Countess Dracula (14 page)

The wealth of incidental detail is fascinating, but no guarantee of veracity: it has been shown that the barbarities the priest ascribes to Elisabeth have their parallels in contemporary folklore, and the novelty – so far-fetched to the post-Enlightenment way of thinking
– of shape-shifting was a magic technique that most of his parishioners and many of his fellow-clergymen would have believed in.

It has been suggested that Ponikenus' letter was actually composed in three separate stages, an idea supported by changes in the handwriting and by the fact that he gives two different consecutive accounts of his visit to the imprisoned Countess, and that the accusations he makes against Elisabeth increase both in gravity and in sensationalism as the letter progresses. It may be that the priest began to compose the letter spontaneously, fearful of the repercussions of his feud with the most powerful noblewoman of the locality. When he heard that Countess Báthory had been arrested, he paused before restarting the letter in a distinctly different style and with a shift in focus. According to this interpretation, the penultimate part of the letter may even have been dictated directly to Ponikenus by Thurzó or one of his agents, expressly so that it could be introduced in evidence if needed. In his postscript Ponikenus launches into the realms of the supernatural with his story of being attacked by phantom cats; this outburst of superstitious paranoia was not likely, in the formal setting of the court, to help the credibility of the case against Elisabeth, and was never referred to again, even when Ponikenus gave evidence orally later the same year.
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The world that Countess Báthory and her parish priests inhabited was one in which people of all classes sought desperately to make sense of the bewildering series of torments that fate was subjecting them to, and also to exercise a little more control over their lives than their static society (with the hugger-mugger intimacy of village life and the cramping proximities of the servants' quarters) normally allowed. The many examples of magic help to illuminate the mind of the age and of those who aided the Blood Countess and those who condemned her.

Until the oppressions of the Counter-Reformation took hold, and the tensions in society heightened to intolerable levels, superstition was quite respectable and not by any means limited to the poor. At the end of the seventeenth century Count Francis Esterházy, the military commander of Csesznek and head of the county of Fejér, compiled a small handbook of magic cures. His recipe against toothache prescribes the reciting of an incantation on the first Friday after the new moon. (The words must be said standing at the door and looking at the moon, just as Majorosné did when reciting her new
spell for Elisabeth.) Esterházy adds the standard ‘probatum est' (it has been tried and proven).
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Like Esterházy and like Elisabeth, George Thurzó, the Count Palatine, also made use of formulaic cures which combined piety and superstition. In a letter he says he is upset to hear of his daughter's illness and tells his wife that he has written a plea for a cure on a piece of paper to be attached to the girl's neck ‘when the fever is upon her again', while saying three ‘Our Fathers'.
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People of all social stations were constantly on the lookout for portents in nature that would mirror and confirm the chaos that regularly overwhelmed their human realities. This habit, and the forms that these portents typically took, were not exclusive to Hungary, but life for Hungarians must have seemed particularly precarious, with attacks by marauding Hajdúks, unpaid foreign mercenaries and local brigands a daily possibility, the ever-present likelihood of war and the threat of the Turks finally overwhelming the nation always in the back of the mind. Battles in the sky, when the clouds parted, the sky turning red and phantom armies clashing with fireballs and thunder, were regularly seen and entered in the ‘miracle books' that each town compiled.

If portents did not actually occur, they were imagined into existence. It was commonly believed that Elisabeth's uncle, Prince Sigmund Báthory, had been born with bloody hands, signifying his warlike nature, and that when he was being bathed by his nurse in a basin, he turned into a fish and slithered out of her grasp, neatly anticipating the fact that he moved his seat of power many times during his political career.

Another kind of folk superstition common to all cultures was a fear of the dead, most keenly felt when it was believed that the deceased retained a physical appetite and the means to satisfy it. If Countess Báthory is known at all in the anglophone countries, it is usually in the context of vampire literature, a fact that is not surprising in that the vampire myth has been especially identified with her native lands – but the connection does not stand up to scrutiny any more than the tenuous links with the Romanian Dracula. In Elisabeth's lifetime, between 1560 and 1614, the vampire craze in central and eastern Europe had not yet begun, but stories of ghostly revenants were common. In 1600 in the north of Hungary there was a local epidemic in which at least 2,500 died. Once the epidemic had subsided, strange phenomena disturbed the people of the region. Schoolchildren and their tutors fled when a
phantom hunt was heard in a schoolhouse, reappearing the following night even after guards (‘including educated persons') had been posted. More disturbingly the dead victims of the epidemic started to reappear in their villages, causing doors to creak and slam, moving furniture, moaning and touching their surviving loved ones with cold hands.
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One particular returnee from the dead was Gasparek of Lublo, who reappeared in his village looking just as he had before his funeral. This ghost indecently assaulted the maidens working in the fields and tried to lie with his widow in her bed at night. He continued to torment and annoy his neighbours until his body was exhumed and burned, after which he was never seen again, but his name served as a nickname for the foolish or mischievous until the 1980s. Peter Plogojowitz, the Serbian vampire whose exploits triggered the eighteenth century's fascination with the blood-drinking undead was part of the same widespread tradition, in which those who managed to live through epidemics were then plagued by the reappearance of their loved ones.
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Modern rationalism explains this as shock, grief and guilt at surviving an inexplicable bereavement preventing the living from coming to terms with what had happened to their community – something too awful for the therapeutic effects of prayer to efface. The exhaustion, lassitude or even prostration that followed these traumas were similar to the effects of bloodletting, and was put down to the vampiric activities of ghosts or zombies.

