The Zephyr of Vampires

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Vampires are certainly not a product of the seventeenth century, since the belief in the lives of the living is always widespread. Their chronological extension, however, is impressive: there are modern, medieval, Greek, Roman, Babylonian, and Jewish documents of vampirism. The ancient Babylonian blood suckers were known as Ekimmu, and seemed to represent individuals who, having faced a horrible death, went back to devour the flesh and suck the veins of the living. According to Jewish tradition, the first woman on Earth became a vampire. Adam's wife (before Eve's creation) was Lilith, who turned out to be too psychologically independent of Adam. After a quarrel about their sex life, Lilith flew to the Red Sea and joined a band of demons. Despite the intervention of a delegation of angels, the woman did not return anymore, and became a daemon who nursed children and seduced men while they slept, then biting them, eating the flesh, and drinking their blood.

The most famous document about vampires is by the Greek writer Filostrato: this is the "The Life of Apollonius of Tyana", the philosopher. One of the poor but deserving disciples of Apollonius, the handsome young Menippo, was hypnotized by a wealthy and beautiful woman intending to marry him. Suspicious, Apollonius appeared on the wedding day and unmasked the woman-vampire, forcing her to admit that she was "fattening Menippo with pleasure" before eating her body, since she was used to nourishing young and beautiful bodies, being their pure and strong blood ".

Vampires are present in the folklore and legends of Africa, East Asia, Australia, the Near East, the Americas and, of course, Europe, where they appear to be widespread, particularly in Greece and the Balkans. In India, Baital, beings similar to bats, were feared as spirits they possessed and resurrected the dead. The rural Vrykolakas of rural Greece still posed a threat in 1900: almost immediately after his death, he sprained a series of attacks on villagers, sowing terror and frustration. In Romania, according to popular tradition, "there was a time when vampires were as numerous as grass roots, or berries in a bucket, and they were never quiet, but wandering at night among the people."

From such testimonies, belief in vampirism seems therefore to be firmly demonstrated and almost universally. Why was it believed that individuals became vampires? Numerous reasons are provided by folklore and historical documents, and go from incomplete burial to sudden death, to those who died cursed, not baptized or excommunicated, to those whose body was trampled by a cat while waiting for the burial. There were many ways to stop vampires. The best method was to bury potential monsters in order to force them to stay in the grave. They were then buried in the marshes or, if the place was mountainous, under a cumulus of stones, or upside down, or nailed to the coffin or soil in the grave, or under heavy objects. Stones, rocks or coins were put into their mouths, so that they had something harmless to suck, or their mouth was tied to them.

If the vampire wanders at night threatening the living, then he was stopped by putting a pole in his body, cutting his head, burning his heart or the whole body. The body of a woman who persecuted Germany in 1345 proved to be particularly difficult to defeat: she wandered at night in the form of a small animal, which was captured and thrown into a ditch, which worsened the situation as the witch wounded sowing even more Victims under the remains of a huge and repugnant beast. Then the body was resuscitated, which, according to villagers, terrorized, showed obvious signs of belonging to a vampire. They pierced their chest with a pole and buried the body again. But this also did not work and the witch - the vampire began to wander around at night, this time using the pole as a weapon against his victims. The body had to be re-energized for the second time and burned. Only then did the woman never be seen again.

Over time, historians and scholars of folklore have elaborated a plethora of theories in an attempt to reach a rational and satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon of vampirism. According to one of the oldest, vampires were individuals who had been buried alive. In the past, there have been numerous cases of premature burial, and re-emerging the body of someone who had tried to get out of the coffin with his nails before dying, impressing witnesses. Many vampires, however, were resurrected long after the burial, but no one had wounded hands that would presume the attempt to "flee" from the coffin. Others have suggested that vampirism is actually a disease; The most likely one is porphyria, which causes hypersensitivity to light and is now treated with blood derivatives. However, this theory has no medical basis, and in the seventies the spread of such information caused great concern among the patients who feared being victims of abuse. The most sensible theory is that proposed by historian Paul Barber in his book "Vampires, Burial and Death" in 1998. Using the results of anatomopathological studies, he demonstrated that many of the signs used to recognize a vampire, such as redheaded bodies Blood swelling, the absence of cadaveric stiffness, and the apparent growth of hair and nails after death could be explained by the perfectly natural changes that come after death. Blood becomes darker as oxygen exhausts, internal organs decompose, producing gases that swell the body, stiffness vanishes quickly enough, and the apparent growth of nails and hair is a consequence of retching the skin. Before the advent of anatomopathological studies, Barber asserts, the easiest way to explain such changes was that the individual still lived. Resurrection of a VampireResumption of a VampireAbout Much of what Barber argues can help explain why it is so widespread Belief in vampirism, does not actually address the question of why particular individuals were identified as vampires. The historian notes that victims of murders, suicides and plagues were the most likely candidates to become vampires. According to Barber, the explanation lies in the fact that all three groups were buried inadequately, and that their corpses were discovered by dogs or other animals that were fed with carrots; That's why they were labeled as vampires. If this seems plausible for the victims of the plague, those who die murdered or suicidal are often buried in a normal coffin (although in Christian communities suicides were not buried in consecrated places). There does not therefore seem to be a valid reason to think that their burial could cause problems. At this point you have to turn to the supernatural again. Individuals who had had an "atrocious" death (besides plague, murder, and suicide, horrendous purposes were considered deaths at birth, death away from home or by witchcraft) were those who most likely would not be They remained in their tombs, and they would turn into vampires. They were, therefore, subject to "special treatments." For example, in Great Britain from the fifth century onwards, until the adoption of a law in 1823, suicides were usually buried at the crossroads of the streets. Contemporary interpretation of this practice was that the sign of the cross would have turned the devil away. A more plausible explanation, since such burials were practiced outside the Christian world (one is mentioned in the "Laws" of the great Greek philosopher Plato), is that the intersections were the meeting point between two boundaries and therefore it was as if Suicides were buried in nobody's land. If they had come back from the world of the dead and tried to vampire the community, they would be confused by the alternative of the possible directions to take. The body of the suicide was often impaled or heavily weighted, practicing that has little to do with Christian rituals and best suits an interpretation that involves supernatural aspects: that is, it was really fearful that the dead would return to annoy the living, perhaps under Form of vampires.

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