CHAPTER NINE
IN 1781, IN THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS near what is now North Ossetia, Russia, a traveler named Stöder witnessed a gripping and no doubt ancient ceremony. A young woman had just been struck and killed by lightning. Immediately afterward, the residents of her village, heedless of the storm, rushed to her body, crying joyously and dancing in a circle around her corpse while singing a song to Elias, or Elijah the Thunderer—the ancient Indo-European god of storms and lightning, draped in the more acceptable garments of an Old Testament prophet.
The dead girl was dressed in new clothes and placed in a coffin atop a platform. For eight days, everyone—including the girl’s parents, sisters, and husband—celebrated. A fire was kept burning, and all work was suspended. Any expression of grief was thought to be a sin against Elijah. Present at the ritual was a youth who had himself survived a lightning strike, which gave him special status as a servant and messenger of Elijah. He sang and danced, then fell into convulsions; when he opened his eyes, he told what he had seen in the heavenly company of Elijah, naming previous lightning victims who were standing at Elijah’s side.
On the eighth day, the dead girl was laid on a new cart, pulled by a pair of oxen with white spots, and paraded through the neighboring villages, accompanied by singing youths and relatives who collected gifts of livestock and food. Then the oxen were turned loose; the patch of grass on which they stopped nearby was designated the burial spot. The coffin was placed on a rectangle of stones several feet high; next to it villagers erected a pole, on which they stretched the skin and head of a goat. Here, everyone feasted.
Remarkably similar ceremonies were once reported all over the Caucasus—among the few commonalities in a fragmented region where each valley otherwise seemed to be its own tribal enclave, speaking its own language and practicing its own traditions. In some places, the lightning-seared body was left on the platform until it decomposed. In others, the body might be hung from a tree for three days while dances and sacrifices took place. Sometimes a “banquet of the thunderstruck” was held on the anniversary of the unfortunate soul’s death. And always the victim’s livestock were released into pastures, specially marked to warn the shepherds away.
Most important, a nimbus of the holy surrounded the lightning’s victim. The survivor was endowed with prophetic powers, to be sure, but the dead were assumed to be sitting among the heavenly elite. Whether quick or dead, these people were charged with a divine energy; they were tabu, hieros, sacer, all meaning “consecrated, holy, untouchable”—and “terrifying.” For it’s not the lightning, but what it illuminates: The joy evident in the community often hid a deeper fear, because the newly dead were believed to enjoy sudden access to supernatural powers. And “primitive man,” as anthropologist Sir James Frazer put it in 1933, saw the handiwork of the dead everywhere, particularly “in earthquakes, thunderstorms, drought, famine, disease and death. No wonder that he regards the supposed authors of such evils with awe and fear, and seeks to guard himself against them by all the means at his command.”
THE POWER OF THE PERISHED
In Curiosities of Olden Times (1895), the English reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, best known for penning the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” quotes two lines from the priest officiating at the funeral of Hamlet’s Ophelia, who has drowned herself in a brook: “For charitable prayers / Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.”
“Unquestionably it must have been customary in England,” Reverend Baring-Gould observes, “thus to pelt a ghost that was suspected of the intention to wander. The stake driven through the suicide’s body was a summary and complete way of ensuring that the ghost would not be troublesome.”
Fear of the dead: Just as it has cast its dank shadow over myth and legend worldwide, so too is it apparent in the tangible artifacts of funerary practices. In graves thousands of years old, skeletons have been found staked, tied up, buried facedown, decapitated, pinned with arrows, crushed by boulders, partially cremated, or exhumed and then reburied—all well-attested ways of preempting the depredations of wandering corpses.
The ancestors are the apotheosized dead. Having been gathered unto their forefathers, they now dwell in an idealized, timeless realm. The recently dead are another story: No matter who they are—parents, siblings, children, friends—they are often conceived as resentful, aggressive, and willing to use their newly enhanced powers against the living. As anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington wrote in 1991, “[t]he corpse is feared because, until its reconstruction in the beyond is complete, part of its spiritual essence remains behind, where it menaces the living with the threat of further death.” So mortuary rites were devised primarily to help the spirit adjust to its new status during this perilous period, to push it on down the line, and to isolate it from the living.
Among the forest tribes of South America, dead bodies were often buried in a fetal position somewhere out in the woods. There were no cemeteries, because cemeteries “incorporate” the dead into the larger community. These tribes wished to do the opposite: They wanted to exclude the deceased, and even banish their memory. Nevertheless, the spirits of the recently dead were believed to wander about at night, sowing illness in their wake.