Long before the now familiar regalia of fangs, batwings and silver crucifixes had accreted to the vampire, there was a rich body of folk-legend surrounding a slightly different creature. The common attribute is blood-drinking, but the original vampire was a malevolent soul – a witch, a suicide or simply someone tainted by evil or ill luck – who would escape from the grave to prey upon humans and their animals. The word itself has been known in English only since 1732, but is much older in the regions of its origins. Cognates, including the Serbian
vampir
and
úpir
in Czech and Russian, are found in all the Slavonic languages and seem to be based on the root
pi,
to drink.

Hungary's vampire-craze, which coincided with lesser epidemics in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, lasted from the end of the seventeenth century through a further eighty-odd years. Probably initiated by rumours from Istria and the Balkans coinciding with waves of hysteria among the common people, who were suffering intolerable social stresses, it was fuelled by the inquisitions launched by the Calvinists
and Catholics and by the attentions of officials of the Austrian Empire and German-speaking scholars, prompted by genuine concern but also by suspicion of heresy, immorality and subversion among their Slav and Magyar subjects.

Distinguished writers such as the sceptic Calmet in his
Treatise on the Vampires of Hungary',
Karl Ferdinand von Schertz in his
Magia Posthuma
and Guiseppe Davanzati in
Dissertazione sopra i vampiri
analysed the phenomenon, as did the Imperial bureaucrats and bailiffs who were sent to investigate the outbreaks of vampirism
in situ.
The published works became bestsellers and the names of the most notorious undead – Jure Grando of Carniola, Peter Plogojowitz of Kisilova, Arnold Paole of Medvegia, as well as the aforementioned Gasparek of Lublo – became familiar throughout the continent. (Although it is significant that Father Túróczi's tales of Countess Báthory's blood-bathing coincided with the first vampire reports and an upsurge in witch-trials elsewhere, Nitra county where
Č
achtice is situated actually recorded fewer persecutions of witches than most other parts of Hungary.)

Local people would often report the sound of chewing coming from the coffins of their deceased neighbours: when graves were opened, the corpses of suspected vampires were often found to be perfectly preserved even months after their deaths. Blood – or what appeared to be blood – might be seen around the mouth and on the fingernails, and the flesh might be rosy and firm. Once again there are explanations. Where local conditions or intense cold do not actually preserve a body, the effects of decomposition can mimic preservation. The actions of bacteria can reinflate the body, liquefy the blood and cause reddish secretions to seep from the orifices. Surface skin can peel to reveal healthy-looking pigments beneath or there may be ‘rubefaction' from internal chemical changes which can even heat up the corpse to a lifelike temperature. When exhumations revealed a lustrous, well-fed cadaver, the standard procedure was to cut off the head, drive a stake through the heart and then burn the remains, scattering the ashes as widely as possible.

By 1848 the Carpathians had been made the setting for the many vampire romances produced in Paris. The archetype of the undead
femme fatale
which was embodied in Elisabeth Báthory had also begun to filter into the literature of the west. Although the best-known eighteenth-century revenants of central Europe and the most famous fictional blood-drinker have been male, it is notable that in a recent
survey of the most important vampires recorded in folklore, prose and poetry between 1687 and 1913 the list of forty-three (which includes Elisabeth Báthory) contains twenty-three women and three supernatural creatures of unknown gender, and another six female ‘semi-vampires' are mentioned in the accompanying text.
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A spectral being which can be found in Hungary is the ‘beautiful lady', an ambivalent witch/fairy who rarely appears alone, but dances and sings with her companions on lawns and in meadows. The beautiful ladies will entice their victims, then dance them to death. They also live in whirlwinds and steal the milk from the cow's udder, but they are said to be invisible at high noon and from midnight to dawn, unlike the Slovak fairies – the souls of girls who died while preparing for their weddings, or in childbirth – who, like the Romanian
Pripolniza,
can only be seen at those times, especially on St George's day, 23 April, when the earth opens and they dance forth from its crevices and caverns. In central Slovakia the noonday fairies are ugly crones, while further east the
Rusalka,
or water spirit, also known to the southern Slavs, is more prevalent; she lives in wells, in channels, in rain and dew, and can be recognised by the water dripping from her left eye. These were among the denizens of the faery world in which Elisabeth's make-believe persona also found a place.

If old Hungary was a land often visited by the supernatural, its neighbour to the east was a veritable magic cauldron. The nineteenth-century gentlewoman Emily de Laszowska Gérard wrote of Transylvania: ‘It would almost seem as though the whole species of demons, pixies, witches and hobgoblins, driven from the rest of Europe by the hand of science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that here they would find secure lurking-places, whence they might defy their pursuers yet awhile . . .'
²²

Old Romanian legends, probably influenced by rumours from the time of the Crusades, recount that the stability of castles and churches was guaranteed by walling up a live victim, preferably a female virgin, in their foundations. Emily Gérard noted that in Transylvania the practice had been replaced by the custom of stealing the shadow of a passer-by and sealing that into the building instead – not such an innocuous alternative, as the unwitting donor would sicken and die within days.

The connections between the world of magic and virgins and castle foundations, and the links between the real Countess and her
counterparts in myth, do not end here. And more elements – the female provinces of herbalism and curing, and the associated concepts of witchcraft, the persecution of women, and myths of femininity and blood, as well as the pastimes of the privileged, both innocent and not so innocent – must be considered before we can displace ourselves into the vanished landscape of the early modern mind.