Vampyrismus & Magia posthuma

By chance, years ago I watched part of a programme on History Channel about vampires in which anthropologist Giuseppe Maiello from the Charles University, Univerzita Karlova, in Prague was interviewed about vampires. I recall contacting Maiello who responded that he had himself not seen that interview. At the same time I learned about the book he had written on vampires, Vampyrismus v kulturních dĕjinách Evropy, which had been published in 2004, and got hold of it to see what a Czech researcher would include in a book on this subject.

Now Maiello has published a new edition of the book, this time titled Vampyrismus & Magia posthuma, and the new title indicates the major addition that has been made in this edition: A Czech translation of Karl Ferdinand von Schertz’s Magia Posthuma has been added to the sources at the end of the book!

The new edition also includes a foreword mentioning some of the work that has been published since the first edition, as well as summaries in English, French and Italian that can be helpful to those of us who are not proficient in the Czech language. Furthermore, a number of illustrations have been added, in particular of some key persons, including one of Schertz, which is unfortunately not of the best quality.

According to the English summary, 'Vampyrismus a Magia posthuma [Vampirism and Magia posthuma] is an updated version of Vampyrismus v kulturních dějinách Evropy [Vampirism in the cultural history of Europe], which had first appeared in bookstores back in 2005. The book describes the phenomenon of Vampirism from an etymological, cultural-historical, ethnographic and anthropological point of view.

Up until now, the sources of the book were found primarily in the libraries of the Czech Republic. For this reason the book includes both classic examples from the literature of Western countries, transmitted through the intermediation of Abbot Augustine Calmet, as well as examples taken from the ethnographic literature of Central and Eastern European countries and the Balkans; lesser known or completely unknown to wider audiences and to western European and northern American specialists.

The second part of the book deals with the main theories on the origins of vampirism through the comparison between different cultures, and across temporal space, from classical antiquity up to the late nineteenth century. These theories concentrate on three areas: universal theories of the origins and prehistory of vampirism; theories (less probable) that derive vampirism by social and cultural changes that took place in modern Europe; and theories related to the analysis of agrarian cults and their struggles for the fertility of the fields.

In addition to other texts already published or translated into other languages, this is the first time that there is published in a modern language the Karl Ferdinand Schertz's study Magia posthuma, which had been released only once in a printed Latin edition in 1704 (but which had the date 1706 written on the title page).'

Maiello has also published a paper on Schertz in 2012 in Slavica litteraria, Racionalismus Karla Ferdinada Schertze a Magia posthuma (Karl Ferdinand Schertz's rationalism and Magia posthuma). Written in Czech, it does however include an English abstract:

'Karl Ferdinand Schertz is at home a no well known author. On the contrary, his name is known around the world thanks to his work Magia posthuma, which was quoted by Augustin Calmet. Because of his not well available biography and books, Schertz is unfortunately wrong understood and around him circulate various rumors or negative critics. Karl Ferdinand Schertz was on the contrary highly cultured author, who could enjoy a good reputation among the european intellectuals of his time.'

The paper briefly deals with Schertz's life and works, and discusses his approach to magia posthuma, which in Maiello's view make Schertz more of a rationalist than a man of the Baroque period. Maiello actually finds that the rationalistic approach of Schertz is comparable to that of Calmet. Cf. what I have myself written in Vampirismus und magia posthuma im Diskurs der Habsburgermonarchie edited by Augustynowiz and Reber (or as part of Kakanien Revisited).


Giuseppe Maiello talks about vampires on this Czech talk show
I thank Giuseppe Maiello for providing me with a copy of his book. He informs me that the publisheres are considering publishing an edition in English.

The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment

The 'dynamic of historical change may have been less dialectical than is generally supposed,' is a quote from a book by David Lederer, that Peter J. Bräunlein uses in his introduction to his paper entitled The frightening borderlands of Enlightenment: The vampire problem (Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012), p. 710-719). I would suppose that it is unsurprising to readers of this blog, that the vampire debate of the 18th century clearly is not another - to use Bräunlein's phrase - 'episode to the successful series 'Science Conquers Superstition'', or as Bräunlein writes in his conclusion:

'Within the discursive field of vampirism, various expert cultures were active. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the vampire debate does not lend itself to the construction of an opposition between science and religion. The existence of this dichotomy is widely assumed, but that is to read the present back into the past. Eighteenth-century physicians and theologians were both equally interested in the question of whether 'the relationship between the dead body and an illness of mind and body should be understood as a sympathetic, astral or diabolical effect' (Hamberger, 1992, p. 167). In the first half of the eighteenth century, we are not dealing with a single epistemic competition so much as a plurality of forms of knowledge, observing one another critically even as they communicated with one another.'

