CHAPTER EIGHT
DAWN ON THE RIVER GANGES—it might have been a thousand years ago, or today, or the 1890s, when American traveler Eliza Scidmore first gazed on the Hindu holy city of Benares:
The greatest human spectacle in India, the chief incident and motive of Benares life, and the most extraordinary manifestation of religious zeal and superstition in all the world, begins at sunrise by the Ganges bank and lasts for several hours. We started in the first gray light of the dawn, drove two miles across the city, and, descending the ghats, or broad staircases, to the water’s edge, were rowed slowly up and down the three-mile crescent of river-front, watching Brahmans and humbler believers bathe and pray to the rising sun, repeating the oldest Vedic hymns. That picturesque sweep of the city front—a high cliff with palaces, temples, and gardens clinging to its terraced embankments and long flights of steps descending to the water—is spectacle enough when lighted by the first yellow flash of sunlight, without the thousands of white-clad worshipers at the Ganges brink and far out in its turbid flood. After three sunrise visits to the river bank, the spectacle was as amazing and incomprehensible as at first, as incredible, as dreamlike, as the afternoon memory of it. I saw it with equal surprise each time, the key-note, the soul of India revealed in Benares as nowhere else—since all India flocks to Benares in sickness and health, in trouble and rejoicing, to pray and to commit crimes, the sacred city being the meeting-place and hiding-place of all criminals, the hatching-place of all conspiracies.
The thousands of worshipers might not have finished their oblations before the first white-shrouded, flower-bedecked corpse arrived. Perhaps only an hour or two had passed since the final moments when, ceremonial cow tail in hand, its spirit had loosed its hold and slipped back into the cycle of reincarnation. Brought on a bamboo bier by dirge-singing mourners, the corpse would be laid on the bottom step of the ghats so that its feet might be lapped by the Ganges. Only an hour or two more might pass before the body was ceremonially immersed in the river and then placed on the pyre.
The rising smoke might conceal what happened next; if not, the chief mourner might be seen prodding the burning skull with a bamboo pole and waiting for it to crack in the flames—a sign that the vital winds collected there had been released.
The scene is so spectacular that it is easy to miss the invisible. Just as all of India seems to flock to Benares, so too do its legions of devils, demons, and such terrifying figures as Kali—the bloodstained, skull-bedecked goddess of death, plague, and annihilation. The river stairways known as ghats are supernaturally charged places, as are cremation grounds all over the Indian subcontinent. In the countryside, you don’t go near them unless absolutely necessary; they are always located at the margins, as far from the village as possible.
From the dying man’s last moments to the ceremony of his incorporation into the ancestors 12 days later, the burial rituals serve a twofold purpose: They ease the passage of the dying and guard his soul along its way while wrapping a sheath of sanctity around the corpse, even though that won’t be around for long.
According to Hindu mythology, supernatural scavengers are everywhere. Those that haunt cremation and burial grounds are loosely called Indian vampires, and they exist in bewildering varieties. Almost everywhere in India, both in villages and in the surrounding forests, stand small shrines called bhandara. These are for the bhutas (usually translated as “living beings”), and offerings of grain are made there each morning and evening to placate them.
Because the bhutas are malevolent goblins roaming the village, these offerings cannot be neglected. Otherwise, the bhutas may turn spiteful, blasting crops and livestock and visiting diseases upon the village children. Their cult is therefore observed with great ceremony: festivals, dances, and even blood sacrifices. Large temples known as bhutastan often house the statues of especially important bhutas.
Yet, peel back a layer, and the bhutas emerge not as gods or demons but as spirits of the dead—bhuta can be translated more precisely as “someone who was” or, roughly, “the departed.” In some sense, then, bhutas are spirits that still cling to this world. In this aspect, they have a familiar provenance: They are the spirits of those who died untimely or violent deaths, who killed themselves, who were denied proper funeral rites, or who otherwise died unfulfilled. Meeting several such qualifications magnifies one’s odds of becoming a bhuta.
More ominously, it seems that a bhuta can preempt a living body (and occasionally a dead one) to fulfill its desires. Bhutas lurk not only around cemeteries and cremation grounds but also in ruined temples and other places where owls—held in superstitious dread in India—might be found. So greatly feared are bhutas that their name encompasses a host of demonic beings, among them the brahmapa-rush, which drinks blood from its victim’s skull while dancing with his intestines wrapped about its head like a turban. Like Western vampires, bhutas are said to cast no shadow, but garlic won’t deter them—burning turmeric is the apotropaic ritual of choice.
