Authors: Mark Collins Jenkins
Witty, charming Walter Map—prelate, sometime diplomat, and friend of both Henry II and Thomas Becket—wrote of a Welsh
maleficus,
or wizard, who had been reanimated by an “evil angel.” The maleficus returned from the dead to sow death and destruction before a particularly heroic knight beheaded him at his tomb.
But William of Newburgh mined the richest vein of such stories. William spent most of his life as an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Abbey, which once nestled at the foot of the Yorkshire moors. It is long gone now, having been dissolved by Henry VIII and replaced by the house where, curiously enough, Oliver Cromwell’s desecrated remains may have been clandestinely reburied. Newburgh Abbey was not far from the Old Northern Road that once ran from London to Edinburgh, and along that road, William’s fame as a chronicler and historian spread. His masterpiece was the
Historia rerum Anglicarum,
or
History of English Affairs,
which told of the varying fortunes of kings and nobles in the century since the Norman invasion of 1066. It also included a section entitled “Of Certain Prodigies.”
“It would not be easy to believe,” William wrote, “that the corpses of the dead should sally…from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact….” Ever the dutiful historian, William had combed through works of all the ancient authors known to his age but had found nothing to compare with the stories he was about to relate. “Moreover,” he wrote, “were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.”
William heard one such instance from a “venerable archdeacon” in Buckingham, southwest of London. A certain man died and was laid in his tomb:
On the following night, however, having entered the bed where his wife was reposing, he not only terrified her on awaking, but nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body. The next night, also, he afflicted the astonished woman in the same manner, who, frightened at the danger, as the struggle of the third night drew near, took care to remain awake herself, and surround herself with watchful companions. Still he came; but being repulsed by the shouts of the watchers, and seeing that he was prevented from doing mischief, he departed. Thus driven off from his wife, he harassed, in a similar manner, his own brothers, who were dwelling in the same street; but they, following the cautious example of the woman, passed the nights in wakefulness with their companions, ready to meet and repel the expected danger. He appeared, notwithstanding, as if with the hope of surprising them should they be overcome with drowsiness; but being repelled by the carefulness and valour of the watchers, he rioted among the animals, both in-doors and out-of-doors, as their wildness and unwonted movements testified.
Soon the entire town was alarmed, and before long, the dead man began wandering during daylight as well, though he was visible to only a few people. The terrified populace sought the protection of the church. William of Newburgh’s informant then wrote for advice to the Bishop of Lincoln:
…but the bishop, being amazed at his account, held a searching investigation with his companions; and there were some who said that such things had often befallen in England, and cited frequent examples to show that tranquillity could not be restored to the people until the body of this most wretched man were dug up and burnt. This proceeding, however, appeared indecent and improper in the last degree to the reverend bishop, who shortly after addressed a letter of absolution, written with his own hand, to the archdeacon, in order that it might be demonstrated by inspection in what state the body of that man really was; and he commanded his tomb to be opened, and the letter having been laid upon his breast, to be again closed: so the sepulchre having been opened, the corpse was found as it had been placed there, and the charter of absolution having been deposited upon its breast, and the tomb once more closed, he was thenceforth never more seen to wander, nor permitted to inflict annoyance or terror upon any one.
A more dependable means for dispatching the roving dead was resorted to at Berwick, at the mouth of the river Tweed, where an “equally wonderful” event had occurred. A wealthy man died and was buried, but he soon “sallied forth (by the contrivance, as it is believed, of Satan) out of his grave by night, and was borne hither and thither, pursued by a pack of dogs with loud barkings.” This struck terror into the townsfolk, and soon the leaders convened to debate the best course of action. No one wanted to be beaten senseless by this “prodigy of the grave,” and the wiser among them concluded that, “were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death.”
Curiously enough, the monster, “while it was being borne about (as it is said) by Satan, had told certain persons whom it had by chance encountered, that as long as it remained unburnt the people should have no peace.” So ten young men dug up the horrible carcass, and after dismembering it, they burned it. Nevertheless, a “pestilence, which arose in consequence, carried off the greater portion of them: for never did it so furiously rage elsewhere, though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England….”