Personally, this is a major part of the fascination with the topic, so it is interesting to read Bräunlein's take on the complexity of issues at play. The paper is, to my knowledge, also one of the few texts in English that relates the eighteenth century development of the 'Vampyrus Serviensis' in relatively great detail, no doubt attracting some more interest to the subject. 'Vampires are good to think with,' as he says, and here is at least food for thought, as Bräunlein e.g. addresses questions regarding the attitudes under Ottoman rule towards vampires and the safe passage of deceased people from this world. Overall, however, he questions the widespread myths about Enligthenment, science and 'disenchantment', while also stressing that the complexity of the vampire in all his shapes and forms it takes deserves more analysis. Enlightenment does not necessarily lead to a disbelief in revenants: 'The idea that progress in knowledge will inevitably lead to factuality and truth is a dream of Enlightenment, and of some historians.'

I am, however, a little concerned to read that, 'In Viennese circles, it was even put about that a princess Eleonore von Schwarzenberg (1682-1741), was a practising vampire.' Only the well-known TV documentary is referred to as a source for this claim, so I have yet to see evidence that this princess was indeed believed to be 'a practising vampire,' whatever that should have been at the time. This, however, is just a detail that has no bearing on the premisses and conclusions of the paper.

Peter J. Bräunlein is Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen.

The product of superstitious and false beliefs

What do we understand by superstition?

I suppose that we all have some kind of commonsensical idea of what ‘superstition’ means, when we use it on an everyday basis, but when you need to apply it to a specific historical context, you easily get into trouble. So when I took up the subject of vampires and posthumous magic some years ago, I quickly felt a pressing need to get some grasp of the term and its history. This, unfortunately, was not so easy, because the meaning of the term not only has changed over time and very much depends on a given context, but frequently there is ‘a certain elasticity about it’, as Keith Thomas pointed out in his Religion & The Decline of Magic (1971, p. 48-9). Similarly, in a more recent work, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, & Religion, 1250-1750 (2010), Euan Cameron calls superstition ‘an elusive and slippery term’ (p. 4) that is ‘a flexible designation, and can be aimed at a range of targets at different times and by different people.’ (p. 5)

'In the era of confessional orthodoxy from the late sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, the rhetoric that had traditionally condemned superstition and magic in the eyes of the devout became a crucial part of the intellectual armour used to prosecute sorcerers, magicians, and witches. Then, in the early Enlightenment, ‘superstition’ took centre stage in religious discussions to an even greater extent than before. ‘Superstition’ and ‘reason’ became the poles around which the religious and ethical theorists of the early Enlightenment debated the proper claims of religion on the human mind.' (p. 6)

Superstition and reason are also frequently seen as the poles in the vampire debate of the 1730’s. Stefan Hock did so in 1901, dividing the authors of vampire books into two groups: those explaining vampires in terms of demonic influences, and those seeking a rational and natural explanation. However, if you actually read the books and articles from the period, you find that the texts do not easily fit into such a simple scheme. Likewise, on a more general scale, Cameron stresses the complexity of the debates concerning superstition:

'The eighteenth century did not discard the heritage of previous centuries wholesale, whatever the statements of propagandists for the ‘Enlightenment’ might at times imply. Some ‘superstition-treatises’ emerged from the movement known as ‘baroque Catholicism’ that embodied a firm belief in the continuity of traditional metaphysics and traditional pastoral theology. In Protestant Europe, the seventeenth-century debate over the reality of spirits continued into the era of the Enlightenment with no clearly discernible winners or losers.’ (p. 286-7)

In a lengthy paper from 2010, “… da sie in den närrischen Wahn gestanden, daß es Vampyren gebe”. Dimensionen des Aberglaubenbegriffs und Strategien der Aberglaubenskritik in gelehrten Beiträgen zur Vampirdebatte der 1730er Jahre, Benjamin Durst notes that the view of a vampire debate between obscurantism and Enlightenment has survived well into our time and can be found even in modern works on the subject.