Bhutas, however, have become confused and conflated with pretas. In one form or another, the preta has resonance all over Asia, where it often means “deceased.” In China, according to Gerald Willoughby-Meade, preta means the “suffering soul of a suicide seeking a substitute.” But preta implies a process more than a completion, so it might be better rendered as “one in transition.” The preta is the form the soul takes on its journey to the ancestors, or pitrs (“protectors” or “fathers,” akin to the Latin pater, “father”). It can take a baffling number of forms—as innumerable as seem to be the stages in Hindu soul making. The preta from a deformed child, for example, can be as small as your thumb. Yet, all pretas are potentially dangerous, and they must be propitiated by constant observation of extended funerary rites. These help them on their journey so that one day, they too can partake of the evening bali, or offering, which is always thrown to the south—the abode of the dead.
Another Indian embodiment of the unsatisfied dead takes a more recognizable form. Vetalas, which resemble giant vampire bats, were made known to the West by Sir Richard Francis Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; or, Tales of Hindu Devilry. This collection of stories within a story was the polyglot Burton’s loose translation of the Hindu classic Baital Pachisi, which features an eloquent, tale-spinning vetala who greets the legendary king Vikram while hanging upside down from a tree. His fellow vetalas, however, prefer banqueting on corpses stacked at the cremation grounds or reanimating those buried in cemeteries.
On central India’s broad Deccan Plateau, you commonly encounter stones (some painted a lurid red) that have been raised expressly for the use of vetalas; the vetalas serve as village guardians, and from these perches, their eerie singing may perhaps be heard.
Among the most hideous and reviled of Indian vampires are pisachas, or “flesh-eaters.” These spirits—of criminals, liars, adulterers, or the insane—likewise loiter at cremation grounds, but they are far more insidious than bhutas or vetalas. They can enter a living person’s open mouth and lodge in the intestines, where they banquet on feces—all of which sounds symbolic of disease, especially given that the great cholera, one of history’s most horrible epidemics, was traced to India.
Then there are the rakshasas, or “destroyers.” All blood and fangs, these shape-shifters might take the form of an owl, a dog, a cuckoo—or perhaps even the form of an absent lover or husband. A rakshasa has fiery red eyes and a long tongue, the better to prey on newborn infants and their mothers. They fear fire and mustard but not garlic.
Rakshasas were also once mystifyingly called “confounders of the sacrifice.” Yet, peel back another layer: That epithet may be ancient indeed—dating, some experts believe, to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in India. Coming off the dry, windswept plateaus of Iran and Afghanistan, the invaders drove away the Indian subcontinent’s aboriginal inhabitants, who took to the jungles and became guerrilla fighters. Like Robin Hood and his men, the guerrillas evaded capture in their leafy new home and struck without warning—like forest demons.
In the Rig Veda, Indra, the thunder god, is implored to seek out and destroy these followers of an old religion, as their raids have been disrupting the elaborate sacrifices of the new one. There is some evidence that the word pisacha may once also have applied to tribes living in northern India. Thus, rakshasa, pisacha, and vanara (monkey-men), like vampir and warg-wolf, originally might have had no supernatural significance whatsoever. Perhaps they were instead ethnic epithets, once hurled in hatred.
These aboriginal tribes supposedly would have worshiped the deities of forest, mountain, stream, and hill: wolves, tigers, birds, and snakes. These deities either survived in the remoter villages, becoming protective spirits that lodged in sacred trees to which offerings were made, or were banished to the cremation grounds as cannibalistic demons.
But do these creatures correspond with European vampires? They seem to share a family tree but hang from a different branch. In India, however, you can usually find what you want if you look for it hard enough. If your pregnant wife dies during the Dewali festival or while ritually unclean, you had better bury her facedown, nail her fingers to her thumbs, and pile her grave with stones and thorns; otherwise, she will return as a churel and attack her family. That sounds more familiar.
Yet, some traces of Indian vampire lore may have been carried to Europe after all.
WANDERING VAMPIRES
Gypsies were perhaps the original bohemians. In 1423, King Sigismund of Bohemia gave a band of “outlandysshe” wanderers from “Egypt” the letter of safe conduct—and a name and reputation—that they carried all over Europe.