Today, the ruins of Melrose Abbey loom in melancholy splendor over the hills of southern Scotland. In William of Newburgh’s day, however, the abbey was a thriving Cistercian center. One of its chaplains, lamentably, was overfond of women and the chase. His weakness landed him in some metaphysical trouble, at least in William’s eyes, for after the chaplain’s death, Satan used his corpse as his “own chosen vessel.” Thanks to the “meritorious resistance” of the monks, the vampire was barred from doing any great harm within the abbey itself, “whereupon he wandered beyond the walls, and hovered chiefly, with loud groans and horrible murmurs, round the bedchamber of his former mistress. She, after this had frequently occurred, becoming exceedingly terrified, revealed her fears or danger to one of the friars who visited her about the business of the monastery; demanding with tears that prayers more earnest than usual should be poured out to the Lord in her behalf as for one in agony.”
The friar enlisted three companions. “[F]urnished with arms and animated with courage,” they maintained a chilly, all-night vigil. When midnight passed with no monster, three of the quartet slipped off to the nearest warm house:
As soon as this man was left alone [William recounted], the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud, and, turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared to close again with the same facility. In the meantime, they who, impatient of the coldness of the night, had retreated to the fire ran up, though somewhat too late, and, having heard what had happened, rendered needful assistance in digging up and removing from the midst of the tomb the accursed corpse at the earliest dawn. When they had divested it of the clay cast forth with it, they found the huge wound it had received, and a great quantity of gore which had flowed from it in the sepulchre; and so having carried it away beyond the walls of the monastery and burnt it, they scattered the ashes to the winds. These things I have explained in a simple narration, as I myself heard them recounted by religious men.
Finally, there was the story William heard from “an aged monk who…related this event as having occurred in his own presence.”
A man of “evil propensities” had fled the province of York and had found sanctuary at nearby Anantis Castle. There he married, only to become a jealous husband. Determined to catch his wife dallying with her young lover, he pretended to be away and hid on a beam overlooking his wife’s chamber. Enraged at the sight of his wife lying in her lover’s arms, he lost his balance and fell to the floor. Severely injured, the husband died before he had a chance to confess his numerous sins or to receive the sacrament.
That crucial omission should suffice to alert us to his fate. Although the dead husband received a Christian burial, “it did not much benefit him,” wrote William archly, “for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at nighttime, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses; while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster. But these precautions were of no avail; for the atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcase, filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.”
The once-bustling town was quickly abandoned. At that point, two brothers who had lost their father to this plague undertook a desperate mission:
Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcase, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart.
Then came the miraculous conclusion: “When that infernal hell-hound had thus been destroyed, the pestilence which was rife among the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by the contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the fire which had consumed it.”
E
VER
D
EEPER
Some 500 years would pass before Henry More learned about Johannes Cuntius and the Breslau shoemaker. Yet, the same pen could have written both these accounts. There is the same emphasis on sins (of omission or commission) determining the subsequent events; the same depiction of physical brutality in the revenant; the same hysterical reaction in the various towns; and, one letter of absolution aside, the same means of destroying the pests: cutting off the heads, ripping out the hearts, and burning the carcasses.
Another pen might have written the story of Arnold Paole and that graveyard full of Serbian vampires (see Chapter 4), and a third pen still might have described those hideous undead larvae, the nachzehrer (see Chapter 5). But are these really different conceptions? Or are they rather outcroppings, each shaped by the forces of history and geography, of an even deeper, underlying layer?
O
N
M
ARCH
6, 1710,
with the Sun King, Louis XIV, still on the throne of France, a discovery was made deep in the vaults of venerable Notre Dame de Paris. While constructing a new crypt beneath the nave, workers uncovered an ancient, four-tiered stone block. Supporting part of the choir and chancel, the block had been part of a pagan temple that once stood on the site. Originally dedicated to the god Jupiter by the Nautae Parisiaci—the mariners of Parisii during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius—the block depicted in bas-relief a number of gods, but none so prominently as the fearsome visage bearing the antlers of a stag. The broken inscription read, “–ernunnos.”