Durst points out that the dichotomy between mystical obscurantism and rational Enlightenment that many historians superimpose on the eighteenth century is rather a result of the Enlightenment process than a condition of the period itself. This dichotomy is a construct of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not of the eighteenth, so Durst sets out to critically scrutinize the vampire debate in terms of the knowledge and views of its own time. Limiting himself to what he calls the first phase of the vampire debate: the debate during the 1730’s between authors whose native tongue is German, Durst divides the debate into three groups according to the arguments employed: 1) theological, 2) sympathetic (Aristotelian or Paracelsian), and 3) medical.

Their different points of view notwithstanding, all authors tend to agree that the Serbian vampire belief is superstitious. Frequently, they consider the superstitious Irrglaube and Altweibermärchen to be the surviving remains of pre-Christian, pagan beliefs. Harenberg in his Vernünftige und Christliche Gedancken über die Vampirs oder Bluhtsaugende Todten stresses the antiquity of the belief in harmful revenants, saying that it existed at the time of Moses and can be found in the works of Vergil and Homer. Michael Ranft writes of the poison of superstition from old times and thinks that it may still work in the hearts of Christians.

As the Serbians typically were Orthodox Christians, the authors participating in the debate, most of whom were Protestants, find that this Church plays a role in the vampire belief. Protestants were of the opinion that both the Catholic and Orthodox Church had introduced superstitiones superstructae, false and superstitious constructions on top of the pure Christian belief, in order to maintain and gain power and money. Polemical books about the Orthodox Church, such as Thomas Smith’s Epistola de Graecae Ecclesiae hodierno statu (1698) and Johann Michael Heineccii Eigentliche und wahrhafftige Abbildung der alten und neuen Griechischen Kirche (1711), were not only sources of contemporary views of this Church, but also contained information on the Greek popular beliefs in revenants like the Brucolaccas.

from Salomon Schweigger: Ein newe Reiss Beschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel (1639)

The participants in the debate were quick to equate the Serbian vampire belief with the Greek revenants, and generally link the Orthodox belief in the effects of excommunication with the Serbian vampire belief. They criticize the clergy for not eradicating the superstitious belief, but instead accepting or promoting it for their own purposes. Consequently Durst notes that the criticism of vampire superstitions turns into a critique of the Orthodox Church.

There were, of course, exceptions. Johann Conrad Dippel accepts the Orthodox belief in the preservation of holy people and of the excommunicated as the work of God, but refutes a connection between excommunication and vampire beliefs. The Catholic W.S.G.E. finds that the vampire belief is the product of the uneducated and superstitious Serbians’ reception of true Christian tenets. From a theological point of view, the more superstition and the less education there is in a place, the easier it is for the devil to carry out his schemes in that area.

The Serbians themselves are also the subject of various explanations. They are stereotypically considered barbarous and under the influence of opium which is thought to have influenced both the deaths of suspected vampires as well as the belief itself. Their moral deficits and lack of education make them susceptible to superstition or even demonic influence. Egidius Günther Hellmund in his book on divine judgment, Iudicia Dei Incognita, oder unerkannte Gerichte Gottes über Böße und Gute in der Welt (1737), goes so far as to consider the revenants as God’s punishment of a sinful and ungodly Serbian populace in need of repentance.

The authors, and not just those those writing from a medical perspective, find that there is a close connection between the superstitious belief and the disease that the supposed victims of vampires suffer from. In some cases an analogy between these is stated, blurring the division between disease and superstition.

The superstition leads to fear and fancy, perhaps even creating visions of nightly revenant visitations, making the villagers more prone to diseases. So itself a product of pagan doctrine, false religious beliefs and the inability of uneducated people to comprehend natural phenomena, the vampire belief is inseparable from the suffering – and ultimately the death - of the Serbian villagers.

Durst carefully describes the individual arguments behind these general views of the role of superstition in the Serbian vampire belief. He does, however, emphasize that more work on the subject will yield more facts and dimensions to our understanding of what superstition was according to the learned authors involved in the debate.

I plan to write about some other recent papers on the seventeenth and eighteenth century writings about vampires and related topics. For now, I will recommend a reading of Durst’s work which not only provides an interesting reading of the vampire debate, but also points to a handful of works that I don't recall seeing mentioned elsewhere.