They had long been blacksmiths, tinkers, knife grinders, and horse traders, as well as dancers, musicians, and fortune-tellers. Black of eye and black of hair, gypsies (or Romani, as they call themselves) entered 15th-century Europe from Asia Minor just ahead of the Ottoman wave. Though they would eventually spread as far as the British Isles and then around the world, they roamed the Balkans and eastern Europe in such numbers that an 18th-century traveler to Transylvania compared them to “locusts” swarming over the land. Their clannish, secretive ways lent them an aura of superstition; they gained a reputation for being a caste apart, masters at harnessing or propitiating occult forces. And despite the widespread belief that they had come from Egypt, their original home was India.
For good reason—they once were enslaved in Romania and were nearly exterminated by the Nazis in World War II—the Romani have remained reclusive and wary. Their kris, or unwritten code, and their ever-changing Romani tongue have been constant bonds shared by widely dispersed bands. At the same time, their wanderings have accentuated the human tendency to diversify, making gypsies a challenge to linguists and anthropologists alike. Additionally, many of their customs are imbued with—perhaps contaminated by—those of the lands in which they sojourned.
The gypsy attitude toward the dead became less diluted than their other beliefs. They recognized two categories of dead people: Suuntsé were “saints” in paradise and need not be feared, whereas mulé died unnaturally, unexpectedly, or prematurely. In the animistic world of the gypsies, however, all death resulted from deliberate evil, so the latter category included just about everyone.
Never mind other people’s ghosts or vampires; gypsies could pass untroubled nights in outsiders’ graveyards. It was the mulo they feared. After a death in a gypsy camp, the tent where the corpse was laid would be carefully guarded so nothing untoward could affect it; meanwhile, the campfires outside were stoked high to scare off any ghosts. Every burial rite was observed to the letter, with the dead man’s possessions—even his money—being destroyed to rob a potential ghost of any reason to pursue its former clan members and to exact its revenge for negligence or theft. The destruction extended even to the departed’s home: The ritual of the burning wagon was once a spectacular gypsy custom.
Some say the mulo walks abroad by day; others that he moves only at night and must return to his grave by cockcrow. Either way, he can also be active precisely at noon, when nothing casts a shadow—a sort of witching hour in reverse. Not quite a reanimated corpse but not exactly a ghost either, the mulo is something in between—a kind of posthumous double that, though tethered to the grave, can nonetheless wander at will. Though the mulo is greatly feared for his often brutally sexual depredations, he is almost never a bloodsucker. In fact, his adventures are comically folkloric. Many aspects of his legend have been gathered from those of the vampire—the sharpened hawthorn stake, decapitation, and burning, to name just a few of the various methods used to well and truly dispatch him. This makes it likely that, as far as vampires are concerned, the gypsy got more than he gave.
On the other hand, there are those offerings. Yes, the mulo can wander, but he must always return to the grave—there to be propitiated with offerings of food and milk in a rite that might be as old as India. So, too, might be the belief in its universality. Vampirism, to the gypsy, is a principle of nature, as applicable to animals and plants as it is to humans. Pumpkins and melons, to name the two most famous examples, often turn into vampires.
All things, it seems, are full of more than just gods.
BLOOD AND SAND
A century and more ago, when European archaeologists began excavating the earliest civilizations in the Near East, they saw in the bas-reliefs, the shattered cuneiform tablets, the broken pottery, the scattered amulets and wristbands and rings, evidence of what must have been vast pantheons of gods and demons.
According to Montague Summers, one such find—a prehistoric bowl discovered by a French archaeological mission in Persia at the turn of the 20th century—is the earliest known representation of a vampire. It depicts a supernatural warning in the form of a man copulating with a headless corpse (the threat of decapitation being enough to scare off a succubus, or demon in female form said to have sexual intercourse with men while they sleep). Dr. Reginald Campbell Thompson, author of Semitic Magic, is quoted as suggesting “quite probably the man may have drunk from this bowl as helping the magic (although this is a doubtful point).”
It might be a doubtful point; it is certainly an enigmatic object. So is the Assyrian cylinder seal, dating to around 2000 B.C., that depicts a naked female straddling a prostrate male while another man, wielding what looks like a stake but could be a dagger, advances threateningly upon the woman. This seal might have been the amulet of a man “troubled by nightly emissions,” in Campbell Thompson’s decorous phrase. It, too, would ward off a succubus by depicting the fate that lay in store for her.