Occasionally, after a member of the community died, people simply abandoned their village altogether. Sometimes they indulged in a bit of preliminary flattery instead, as among the Bororo of Mato Grosso in Brazil: A death would be followed by an elaborate, two-stage burial. First, the body was interred, and it was permitted to remain for several weeks while ritual hunts and dances took place to honor the spirit. Next, the body was exhumed and defleshed. The skeleton was then painted with urucu—a red dye from a local shrub—and plastered with feathers. In a final indignity, it was placed in a basket and cast into the river.
“There is almost no end to the expedients adopted for getting rid of the dead,” marveled Reverend Baring-Gould:
Piles of stones are heaped over them, they are buried deep in the earth, they are walled up in natural caves, they are enclosed in megalithic structures, they are burned, they are sunk in the sea. They are threatened, they are cajoled, they are hoodwinked. Every sort of trickery is had recourse to, to throw them off the scent of home and of their living relations.
The wives, horses, dogs slain and buried with them, the copious supplies of food and drink laid on their graves, are bribes to induce them to be content with their situation. Nay, further—in very many places no food may be eaten in the house of mourning for many days after an interment. The object of course is to disappoint the returning spirit, which comes seeking a meal, finds none, comes again next day, finds none again, and after a while desists from returning out of sheer disgust.
The primary defense against such malevolent spirits was a good offense—that is, the proper care of their dead bodies. “It is affirmed that persons who have been struck dead by lightning do not decay, and for that reason the ancients neither burnt them nor buried them,” wrote Benedictine exegetist Dom Augustin Calmet in the 18th century. The “reason they are not subject to corruption is because they are as it were embalmed by the sulphur of the thunder-bolt, which serves them instead of salt.”
But “unenlightninged” bodies are subject to corruption, and the history of disposing of such noxious corpses is novel indeed. It has ranged from exposing them to scavengers, to burning them to cinders, to burying them in the ground, to simply eating them. The sequence has varied from place to place; most cultures have had recourse to some mixture of all these elements.
Not that it has helped them understand one another. Two and a half millennia ago, the Greek historian Herodotus told how King Darius of Persia once gathered some Greeks who practiced cremation of their dead and asked what it would take to eat them instead:
They said that no price in the world would make them do so. After that, Darius summoned those of the Indians who are called Callatians…[who did practice funerary cannibalism] and…asked them what price would make them burn their dead fathers with fire. They shouted aloud, “Don’t mention such horrors!” These are matters of settled custom, and I think Pindar was right when he says, “Custom is king of all.”
DEATH LIFTS US UP WHERE WE BELONG
Several centuries ago, when travelers returned from the Caucasus Mountains and reported having seen dead bodies carefully laid in tree branches, they were describing a tradition that was already venerable when the kings of ancient Colchis—keepers of the Golden Fleece—ruled the area. Deliberate exposure is perhaps humankind’s oldest way of disposing of cadavers.
Chimpanzees, when faced with the corpse of a fellow chimp, prod it gingerly a bit and then take to their heels, abandoning it to forest scavengers. Early hominids probably fared no better. “When they died,” archaeologist Timothy Taylor wrote in 2002, “there was little to stop ape-men, ape-women, and ape-children from being torn to pieces. The dead were edible. Vultures, hyenas, crocodiles, rodents, insects, fish and bacteria each took the meat, blood, and fat they wanted. What remained was scattered and trampled, then shattered and powdered by wind and rain.”
At some point in the distant past, our forebears made a virtue—or something like it—of necessity deliberately by exposing human bodies to scavengers. Not just any scavengers, however. Nearly everywhere there was a decided preference for birds of prey, no doubt because they descend from the heavens. Whether standing in the desiccating wind of the Dakota prairie or hanging from the branches of an Australian eucalyptus, exposure platforms therefore served a dual purpose: They kept terrestrial scavengers at bay and brought the body nearer to heaven, where the vultures wheeled.
At Çatal Hüyük, a Neolithic village excavated in southern Turkey, 8,000-year-old wall paintings seem to depict vultures alighting on headless corpses. The “birds” might instead represent women dressed as vultures, however, engaging in some long-forgotten funerary rite. If so, they may be prototypes of the classical harpies (called snatchers in Greek)—ravenous, loathsome mythological birds with the faces of women. Certainly vultures carried an association with the divine into historical times. The Vaccaei, for example, who inhabited parts of Spain and Portugal during the third century B.C.E., sneered at those who succumbed to disease; let them be cremated. Death in battle was the nobler quietus; the bodies of those so righteously slain should be entrusted to nothing less than vultures.
