Habsburg maps of Kisolova and Frey Hermersdorf online

Thanks to an international co-operation between a number of archives, including the Austrian State Archives, historical maps of the Habsburg Empire are now available in both 2D and 3D as layers on top of current Google Earth maps. The maps are searchable, so you can seek out a number of places that are e.g. relevant to the history of vampires and posthumous magic, including those shown below: Kisolova, the site of the first 'vampire case' concerning a certain Peter Plogojowitz, and Frey Hermersdorf, the site of an instance of magia posthuma that was investigated by the court physicians Johannes Gasser and Christian Wabst, described and analyzed by Gerard van Swieten, before prompting Empress Maria Theresa's decree concerning magia posthuma and other superstitions.

Historical Maps of the Habsburg Empire is an excellent resource worth investigating.

Are there vampires in the library?

Having recently seen Count Dracula visit the Prunksaal of the Austrian National Library, it should be easy to answer the question: Gibt es Vampire in der Bibliothek? (i.e. Are there vampires in the library?) Of course, Gerard van Swieten vil disagree, but visitors, and this tour is particularly aimed at children, will find garlic and books to help them ward off vampires and other creatures of popular superstition...

More information on the library's web site.

Dracula: Die wahre Geschichte der Vampire

Count Dracula visits the Prunksaal in Vienna

The German documentary series Terra X on channel ZDF launched a new documentary on Dracula and vampires this evening, Dracula: Die wahre Geschichte der Vampire, which is currently available on the ZDF web site along with various information on vampire books a.o. Forensic scientist and vampire expert Mark Benecke as well as Dr. Clare Downham participate in this program that is partially narrated by Count Dracula himself as portrayed by actor Christian Baumann. The Count visits the archives in Vienna to examine the original Visum et Repertum, and we see Flückinger examine 'Arnold Paole' - even the apocryphal journey of Gerard van Swieten to Moravia is dramatized. Still, this is generally one of the best documentaries on the subject so far, including visits to Romania, London, and Vienna, where Dracula studies some of the 18th century literature on vampires in the Prunksaal next to the bust of van Swieten.

The documentary will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in early 2014.

A surgeon's eyewitness accounts from Transylvania and Wallachia

Most of what was written on vampires in the eighteenth century consisted of commentaries on either a very small corpus of eyewitness accounts from officials of the Habsburg authorities or the Catholic Church or of various tales of vampires and revenants from around Europe. The most careful and comprehensive study based on first hand examinations of both those who complained of being attacked by a bloodsucker and of the bodies of the suspected vampires, was written in 1756 by a regimental surgeon, Georg Tallar.

Tallar was born in Mainz around 1700, and studied medicine there and in Straβburg. He then pursued a career as a surgeon and physician in the Habsburg army for more than thirty years, serving in Transylvania, Wallachia and the Banat. As Tallar mastered the local languages of those regions, he was not only able to discuss the subject of vampires first hand with the people who actually believed in them.

The new edition of Tallar's book and two pages from the manuscript shown in the Dracula. Woiwode und Vampir exhibition catalogue

Tallar witnessed five incidents in which people claimed to be attacked by vampires – or actually: Moroi – and in three cases he was himself involved in examining those who were ill as well as the corpses that were exhumed. He had actually even known some of those who, after their demise, were suspected of being bloodsuckers.

The Wallachians who were ill and claimed to have been attacked by a bloodsucker, told Tallar that they had been in bed for a couple of days, and that their heart hurt. When asked where the heart sits, they pointed, not to the heart, but to the stomach and the intestines. They said that, whenever they tried to fall asleep, the bloodsucker appeared in the shape of this or that deceased man or woman, standing in front of them or in a corner. Some said that they saw the bloodsucker when they were asleep, but many of the afflicted actually saw nothing. Still, they believed that it was necessary to open the graves to look for the Moroi. Although exhuming and destroying corpses was prohibited by law, they were willing to break the law to seek out and destroy the bloodsucker. In fact, people were so afraid of falling prey to the vampire, that they dared not walk about after dark.

Examining them, Tallar found that they complained from pains and aches in various part of the body, including strong headaches, and that their tongue would turn first pale and then become brownish red and dry as wood. They were very thirsty, and had a faint and erratic pulse.