Illustration in Leithäuser: Das neue Buch vom Aberglauben (1964)

Fantasmagoriana

'But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.'

I suppose a lot of us living in Europe recall this year's Summer as wet, and perhaps, some have spent Summer days reading (or watching) fictional tales of a horrific nature, like Mary Shelley did in 1816:

'Some volumes of ghost stories translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise.'

Byron, Shelley and co. read the French Fantasmagoriana ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions, de Spectre, Revenans, etc. as translated from German by Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyriès. Curiously, a translation into English was published in 1812 as Tales of the Dead, and reviewed in The Monthly Review with a reference to both Dom Calmet and Abbé Lenglet-Dufresnoy and their writings on vampires and other revenants.

The German origins of Fantasmagoriana was the popular Gespensterbuch written and compiled by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun (actually Friedrich August Schulze). According to the brilliant study of German ghost and revenant literature, Die deutsche Gespenstergeschichte (1994) by Gero von Wilpert, this is actually the best known German collection of ghost stories, including tales inspired by Erasmus Franciscus and Otto von Graben zum Stein. The first volume was published in 1811, and is today available as a reprint from De Gruyter, but can also be found on Google Books.

By 1811 a lot had happened since the time when debates on the existence of revenants were a struggle between more orthodox points of view. In the preface, Laun says that friends of Enlightenment would expect is to oppose superstition, while those more in favour of the spirit world would expect it to give their theories a helping hand. And Apel finishes the book by eloquently saying that while it is debated whether ghosts exist, it is certain that there are ghost stories, and that there are many people who like to hear and read them.

Obviously, by 1811 a book about ghosts and spirits no longer served to prove or disprove the existence of such phenomena. Apel states that the Gespensterbuch does neither: There is neither pro nor contra ghosts in the book. The reader can, as Apel says, read the tales of old castles, graves, treasures, white ladies, shrouds etc. without fearing to encounter such things.

Von Wilpert places Laun and Apel in between Enlightenment and Romanticism. Today, of course, most books about ghosts, vampires and other revenants only intend to make us shudder at the thought of 'what if' - what if such things were real? And today on this very day people in parts of the world even dress up to look and behave like ghosts and vampires, only to return to everyday life next day. Just as the reader could put the Gespensterbuch aside, 'ohne zu fürchten, daß dir etwas unheimliches der Art in Leben begegne.'

Breaking with the Baroque

'By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were signs that the appeal of graphic violence in Catholic Baroque culture was waning. Popular culture never lost its fascination with violence and crime, and the decrease in the number of public executions within the Habsburg realms cannot be taken as evidence that the public was less interested in these spectacles, rather, it demonstrated that the central government was starting to take a different view of public displays of physical punishment. What had changed was the sense of simultaneous distancing and identification with the sufferer that had characterized the Baroque encounter with violence. The distancing had originally made it possible to view animal baiting, or even the execution of a criminal, without the on-lookers experiencing any stirrings of empathy toward the sufferers, but curiosity or pleasure instead. Yet the pious Catholic also identified with the sufferings of saint or martyr because of the different moral context in which the torments were inflicted. Suffering of ordinary mortals or of saints, like the suffering of Jesus, could produce positive results for the sufferer or for others. Suffering blocked out the less important day-to-day world, and a meditation on denial and suffering invited the participant to enter another world where closeness to God was the reward for the act of distancing oneself from the material. The promoters of the Enlightenment did not share this view, but were much more concerned with the possibilities of happiness being achieved through less painful and non-supernatural means.

The breakdown of this seeming fusion of what appear to be polar opposites, empathy and distancing, was further fostered by a more dispassionate and analytical view of the body, in particular, the human body. The anatomical Wachsenpräparaten created in the 1780s for the Josephinum, the surgical institute established in Vienna by Joseph II, are the clearest demonstration of the break with the Baroque in the Habsburg world. Although their postures and the tasseled pillows on which some of them are displayed are reminiscent of the waxen figures in Baroque reliquaries, these figures are guardians of a mystery with no theological or moral implications. They are instead aids to instruction at a state-supported school that teaches a practical skill imparted by a scientist rather than a priest, where no clergy are employed and whose every detail bears the mark of enlightened despotism.'

According to Dr. Paul Shore, St. Louis University, in The Eagle and the Cross: Jesuits in Late Baroque Prague (Saint Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2002), p. 50-1.