This was almost certainly Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Lord of the Animals, the most famous horned god in European mythology. The Christian Middle Ages, it seemed, truly rested on pagan foundations.
The image (but not the name) of Cernunnos had been known at Val Camonica in the Italian Alps, where a great antlered figure looms out from a fourth-century B.C. cave engraving, a torque necklace on his right arm and a horned serpent on his left. At Autun in France, Cernunnos bears two horned serpents. At Reims, where stags and bulls surround him, he holds a sack of coins or grain. Sometimes he appears with three faces, in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, or even, perhaps, in degraded form as Herne the Hunter, disporting with the merry wives among the oaks of Windsor Forest.
But the horned Cernunnos is most widely recognized in the features of Satan.
A once-fashionable theory suggested that the medieval witch cult was not a Satanist one—that it was not even diabolical but represented the vestiges of an old religion, displaced and driven underground by Christianity, that worshiped the horned god of European paganism. Although this thesis has come under heavy critical fire, it maintains a stubborn life, if only because it suggests that our monsters did not spring sui generis from the medieval imagination. If the demons of Christianity were perhaps the gods of a former faith—at least those not bought off with halos and sainthoods—it is to the pagan world of antiquity, and to its Indo-European underpinnings, that we now must turn.
T
HE
H
IDDEN
P
AST
Buried in a fourth-century Bulgarian manuscript, “Oration of St. Gregory the Theologian,” is a 15th-century insertion sometimes called
The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols:
…to the same gods the Slavic people make fires and perform sacrifice, and to
vilas
and Mokos and the
diva
and Perun…and Rozanica. And to vampires and
bereginas
. And dancing to Pereplut, they drink to him in horns.
This puzzling fragment has been pored over and analyzed from every possible angle. What scholars surmise is this: A vilas was a kind of demon, as was a diva. Mokos was a goddess of shearing, spinning, and weaving, while Perun was the widely worshiped Slavic god of thunder and lightning. The Rozanica were the spirits of ancestors, and Pereplut was a god revered by seafarers. As for bereginas, they are believed to be an arcane riverbank entity.
But vampires—why would
they
have once been considered fit objects for sacrifice? Even the glimmer of an answer demands a journey deep into both the historical and the mythological past.
Somewhere out on the Eurasian steppe, no one is sure exactly where, lies the homeland of the Indo-European peoples. In this prehistoric cradle, tribes that later migrated far away from one another—giving rise in the process to such related language families as the Indo-Iranian, the Italic, the Celtic, the Germanic, and the Slavic—once shared a culture and religion. By historical times, the Greeks, Romans, and Celts, for example, had become simply local inflections of that common ancestral pattern. Their gods, too, had been customized, but in them could still be discerned the slightly distorted echoes of the distant originals.
Among all the daughters of the Indo-Europeans, the ancient Slavs have been the most challenging to trace. Think of a people about whom there are scant eyewitness accounts yet an abundance of biased, if not actively hostile, commentators. Indeed, were it not for the painstaking labors of scholars, linguists, and comparative mythologists, we would be able to glimpse today only a rustic Slavic pantheon, its idols carved from tree trunks or crudely chiseled in stone. Even so, what remains known of many Slavic gods is only their names.
One big barrier to our knowledge of Slavic deities is that the early Slavs had no alphabet. That came with the priests. Slavic tribes first came into contact with Christianity in the sixth century, when they wandered into central Europe and down into the Balkans. Not until 863, however, did Cyril and Methodius, the Slavic apostles, arrive in Moravia, the rolling region of hill and valley now part of the Czech Republic. By the time their mission was expelled for political reasons two decades later, they had created what eventually became the Cyrillic alphabet and had used it to shape what is called the Slavonic liturgy.
