This post might be a bit of a blitz! I want to try to get through the rest of the “Approaches” section of this book so that we can finish the introductory portion and start digging into the history and archaeology of epidemics of the dangerous dead. I do want to spend enough time here, though, because he talks in detail about a critical category: Sources! Not just what he’s using but how we should think about and take in an archive that includes archaeological work, stories, legends, and even academic studies.

Let’s dig in (heh)!

Fearing Dead Friends, Killing Dead enemies

The question that Blair faces down in this section is: Does a corpse still have part or all of its personality, and if so, is it the one that we knew, or has it changed? And also, are the fears of a wrong personality “hard-wired in the human psyche” such that people in all societies believed that corpses can exert agency?

Blair dwells some in this section on psychology (unfortunately not something that terribly interests me, so read it if you’re curious), but the answer he comes to is that these fears are not universal enough for the European-style bloodsucking “vampire” to translate everywhere. However, others (Blair points to Pascal Boyer) have seen the Vampire as a more culturally transmittable monster because it is corporeal and therefore can be destroyed.

I wondered in this section about how much Blair had read for vampires alongside ghosts. After all, even in Europe, ghosts were thought for a long time to be corporeal themselves. It was really only with the advent of spirit photography and the Spiritualist movement that they began to take on more immaterial qualities in the general imagination. That’s not even to begin to tackle the question of the broad category of corporeal “ghosts” (as with “vampire,” taking a European-original word to try to describe global phenomena) elsewhere in the world. Asia, in particular, has some pretty gnarly critters that cross the boundaries at times between vampire, ghost, and even witch.

There is another crossover to consider, however, which Blair expounds on next: the night-mare. Many stories of the unquiet dead have included tales of them haunting the living by crouching on them as they slept, frequently imagined with the faces of recently dead loved ones or neighbors. Blair highlights the night-mares and the visceral nature of the experiences their victims remember, even if we understand them differently, indicate why fears of the dangerous dead can linger so long. To the people who experienced night-mares long before we knew enough of the human brain to understand sleep paralysis, these were real events, and therefore provided the evidence they and others needed to remain afraid.

Of course, other classic “evidence” that a body is not properly dead will be familiar to anyone who has read Dracula (or seen any of its film interpretations or spinoffs!). Natural elements of the decomposition process–bloating, swelling, ruddy skin, and sometimes contortion and the oozing of blood–have often been taken as proof that something still inhabits the body in the grave.

The answer, then, to Blair’s questions are that there is a human fear that the dead are not really dead, but the shape of the fears and of the unquiet dead themselves will be shaped, as we might expect, by their unique environment.

The Dangerous Dead in Society

The large part of this chapter is dedicated to anthropology, pulling some anecdotes to talk about varied practices and belief surrounding the dead as almost active participants in life. If you are interested, I recommend you buy the book to read it yourself. The emphasis is on the ways in which people have often expected the ongoing participation of the dead, especially in the cases of bad deaths or parents whose will in life was disobeyed. Examples from the Sora on the east coast of India; a town in eastern Finland; Wallachian migrant families in Denmark and Sweden; and a Greek town when read together clearly illustrate the struggle of trying to provide a global history of vampirism. A Serbian mother, frustrated that her son chose his own wife and even moved out of the family home in order to minimize conflict, returns after death to emotionally drain her son, guilt-tripping him about his decision to leave. Complex beliefs in the Greek town about the circulation of blood tie marriage to vampire beliefs through the proverb, “The vampire haunts its own kindred.” Moving blood, that is, marriage out to an unrelated family, prevents stagnation, which might happen, in one case, with the marriage of second cousins. The devouring in the Greek context is more literally imagined than the Serbian, but both certainly fall into the category of the “dangerous dead,” who return to trouble the living. Increasingly, however, I find myself wondering where and how to draw the line between what we call vampires and what we call ghosts.

Rest in Peace (And Don’t Come Back)

The processes and rituals of escorting the newly dead across the threshold into whatever awaits is central to many beliefs about the unquiet dead, as this is the critical phase at which something might go wrong. There is already a huge amount of literature on death rituals, but of most interest to Blair is the possible consequence of those rituals’ absence or failure. The living might take preventative steps, either against invasion or corruption of the corpse or to foil the corpse already likely to get up again (e.g. tying the clothes in many knots so that any undead might take a long time to untie them).

