Vampiros

The Vampire
by Margaret L. Carter

INTRODUCTION
Ernest Jones in On the Nightmare maintains that no superstitious belief is
‘‘richer or more over-determined than that in the vampire’’ and its ‘‘psychological
meaning is correspondingly complicated’’ (98). Therefore, it is not
surprising that vampirism in some form is found in folklore throughout the
world. In his survey of vampire fiction,Brian Frost calls this creature the
‘‘monster with a thousand faces,’’ the ultimate shapeshifter. Supernatural entities
falling under the general classification of ‘‘vampire’’ include many varieties
of blood-drinking demons as well as the animated dead that prey on the
living, often feeding on blood but sometimes on other body fluids or simply
spreading disease, draining life-force, orfrightening victims to death. Some of
them must return to their graves at dawn and can be trapped aboveground by
scattering seeds they feel compelled to count, while at least one variety is active
from midnight to noon. Some undead survive only forty days, while others maintain their quasi-life indefinitely, and still others (in one European tradition),
if they survive the initial, most hazardousperiod of postmortem existence,
eventually develop the ability to pass for human and reenter society in a
community distant from their original home. Internationally, vampires range
from men who return from the grave to live with and impregnate their widows
to grotesque revenants who could not possibly be mistaken for ordinary people,
such as the Maylasian penanggalan, a disembodied headtrailing its
stomach and intestines, and the chiang-shih of China, which may grow a coat
of long, white hair. The wider European culture became aware of vampires as
we know them in the early eighteenth century, in the aftermath of extended
warfare between the Habsburg dynasty and the Ottoman Empire. Dom Augustin
Calmet’s 1751 ‘‘Dissertations on Those Persons Who Return to Earth
Bodily’’ is thebest-known and most frequently cited work of this period to
explore vampire legends at length and attempt to explain them rationally. In
the twentieth century, Dudley Wright’s Vampires and Vampirism (1914) and
two books by Gothic scholar Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and
Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929), provide exhaustive surveys of
the varieties of vampirism throughout theworld’s cultures.
Even within the familiar Central and Eastern European context, folk traditions
vary widely. Among causes of vampirism, although victims often become
transformed into the undead after death, many other events can cause an
individual to become a vampire, such as being born on Christmas, with teeth,
or illegitimately of illegitimate parents, or committing suicide, practicingsorcery, being cursed by one’s parents or excommunicated, or having a cat
jump over one’s corpse. Prescriptions for destroying vampires also encompass
many methods in addition to the best-known remedy of a stake through the
heart, for example, beheading, cremation, immersion in running water, firing a
blessed bullet into the coffin, and removing the heart and boiling it in oil, wine,
orvinegar. To prevent a potential vampire from rising as one of the undead, the
corpse might be buried face down so that it could not find its way out of the
grave. Means of protection against vampire attacks include the familiar garlic
and holy objects, but also thorny plants such as holly or wild roses. Modern
theories of the sources of vampire beliefs range from the psychoanalytic, as
advanced byErnest Jones and other Freudian authorities, to the more pragmatic,
such as the risks of premature burial in the centuries before modern
medicine. Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death (1988) makes a convincing
argument that, once belief in the undead became established, observation
of phenomena associated with the decomposition of corpses reinforced
this belief system. When bodies...