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*-^erhaps the quintessential horrific creature of the night is the vam- JL pire, “a living corpse or soulless body that comes from its burial place and drinks the blood of the living” (Leach 1984, 1154). Although it is typically a Slavic concept—hence the setting of Bram Stoker’s classic, Dracula (1897), in Romania—belief in vampires is found in many cultures (Bunson 2000).
Tales of the “living dead” can be traced back to ancient Greece, where mythological creatures flourished. For example, Empusa, a daughter of the goddess Hecate, was a demonic being who transformed herself into a beautiful young maiden to seduce men in their sleep, and Lamia was a monster that lived on children’s flesh and blood. However there is no direct connection between these mythological beings and today’s vampire.
From eleventh-century Europe came stories of corpses seen roaming beyond their tombs or discovered intact in their coffins. This type of living dead became known as cadaver sanguisugus , a Latin term meaning “bloodsucking corpse.” By the fourteenth century, belief in vampirism became endemic in central Europe (in Prussia, Silesia, and Bohemia), coincident with outbreaks there of bubonic plague (Marigny 1994, 16, 23-24). Indeed vampirism has often been linked to plagues, with the initial victim
being thought one of the undead. By exhuming, staking, and burning the initial vampire’s corpse, it was thought, subsequent victims would be quieted in their graves, so ending the epidemic (Bunson 2000, 200-201).
Ironically, Christianity—the avowed opponent of everything evil, including vampires—helped to shape European belief in the concept. As it did with witchcraft, the Catholic Church treated vampirism as real. The Church’s anti-witch doctrine Malleus Maleficarum (or “witch hammer”), issued in 1485, declared that the devil made use of corpses to assail humankind. “In this tradition,” states Matthew Bunson in The Vampire Encyclopedia , “and derived from the rapidly growing legends or customs of the dead, learned theologians authored pseudoscientific treatises, collecting hearsay, doctrine and often pure fantasy into lengthy works that came to be accepted as fact.” “Church leaders,” he continues, “having fostered widespread hysteria, were seemingly the only officials capable of dealing with the crisis as terrified villagers turned to clerics to serve as their vampire hunters” (2000, 47).
Vampires became the stuff of gothic horror tales with the 1819 publication of “The Vampyre” by John Polidori, followed by others, most notably Bram Stoker’s classic, Dracula , in 1897. As is well known, Stoker’s Count Dracula is very loosely based on the Romanian Vlad Tepes (Polidoro 2006). As popular occult writers Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson explain (1992, 372-73):
For more than four centuries the Turks had dominated Eastern Europe, marching in and out of Transylvania, Walachia, and Hungary and even conquering Constantinople in 1453. Don John of Austria defeated them at the great sea battle of Lepanto (1571), but it was their failure to capture Vienna after a siege in 1683 that caused the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. During the earlier stages of this war between Europe and Turkey, the man whose name has become synonymous with vampirism—Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler—struck blow after blow against the Turks, until they killed and beheaded him in 1477.
Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), king of Walachia (1456-62, 1476-77), was, as his nickname implies, a man of sadistic temperament, whose greatest pleasure was to impale his enemies (which meant anyone against whom he had a grudge) on pointed stakes; the stake—driven into the ground—was inserted into the anus (or, in the case of women, the
vagina), and the victim was allowed to impale himself slowly under his own weight. ... In his own time he was known as Dracula, which means “son of a dragon” or “son of the Devil.” It is estimated that Dracula had about one hundred thousand people impaled during the course of a lifetime. When he conquered Brasov, in Transylvania, he had all its inhabitants impaled on poles, then gave a feast among the corpses. When one nobleman held his nose at the stench, Vlad sent for a particularly long pole and had him impaled. When he was a prisoner in Hungary, Vlad was kept supplied with birds, rats, and toads, which he impaled on small stakes. A brave and fearless warrior, he was finally killed in battle—or possibly assassinated by his own soldiers—and his head sent to Constantinople. Four hundred twenty years later, in 1897, he was immortalized by Bram Stoker as the sinister Count Dracula, no longer a sadistic maniac, but a drinker of blood.
Over time, vampires have evolved in the popular imagination into a variety of often-conflicting concepts. Are they, as some would suggest, demons, or ghosts, or aliens? Are they living people? Can one be born a vampire? According to vampirologist Jay Stevenson (2002, 29-30):
The short answer to these questions is that the familiar mainstream vampire inherited from Slavic legend and popularized in books and movies is the undead, reanimated corpse of a former human being—not born that way, not from planet Drakulon, not simply alive, nor a ghost, nor a demon. In general, this traditional undead vampire has awakened the most interest, attention, and terror.
However,
The longer answer is that vampire lore is living mythology. People continue to use the vampire concept in new ways, combining it with new ideas and incorporating it into new realities. So to really understand vampires, it helps to see them in various contexts, not just stomping around the Transylvanian castle or sleeping in the coffin that opens from the inside.