Thoughts on Vampirism

From a review of a new book by John Blair, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. A couple of cases:

There is the record of Michal Kasparak, for example, a wine merchant in the Slovakian town of Lubló, whose death in 1718 didn’t stop him from wreaking havoc; he returned on a white horse from the grave, attacking members of the community, starting fires, collecting debts from those who owed him money, all while also managing to impregnate his widow and four other women. (Only after his heart was burned did Kasparak finally give up the ghost.) And there is the story of Johann Kunze, who was kicked in the testicles by a horse and, despite not sustaining any other injury, died in great pain. On his deathbed he renounced any hope of salvation; as he died a black cat rushed in and scratched his face. The men charged with burying him were disconcerted when one hand repeatedly moved to his genitals, but they managed to get him underground anyway, only to subsequently discover he was a revenant, returning to cause mayhem throughout his hometown of Bennisch in Moravia.

I thought this was interesting:

What separates the vampire from the ghost or the demon is that it’s a corpse. As such, many writers on vampires have focused on physical aspects of decay: A corpse that is unexpectedly preserved or bloated or bloody is often suspected of being a vampire. But Blair argues that this in and of itself is not enough. Rather, he notes, the single most common cause that leads to a revenant body is “uncompleted ritual.” For many cultures, death is not just a physical event; it’s also a social process, and if the burial rites are incomplete, interrupted, or denied, the dead body becomes problematic. The souls or life forces of the departed are now stuck: As Blair explains, they “cannot return to human life, but nor can they move on, so that their needy, envious personalities lurk poisonously in their physical bodies.” Abnormal physical processes during decomposition may strengthen a belief in vampires, but it is the social belief that comes first. After all, why dig up a corpse to check for signs if you didn’t already suspect it of causing trouble?

Several of Blair's cases concern people who cause trouble after death because they were punished for crimes during life by denial of the complete burial ritual.

Individual vampires were often the recently deceased whose misdeeds and poor behavior in life had returned to haunt them: the walking dead, “noxious by nature,” could become “dark mirrors for the noxious living.” Particularly in England, which by the tenth century had started denying burial rites to undesirables such as perjurers, thieves, and philanderers, only to have those same people return as vampires. Belief in vampires became another way of enforcing social mores.

But what social mores are being enforced here? Could it maybe be that people were protesting the denial of full burial rites to petty criminals by claiming that those folks were coming back as vampires? If those not buried in consecrated ground come back to haunt the living, doesn't that imply they should have been buried in consecrated ground? 

I think one of the essential points about all such discussions is that past people disagreed about things like ghosts and curses just as much as we do. One model of what is going on here is that people who were suspected of philandering or thievery while they were alive were controversial characters in the village, and that any decision to deny them proper burial would also be controversial, and whether to blame them for any strange incidents that happened after their burials would also be controversial. We know that the people who dug up corpses to see if they were returning often did so at night or otherwise in semi-secrecy, which implies that some people opposed such acts. I find that it sometimes makes sense to see these incidents – digging up corpses, deciding if they had the signs of vampirism, deciding if they were to blame for dead sheep – as points made within an ongoing dispute over the standing of some people in the community.