After 886, when Bulgaria’s Khan Boris I welcomed the refugees of the Moravian mission, the Balkans, especially Macedonia, became the true cradle of the Slavonic rite. From there, that liturgy spread to Serbia and Romania. By 988, it had reached Russia, where the statue of Perun was toppled from its site overlooking Kiev, dragged by horse to the Dnieper, given a thorough beating, and dumped into the river.
Although the church bestowed literacy, churchmen were never sympathetic to pagan “superstitions.” This makes it hard to distinguish the authentic elements of medieval chronicles. The last of the Baltic Slavs were finally converted to Christianity early in the 15th century, yet the
Prussian Chronicle,
written about 1520 by a Dominican priest named Simon Grunau, gives such a fanciful account of the Slavs’ chief pagan shrine that scholars still debate its veracity. According to Grunau, the idols were hung high in a sacred oak; they included a Perun-like god of thunder—all angry visage and curly beard—and a death god, all pallid countenance with green beard, a thirst for human blood, and a garland of human and animal skulls.
The Russians, for their part, were often accused of practicing a “mixed faith”—acting piously Christian in church but stubbornly pagan in woods and field. After centuries of listening to imprecations thundered down on “heretics,” many Russian villagers came to clump all their suspicious dead under the single label of
eretiks.
They knew little and cared less about doctrinal disputes, and it was simpler to keep the properly Orthodox dead in hallowed ground and to consign the eretiks to the margins.
Eretiks comprised not just schismatics and Old Believers—those who objected to the 17th-century liturgical reforms—but “sorcerers” as well. A whiff of ominous familiarity shrouds those “sorcerers,” especially those purported to leave their graves at night to roam the village and to eat people. A vampire, it seems, smells just as vile by any other name.
Eretiks, then, might encompass all the dangerous dead. The means of dispatching one for good likewise has a familiar cast: Open the grave, roll the corpse over, drive an aspen stake through it, and perhaps burn it as well. (In one village, it sufficed to give the body “a thorough thrashing” by horsewhip.) Beset by a prolonged drought, a village might exhume an eretik who had once been suspected of sorcery, dash the remains with water, or toss them into the Volga. During one such ritual, villagers beat the skull of a corpse while crying out, “Bring rain!”
In parts of Russia, the vampire
—upir,
in Russian—had clearly been subsumed under the broader category of spiritual outlaws dubbed heretics. Possibly that relationship began the other way around: The word
heretic,
along with
pagan,
may once have been subsumed beneath
vampire
—which may originally have had no supernatural connotations whatsoever.
Linguists seeking the origins of the word
vampire
have been shaking the etymological bushes for clues for at least a century.
Vampir, upir, upyr, upior,
and other cognate forms from around the Slavic world were long thought to have stemmed from the root word
uber
—Turkish for “witch.” That seemed logical, given the number of authorities who suspected vampires of having hatched in the Balkans, so long under the sway of the sultan. Although other linguists favored an entirely Hungarian origin or argued that the root of
vampire
was the Greek word
pi—
“to drink”—many scholars, including the influential Montague Summers, embraced the Turkish theory.
The consensus today, by contrast, is that
vampire
is almost undoubtedly Slavic. The root, as far back as it can be traced, seems to be a medieval Serbian word; when anglicized, it came to resemble something like
vampir.
Originating perhaps in the heart of the Balkans, the word gradually diffused throughout the Slavic world. Each local adaptation gave the word its own slight new twist.
The thorniest question of all, however, persists: What did
vampir
originally mean?
The earliest written evidence of
vampir—oupir
or
upir,
as it happens—appears in the margin of a manuscript called the
Book of the Prophets
, a copy of a work whose original dates to 1047. Its contextual significance is cryptic in the extreme; an Orthodox monk from Novgorod uses it to describe some personal shortcoming of his.
Then again, there is that mention, in
The Story of How the Pagans Honored Their Idols
, of sacrifices made to “vampires and bereginas.” Since the reference is probably a 15th-century insertion, it may not shed much light on the original meaning of
vampir.
