to Vishnu. The figure bathing alongside the elephants recalls Lakshmi, a Hindu goddess of good fortune. The figure with the paired birds and nursing child suggests Hariti, Hindu protectress of children. And Cernunnos might be less and more than he appears, too: Legs folded yoga-style beneath him, he resembles not only Buddha but also the seated figure of a horned god, surrounded by a lion, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a bull, depicted on a seal found in the Indus Valley and dating from the third or fourth millennium B.C.
Nevertheless, the cauldron was almost certainly made in Thrace, and by Thracian silversmiths. Only they could have borrowed elements from a pancultural fund of iconography, so to speak, that their imaginations could tap. Iron Age silversmiths might have been predominantly itinerant craftsmen, a valued and protected guild or caste that wandered over the ancient world, practicing an awe-inspiring and ritually sacrosanct art.
Such roving castes of craftsmen—alongside holy men, merchants, and soldiers—were the principal vehicles of cultural diffusion. They carried with them not only the germs of epidemic diseases, perhaps, but also an eclectic jumble of religious images and practices, gods and goddesses, idols and demons and rituals—and they sowed these all across Europe and the Near East. If inspiration for the decoration of a Celtic cauldron came 5,000 miles from India, might not certain attributes of the vampire have crossed those same steppes, deserts, and mountains?