For more than 300 years, the Parsees of Mumbai have been famous for their Towers of Silence: Atop these circular stone platforms, they expose their dead for vultures to devour. Earth, fire, and water are all sacred elements, the Parsees believe, and are essential for life; they must therefore not be polluted by exposure to death. This rules out disposing of corpses by burial, burning, or consignment to a river. Instead, they are carefully laid out on these stone floors—men here, women there, children in another place—for the circling birds to feast upon. “One afternoon,” wrote Edward Ives in the 1750s, “I resolved to satisfy my curiosity so far as to peep into one of these edifices. I perceived several dead bodies, but there was little flesh left upon the bones; and that little was so parched up by the excessive heat of the sun, that it did not emit those stinking effluvia which there was reason to expect.”
In fact, until quite recently, when India’s vulture population crashed after widespread poisoning, this method of disposing of the dead was both highly organized and extremely hygienic: Nobody was allowed to touch the bodies, lest they spread contagion around the city. The corpses were instead maneuvered by means of metal hooks. Vultures, moreover, worked “more expeditiously than millions of insects would do, if dead bodies were buried in the ground,” as the Parsee Sir Ervad Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (1854–1933) explained. “By this rapid process, putrefaction with all its concomitant evils, is most effectually prevented.”
On the treeless Tibetan Plateau, where the soil is thin, rocky, and often frozen, the Buddhists don’t worry about even the leftover bones. In their traditional “sky burials,” the corpse is first defleshed by ritual specialists. Its skeleton is then pounded into fragments with hammers. Within an hour of the first vulture’s arrival, not a scrap is left, making this perhaps the most ecologically pure of all methods for the disposal of human remains.
Elsewhere, carcasses were often left exposed on platforms for months on end. Some Australian tribes occasionally gathered beneath such podia, which had been suspended from trees, to anoint themselves with the fluids dripping down from their decomposing cargoes. Eventually, whatever bones remained would be collected and buried. Funerary groves such as these—be they in Australia or the Caucasus or North America—were sites both holy and dreadful. Nevertheless, as a Goulburn Island Aboriginal woman once commented matter-of-factly, “It’s cleaner on a tree than under the ground—and we can go back and look at them sometimes.”
IT’S A MAN-EAT-MAN WORLD
Exposure is often associated with excarnation—deliberately stripping the flesh from a corpse to turn it into a skeleton as quickly as possible. Sometimes the reason has to do with ritual, as in Tibetan sky burials. At other times, the goal is the brutally immediate—and nutritive—one of the human flesh itself. “All the vampire stories have developed out of facts concerning primitive cannibalism,” declared MacLeod Yearsley in The Folklore of Fairy-Tale (1924). His facts may be suspect—anthropologists have debated the scope and extent of human cannibalism for decades—but how much does the grisly practice pertain to the origin of vampire stories?
Deep in Spain’s wooded Atapuerca Mountains is a cluster of caves that have long provided a wealth of ancient human remains. In one cave, Gran Dolina, bone fragments recovered in the mid-1990s show clear evidence of having been butchered with stone tools. Dating from 780,000 years ago, they represent the oldest archaeological evidence of cannibalism ever discovered.
In 1976, a nearly complete hominid skull was unearthed near Bodo in Ethiopia. Dated to 600,000 years before the present, it bears cut marks indicating it was deliberately defleshed—yet another sign suggesting cannibalism. Judging from the number of later Paleolithic bones displaying similar expertly placed incisions, cannibalism may have been a common practice. The uncertainties of Stone Age hunting and gathering, after all, placed a premium on protein gathered from whatever sources were available.
Travelers’ tales describing smoked flesh hanging in huts, or prisoners being fattened in wooden cages, or “long pig” gracing chiefly tables were once routine from Africa to the South Pacific. The conquistadors brought back their own lurid tales of the supposed Aztec and Mayan predilection for human meat. As 19th-century Chicago anthropologist Rushton M. Dorman noted,
The Mayas also ate the flesh of human victims sacrificed to the gods. In Nicaragua, the high-priest received the heart, the king the feet and hands, the captors took the thighs, and the tripe was given to the trumpeters. The natives of Honduras said the Spaniards were too tough and bitter to be eaten.