In each case, only Wallachians were affected by the bloodsucker, whereas neither soldiers, German settlers, nor local Serbs became ill, so Tallar concluded that the Wallachians did not suffer from an epidemic, but rather an endemic disease. Considering the traits of the Wallachians, he concluded that the food eaten by them, especially during the fasts that they fanatically observed during Winter - consisting of e.g. cabbage, garlic, and sauerkraut - was the cause of the disease. In fact, administering a simple vomitive often cured the diseased!

Tallar also discusses various beliefs concerning the dead and their graves, refuting the beliefs and providing various natural causes for the phenomena. He e.g. refutes the belief that the bloodsuckers are more harmful on Saturdays, by exhuming and examining the corpses on various days of the week, showing that the state of the corpses were independent of the day of the week.

Overall, Tallar is an exemplar of the medical enlightened man, emphasizing – like Gerard van Swieten – the lack of education among the Wallachians, while at the same time mentioning that they are not so stupid not to accept his medical remedies against the disease, when they notice that people get cured.

From Medicinische Jahrbücher des kaiserl. königl.
österreichischen Staates Band 56 (Wien, 1846)

Tallar wrote his Visum-Repertum Anatomico-Chirurgicum after the vampire incident in Hermersdorf that prompted Empress Maria Theresa to stop the burning of corpses associated with magia posthuma, but his manuscript was left unpublished for almost thirty years, until the Viennese publisher Johann Georg Möβle came upon it and decided to publish it in 1784.

A reviewer in the Viennese Realzeitung für das Jahr 1784, expressed the wish that Tallar had used his proficiency in the Wallachian language to publish his observations on the matter in that tongue. Excerpts from the book turned up in Johann Dionis John’s Lexikon der K. K. Medizinalgeseze in 1790, and in an article in the Medicinische Jahrbücher des kaiserl. Königl. Österreichischen Staates in 1846.

Now, almost 250 years after its first publication, Tallar’s book has been reprinted by Nicolaus Equiamicus in a slim volume that replaces Möβle’s introduction by a new one by Equiamicus, and adds a few explanatory footnotes, while slightly updating the language of the original. Tallar’s original is readily available online (see my list of links), but Equiamicus is to be commended for providing us with a handy edition of this essential text on vampire beliefs. And it is available for just €7.90.

Dracula era in Triennale

To many, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula has become quite the epitome of the story of the vampiric Count Dracula. The soundtrack music by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar is ubiquitous, and the film’s blend of history and fiction, of romance and horror, as well as its creative play with cinema itself, seem to suit a vision that many people have of Dracula and vampires, or at least one that appeals to them – that is, of course, prior to the boom of adolescent vampire fiction like Twilight. Perhaps, as it is more than twenty years since Coppola’s film received its premiere, many people have simply grown up with this film and consequently now identify Dracula with Coppola’s Count.

So it is little wonder that the first thing behind the dark curtain leading into the Dracula e il mito dei vampiri exhibition at the Triennale design museum in Milan was a screen showing excerpts from Coppola’s film. In fact, the fusion of historical fact and vampire fiction, of artistic creativity and design, and of Bram Stoker’s novel with its interpretation by artists and cinematographers, permeated the exhibition as a whole.

Not so much an extension or reworking of the Dracula Woiwode und Vampir exhibitions at Innsbruck and Bucharest, Dracula e il mito dei vampiri rather integrated items from that exhibition into something new, not only bringing the fictional vampire into focus, but also, as one would expect af a design museum, stressing Italian art and design.

Having watched Coppola’s vision of the Wallachian warlord turned vampire, the visitor was greeted by the famous portrait of Vlad Tepes from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Fortunately, one was not met by Vlad’s gaze, as he rather looks at something or someone to your left, so one can study his features without fear of having aroused his, er, attention. Similarly, the full-length portrait of Dracula Waida Princeps from Forchtenstein Castle appears to look to one side, but strangely, his eyes have an uncanny look as if a film is layered on top of them, or maybe someone attempted to blur them?