The surviving bits of literature recovered so far are full of such warnings, spells, and exorcisms. The deserts bounding the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Assyria were fearsome enough places without doubling as the abodes of demons and the dead. These included the mysterious Seven Spirits, suckers of blood and eaters of flesh, and the dreaded ekimmu or elimmu, ghosts of men whose bodies lay abandoned in desert or marsh. Deprived of the proper burial rituals, they wander between worlds, hungry and thirsty, preying on passersby. They seem to be of ancient provenance; in Sumerian demonology, Professor Samuel Hooke noted, “the dead who had not had funeral rites performed for them were greatly feared.”
And then there was Lilith, who clawed her way up the demonological ladder until, by the Middle Ages, she was Queen of the Succubi, if not the consort of the devil himself. Lilith began inauspiciously enough, though, possibly as the Sumerian wind spirit (from lil, “wind”), one of the legions that arose in the solitary wastes of the desert. She got an early boost in status when she married Adam—this was before Eve, at least according to Hebrew folklore—but was eventually exiled back to the desert. There she took up residence, said the Prophet Isaiah, with jackals and ostriches and vultures. Once her name became confused with the Hebrew layal (“night”), Lilith became a hairy, night-flying monster—the very epitome of the female sexual predator. Solomon thought the Queen of Sheba’s hairy legs betrayed her as Lilith in disguise, and indeed, in this hirsute role, she has wormed her way through poetry, drama, and fiction.
But if Lilith morphed into a literary archetype, another demonic Hebrew child killer, the estrie, managed to retain her original vampiric attributes. At the burial of a woman believed liable to become an estrie after death, the body was examined to see if its mouth was open. That, as we have seen, was an infallibly ominous sign—and if the mouth was in fact open, it was promptly stuffed with dirt.
Deeper in the deserts of Arabia, a demon in the shape of a beautiful enchantress was said to open graves to feed on fresh corpses. She was called the algul— origin, understandably, of the English word ghoul. Islam may have banished such monsters to the farthest liminal margins, but it could not eradicate the fear of them. An isolated grave found in an Ottoman cemetery on the Greek island of Mytilene, and dating to the late 18th or early 19th century, contained a skeleton with nails driven through its neck, pelvis, and ankles. Muslim custom calls for the imam to remain at the tomb when a funeral is over, to coach the dead man in the replies he should make to the Questioners—the angels Mounkir and Nekir—who have entered the grave to interrogate him about his faith. Even in Islam, the soul after death retains some mysterious connection with its body, and is thought to linger with it until after its burial.
No place in the ancient world, however, was more obsessed with death than Egypt. Possessing the most elaborate funerary complex of them all, as the pyramids have reminded countless generations of visitors, the Egyptians so purified, embalmed, mummified, memorialized, and mythologized their dead that surely they must have told tales of their occasional return. Yet, despite Egypt’s reputation as the wellspring of all magic, all mystery, all black arts; despite its subsequent role in the literature of mystery and romance; and despite claims to the contrary, no trace of vampires has been found in the country’s extensive archaeological records.
The reason: The Egyptians performed their mortuary labors too well. Many of the earliest mummies were decapitated, eviscerated, hacked into pieces, and then reassembled and wrapped in linen, rendering the body uninhabitable. Furthermore, they built for the ages. All those necropolises in the desert, all that “care that the Egyptians took to bury their dead in tombs deep in the ground and in the sides of mountains,” as pioneering Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge wrote in 1883, may have been the equivalent of constructing containment domes around some very dangerous force: “The massive stone and wooden sarcophagi, the bandages of the mummy, the double and triple coffins, the walled-up doors of the tomb, the long shaft filled with earth and stones, etc., all were devised with the idea of making it impossible for the dead to reappear upon the earth.”
NIGHT IN THE KAMPONGS
From Burma to the farthest-flung islands of the Malay Archipelago, in jungles where head-hunting once thrived and were-tigers and were-buffalo and even were-elephants once stalked, the rank flourish of tropical vegetation competes with a riot of supernatural bloodsucking creatures. When their tales were told at night in the scattered kampongs, or villages, protective screens of jeruju thorn might be drawn closer around the community’s most vulnerable: pregnant women, infants, and young mothers.