That was exo-cannibalism, or the eating of people from outside one’s own community. Endo-cannibalism, on the other hand, is typically practiced as a reverential funerary rite, and it may have once been widespread. Among the Tapuyas of Brazil, for example, Dorman claimed that, “when an infant died it was eaten by the parents. Adults were eaten by the kindred, and their bones were pounded and reserved for marriage-feasts, as being the most precious thing that could be offered. When they became old they offered themselves to their children, who devoured them after putting them to death. They thought their spiritual substance became incorporated.”
However exaggerated these reports might be, the idea of incorporation was the motive behind all funerary cannibalism—which did not necessarily entail a feast of flesh. One way of incorporating the dead was “to grind their bones to powder or to burn them to ashes,” according to Frazer, “and then to swallow the powder or the ashes mixed with food or drink.” The Yanomamo, an Amazonian tribe, mixed the ashes of their dead into plantain soup, which they drank from gourd bowls. That way, in Dorman’s words, they “received into their bodies the spirits of their deceased friends.”
The most heart-wrenching cannibal accounts must surely be those of mothers eating their dead children. Among certain Australian tribes, in which infant mortality was high, the bereaved mother might partake of her departed child in a bid to facilitate its rebirth. If such practices were widespread in prehistoric times, their dim memories could conceivably underlie the legends of child-eating lamias, witches, and ogres, as such archaic practices might have become (understandably) demonized over time.
Perhaps ceremonial endo-cannibalism, misremembered and reembroidered over countless generations, is the vestigial fact underpinning many folk- and fairy tales. Certainly the pagans accused the earliest Christians of eating flesh and drinking blood in a deliberately calculated insult to the Eucharist. Hurling their own charges in return, the Christians accused pagans of blood sacrifices. And because it was under Christianity that the vampire evolved into the refined bloodsucker we know today, his buried links to cannibalism may not be all that far-fetched.
Voltaire, wouldn’t you know it, had his own take on cannibalism. “The body of a man, reduced to ashes, scattered in the air, and falling on the surface of the earth, becomes corn or vegetable,” the French philosopher and dramatist wrote in his Dictionnaire philosophique in 1764. “So Cain ate a part of Adam; Enoch fed on Cain; Irad on Enoch; Mahalaleel on Irad; Methuselah on Mahalaleel; and thus we find that there is not one among us who has not swallowed some portion of our first parent. Hence it has been said, that we have all been cannibals.”
CONSIGNED TO THE FLAMES
In 1658, when Sir Thomas Browne published his Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, he had been reflecting on some ancient funerary urns—containing the ashes of men and women deceased for untold centuries—that had recently emerged from the muddy Norfolk flats that were his English home. “To be knav’d out of our graves,” Browne mused, “to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragicall abominations, escaped in burning burials.”
Judging from the remains of “Mungo Lady”—discovered in 1969 at Mungo Lake in Australia, and marking the earliest-known cremation—burning burials have been around for at least 40,000 years. Mungo Lady’s skeleton appears to have been deliberately shattered after she had been burned, but before she was put to the torch a second time. What apocalyptic deeds she may have committed in life to deserve this treatment after death, we shall never know.
Deliberately putting the fleshly tabernacle to the flame, reducing it to sifting ash and crumbled bits of bone, seems to be a late addition to the panoply of funerary options—possibly because cremation, as we have seen, is trickier than it appears. Because of the high water content in fresh bodies—the intestines and heart being notoriously incombustible, as in the cases of Joan of Arc and Percy Bysshe Shelley—proper cremation demands an intensely hot and enduring flame. Nevertheless, it seems to have been widely adopted in the prehistoric period—part of a confusing flip-flop from burial to cremation and back that continues to puzzle archaeologists today. Not until the Bronze Age, with its improved high-temperature fire technology, did the pyre replace the grave—but even then only for a while. The so-called “Urnfield culture” dominated the death rituals of heavily forested central Europe for about half a millennium, from roughly 1300 to 750 B.C.E.
Cremation made short work of many a troublesome corpse problem, yet it tended to release the soul with a roar, before it was ready, thus magnifying its maleficence. In the Balkans and parts of eastern Europe, there persists a deep tradition, touched on in Chapter 6, that the soul requires 40 days before it is ready to leave its former lodgings and push on. The arrival of Christianity and its emphasis on the resurrection of the body extinguished pyres all across Europe.