There are many traditions designed to confuse the dead or prevent their return. In the Philippines, for example, it has long been a tradition after the wake to pass a coffin out a window instead of out a door, so that it’s harder for a spirit to find their way back into the home. The consequences of their return can vary widely in severity. In twentieth-century Haiti, the living might bury the dead without shoes so that when their spirits come back, they don’t make too much noise stomping around. Among the Skolt Sámi, however, if a corpse was buried before three days had passed, they would turn into a cannibalistic spirit with iron teeth.

Again, much of this chapter could potentially be attributed to ghost beliefs, but I’m willing to roll with it–Blair has shown us the most critical preventative step for us to be aware of when we discuss vampire epidemics. The corpse-killing will come later.

Understanding Stories (1): The Spoken and Written Word

Blair separates his consideration of “stories” into two parts. This first focuses on that brand of stories that was historically transmitted orally. As Blair points out, we immediately face a conundrum: The very survival of these stories required that they be written down; but in writing them down, the popular has often become filtered through the perspectives of literate higher classes. We first face the fact that oral storytelling needs to be accompanied by an analysis of what we can glean from subjects who could have an imperfect memory or are simply lying. Or, in the case particularly of legends and folklore, what real can we take from events that are almost certainly unreal? The answer, usually, is shared values, vocabulary, and practice.

But what Blair points to in this chapter is the challenges posed, also, by the record-keeping of such stories. As a historian, the quandary is familiar to me as the challenge of the Archive. Such a collection, many historians have argued, of necessity incorporates a curation that also involves cutting away that which is deemed unnecessary and excessive. The work of archiving can itself, therefore, transpose the archivists values and assumptions on top of the stories, objects, and documents that they are archiving. I will be curious to see this at work in later chapters of the book.

Nevertheless, written historical sources are always a boon, even when we must recognize that most historically literate people were upper class. (Or had their own agenda; consider that one of the clearest sources we have conveying the values and myths of the Norse gods was actually a Christian trying to explain this former mythology to his fellow Christians.) Blair acknowledges, again, that his specialty weights the book toward Christian societies of Medieval and Early modern Europe. We certainly cannot take their stories of the dangerous dead as universal, even within their own societies as the undead became weighted down with ideas about sinfulness but also gendered anxieties about who gets to have power.

We’ll get there! For now, on to…

Understanding Stories (2): Vampires in Print

This chapter does exactly what it says on the tin, turning to the history of publication and therefore dissemination and circulation of vampire stories, alongside theology and philosophy, to an unprecedented degree. In 1748, Benedictine scholar Dam Augustin Calmet published a survey of supernatural beings, with a section on vampires that became the single most influential work on the subject ever published. It was straightforward and evidence-based, and had a long readership. Blair sites an 1820 publication as essentially a pocket-sized repackaging of Calmet’s vampire section on its own. At this time, conversations began to split between “educated” writers began to formulate an idea of “popular” (and assumed incorrect) vampire beliefs.

The most fascinating instance of the conflict between the two is illustrated through the case, not of vampires drinking blood, but the drinking of vampire blood. (Brace your stomachs.) A practice evolved of ingesting blood, ashes, or organs of supposed vampires (corpses), as a remedy for vampire-induced illnesses. Such a practice evolved out of the long history of the use of human blood and body parts in medicine, following the alchemist Paracelsus (aka Theophrastus von Hohenheim, circa 1493-1541). Blair argues, though, that there is not persuasive evidence of this practice as a “genuine vernacular belief” before the nineteenth century, although it was rumored in academic works on vampires for several centuries. He argues that, instead, its presence in that literature so convinced the educated of these beliefs that aristocrats began to believe it as an effective remedy and began to impose it on their dependents. Essentially, that the studies came before the true folklore. Blair’s story tracing different works is a long one, I recommend reading it yourself if it interests you.

Understanding Corpses: The Evidence of Burial Archaeology

I’ve cheated a bit. I have been working on a short story set in the early Middle Ages and have therefore read ahead into a few of the chapters during the period for inspiration on burials and beliefs around the dead. I can therefore tell you that the archaeological record, while providing an incomplete picture, is a fascinating and absolutely necessary portion of this long history.

