Fear, Faith, and the Undead: Vampires and Religious Belief in 18th Century Eastern Europe
As part of human nature, fear and the supernatural have a symbiotic relationship, resulting in a link between fear and religious belief, or more intrinsically — fear and God.
As part of human nature, fear and the supernatural have a symbiotic relationship, resulting in a link between fear and religious belief, or more intrinsically — fear and God. This essay will focus on the fear-fuelled portrayal of vampires in 18th century Eastern Europe and how the folklore of the undead entwined religious belief and superstition for its people. Oldridge (2006, p.85) found that ‘the acceptance of demonic interventions informed the thinking of all pre-modem writers on revenants and prevented them from dismissing reports of the returning dead’. Without dismissal of such tales, particularly those from the Bible, the undead raised paradoxical questions about God, the devil, the resurrection of Jesus and stories of the Last Judgement. With religious leaders and royal figureheads in debate and contemplation, the common person created their own defences in fear of succumbing to the threat of vampirism.
As Braudy (2016, p.17) suggests, there have always been ‘individual efforts to master fears by turning them into stories; there is also a historical context for their eruption’. Investigating some of the earliest written recollections of vampires through a series of cases documented between 1724 and 1760 (Bräunlein, 2012, p.712), it is apparent that vampires bridged discussion and exploration from the supernatural to the natural, and rational with religious, with an audience of academics and intrigued Vatican circles (Bräunlein, 2012, p.715). Until 21 July 1725, tales of local vampirism were mainly shared verbally amongst villagers. It was not unusual to hear stories from peasants who had witnessed numerous vampirism accounts during their lifetime. The recounted stories published in The Phantom World by Calmet, originally published in 1850, are good examples. According to Bräunlein (2012, p.713), in July 1725, the existence of blood-sucking dead known as vampyri was made known to the Viennese public by Glaser, an epidemics physician. Thirteen years later, Glaser exhumed several bodies in a village cemetery. Reportedly, he was astonished by the ‘undecayed condition of the corpses’ and promptly requested they be put to death (again) to appease the fearful residents who were threatening to abandon their village. A second killing would usually entail corpses being beheaded, burned and staked. In 1731, Glaser, who originally exposed Vampyrus Serviensis to the media, went further to report that “Perfectly normally buried dead are arising from their undisturbed graves to kill the living. These too, dead and buried in their turn, arise in the same way to kill yet more people” (Bräunlein, 2012, p.715). This public revelation, in grotesque detail, created what could be coined in our modern terminology as a media storm. Bräunlein (2012, p.715) goes on to explain that ‘the vampire fuelled a craving for sensation, evoked frissons of fear, and mobilised the fantasies of a bourgeois public sphere in European metropolises.’
With Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ (1897) as a case in point, Vampirism is a persistent supernatural theme with continued popularity, inspiring fear and wonder. Although the description of vampires is centuries old, little has changed, and authors of terrifying accounts of the undead stay within a narrow context of what defines a vampire, making the premise more believable. Describers of vampires relish in the dance between fact and fiction, turning truths and untruths into dreadful accounts that an audience cannot resist. The fascination is fed by descriptions of the physical attributes of a vampire and their habits, weaknesses, and insatiable appetite for fresh blood. Angela Carter has written an excellent description of a vampire in her short story, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1997). The author intertwines hints of nostalgic folklore by mentioning the female vampire’s descent from a bloodline, including Nosferatu, Vlad the Impaler, and Count Dracula. Carter also details the nocturnal appetite of her undead Countess in crisp prose, designed to thrill and haunt the reader.
“Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones... She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery-throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust.”
(Carter, 1997, p.234-236)
Superstition and outright fear of ‘vambyres or bloodsuckers’ (Bräunlein, 2012, p.713) prompted a military medical investigation that finally offered explanations of natural causes and remedies to vampirism. Even considering the rational reasons for such an evil phenomenon, people’s fears were generationally entrenched. They were unable to let go of the possibility of becoming undead and the threat to their mortality, and also remaining in the good graces of God. Jindra (2003, p.165) presents a psychological explanation that ‘the construction of meaning is basic to humanity, and the cold rationalism of naturalistic philosophies can rarely be satisfactory in this endeavour.’ Vampirism folklore and the ritual of combatting the undead and protecting themselves may have helped abate deep fears of death and the afterlife and allowed the villagers to take a pluralistic approach to religion and the rationalist view of medicine. From a cultural perspective, Freud and Jung suggest that horror is defined as something culture seeks to submerge in the name of social order (Braudy, 2016, p.16). To be proactive in social order and organisation regarding matters of the dead, elaborate rituals were adopted by villagers of Eastern Europe. Such efforts required a group effort to control the recently deceased and continued ritualistic practices which strived to keep the dead in their graves for years to come, perhaps giving a sense of order and control.
In the learned society of the 18th century, the vampire debate stimulated essential questions about life and death, and the afterlife (Bräunlein, 2012, p.717), but fear of the undead and excommunicants did not abate in the villages of Hungary, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland; and of the vroucolacas of Greece (Calmet, 2012, p.6). In 1888, Gerard (2010, p.319) summarised that ‘evil is the nosferatu or vampire, in which every Roumanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell.’ Putting this idea into a more significant context and illustrating how the compounded fear of evil may overwhelm a pious society, William James (1994, p.182) stated, ‘Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.’ With this, my concluding thought is that fear breeds fear; and storytelling motivated by an individual’s fear compounds emotions into a group fear that can be acted upon — attempting to reconcile fear with God’s will, for all.
REFERENCES
Braudy, L. (2016). Haunted : On ghosts, witches, vampires, zombies, and other monsters of the natural and supernatural worlds. ProQuest Ebook Central
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au
Calmet, A. (2012). The Phantom World: Or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, Etc (Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge) (H. Christmas, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139176422
Carter, A. (1997). Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. United Kingdom: Penguin.
Gerard, E. (2010). The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania (Cambridge Library Collection - Travel, Europe). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511719905
James, W. (1994). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. ProQuest Ebook Central
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au
Jindra M. (2003) Natural/supernatural conceptions in Western cultural contexts, Anthropological Forum, 13:2, 159-166,
DOI: 10.1080/0066467032000129824. https://doi.org/10.1080/0066467032000129824
Oldridge, D. (2006). “ “Dead Man Walking”: The Historical Context of Vampire Beliefs”. In Vampires Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401201469_009
Peter J. Bräunlein, The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment: The vampire problem, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 43, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 710-719, ISSN 1369-8486, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2012.02.007