Cremation is a rapid and violent desiccation. Deliberate smoke drying is a statelier one. On the Lower Murray River, the Aborigines often smoked their dead, by placing them in a sitting position (but with arms outstretched) on a bier above an outdoor fire. Once the skin blistered, the body was removed, its hair was scraped off, and its apertures were all sewn tight. The smoke-dried corpse was then smeared with red ochre—a naturally antibacterial iron-oxide pigment derived from tinted clay. Placed above a second fire, this one contained within a special hut, the dead person would smoke away while wailers brushed off the flies. After being removed, wrapped, and carried about with the tribe for several months, the body might at long last be cremated, after which a kinsman would retrieve the skull and—yes—fashion it into a drinking bowl.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
And that leaves burial. Using high-tech methods to fix the date of remains found in Israel’s Skhul Cave, anthropologists have concluded that modern Homo sapiens were being deliberately interred by at least 120,000 years ago. Yet, intentional burial may be far older than that. Nearly 30 skeletons have been recovered from the thousands of hominid bones filling the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains. They had been lying there for at least 350,000 years, and some—but not all—archaeologists believe they represent a ritual deposit.
Burial was certainly a feature of human societies by the later Stone Age, or Upper Paleolithic (between about 40,000 and 10,000 years ago), given that 150 or so examples from that period have been discovered. The triple inhumation at Dolní Vestonice, in today’s Czech Republic, has elicited much comment. Two male bodies were placed flanking a female body in sexually suggestive poses, as if the trio had been killed for some sexual transgression around 26,000 years ago.
Burial became common after the establishment of settled agricultural communities in the Neolithic. At Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, dead ancestors were sometimes deliberately incorporated into living households—for example, some were buried beneath sleeping platforms. At British hill forts, slain warriors were interred behind the battlements, thus inviting their supernaturally empowered spirits to help protect the ramparts from assault. There are even cases where the living agreed to be buried alive so that their spirits might guard the community. Spanish conquistadors recorded an episode in which an Inca girl volunteered to be interred on a remote Andean peak as an offering to the sun god, so that she would be revered forever after as a goddess of healing and abundance. And some priest-kings of the Dinka in southern Sudan chose to be inhumed while still alive, convinced that their spirits would eternally hover above their villages.
Live burial also has a rich if macabre history as an enforced punishment. In ancient Rome, for example, four (and later six) virgins were charged with tending the sacred fire kept burning on the altar of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. If any one of them was discovered to have broken her vow of chastity, she was led down a ladder to a small underground cell, supplied with a little food and water, and covered up with earth. A citizen passing by would thus be reminded that here is where it happened, that beneath this spot still lie the scandalous bones. It all points up a central fact about burial: Graves are specially charged places, and as such can readily come to be haunted.
Even in today’s secular world, few would care to spend an entire night in a cemetery. The ancient tombs of forgotten peoples can be even spookier. In parts of North America, each new spring plowing once turned up bones from old Indian mounds. These are deposits of the dead that tribes such as the Hurons and the Iroquois gathered annually from scaffolds, trees, houses, temples, and rock shelters for burial in an ancestral ossuary. Scattered across western Europe and the British Isles, meanwhile, large communal graves—among them bank barrows, long barrows, round barrows, passage graves, and megalithic tombs—were serving as bone repositories long before the time of Christ. Subsequent generations viewed such places as haunted. A century ago, historian John Arnott MacCulloch, having studied Norse sagas, claimed that in “ancient Scandinavia the idea that the dead were alive in their barrows gave rise to the belief that they might become unhallowed monsters of the vampire kind…. Parallels occur in Saxon England and among the early Teutons and Celts.”
In agricultural societies, in which the underworld was seen as both the abode of death and the seat of fertility, the buried body, like the buried seed, gave rise to new life. In Egypt, the billowing grain flanking the Nile rose annually from the buried god Osiris. In Scottish balladry, Sweet William becomes a green-red rose and Barbara Allen a briar. And in Slavic folklore, claimed Sir James Frazer, a “tree that grows on a grave is regarded by the South Slavonian peasant as a sort of fetish. Whoever breaks a twig from it hurts the soul of the dead, but gains thereby a magic wand, since the soul embodied in the twig will be at his service.”
Yet, the dark side of burial may have been uppermost in the minds of its earliest practitioners. Archaeologist Timothy Taylor suspects that burial might originally have been conceived as a form of punishment—a kind of ostracism for the community’s scapegoats. Those bodies being laid in the backs of caves (or sunk deep in lakes, or interred in earth whose chemical properties deterred decomposition) could never be physically reincorporated into the community; instead, they were exiled to its cold, dark margins.