In Malaysia, it is told, a mother once died of grief after giving birth to a stillborn. Her spirit flew up into a tree and became a langsuir, a cormorantlike vampire that eats fish and spitefully sucks the blood of other newborns through a hole in the back of her neck. By day, however, she continued to be the very picture of a beautiful Malay woman, with long, black hair and a green dress. The stillborn child, for its part, became a pontianak— a terrible little bloodsucking vampire that often assumes the form of an owl. Unless certain now-familiar steps are taken with their corpses, all mothers who die in childbirth, and all babies who are stillborn, are in the danger of becoming langsuir and pontianak. Needles must be jabbed in their palms, eggs lodged beneath their arms, and glass beads inserted in their mouths to block the entry or exit of spirits. Folklore being what it is, however, the roles have been reversed on crowded Java. There, the langsuir has become the stillborn child, and the pontianak the inconsolable, vengeful mother heard wailing in the night.
Stillborn children, dying newborns, mothers expiring while giving birth or before they can be ritually purified—such tragedies must have been all too common at one time, so deeply have they impressed themselves upon the folklore. Stories of dead mothers and children returning and, having been robbed of life and offspring themselves, enviously destroying those of others, convey an almost unbearable psychological truth. Yet, the local mythology saw even healthy, growing children as vulnerable, too. They might be attacked by the bajang, a malevolent spirit clearly based on the secretive, nocturnal civet of the jungle canopy. When captured in a hollow bamboo stalk, the bajang can become a wizard’s familiar—and even his legacy, passed down from one generation to the next in a wizard family.
The most dreaded and lurid supernatural predator of mothers and infants in Malaysia is the horrible penanggalen, a monster reduced to its gory minimum: a fanged female head trailing only stomach and intestines. These vile viscera glow behind it at night like a macabre comet, sometimes sparkling like fireflies. Given this ghastly vision, it’s easy to understand how and why only a screen of jeruju thorn might have the power to entangle and halt the demon.
When the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in the 1500s, they found a population terrified of aswangs— supernatural creatures that were a blend of vampire, witch, and some kind of were-animal. The aswang that flew in the night was decidedly a bloodsucker, using its long tongue to prick the jugular vein of the unwary sleeper, but during the day, it was a beautiful woman leading an ordinary village life; she achieved her supernatural powers, as did medieval witches, by rubbing herself with a special ointment.
To ward off an aswang attack—and, incidentally, to carve out more room on the communal sleeping mat—you might rub garlic in your armpits. In some places, the aswang is called mandurugo, or “bloodsucker.” Beautiful and enticing by day, a winged monstrosity by night, the mandurugo preys on a succession of young men.
The Spanish also encountered a belief in the danag. Once a cultural hero as the goddess who gave humankind the gift of taro, the danag had since been demoted to a bloodsucking demon.
Such creatures both resemble the European vampire and differ from it. They suck blood. They bring death by disease. They prey upon the vulnerable. And they are often mixed up with witches and wizards. The aswang, the mandurugo, and the danag are also associated with such nocturnal aviators as the owl and the flying fox, or kalang, a fearsome-looking bat with a wingspan of six feet that Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus unjustifiably named Pteropus vampyrus in 1758, though it actually eats nothing but fruit.
And though “it is impossible,” as authors Stella Martin and Denis Walls put it, “to ascertain whether orang minyak (oily men) were human or fictional,” many women might find them creepily reminiscent of real-life vampires they have known: “These naked and reputedly handsome men molest unsuspecting women in their homes at night and if caught either slip out of their captors’ hands or, according to some, turn into butterflies or rats.”
TALES FROM CHINA AND JAPAN
In a land as ancient as China, where ancestor worship has been so prominent for so long, tombs and cemeteries are ubiquitous. The bodies that are laid there—or rather stood, as Chinese cadavers were often buried vertically—were also swathed in shrouds and wrapped with as many protective rituals as man was capable of inventing. For the Chinese double soul—p’o was earthy, made of shadowy yin, while hun was spirit, full of bright yang—had worked harmoniously in life but then separated at death: While the hun departed for heaven, the p’o remained with the body and ultimately returned to earth.
But leave a corpse too long exposed to sunlight (or, for the sake of ambience, to moonlight) and the p’o might absorb too much yang. The moon has always been a source of occult energy (in Europe, moonbeams were said to induce lunacy, but in China, its energy is that of yang) — thus the belief that, should moonbeams strike a fresh corpse, yang might seep into it and overwhelm the p’o. This might reawaken a need for continuing sustenance once in the grave—a need that can be met only by feeding on the corpses nearby or, failing that, by feeding on living people. In the latter case, you get a ch’ing shih— a Chinese vampire.