Only a very small selection of items from the earlier Dracula exhibitions were displayed here to provide some context for the life and cruelty of Vlad Tepes: A 17th century map of Transylvania from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the coloured print of the city of Papa from 1617 showing impalements, a copy of Sebastian Münster’s 1598 Cosmographey with its depiction of impalements, and various clothes and weapons used by the Ottomans.

The vampire cases and the ensuing debate of the 18th century were illustrated via a handful of books, including Johann Christoph Harenberg’s 1733 Vernünftige und Christliche Gedancken über die Vampirs oder bluhtsaugende Todten, Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy’s 1751 Traité historique et dogmatique sur les apparitions, les visions & les revelations particulières, and the German translation of van Swieten’s commentaries published in 1768. However, there were no documents, no Calmet, Ranft or Tallar, no bust of van Swieten or portrait of Maria Theresa as in the exhibitions at Innsbruck and Bucharest.

Instead, the exhibition of vampire fiction was enhanced by some remarkable items courtesy of the Bram Stoker Estate and John Moore Collection: Bram Stoker’s so-called lost journal that was published for the first time last year, and Stoker’s autograph copy of the first edition of Dracula ‘to my dear mother’, both definitely some of the chief attractions of the exhibition.

A couple of Goya’s Caprichos, a first edition copy of Polidori’s The Vampyre as well as posters for performances of Marschner’s opera Der Vampyr and a programme for a 1927 performance of Deane and Balderston’s stage adaptation all led the way into a room where quotes from Stoker’s novel were displayed in Italian on a wall. Here you could also enter the house of a vampire as envisioned by Milanese architect and designer Italo Rota. A rather creepy tableau of a ‘living room’ with earth strayed across the table and a selection of ritual tools, remedies, books and art, all of which, according to Rota, should reflect the mentality and everyday ‘life’ of a vampire. Suffice it to say, that I would not spend my time in that place…

Entering the world of vampire cinema, one could peep through holes like a voyeur to observe a variety of ‘vampire kisses’ from a number of vampire films, while more analytically, over the door to the next room, a brief genealogy and philosophy of cinematic vampirism was outlined. Nosferatu from 1922 accordingly reflected the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung, whereas Dracula from 1931 showed the vampire in the modern major city, and might be interpreted in terms of Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin.

Then, for some reason the vampires of Hammer and many other filmmakers from the 1950’s to 1980’s were not included in the genealogy, so we jumped right to the era of post-structuralism (Jacques Lacan) and postmodernism (Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992 and Interview with the Vampire from 1994, respectively. Finally, in a 'liquid' society where 'solid' concepts like work and marriage are, in the words of Zygmunt Bauman, 'like zombies, such concepts are today simultaneously dead and alive',  Edward Cullen and the other vampires of Twilight could be perceived as 'post-vampires', indistinguishable from mortal humans.

Clips from a variety of vampire films, including Mario Bava’s Italian La maschera del demonio from 1960, were shown on three transparent screens in a separate room, their soundtrack having been replaced by popular pieces like Orff’s O Fortuna and Delibes’s Flower Duet, all played at high volume.

Among the clips were, of course, Coppola’s Dracula film, and not only its screenplay and parts of its storyboards were exhibited, Dracula e il mito dei vampiri also paid homage to the film's costume designer, Ishioka Eiko, by displaying the blood red armour she created for Dracula, and showing a documentary about her work on the film. The  tribute to Eiko was followed up by a a tableau of impressive female stage costumes from various operas and ballets like Aida, Die Zauberflöte, and Turandot. Very fitting for an exhibition in the hometown of Italian fashion and the famous opera house, La Scala. A wall of photos from catwalks rounded this section off with fashion for men designed by Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada and others, all illustrating the crossover of the vampire from fiction to fashion, no doubt with a good deal of help from Goth subculture.

Finally, a room not intended for children, exhibited pages from Guido Crepax’ comic book adaptation of Dracula as well as a hitherto unknown sequence in which his heroine Valentina meets Count Dracula.