Over the past few centuries, for example, hundreds of remarkably well-preserved bodies have been recovered from the bogs of Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula (the same general area where the Gundestrup Cauldron was found). Mostly dating from 100 B.C.E. to about 400 C.E., these finds include many—Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, Windeby Girl, Yde Girl—who have won a peaty immortality because the stubble on their chins or the plaits in their hair look nowhere near the several thousand years old that scientists have determined them to be. The bodies were buried in these bogs for a reason. And because their Iron Age communities overwhelmingly cremated their dead, that reason must have something to do with sacrifice or punishment.
Forensic anthropologists have figured out that many of those buried here were victims: They had been hanged, garroted, or otherwise strangled. In addition, many had been beaten and broken—perhaps after death, perhaps before. It is therefore likely that they had violated some taboo. Taylor believes they were buried in bogs in order to “vex the ghost and prevent the progress of the soul.” Pinned down by preservative peat, their bodies could not decay—and release their souls in the process.
It’s easy to see how a superstitious community might come to believe that its scapegoats, its sacrificed outcasts, the sick, lame, or deformed lying out there in those lonely graves might resent their fate and—especially if their corpses weren’t decomposing—might return one night to seek revenge.
LIFEBLOOD
Dead bodies may have been charged with supernatural power, but so were living ones—if it resided in their blood.
Those stately columns and orders—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian—that grace our courts, capitols, and schools are rooted in the traditions of Greek temple architecture. But that means they are also steeped in blood: The pillars evolved from the posts to which sacrifices were once tied, creating scenes that second-century Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria called “disgusting murders and burials.” In a Greek temple, the holiest of altars was also the most sanguinary, distinguishing the structures as places where, in the words of Nietzsche, the “beauty tempered the dread, but this dread was the prerequisite everywhere.”
Sacrifice enshrined the most ancient of bargains. The gods might hurl their thunderbolts, but men propitiated (and even manipulated) them with offerings of life and its vehicle, blood. Pagans did not need to read in Deuteronomy that “the blood is the life” to realize the essential truth of that statement. Blood—lose enough of it and you die. That was as obvious to the primitive as it is to the 21st-century physician. Blood, served by the heart, must be the seat of vitality.
Roman gladiators gulped the blood of fallen opponents, thereby doubling their strength. Ancient Europeans poured blood into graves to slake the thirst of the dead. In the Odyssey, Odysseus placates those in Hades by slitting the throats of sheep and letting the blood soak into the earth. The blood of martyrs, of patriots, of innocents and kings—all had magical healing powers. In some places, a single drop of blood is believed to possess power enough to reanimate old bones. The sacred smolders in bone, too—but not like it does in blood.
The fierce Botocudos of Brazil were said to open wounds in their victims and drink their blood before killing them. The Tongaranka of New South Wales would not bury a body without arranging for a male relative to stand over the grave and submit to a beating with the sharp edge of a boomerang; his blood then flowed over the corpse. Zapotec priests in Mexico sacrificed their blood by cutting themselves with stingray spines or blades of obsidian; they believed that blood, like wind or lightning, had peè— a life force that manifests itself in flowing movement.
Blood consecrated in ritual sacrifice—whether that of a human or an animal—was deemed to be doubly charged with the sacred. By consecrating the bread and wine, the Catholic priest transubstantiates it to the body and blood of Christ. But in earlier centuries, the consumption of consecrated blood, like lightning strikes in the Caucasus, led to prophecy. “In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos,” Sir James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough, “a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a woman…tasted the blood of the lamb, and thus being inspired by the god she prophesied or divined. At Aegira in Achaia the priestess of the earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into the cave to prophesy.” And among the Achomawi Indians of California, the shamans would drink the blood of the sick; not only did it contain the seeds of the malady, but the shaman’s attendant spirits were thirsty and he needed their help.
Before there were priests, there were shamans—the name, derived from a Siberian Tungusic word, now generally applies to folk healers and religious specialists in tribal cultures worldwide. Whether man or woman, the shaman is a prophet, a seer, and a metaphysical traveler, able to speak the language of animals, turn into a bird, become invisible, enter other people’s dreams, and—able to manipulate the cyclical process of death and rebirth—visit the land of the dead.