Macabre speculations

I recently mentioned Andrew Miller's new novel Pure, which in the meantime I have read. It certainly is a macabre tale, but also a gripping story of the people involved in the destruction of the Les Innocents cemetery a couple of years before the French Revolution. Most of the characters are fictional, but some historical persons crop up, in particular the well-known physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who in the novel is studies the various stages of human decomposition that are found during the unpleasant exhumation of thousands of bodies in the cemetery. The novel provides entertainment as well as an interesting view of the period. That the story of a young engineer destroying an ancient church and its cemetery can be interpreted as a metaphor for a major change in society is lost neither on the reader nor the engineer himself.

A paper from 1997 on Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet's Vampires and the Rule Over Death by Marie-Hélène Huet, published in Eighteenth-Century Life Vol. 21 (May 1997), p. 222-232, speculates on  both Calmet's work on vampires and the move of cemeteries from central Paris to its outskirts. Personally, I think Huet overinterpretes this conjunction, but she provides some interesting information on e.g. the cemeteries:

'Toward the end of the century, when new legislation finally authorized the closing of overcrowded cemeteries and new locations were chosen, one of the primary concerns was to find a soil where the bodies would decompose quickly. Long before the Cemetery of the Innocents was closed, officials complained that "the soil has difficulty absorbing the bodies buried there" (qtd. in Thibaut-Payen, p. 211). A similar anxiety would spread through Paris during the Revolution, with endless complaints that the guillotined bodies failed to decompose and were rejected by the clay of the Madeleine cemetery where they were first buried.

In the second half of the century, one notices a growing repulsion toward and dread of the dead as the sacred respect due them seemed to be superseded by a rising fear of their nefarious powers. Michel Vovelle quotes a 1781 Lettre du Baron de *** à son ami sur l'affaires des cimetières, from an anonymous author protesting a proposed "lieu de dépôts" or "temporary storage" of the dead in Paris:

"A sick person dies and is kept at home twenty four, sometimes forty eight hours: shall we have to keep it uncovered for another twelve hours? ... Here is a corpse that casts its most dangerous infection into the air; the many moves one will be obliged to make, to take it to church, onto the cart, moving and emptying the cart, will increase this infection, letting it escape into the air. What will be the scope of this infection, already so dangerous when it comes from a single body, when it is multiplied by all the corpses of Paris and air temperatures? ... All of Paris, at all times and in all its quarters, will be filled with cadaverous and pestilential putrefaction." (pp. 202-3)

A growing antipollution movement brought together village priests and villagers, as well as members of the Academy of Medicine and of the Academy of Sciences, all of whom were anxious to relocate cemeteries outside the cities, far from the living. The famous decision in 1785 to close the Cemetery of the Innocents testifies to several concerns, writes Thibaut-Payen, chief among them, "the dangers of insalubrity presented by the presence of a necropolis inside the city limits" (p. 221).' 

Particularly far-fetching are in my opinion Huet's comments on the 'deep Christianity' of the 1732 story of 'Arnold Paul', Calmet being her prime source:

'Undoubtedly, most of the elements of the classical vampire story are here. But the most striking part of the story lies in its deep Christianity, in its hardly disguised evocation of Christ's life: the forty days reminiscent of the days spent fasting in the desert, fighting the devil's temptations, the ressurection from the dead. But at the same time, everything is reversed: the vampire's public life starts after his death, and, instead of fasting and resisting temptation, he indulges in blood feasts that cannot be stopped until forty days after his life as a vampire has started. Like an inverted image of Christ, the vampire wins disciples who will, in turn, make their victims into new converts. Vampirism is not just a plague, it is a false religion. The sacrificial burning of vampires cannot fail to evoke the burning at the stake of heretics and devil worshippers.'

I object to this analysis, because I cannot recall reading any contemporary 18th century speculations along these lines. For more or less the same reason, I also find her thoughts regarding the name of 'Arnold Paul' speculative:

'Moreover, the name of the deadly vampire, Arnold Paul (which Calmet remarked himself was a most unlikely name for a Hungarian vampire), must have immediately reminded readers of the great Jansenist Arnauld. Certainly, vampire stories, articulated on countless episodes of grave profanation and extraordinary attacks on Jansenists, provided the Benedictine monk with a thinly disguised religious parable.'