Personally, I must say that the exhibition whet my appetite for more, as it is fairly easy to imagine how an exhibition like Dracula e il mito dei vampiri could be expanded in order to go into more detail with Vlad Tepes, with the struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe, with vampires and revenant beliefs, and with the rise of the fictional vampire, Count Dracula and the vampire of modern popular culture. I am, however, well aware of the painstaking work that is no doubt required to assemble the number of paintings, books, documents and artefacts that would fit in with the themes, and at the same time I am not sure how much the average visitor is in fact able to digest. With regards to Vlad Tepes and vampires, the exhibitions in Innsbruck and Bucharest are so far the most comprehensive exhibitions I am aware of, and it will probably be hard to surpass hem. But hopefully there is more to come in the future.

In connection with the exhibition, Skira has published a 131 page catalogue, which includes a number of articles and a selection of the items exhibited. Margot Rauch has contributed the historical part of the catalogue, Dracula: voivoda e vampire, which is in fact a translation of what she wrote for the Innsbruck and Bucharest exhibition catalogues, as well as an inventory of some of the books and artefacts exhibited. The article on the costumes of female vampires (and vamps) include a number of photos of stars like Dietrich, Garbo, Bernhardt, Swanson and Bara that were not on display, while Italo Rota’s vampiric living room is only documented on a youtube video that can be accessed with a QR code.

Source: Alef

Whether Dracula e il mito dei vampiri will be exhibited elsewhere in the future – in the same or some other form – I do not know, but the photo to right was posted on facebook by the company that organized the exhibition,with the accompanying message:

‘Dracula ha fatoo le valigie ed è pronto a ripartire alle conquista di nuove città!’:

Dracula has packed and is ready to conquer new cities!

Austria or Serbia?

Roxanne Hellman and Derek Hall's Vampire Legends and Myths published in a series of books about the supernatural in 2012 by Rosen Publishing is a very attractive book about vampires aimed at adolescent readers. It is attractive because of a variety of colour illustrations from a broad range of places and sources, a selection that reflects an unusual variety of topics, which however are somewhat marred by a lack of precision. E.g. Kisiljevo or Kisilova is described as 'an Austrian village' and the text is accompanied by a nice photo of what looks precisely like that: a village in Austria instead of a village in Serbia. At the same time, Peter Plogojowitz is clearly characterized as 'a Serbian peasant'. It is, however, still a joy to flick through the pages of this book to study a great number of photos from Romania and other places around the world.

Kisilova: 'an Austrian village'

The Morava river, and Kosovo, 'in the vicinity of which Arnold Paole was seemingly troubled by a vampire'

Voltaire and Empress Maria Theresa

'Gerard van Swieten, whose investigations put an end to vampire hysteria in Austria' (sic)

Thanatourism

I was unaware of the term thanatourism ('involving travel to sites associated with death and tragedy') until I noticed it in this blog post from Powered by Osteons on the Museum Boorhave in Leiden and its famous anatomical theatre. I posted about the same subject a couple of years ago when I had myself visited Leiden, the birthplace of Gerard van Swieten. Powered by Osteons is the personal blog of bioarchaeologist Kristina Killgrove.

The Archbishop's Vampires

'If I were to permit myself to investigate the holy mysteries of divine Providence, I would say: why do these apparitions and tricks of the Devil only take place today in poor Moravia and northern Hungary, and not elsewhere in Spain, France and our Italy?'

The Dissertazione sopra i vampiri by the Archbishop of Trani, Giuseppe Davanzati, to my knowledge has never been translated in toto into any language, although it is relatively easy to come by an Italian copy. So you may have a hard time finding extracts and more than just cursory information in English. Montague Summers dedicated a couple of pages to Davanzati, but most of it is biographical information, and he is quick to dismiss the Archbishop’s conclusion.

Fortunately, Francesco Paolo de Ceglia of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy (not far from Trani), the author of a.o. a book on Georg Ernst Stahl, has remedied the lack of information in English with his paper The Archbishop’s Vampires: Giuseppe Davanzati’s Dissertation and the reaction of “scientific” Italian Catholicism to the “Moravian events”, published in Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences vol. 61, no 166-167, Juin-Décembre 2011.