The English astronomer and mathematician Thomas Harriot, in the 1580s, might almost have been describing just such an eerie visit when he related what he had been told by a Native American residing near Roanoke Island in eastern North Carolina:
[I]t was told me for strange news that one being dead, buried, and taken up again…showed that although his body had laid dead in the grave, yet his soul was alive, and had travelled far in the long, broad way, on both sides whereof grew most delicate and pleasant trees, bearing more rare and excellent fruits than ever he had seen before. He at length came to most fair houses, near which he met his father that had been dead before, who gave him great charge to go back again and show his friends what good they were to do to enjoy the pleasures of that place.
If not a journey and return, it might be a symbolic death and resurrection: “Among the Eskimos,” Rushton Dorman wrote, “if a man wished to become of the highest order of priests, it was requisite that he should be drowned and eaten by sea-monsters; then, when his bones were washed ashore, his spirit, which had spent all this time gathering information about the secrets of the invisible world, would return to them, and he would rejoin his tribe.”
Such journeys and rejuvenations empowered the shaman to battle demons, witches, and vampires on an equal footing. For in his concomitant role of medicine man or witch doctor, the shaman was also charged with protecting the community from death and disease.
One field of battle was the human body—dead, alive, or somewhere in between. The shaman would exorcise whatever unclean spirits were parasitically consuming the flesh and blood of a person from within. He would also contest the possession of fresh corpses. Among the Karens of Burma, an enemy shaman might steal the soul of a sleeper—much as the African shaman does to obtain a zombie—and then slip it into a corpse. The dead body returns to life, while the living one perishes without awakening.
In the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, a wizard of the Banks Islands might project his soul into a fresh cadaver and then consume whatever traces of life he finds lingering there. Batak witch doctors in the highlands of Sumatra lock horns with evil spirits for possession of a corpse. Among their principal weapons in the struggle: garlic.
In the Balkans, there were once several classes of shamanic figures—if, that is, the dead could be enlisted in that role. The kresnik was a reanimated corpse who rose from the grave not to prey on the living, but to help fight evil forces. His clashes with the Serbian vukodlak, for example, might reflect a buried memory of ancient battles between enemy shamans. “Quite similar beliefs and practices,” writes Slavic scholar Bruce McClelland of the University of Virginia, “surround a broadly dispersed group of folkloric figures in southern and central parts of Europe who all functioned on the positive side of the village social ledger yet nevertheless were themselves associated, in the Christianizing mind, with their very enemies—witches, sorcerers, vampires.”
Such shamans or seers of the Slavic world might have played an important if now buried role in the evolution of the vampire legend. Because the shaman could project his soul on visits to the underworld, revive the dead, enter other people’s dreams, steal their souls, raise storms, promote fertility, rout famine and disease, and slay monsters, he was a type of St. George, the protector of so many rural communities. But after Christianity deprived this village defender of his arsenal and cast him in the role of witch or wizard, his adversaries—the bringers of pestilence, plague, and death—were left holding the field, so to speak, free to stalk the European imagination. This guardian figure, though, has occasionally been resurrected in such figures as Abraham van Helsing of Stoker’s Dracula— to say nothing of that stalwart defender of Sunnydale, California, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
FOREVER UNDEAD
By 1913, even Sigmund Freud was speculating about why there had once been such a widespread fear of the dead. In Totem and Taboo, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis took up the ideas of a German classicist named Rudolf Kleinpaul, who maintained that primitive people believed the dead—even deceased loved ones—sought to drag the living to the grave. Perhaps this is why the emblem of death has always been a skeleton; it symbolizes the departed’s double status as both slain and slayer. Over time, that conception narrowed until the hostile dead were restricted to souls entitled to feel resentment: murder victims, young brides, and others cut off in their prime or living unfulfilled lives.
“But originally,” Freud reported Kleinpaul as stating, “all of the dead were vampires, all of them had a grudge against the living and sought to injure them and rob them of their lives. It was from corpses that the concept of evil spirits first arose.”
If so, that concept would have traveled a very long way before leaving its first tracks in the historical record.
Humankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture some 8,000 years ago gave rise to settlements, and with settlements came epidemics. As Edward Jenner, the “father of immunology,” wrote in 1798, “The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases.” Even the earliest sedentary communities were more infested with intestinal worms and parasites than were nomadic bands. The arrival of an unknown microbe could easily destabilize whatever tenuous equilibrium had been established between a community and its parasites.
In a world where supernatural agency ruled everything, where the dead played a pivotal role, such invisible parasitism demanded a scapegoat—and what better figure could early cultures imagine than a walking corpse, death literally stalking the land? From an epidemiological point of view, then, the vampire—so long twinned with epidemic disease—is a pathology of civilization: Both require settled communities, where humans dwell cheek by jowl and a cemetery is always conveniently nearby.