A quick warning that this section might get a bit gruesome, as Blair talks about the violence that might be done to both the dead and the living.

He argues in this chapter that a range of processes “did indeed aim to kill the dead” (81). One of the chief elements that Blair pursues in the archaeological record is the “deviant burial.” Reading for such a burial through histories of warfare, murder, execution, sacrifice, and even shameful burials to find evidence of attacks on corpses is an incredibly difficult tasks. To make it more complicated, bodies that were supposedly still whole or uncorrupted could be seen as evidence of both vampirism and sainthood. Especially in cases of mummification, there are many examples of funerary rites that aimed to halt the natural processes of decay.

Blair devotes much time (rightly) to emphasizing that the interpretation of grave sites in the archaeological records is always that: interpretation. Scholars and scientists can make incredibly educated guesses about what might have befallen a corpse, but even their opinions might vary widely. This is especially true in this book, where what Blair wants to understand most is the perspective of the people handling the dead–sometimes more than once. For example, when it comes to interpreting “disorderly” corpses whose bones have been uncovered in strange postures, there are cases where people may have been buried alive, intentionally or not. In attempts at escape, their body may have ultimately come to lie permanently in a twisted and unorganized way. Prone burials, however, in which a body lies face-down, has seemed too often intentional to attribute to writhing or rolling. The practice has appeared in societies in North Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and South-east Asia, with a variety of possible reasons, including shaming the person buried, or conversely placing them in a stance of spiritual humility. However, Blair calls it one of the “most widely recognized forms of corpse-killing,” possibly because if they try to dig out they will only dig down, or because it subverts the natural order, or because, as in the case of shaming burials, because it is ignominious or submissive (86-87).

There is a wide variety of burial “countermeasures” that Blair summarizes, also with inconclusive interpretations. Loading a body down with stones might be another form of shaming, but could also be a means of weighting a corpse down so they cannot climb out again. Decapitation is often interpreted in the archaeological record as execution, but context makes a huge difference in interpretation. Cemeteries of the executed are often easy to identify, as every corpse bears marks of their cause of death, but a beheaded corpse in an otherwise normal cemetery suggests a wholly different reason for the decapitation. Removal of the jaw could be the result of natural joint loosening in the grave, but there are many instances of burials where a jaw has been wholly taken from the head and placed, for example, in the corpse’s lap. Some bodies have also been uncovered that are bent into positions that could only be maintained with bindings, and in some cases archaeologists have found the shackles of a prisoner so buried. Removal or maiming of limbs might be interpreted as a clear countermeasure against the dead getting up and walking again, but we must consider cases like ancient Athens, where they removed the feet of people who had committed suicide in order to shame them (89).

An exciting countermeasure to consider in the context of vampire lore: piercing bodies with stakes and nails. Driving a wooden stake through the body, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer has aptly demonstrated, the classic remedy for vampires, and is mentioned as early as the 1000s in the Rhineland. However, wood in the grave rarely lasts that long. Iron nails, meanwhile, survive better. The practice has been used to bind the dead in the grave in a wide variety of cultures, from Anglo-Saxon England to early 20th-century Jamaica. The nails are not always driven through the body, as in the latter case, but used to pin the clothing of the deceased into the coffin. Similarly, edged weapons or tools have often been used for containment, whether holding the coffin closed or directly pinning/weighing down the body.

The list goes on! Blocking, binding, or separating the jaws; extracting or piercing the heart; burning the body in the grave; scattering grain (to encourage the dead to count it and therefore never leave); exhuming a body to dispose it some other way; or performing other mutilations of the body. As I’ve already seen in reading ahead, Blair carefully balances his readings of the archaeological record to account for context in trying to understand the broad strokes of burial practices.

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In the history Blair presents, uncertainty seems inevitable, but we should resist the assumption that what makes this difficult is that the dangerous dead were not “real.” To those who experienced the fear and anxiety, they were real enough, and as we move forward that is what I am most interested in. What shape did the world take for the people who would dig up their neighbors to ensure that they remained soundly sleeping?

Next time, we’ll find out as we move on to what Blair calls “dynamics”: How did beliefs about the dangerous dead develop, move, and influence each other?

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