Written about 1739, when Davanzati heard of the Moravian episodes of posthumous magic from e.g. Cardinal Wolfgang Schrattenbach, Bishop of Olomouc from 1711 to 1738, the Dissertazione was published posthumously in 1774, long time after the initial vampire debates. Still, manuscript copies appear to have rapidly been spread and read shortly after it was written, even in the Netherlands.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the area under clerical jurisdiction of the Consistory in Olomouc saw several cases of what Karl Ferdinand von Schertz had coined magia posthuma, and in the 1730’s the interest in this kind of phenomenon had exploded with the news of the Serbian vampires. Some fifteen years later, Empress Maria Theresa aided by her physician, Gerard van Swieten, would take matters into her own hands, when news reached Vienna of how the Catholic authorities handled the instances of posthumous magic, no doubt further eroding the position of the Jesuits in the Austrian lands.

Davanzati, writes de Ceglia, 'was a man of that Catholic Aufklärung which, shaking off the visionary excesses of Baroque mysticism, was responsible for the classics of the Italian “anti-superstitious” school of thought. Concentrating, above all, on the theme of witches and celestial apparitions, these publications were circumscribing the space that, until that time, had been conceded, above all, to the action of the Devil, but in part to God as well, in this way drastically reducing the group of phenomena that tradition had considered preter- and supernatural. The imperative was to explain the phenomena through the laws of nature, without unnecessarily involving the Devil, as had, instead, been done until just a few decades prior.'

Believing in the invariability of the laws of nature, Davanzati was of the opinion that if vampires should exist, they could not be something new. Consequently, he identified vampires with ghosts, and even elves common to the mythology of Southern Italy. The Church accepted the existence of ghosts as souls from the Purgatory, but they were souls temporarily allowed by God to return and still under his jurisdiction. So from a theological point of view, ghosts were not allowed to carry out evil acts, for which reason vampires could not exist.

The Protestants, on the other hand, denying the existence of Purgatory, believed that ghosts, if not illusory, had to be the work of the Devil. Davanzati’s response to various theological counterarguments was to point out that vampires had apparently only been encountered in Moravia and Hungary, and not in Spain, France and Italy. Perhaps it was rather the work of priests taking advantage of the local populace’s fear that led people to believe in the excessive power of the Devil?

De Ceglia sums up Davanzati’s strategy, ‘much drier, more debonair and, above all, less gullible than Calmet’, briefly this way:

‘1) first of all, he “rationally” – that is, without making recourse to the authority of the conciliar decrees – minimised the Devil’s actual ability to influence nature and people, being nonetheless careful not to slip into the Pyrrhonism of Pierre Bayle or the radical Cartesianism of Balthasar Bekker. 2) The operation succeeded in temporarily identifying the vampire-ghosts as souls from Purgatory. Someone had already noticed that the belief in vampires prospered mostly in areas where the existence of the third realm of the afterlife was denied. Moreover, like souls from Purgatory, vampires could be interpreted as an intermediate state between saved and damned souls. It was nonetheless inexpedient to go on with this identification, dangerous from a theological point of view. 3) At this point, it was only necessary to prove that these apparitions had no goals of spiritual elevation to set aside their supernatural origin. 4) Once all this was done, the last obstacle to overcome was the naturalistic interpretation of the phenomenon:

“Anyone with a little common sense, so to speak, can clearly realise that the Devil plays no role in a story like that of these vampires; it is all a human creation, or at most a sort of tiresome illness, such as the plague, or some other epidemic disease.”’

As for the questions concerning the incorruptibility of corpses and whether a corpse is still alive, de Ceglia notes that ‘Davanzati was working in a period in which the Roman Church was redefining its ambivalent relationship with uncorrupted bodies,’ and compares the canonisations manual that was in use at the time of the incidents of posthumous magic in Moravia, Bishop Carlo Felice de Matta’s Novissimus de sanctorum canonizatione tractatus from 1678 with the later one by Prospero Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione (1734-8), which in its second edition also deals with vampires.

‘The chapter “De incorruptione” in the first handbook, gave credence to the most improbably tales,’ de Ceglia notes and sums up its views briefly: ‘a) a holy body is soft and flexible; b) nevertheless, it is important to pay attention to the Devil’s nasty jokes; c) as well as to the intimate vitality of the cadaver (whatever its origin may be),’ adding that: ‘All three of these positions were scaled down by the new “regulated devotion” of the 18th century.’

