A local newspaper here in Denmark reports that the remains of 4-10.000 bodies are going to be excavated in connection with the construction of a new underground metro station in Copenhagen. The station will be located beneath the cemetery that I wrote about here. The excavation will not affect the graves of such world famous people as Niels Bohr and Søren Kierkegaard, who are buried there, but people have been buried here between 1805 and 1998, so it is certainly a piece of cultural history that will be affected by the work.
Apart from the unique and delicate nature of the work, it is interesting to read that a rule of thumb is that on average the bodies of 13 people can be expected to have been buried in each burial plot over the past 200 years, and that apparently few of these bodily remains have been removed. That is why the archaeologists who will carry out the work expect to find the remains of an unknown, but pretty large number of people.
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I stumbled upon a blog that was listed in a reference in another blog that had nothing to do with this subject but recently in a study I was working on, in the book of Enoch, considered by some to be part of the Bible as it is referenced by it in several places and also found along with the other books with the dead sea scrolls.
It struck me that this may be the origin of the idea of what we call vampires. In an English translation of Enoch, titled "The Lost Book of Enoch, by Joseph B. Lumpkin, this set of verses caught my attention:
Chapter 7
1 And all if them together went and took wives for themselves, each choosing one for himself, and they began to go in to them and to defile themselves with sex with them.
2 And the angels taught them charms and spells, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.
3 And the women became pregnant, and they bare large giants, whose height was three thousand cubits (ells).
4 The giants consumed all the work and toil of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
5 And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drank the blood.
6 Then the earth laid accusations against the lawless ones.
First off, my perspective is that of a Bible believer, in that it is the Word of God; so whatever is written in there has truth no matter how unbelieveable it might seem to modern man. Many people have followed clues found in the Bible and it led them to find places and things such as cities or kings that were cited but were not yet found until they used the Bible to search them out.
That said, the Greek tales of heros sound very much like they could have been the offspring of angels and man, or at the very least have been one of the half man-half angel children? Enoch isn't the only references that are found about these creatures, they are also found in various other books within the books of the Bible.
Some creationist, scientists, believe God destroyed everything in the flood because the DNA of mankind had been corrupted by these angels so that there was only one family left that remained untouched. There are scriptures that support that the spirits of these creatures do not die, but seek to inhabit humans as evil spirits, that is to possess humans again. Thus the idea that these "vampires" can't die.
The Bible speaks of these giants also being around after the flood which seems to give weight to this understanding, either that or perhaps the angels procreated with humans again after the flood. I tend not to agree with that theory as we are told they are now locked away until judgement.
The verses in Enoch speak of these angels sinning against animals. What does this mean? Did they also have sex with animals? If so, could that have created something like a werewolf or other creature that we find in some of these "tales"? If you have read some of the descriptions of angels in the Bible, some of them have features like that of a lion or a bird, etc.
In these verses it talks of these giants drinking blood. Could it be that may be where the idea of a vampire came from? In the Bible it talks about these giants having sons, and one of those sons was Goliath who wasn't described as being as tall as these first giants are. David and his men of the Bible battled these sons and killed them.
I'm not sure whether to go as far and say there were creatures that drank blood the same way they have been protrayed in modern tales, but perhaps this is where that idea originated from and the same goes for creatures like werewolves.
I've not studied this subject at all before, so I'm not sure if anyone has ever put forth this as a possiblity or not? As far as being able to kill or ward someone off with spells and plants, say like garlic, that could also have it roots, pardon the pun, in the Bible and Enoch as well.
To think that there is a lot more truth in these stories is scary, huh? Not so unbelieveable if you believe the Bible.
a believer
I alway thought that in countries such as Denmark one was never to witness the destruction of a cultural heritage. But it seems, however, that the main definition of Cultural Heritage is very elastic, at least from the point of view of those responsible of urbanization and modernization of cities. The fact that there will be an Archaeological investigation do mitigates a little the intervention you mention in your post.
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