Preface: As my regular readers know, I ramble on about many things, and this time, partly as a result of reading Paul Barber's charming "Vampires, Burial and Death" and because of certain questions raised on the Forum, I was inspired to this absolutely useless but hopefully entertaining and even a bit educational essay.


VAMPIRES, BURIAL AND DEATH by Paul Barber.
New Haven, Yale University Press.
236 pp. $30.00

One of the most primitive but most durable beliefs among simple people is that the dead can return to life, and one of the most exotic manifestations of this belief is the legend of the vampire. Certainly since 1897, when Bram Stoker wrote "Dracula", nearly everyone has had a fixed image of what vampires were all about. Whether in literary or cinematic form, vampires are lanky creatures with pale, narrow faces that frequently sprout a pair of prominent canine teeth. Often portrayed with a trickle of blood at the corner of the mouth, they have long crooked fingernails and affect as a characteristic stance a kind of hunched loom. Such vampires often wear black cloaks that have a kind of fringe, the shape of which suggests the wings of a bat.

In most fiction about vampires, there is only one means of achieving the state of vampirism - people become vampires by being bitten by one. Traditionally, the vampire looms dramatically over his victim and then bites into the neck to suck the blood. Because of the distinctly sexual nature of the vampiric activity, male vampires have a distinct taste for female blood. Female vampires, perhaps because they have more diffuse libidinal energy, settle equally for male or female arteries, sexual preference playing second-fiddle to the quantity of fresh food.

In examining six centuries of folklore about vampires, Paul in his "Vampire, Burial and Death" (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1989) finds that there is little connection between literary imagery and folkloric beliefs. Unlike the screen versions of suave, pale Draculas or Nosferatus, "real" vampires are more likely to be plump Slavonic chaps with ruddy faces and stubby beards. In the folklore of Europe and Asia, vampires are never pale. In fact, their faces are commonly described as florid or dark. And, rather than being thought of as lanky and undernourished, they are generally thought to be somewhat on the lusty side, tending, in fact, to obesity. With regard to how vampires drink blood, most folk tales have victims bitten in the area of the left breast, on the nipple, in the region of the heart, on the thorax or between the eyes. The jugular vein simply does not play a very important role in the lifestyle of real-life vampires.

Nor are all folkloric vampires created by having been bitten by someone already converted to vampirism. Bulgarians feel that robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes and treacherous barmaids are specially prone to becoming vampires. One does not even have to be a sinner to become a vampire. Greeks on the island of Corfu believe that having a brother that walks in his sleep is enough to turn an otherwise decent dead person into a vampire. Turks are convinced that being the seventh child in a family or being the illegitimate offspring of illegitimate parents is enough to do it.

Armenians hold that one will automatically become a vampire if his or her shadow is stolen during their lifetime. (This usually takes place at a construction site, when the victim's shadow is pinned to the wall by driving a nail through its head. The purpose of this exercise is to ensure that the building will be durable. As has been recently made dramatically clear, this makes some sense, as parts of Armenia are particular subject to earthquakes).

In his quite serious but eminently readable book, Barber argues that the lore about vampires is an elaborate folk-hypothesis that sought to make sense out of a wide variety of natural phenomena that mistakenly led people to the assumption that corpses found in certain conditions were not really dead. In a review that covers five centuries of vampiric folklore, Barber documents cases where bodies rose partly from their graves. He also examines incidents in which, even after several months in the cold, cold ground, corpses gave forth fresh blood, maintained a florid dark look, and had limbs that were perfectly flexible. There is even documentation of how corpses would "cry out, seemingly in anguish" when a stake was driven into their hearts. All of which led to the conclusion that such bodies were coming to life again to prey on the living, to suck their blood and to doom them to eventually join the ranks of the "living dead."

The official documents, including several written by doctors, which describe such incidents were quite accurate. Only the explanations, based on ignorance of physiology and combined with fear and superstition were faulty. A body is uncovered, but the people who discover it see only one stage of the process - an arm sticking out of the earth. This in turn is presented as a super-natural event. The hand belonged to a sinner. Thus, the body is emerging to attack the living. The evidence, in other words is first interpreted and this interpretation is then used to eke out further evidence. The slippage in logic here is clear: dead bodies do bloat and bleed at the mouth and, if bacterial activity creates methane gas, a corpse buried in soft ground may rise to the surface. Instead of seeing these as signs of normal decomposition, however, under the rules of the folkloric game, they become signs that the corpse is really not quite as dead as one might desire.

By incorporating up-to-date knowledge of forensic medicine, including the process of decomposition and descriptions of exhumed cadavers in the light of what is now known, Barber shows that while all of these phenomena are clinically possible, they have nothing to do with vampirism. This fascinating account shows how each stage in the process of human decomposition contributed to various aspects of the vampire legend. Whether he is examining the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires or telling of the exploits of a dead sixteenth century shoemaker from Breslau who turned an entire town into vampires, Barber is a delightful teacher, interweaving folklore, philosophy and modern medical practice.

Despite scientific revelation, there are those who hard to convince. Such people will be glad to know that the best way to avoid being bitten by a vampire is to hang garlic in all of the doors and windows of the house and wear a cross around the neck (the efficacy of the Star of David is open to question). With the possible exception of those among us with a bent towards necrophilia, most people would have little reason to think that a textbook on forensic pathology could provide one of the best reads of the year. In his search for a scientific explanation for the origin of vampire legends, Paul Barber surprises us by producing a book that will prove fascinating reading to anyone who has devoted even a fleeting moment to the question of what Count Dracula and his blood-sucking brothers and sisters were really like.

To read more specifically about Count Dracula (who may have been one of the cruelest men in history but was definitely not a vampire) and his dining habits, click here

© Daniel Rogov