Ultimately it becomes a matter for the theologians to decide whether an uncorrupted corpse is in fact a miracle, as Davanzati states: ‘And although it would not be difficult for me to believe that said circumstance could be a purely natural thing in some cadavers, I demand it be a supernatural and miraculous thing in those servants of God whose moral virtues in heroic status have been proved as such by the Holy Mother Church and by the Sacred Roman Rota.’

Davanzati, however, admits the importance of the imagination as a real operative force that could produce effects outside the body of the imaginer, a kind of action at a distance. Vampires consequently are, in de Ceglia's words, 'the result of a collective suggestion, in which, however, the imagination of one person "effectively" acted on that of another, triggering a "spiritual epidemic".' This kind of argument surely could easily undermine the notion of true miracles, so Davanzati decided to subordinate medicine to theology:

‘From this it can be deduced that fear of the adversary is pointless, so by attributing so many almost miraculous operations to the imagination, damage is done to the virtue of real miracles and the canonisation of saints. The miracles of the latter will always be real miracles, each time, as previously said, when they happen concurrently with heroic virtues. When this is not the case, these same supposed miracles will always be considered the natural effects of fantasy.’

A miracle for Davanzati, as de Ceglia writes, ‘tautologically remained what theologically was decreed to be a miracle. The recognition of the efficient cause – natural vs. preter- and supernatural – depended on the individuation of the final cause: aetiology was subordinate to teleology (and theology). Vampires, in conclusion, were for him figments of the imagination, not because they were otherwise inexplicable from a scientific point of view, so much as because the miracle of their existence made no sense theologically. Nonetheless, had the foundations de fide of the reasoning been disowned, as was possible for the Protestants, the whole logical construction would have collapsed.’

Attending the Austrian Army

Just a couple of years after dealing with vampirism, Gerard van Swieten published a book on the most frequent diseases found among the troops in the field: Kurze Beschreibung und Heilungsart der Krankheiten welche am öftesten in dem Fedlager beobachtet werden was published in 1758, i.e. during the Seven Years' War, and deals with both major and minor afflictions among soldiers, diarrhea, fever, epistaxis, venereal diseases, they are all here with a description of remedies.

The book is not aimed at experienced doctors, but rather at all those people who attended on the numerous ill soldiers, but required more knowledge to identify ailments and diseases and know how to remedy them.

Van Swieten also supplies advice on hygiene like cleanliness and how to act in circumstances like e.g. rainy weather, when it is necessary to avoid the rain from entering the tents.

In The Austrian Army 1740-80: Specialist Troops (1995), Philip Haythornthwaite writes of the Austrian medical services:

'Although in general the Austrian soldier received better medical care than his contemporaries in many other armies, Austria did not possess a military medical academy until the 'Josephinium' was established in Vienna in 1785. The medical establishment was reorganizaed in 1746, and although a military surgical school was not created until 1781 (at the military hospital at Gumpendorf), from 1750-1751 the only medical personnel appointed to army positions were those who had been proved medically comptetent. This eliminated the half-trained amateur and those insufficiently skilled to practise medicine in a civilian capacity; both could be found in the medical services of other armies. (---) Above the staff surgeons and at the head of the medical department was the Protomedicus, who was responsible not only for the appointment of competent medical personnel but also for the organization of and medicinal supplies for the army's medical service. In consequence of putting conscientious individuals at the head of the medical organization, by the start of the Seven Years' War the Austrian wounded and sick probably received better treatment than those in any other army, though the constraints imposed by contemporary medical practice still rendered the plight of the wounded pitiable indeed.'

A Christmas Card

With the above look at part of a postcard from Freihermersdorf, I wish readers of this blog a merry christmas.

This was the site of the exhumation and cremation of several bodies suspected of posthumous magic in the winter of 1754-55. When news of the events arrived in Vienna, the court of Maria Theresa sent two prominents physicians, Wabst and Gasser, to investigate. Their report on this and similar incidents in the vicinity of Olomouc (Olmütz) led to Gerard van Swieten's famous commentaries on vampirism and the Empress' proscription of the superstitious handling of corpses.