Yet the association with sacrifice, however tenuous, remains a tantalizing clue.
Its rampant polytheism aside, paganism was vilified for its blood and orgies—that is, for its public sacrifices and riotous feasting. Blood sacrifice—the cutting of an animal’s throat at the altar to propitiate a divinity—was forbidden in Scripture. On the other hand, it formed a central rite in nearly every religion of pagan Europe.
On the shores of the Baltic, where paganism lingered longest, oxen and sheep were regularly sacrificed as late as the 12th century. So too were prisoners of war and (according to the Saxon priest Helmold, author of
Chronicle of the Slavs
) Christians, whose blood was said to particularly please the gods. “[A]fter the victim is felled,” Helmold wrote of sacrifices in general, “the priest drinks of its blood in order to render himself more potent in the receiving of oracles. For it is the opinion of many that demons are very easily conjured with blood.”
And the orgies? Pagan feast days were infamous for their licentiousness, and pagan marriage ceremonies—especially ancient fertility rituals—verged on the truly orgiastic. What’s more, pagans favored barbarous initiation ceremonies, and with good reason, they were reputed to believe in reincarnation—anathema to the Church.
All of this strongly suggests that the word
vampir
arose in the crucible of the Balkans at a time when Christianity was locked in combat with paganism. If
vampir
does indeed spring from an obscure root word meaning “to drink,” it’s only a short logical leap to the understanding that it was likely first used as an epithet flung at those blood-drinking pagans who, tenacious of custom, refused the uncertain embrace of the Church. This may also help explain why the word lingered so long as a proper name in Russia, where an 11th-century nobleman from Novgorod went by the name Prince Upir—Prince Vampire.
By the same token,
warg—
the Nordic word for “wolf,” as every Tolkien reader knows—might at one time have been used to denote outlaws. Transformed thereby from men into wolves—in the eyes of the law, at any rate—the outlaws could be killed on sight. This allegorical shape-shifting may have given rise to the “wild man of the woods” figure so common in medieval folklore, contributing to a range of myths from Robin Hood to werewolves.
Might natural outlaws, then—anathematized, excommunicated, and exiled to the forest—have metamorphosed over the centuries into supernatural ones? If so, the vampir may have been moved along that path by a heresy—one similarly centered in southern Serbia and Macedonia, where between the 10th and 14th centuries, there flourished a little-known sect called the Bogomils.
E
VEN THE
D
EMONS
F
LED
Arising in the highlands of Armenia, the sect of the Bogomils was one in a long line of dualist religions—faiths that condemn all matter as evil and revere all spirit as good. Named for one of their early priests, the Bogomils first entered Bulgaria, perhaps pushed west off the stark Iranian plateau by the armies of Islam, before making the Balkans their redoubt. From there they spread into Russia, central Europe, and even France, where they became known as the Albigenses.
The Bogomils, in turn, had been inspired by the Paulicians, an even more obscure Armenian sect, whose leaders the Byzantine emperors had burned at the stake for heresy. These dualistic movements threatened the Church not only because their adherents fiercely opposed anything hierarchical or liturgical, but also because they bore a disturbing resemblance to the Gnostic heresy that had split the early Christian community.
Despite being persecuted, the Bogomils exerted an insidious influence on the growing Slavic Church. After Russia embraced Orthodoxy in 988, Bulgarian priests—many of them tinged with more than a little Bogomilism—were numerous among its formative clergy. The same thing happened all over eastern Europe. Even after Bogomilism had been condemned as heresy and stamped out, the movement’s dualistic imprint endured deep in the fabric of Orthodoxy, especially in its attitude toward the dead.
Bogomils had claimed that demons fled from them alone but inhabited all other men. These demons were said to instruct their hosts “in vice, lead them to wickedness and after their death dwell in their corpses.” No surprise, then, that in 1143, two Orthodox bishops in Asia Minor were accused of being Bogomils after they “dug up bodies in the belief that they were possessed of demons and unfit for burial.”