Vampire Panic

 

The etymology, or derivation, of the word ‘vampire’ mirrors the rise of superstitious beliefs in Europe from the Dark Ages onwards. Some of these beliefs date back to pagan times, and to ancient folklore in remote rural regions of the north; others are rooted in the most lurid kinds of medieval Christian imagery, particularly descriptions of hell, the devil, and all kinds of monstrous, evil demons. As is outlined below, such folkloric stories, superstitions and taboos often arose as a way of explaining everyday phenomena that peasants would have witnessed at close hand. These would have included the behaviour of blood-drinking animals such as bats and wolves; the strange and often highly alarming way that human bodies decompose after death; and blood-related features of communicable diseases, ranging from plagues to tuberculosis to porphyria. Such superstitions were based in ignorance and fear; they were, for the most part, stories told by uneducated peasant communities about the frightening, cruel, and brutal conditions of life around them, and which they had little scientific knowledge about. However, these stories also expressed some deep-rooted, and understandable, anxieties about a world in which their needs, their individual circumstances, and their common humanity was often ignored. For that reason, these stories are still powerful today.

 

The first ‘Wicked vampire’

 

The word ‘vampire’, in its written form, first appeared in the eleventh century as a scribbled note in a manuscript of the Book of Psalms. This was translated by a humble priest for a Novgorodian prince, Vladimir Yaroslavovich. In the note, the priest addresses the prince as ‘upir lichyj’ (a ‘wicked vampire’). Whether this was a joke, a nickname, or a serious criticism (which is unlikely, given the power of the prince and the lowly position of the priest), is unknown. We next find the word in a treatise called The Word of Saint Grigoriy, which reported the existence of pagan rituals in Russia, and fulminated against them in no uncertain terms. No one knows exactly when this evangelical Christian treatise was written, but it seems to have been prior to the fourteenth century, when the church was keen to stamp out the pagan beliefs and rituals of ordinary working people, especially in remote rural areas of northern Europe.

Pagan worship of non-Christian deities and devils was known to be rife in the Slavic countries of Europe throughout the medieval period, but the word ‘vampire’ does not actually appear in print in England until the mid-eighteenth century. We first come across it when it is mentioned in a travelogue entitled, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen from Venice to Hamburg, being the Grand Tour of Germany, in the Year 1734. Little is said in the text about the actual vampire in question itself, but the fact that it is alluded to makes it clear that belief in such evil demons was becoming more widespread across the countries of Europe during this time.

We know for a fact from historical records that after Austria gained control of parts of Serbia and Romania in 1918, officials complained about the local practice of exhuming corpses to kill off ‘vampire’ spirits. The officials prepared detailed reports on these gruesome rituals, which were widely publicized at the time and enthusiastically received – as they are today – by a public with a seemingly insatiable appetite for horror and gore.

 

The word ‘Vampire’

 

Theories about the derivation of the word ‘vampire’ in English vary, but it appears to have been borrowed from the German word ‘vampir’, which in turn came from the Polish ‘vaper’. There are parallel words for vampire, ranging from ‘vapir’ to ‘upir’, in almost all the Slavic languages, including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. The general etymology of the word is somewhat controversial and uncertain, but it is thought to have links to the word for bat in Russian (netopyr), witch in Turkic (ubyr), and from various Indo-European words for the verb to fly.

Today, the word vampire is defined variously as ‘a corpse that rises nightly from its grave to drink the blood of the living’ and ‘a mythical creature which overcomes death by sucking the blood from living humans’. Some dictionaries and reference works note that portraying the vampire as a corpse in a grave who comes out at night to seek victims, especially those sleeping in their beds, is only one variation of the myth. Other features of vampire lore, such as the creature’s ability to fly, its fear of Christian symbols like the cross, and its susceptibility to sunlight, have been added over the years. The myth has also been elaborated on in other ways, for example in numerous apotropaics – that is, items (such as garlic) or methods (such as driving a stake through the heart) designed to kill the vampire.