And what a vampire: With its red, staring eyes, fetid breath, talonlike fingernails, and cerements covered with the fungus of the grave, it preys on those who pass too close to graveyards at night. The only ways to stop its depredations are to be more prompt in the observances of ancestor worship (moonlight as well as neglected ritual being equally powerful progenitors of a ch’ing shih) or, as a last resort, to burn the body. It may also be the case that a demon has simply possessed a fresh cadaver; either way, as an animated corpse, it closely resembles the European vampire.
Two subtle variations: The ch’ing shih doesn’t infect its victims with its own taint, and it doesn’t swoop down upon them—it can only hop.
It is tempting to seek a channel of cultural transmission, perhaps back and forth along the immemorial Silk Road, where merchants might have carried legends and tales of the walking dead by telling them at night by campfire light or under the roof of caravanserais long gone to dust. But that path is probably too difficult to follow. In any event, to the west of China are those inhospitable figures: the Nepalese Lord of Death, perched on a pile of skeletons, with a crown of skulls and a necklace of severed hands; and the Mongolian Lord of Time, surrounded by bones and rotting corpses.
Tibet is no less forbidding. In 1931, French traveler Alexandra David-Neel witnessed a sort of vampire role reversal: A Tibetan shaman was wrestling with a corpse. He lay on it and, in effect, kissed it, at the same time repeating a magic formula. The corpse tried to throw him off, but the shaman clung fast and eventually succeeded in biting off the cadaver’s tongue. At that, the corpse collapsed back into lifelessness and left a potent talisman—the severed tongue—in the shaman’s possession. That doesn’t sound very European.
Looking east from China, though, it’s hard to find a vampire at all. After 1854, when Japan was first opened to the world, a flood of curious Westerners descended upon the Land of the Rising Sun and, spellbound by what they found, began interpreting this ancient culture to readers back home. Among them was Algernon B. Mitford, later Baron Redesdale, whose 1871 book, Tales of Old Japan, would prove to be an enduring classic. Among the stories Mitford included was one he called “The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima.”
The Prince of Hizen has fallen in love with a “lady of rare beauty, called O Toyo” who, unknown to him, is throttled to death by a giant cat and buried beneath the veranda. The cat then assumes O Toyo’s beautiful form and, lamia-like, begins preying on the prince while he sleeps. When eventually discovered, the beautiful woman transforms back into a cat, springs onto the roof, and gets away.
But not for long.
In classic fairy tale fashion, the cat “fled to the mountains, and did much mischief among the surrounding people, until at last the Prince of Hizen ordered a great hunt, and the beast was killed.”
That is one of the few vampire stories found in the monster-rich folklore of Japan. Fragments, and occasionally entire poems, from ancient Japan mention encounters with dead people out walking, and one poem in particular somehow protects its bearer should he meet up with such a strolling corpse. Yet these are only vestiges. Sepulchers from the Jomon period (4000 to 250 B.C.) have been opened in which skeletons were curled up, stretched out, or had stones placed on chest or head. Archaeologists still puzzle over some bodies buried in fetal positions, wondering whether they signify a return to the womb or represent precautions taken against the return of dead people. Even touching a decomposing corpse demands a purification rite, and Yomi, the Japanese land of the dead, is the decomposing corpse writ large: a domain of impurity that, like most underworlds, is also the source of eventual regeneration.
Yet, the exquisite refinement that is uniquely Japanese extended even to the ancient tomb. Mitford noted how the “rich and noble are buried in several square coffins, one inside the other, in a sitting position; and their bodies are partially preserved from decay by filling the nose, ears, and mouth with vermilion. In the case of the very wealthy, the coffin is completely filled in with vermilion.”
Japanese folklore had its share of demons, baby eaters, and ghouls, as Lafcadio Hearn made known in his In Ghostly Japan. The 19th-century literary critic and travel writer also belonged to that first generation of Westerners enraptured by Japan. Yet, he discovered something ineffably eerier in the appearance of a fleet of miniature “ghost ships.” During the Bon—a three-day festival of the dead held each year in late summer—tiny ship models, each bearing their own little working lanterns, were set afloat on the sea at night. Hearn swam out into the ocean to observe the spectacle firsthand:
I watched those frail glowing shapes drifting through the night, and ever as they drifted scattering, under impulse of wind and wave, more and more widely apart. Each, with its quiver of color, seemed a life afraid,—trembling on the blind current that was bearing it into the outer blackness…. Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating further and further one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colors, must melt forever into the colorless Void….
