On several occasions, particularly on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, dead people were suspected of being revenants or vampires, and consequently dug up and destroyed. Some contemporary authors named this phenomenon Magia Posthuma. This blog is dedicated to understanding what happened and why.
However popular zombies - or rather the zombies of cinema and comic books - have become over the past years, what with e.g. The Walking Dead, I sincerely doubt that their appeal will ever replace that of vampires. As zombies usually behave like brainless automata, who would ever want to become a zombie, whereas it appears that many people find the undead life of the (fictional) vampire intriguing and enticing.
I am currently three episodes into watching the first season of True Blood which I received on DVD from USA the other day. I am not quite sure what to make of it, but somehow I tend to get involved in what's happening in these series - I recently watched the first season of another HBO series, The Wire, and initially thought it was unbearable to watch, but quickly got hooked! Certainly, True Blood is a humorous take on the vampire genre, as well as an unusual series with its explicit focus on sex, at least I am not used to seeing condoms in a TV series!
As an aside, I can also recommend the Mad Men series. Not that it has anything to do with vampires, but because it has something to do with history. Set in New York in 1960 it shows how many things that were just part of the everyday world back then have changed over the past five decades: They constantly smoke and drink at work, and don't mind driving a car after drinking an incredible amount of alcohol. Sexual harassment of female employees is almost obligatory, and women in general are either secretaries or house wives. Racial segregation, of course, is the norm. If we find it hard to understand the world of our ancestors a few centuries back, it is worth being reminded how things that were part of the social order just fifty years ago have become unacceptable today.
'Step into the world of your grandparents,' a Danish travel agency promises when advertising trips to Romania. Eating the heart of a dead man probably wasn't practised in the days of my grandparents, but that's another example of heart eating mentioned by Christa Tuczay in her book. I have actually posted about the incident she refers to, because it's the case of a suspected vampire in Marotinu de Sus in late 2003, but in my post I wrote that 'they cut up the corpse and removed the heart which they burnt at the cross roads.'
A later report on the incident was published in The Independent in October 2007, when Dr. Timothy Taylor recounted what happened when he visited the village and talked to an elderly villager who claimed to have witnessed the exhumation of other presumed vampires (strigoi). He told Taylor that 'The men took the heart, spiked aloft, to the crossroads outside the village. There they roasted it over a brazier and, as far as I could understand, stuffed glowing coals into the ventricles. Held up in the night sky, the heart shed charred flakes that were caught in a tea towel. These were taken to the niece's house [supposedly a victim of the vampire], ground up and mixed in a glass of water. "The niece drank it," Fifor [an anthropologist] confirmed, "and in the morning she said she felt better... in this way she was cured."'
Tuczay comments that according to Fifor the eating of the heart of a vampire is neither a well-known nor old Romanian remedy against strigoi.
Taylor, unfortunately, seems to subscribe to the improbable theory of Juan Gomez-Alonso that the vampire cases of the 17th and 18th centuries might have been caused by rabies. To quote Peter Mario Kreuter: 'Doch alle diese Versuche erwiesen sich als Fehlschläge, denn die Mediziner bedienten sich des Vampirglaubens als eine Art Steinbruch und pickten sich nur diejenigen Elemente des Volkglaubens heraus, die ihre Theorie zu stützen schienen, wobei sie oft noch nicht einmal zwischen Elementen des Volksglaubens und erfundenen Details der Belletristik sauber unterscheiden konnten.'(Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa, p. 12-13)
Below is the last part of the True Blood episode about vampires including footage from Marotinu de Sus as found on youtube. As mentioned in my old post, the series is available on DVD.
A few blogs and web sites have recently linked to this blog, including Revenant Ones, who lists it under Blood Blogs. I'm not sure if I'm entirely happy with that description, but it's obviously the way things are described on that web site, part of the True Blood advertising.