Yet, an incommensurably long time had passed before agriculture arose. Whenever and wherever symbolic meaning evolved in our life as a species, monsters hatched alongside it. Whether the sense of an all-encompassing supernatural is a hominid inheritance or was born with Homo sapiens, it was operative by the time of the “creative explosion” 30,000 years ago, when the figures of bison and aurochs were being painted on cave walls in Spain and France. After all, “[t]here were shamans before there were gods,” as American anthropologist Weston La Barre declared in 1970. These shamans were the “masters of animals” during the long eons of the Paleolithic hunt, and quite likely, they were the first to consecrate beasts with the energy of tabu. Animals would therefore have readily provided the forms and figures of our earliest monsters. Dread of the ominous night-flying owl, for example, apparently helped engender the ancient Greek Strix, a mythic death-bird that became, in turn, a nocturnal devouring monster to the Romans—and, along the way, likely contributed to the evolving vampire legend, too.
Demons long associated with such common physiological episodes as night terrors or sleep paralysis probably have an equally ancient lineage. Occurring just on the verge of slumber, night terrors manifest themselves as a suffocating pressure on the chest—with the result that the sleeper erupts in panicked wakefulness. In Germanic folklore, they have long been attributed to the Old Hag who sits on sleepers’ chests. In other places, the perpetrator is the original “night mare” (from *mer-, a reconstructed Indo-European root meaning “to harm”) or the female succubus and the male incubus—demons said to have sexual intercourse with sleepers. Such fiends no doubt contributed their share to what became the vampire as well.
We have seen how the roots of the Slavic vampire—the most important and influential member of his species—might lie in obscure ancestor worship, quite likely involving fear and propitiation of the dead. We have also glimpsed, in the wandering figure of the alastor, the possible precursor of the Greek vrykolakas. But far older conceptions might lie beneath even these archaic notions, obscured by layers too deep for us to discern.
Nevertheless, if there is such a thing as an archetype of the vampire, it may resemble the Larvae of ancient Rome. These terrifying specters of the hungry dead haunted and injured their living relations—and appeared in the form of horribly decaying corpses. (Larva means “mask,” which is why Linnaeus adopted it in 1691, to describe the juvenile stage of insects that “mask” the adult form, as the caterpillar does the butterfly.) The same figure surfaces half a world away, in Australia’s Arnhem Land, where the dead of the Gunwinggu people are said to undertake a long journey to reach their tribal waterhole, or Dreaming Center. Most of them eventually arrive, but the mam are malevolent spirits that have strayed off the path. Dangerously unpredictable because their brains have rotted away, they too appear as skeletal corpses, hung with strips of decaying flesh and announced by a putrid stench.
In Sulawesi, one of the large islands of Indonesia, the dead of the Toradja people are greatly feared. “They persistently return from the underworld in all manner of fearful guises,” reported anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, “and their presence can be detected by smells of decomposition or low grumbling sounds. Their touch burns the skin, their breath causes dizziness, and they frequently frighten people at night.”
The Larvae, the mam, and the phantoms of the Toradja—these are but three examples of what seems to be a very ancient conception of the walking dead. Quite likely we have wended our way about as far beneath the trampled clay as we are ever likely to get. Yeats’s vampires, with their wet mouths and bloody shrouds, are securely in their coffins. Yet the figure that haunted the imagination of poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) might still be out and about. Baudelaire’s disquieting “Metamorphosis of the Vampire” aptly recapitulates our journey in this book, beginning with the night world’s demon lover, “expert in voluptuous charms,” and ending with dawn’s revelation that she is, after all, but a corpse, a “slimy rotten wineskin, full of pus.” As Kleinpaul and Freud suspected—and as the evidence from archaeology, folklore, and forensics strongly suggests—the corpse is the larva, spawned in the grave and nourished on bodily corruption, from which the figure of the vampire most likely hatched, before metamorphosing over the centuries into that caped and fanged figure found waiting expectantly on your doorstep.
Yet, something more fearful still may lurk behind, or within, the decaying corpse. The most abiding emblem of that corruption is not the skeleton but the worm—that squirming, wriggling, vermiform voluptuary that in reality is the maggot but in symbol is the seed of all-devouring death.
English poet William Blake understood this dynamic all too well when he wrote “The Sick Rose” in 1798. Vampires may have come out of the coffin, but in Blake’s lament, disease remains as insidious as ever:
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.