Even in the moment of this thought I began to doubt whether I was really alone,—to ask myself whether there might not be something more than a mere shuddering of light in the thing that rocked beside me: some presence that haunted the dying flame, and was watching the watcher. A faint cold thrill passed over me,—perhaps some chill uprising from the depths,—perhaps the creeping only of a ghostly fancy. Old superstitions of the coast recurred to me,—old vague warnings of peril in the time of the passage of Souls. I reflected that were any evil to befall me out there in the night,—meddling, or seeming to meddle, with the lights of the Dead,—I should myself furnish the subject of some future weird legend.
So he whispered a hurried Buddhist farewell, then struck out for the shore.
RARE SIGHTINGS
Voyage across the vast Pacific, and the vampire gets only more elusive. In Melanesia, where chiefs were once buried standing up with just their heads emerging from the sand, the dead are envisioned as eating lizards and excrement, among other unpleasantness. In New Caledonia, the dead are likely to return in deceptive form, like that of a living man, but they can be detected at night because they snore, or by the more reliable sign that their body disappears and leaves only the head visible. In north Malekula, the dead are ever present, their skulls arranged on a flat stone in the men’s lodge, where people invoke them by spitting continuously in their direction.
Though such examples can be dug up indefinitely, few vampires are found.
Anthropologist George R. Stetson discovered evidence in Captain Cook’s voyages that, as Stetson put it, the “Polynesians believed that the vampires were the departed souls, which quitted the grave…to creep by night into the houses and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, who afterward died.” Other scholars, by contrast, have come up empty-handed. As in so many cultures worldwide, however, those of the South Seas warn the living that ominous occurrences should be expected when burial rituals for the dead are not observed, or if their resting places are disturbed later on.
A vampire tradition may not exist in the New World, either—but that hardly renders its every element absent. Among the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes region, for example, the soul that failed to enter the next world was doomed to return and to reanimate its body. In a Cherokee legend published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1892, some folklorists perceive an explanation of tuberculosis. A “Demon of Consumption,” goes the tale, once lived in a cave and possessed an iron finger. At night he would steal out, impersonate a member of a given family, enter his house, “select his victim, begin fondling his head, and run his soft fingers through his hair until the unsuspecting victim would go to sleep. Then with his iron finger would he pierce the victim’s side and take his liver and lungs, but without pain. The wound would immediately heal, leaving no outward mark.” With no memory of the assault, the victim would go about his business, growing weaker by the day until he wasted away altogether and died.
Stetson, too, singled out a Cherokee tale. “There are in that tribe,” he wrote, “quite a number of old witches and wizards who thrive and fatten upon the livers of murdered victims.” Like medieval demons, they gather around those on their deathbeds, tormenting and eventually killing them. But mere death does not end the agony. After burial, the Cherokee demons dig up the body, remove the liver, and feast upon it. “They thus lengthen their own lives by as many days as they have taken from his,” Stetson continued. “In this way they get to be very aged, which renders them objects of suspicion. It is not, therefore, well to grow old among the Cherokees.”
Folklorist Stith Thompson includes this Abenaki tale in his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: An old wizard had died and was laid in the branches of a tree in a burial grove. One evening, an Indian and his wife passed by, looking for a place to spend the night. They set up camp beneath the tree and cooked their food. Glancing up, the woman “saw long dark things hanging among the tree branches.” Those were merely the dead from long ago, her husband explained. He then unaccountably fell fast asleep. But the wife, understandably, could not close an eyelid:
Soon the fire went out, and then she began to hear a gnawing sound, like an animal with a bone. She sat still, very much scared, all night long. About dawn she could stand it no longer, and reaching out, tried to wake her husband, but could not…. The gnawing had stopped. When daylight came she went to her husband and found him dead, with his left side gnawed away, and his heart gone.
When the body of the dead wizard was taken down and unwrapped, the “mouth and face were covered with fresh blood.”
Shift that setting to Russia and exchange the grove for a graveyard, and you would have a classic folkloric vampire tale.