Some years ago I spent a lot of time perusing texts and maps to locate Herm(er)sdorf. At the time not an easy task, because texts tend to only mention an approximate position, and there are more than one place that has been called something like Hermersdorf. Unfortunately, this uncertainty is also found in as recent a work as Anja Lauper's Die phantastische Seuche. Lauper follows Heiko Haumann'a opinion that Hermersdorf must be Temenice, today a part of Šumperk (in German Mährisch Schönberg) in Northern Moravia.

Haumann actually just states his opinion in a note ('Bei Hermesdorf handelt es sich vermutlich um ein Dorf bei Mährisch-Schönberg, das Heute Temenice heißt und mit Sumperk zusammengewachsen ist), adding that the research was done by Thomas Bürgisser. (Zeitschrift für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde 28 (2005) 1, p. 8)

Bernard Unterholzner, on the other hand, in his paper on the incident in Vampirismus und magia posthuma im Diskurs der Habsburgermonarchie, clearly identifies Hermersdorf as Svobodné Hermanice: 'Bei dem Ort in Oberschlesien, nahe der mährischen Grenze, handelte es sich um das heutige Svobodné Hermanice, das rund zehn Kilometer westlich von Opava liegt.' (p. 91)

Suffice it to say, it can be proved beyond doubt that Hermersdorf was Svobodné Hermanice, later on known as Freihermersdorf. In fact, if you look at other villages and towns associated with incidents of posthumous magic in the areas near Olomouc/Olmütz and Bruntál/Freudenthal, many of them are situated within a relatively small part of present day Poland and Czech Republic. E.g. just some ten kilometers to the North East you find Velké Heraltice (Groß Herrlitz), and some fifty kilometers to the South West Moravsky Beroun (Bärn) that I recently mentioned in a post on the term vampertione infecta. Both sites of the exhumation and destruction of bodies suspected of harming the living.

Of bats, rats, mummified corpses and Schlagobers

The olde blogger spent some days in Vienna this Summer. Actually, we hoped to escape the rain here in Denmark, but on the airplane I read in the Österreich that the Austrians themselves were fleeing the rain to go to Spain and Italy. Anyway, we arrived at our hotel just around the corner from the Stephansdom and Graben, and the Viennese weather was actually quite OK during most of our stay.

This time I got to visit the crypt under the Michaelerkirche, which was a creepy, but in some ways also enlightening experience. Photography was not allowed, so I must refer you to e.g. this web site for a view of the coffins and mumified corpses that are stored there. Much has happened to the human remains over the years, and we were told that the floor we were walking on top of was actually a layer of about 1,5 m of a mix of soil and human bones! Recently they have had problems with a bug (that has somehow come to Austria from New Zealand) which is devouring the old wooden coffins, so they have to cool part of the crypt to make it less attractive to the insects.

Less creepy is the Kaisergruft, where you can see the development of 'sarcophagus fashion' from Baroque, macabre ornaments to more almost plain sarcophagi, most notably in the difference from Maria Theresia to her son Joseph II.

Of particular interest to the subject of posthumous magic, one finds Karl Joseph von Lothringen in the Neue Gruft. He was bishop at Olomouc from 1694 to 1711, and Karl Ferdinand von Schertz dedicated his book Magia Posthuma to him.

I had also hoped to see the burial site of Gerard van Swieten in the Augustinerkirche, but unfortunately could not get access to that part of the church when I was there. I did, however, see the so-called Kaiserstöckl where he lived from 1751 until his death in 1772. This house, which Maria Theresia built for van Swieten, is located at one of Schönbrunn's gates, in Hietzing, a yellow building which is apparently a post office these days.

Apropos of medicine, there is a nice little guide book for those interested in the subject (and this was where I read about Kaiserstöckl): Wien für Mediziner: 15 Spaziergänge durch das alte medizinisches Wien by Wolfgang Regal and Michael Nanut, and it is also available in English as Vienna: A Doctor's Guide).