QUICK OR DEAD?
“Zombi!—the word is perhaps full of mystery even for those who made it,” marveled Lafcadio Hearn, who washed up on Martinique after leaving Japan. Often erroneously credited with introducing the word zombie in its present meaning into English, in an 1889 Harpers article, Hearn found that in Martinique, it applied to a wide range of goblins, specters, and other monsters of the nursery, but never to the dead. It was a word, he acknowledged, that must have “special strange meanings.”
Our modern word zombie has certainly taken a strange odyssey. It actually appeared in English 70 years earlier, in Robert Southey’s 1819 History of Brazil. Describing an independent ex-slave republic near Pernambuco in the 1690s, Southey stated that its chief was called Zombi, which was the “name for the Deity, in the Angolan tongue.” Noting that the militantly Catholic Portuguese, colonizers of both Brazil and Angola, translated Zombi as “devil,” Southey checked certain books of religious instruction that were printed in both Portuguese and Angolan: “There I found that N’Zambi is the word for Deity.”
From deity to walking corpse is a very large leap, but perhaps the devil has something to do with it after all; missionaries and colonial officials denigrated native gods everywhere as demons. Lexicographers have been combing the jungles of African etymology for decades, hunting for the origins of zombi. Many have sided with Southey. In Kimbundu, the language of Angola, they find the word rendered as nzambi (“god”) or zumi (“ghost” or “departed spirit”). Other linguists derive greater enlightenment from Kikongo, a related language, where zumi means “fetish” and nvumbi is a body deprived of its soul. All point to the region bracketing the mouth of the Congo River, from Angola in the south to Gabon in the north.
The best-known zombie hails from a different hemisphere entirely. It is the grisliest component in the lurid assemblage of features—including pins stuck in effigy dolls, child sacrifice, and cannibalism—that for generations constituted the popular conception of Haitian voodoo. There, the zombie is a mindless if ambulatory corpse, like those spotted working in a sugarcane field by American writer William B. Seabrook. An avowed cannibal himself—he claimed to have shared with an African chief a human rump steak that was “so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal”—Seabrook spent months in Haiti while researching his 1929 book The Magic Island.
The zombies that Seabrook claimed to have encountered had “staring, unfocused, unseeing” eyes. Their faces were “not only expressionless, but incapable of expression,” and they harvested the cane stalks in a kind of unconscious suspended animation, showing no response even to Seabrook’s touch. Could these have been living men, put under a cataleptic spell by certain “substances,” recognized by the Haitian code pénal, that “without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less prolonged”? Perhaps. Yet in theory, at least, they also might have been reanimated corpses, bereft of speech and free will.
In Haiti, it seems, the sorcerer can suck a man’s soul out through the crack of his door and bottle it. This proves fatal; once the victim is buried, the wizard—like the resurrectionists of 18th-century England—sneaks into the graveyard and digs him up. After due propitiations to death gods, the wizard uncorks the bottle and waves it back and forth beneath the corpse’s nose. This waft of his own soul reanimates the dead man, but the wizard then promptly applies some baleful herb to ensure he remains a mindless slave.
Alternatively, the wizard can simply wait until somebody dies and then, like sorcerers in Gabon, revive the body by recalling its soul—which, if not still lingering inside the cadaver, is at least hovering nearby. Either way, time is of the essence: Once decomposition sets in, the dead body is useless as a slave. It might just as well be transformed into animal meat and sold in the market. Unsurprisingly, it is reputed to spoil quickly.
Waiting to drop down upon the unwary, multitudes of bloodsucking, bloodcurdling creatures infest the forests of the African imagination—just as they do the Indian and the Malaysian. Whether or not he originated in the cult of an African snake god, the zombie is not a bloodsucker. Nor is he—despite the mindless cannibals of moviedom—a midnight predator. Rather, a zombie is simply a reanimated corpse, directed by a sorcerer. In this shaman-centered world of divisible souls and of cadavers restored to dimly fluttering life, we can glimpse yet another clue to the origins of the primitive vampire.
The deeper in time we venture—and the farther from Eurasia—the more elusive the vampire grows. He may not appear at all times and in all places. One element, though, seems universal: The dead body must undergo a fixed sequence of changes before being reduced to its fundamental form, the skeleton. That transition, from demise to dissolution, is everywhere deemed a dangerous interlude for both the quick and the dead.