The zoological gardens at Schönbrunn, Tiergarten, was a particular surprise. I have never seen so large bats before, nor have I ever stood in the midst of a lot of small bats flying all around me. This was in the rain forest house, but there were also bats in a part of the zoo simulating life at night. There is even a detailed exhibition on bats, including the vampire bat, at the Naturhistorisches Museum, and we saw a couple of bats flying around in the Stadtpark one evening. Unfortunately, there was also a great number of rats walking around in the park, although mostly under the trees and bushes.

Apart from various zoological creatures, Frankenstein and Boris Karloff turned up in an installation at the Botanical Gardens, and Vlad Tepes lent a helping hand to the crucifixion of St. Andrew in the medieval section of the Unteres Belvedere. And, of course, Fuseli's Nightmare could famously be seen in Sigmund Freud's waiting room in Berggasse. Ernest Jones, who gave Freud the Nightmare black and white reproduction, was the author of On the Nightmare which includes a chapter on vampires. Considering how influential and recognized Freud was in my own country as well as in so many other places, I was surprised to learn that Freudianism had little impact in Austria until decades after WWII.

Otherwise it was a holiday not too dissimilar to that of other tourists. I saw the Hundertwasserhaus and a few other sights, and I certainly feel that I had enough Schlagobers for some time.

In central Vienna - as in many other large cities - a number of people try to amuse and entertain tourists and shoppers, including the guy in the photo above who appears to defy gravity. This to me shows that, perhaps, almost anything is possible in this city? Vienna is a pleasant place to stay, people are polite, and I haven't encountered any scams like the ones that you find in e.g. Rome and Paris.

De sagis magisque posthumis

For some years tranquil peace ruled in Moravia, but then ...

As Google Books put more and more books online, one can get to check up on some more references, and I recently noticed the Moraviæ historia politica et ecclesiastica from 1787 by Adolf Pilarz and František Adolf Moravec, i.e. a political and church history of Moravia. In the third part of the book, Pilarz and Moravetz note that after The War of the Austrian Succession, peace ruled in Moravia, and the area flourished for some years. However ... two kinds of superstitions infested Moravia, one of them being what 'the Hungarians call Vampires'. More precisely, Moravetz writes: 'de sagis magisque posthumis, quos Hungari passim Vampyros vocant,' which links posthumous witches and magicians with vampires.

The authors call this superstition an ancient (vetustus) error which has moved from the East (Oriens) to Poland, Hungary and Moravia, and defines it is a common belief that corpses of witches and magicians buried in cemetries return animated by a demon to suck the blood of the living. And, as we would expect, this belief is related to the find of cadavers full of blood and incorrupted (sanguine plena, atque incorrupta), although these signs can be explained through natural means.

Pilarz and Moravetz  then refer to a specific case, the well-known incident dated December 22 1754 concerning a woman of Polish background, Rosina Polakin, whose body was hardly corrupted after thirty days, and consequently cremated along with a number of other corpses. Baron and court physician van Swieten, however, refuted the belief, and Empress Maria Theresia in 1755 ordered these acts of superstition to be stopped.

Unheimliches Wien

A couple of days ago I read a proof of my paper for the proceedings of the 2009 conference on vampirism and magia posthuma in Vienna, so the book should be on its way within a not too distant future.

At the conference Peter Mario Kreuter mentioned an article in the German magazine Merian about the Hofkammerarchiv in Vienna. I recently got hold of a copy of this special issue on Vienna from July 1999 which contains six pages on the archive:

Wie konnte Grillparzer einen Vampir auf dem Friedhof finden? Und mit einem Kaiser in der Hand aus dem Gleichgewicht geraten? Die Antworten stehen im Wiener Hofkammer-Archiv.

Franz Grillparzer was Direktor from 1832 to 1856 of the archive in Johannesgasse 6, that 'smells of wood and dust and old paper'.

'Eines der Kennzeichen eines Archives ist seine gnadenlose Gleichgültigkeit, die der eines Lexikons um nichts nachsteht: In einem Regal finden sich die schönsten, eisblumenhaften Spitzenmuster aus Böhmen, während sich schon der folgende Akt mit dem Vampyrismus auseinandersetzt: "Nachdem die Anzeig beschehen, daß Arnont Pavle, der sich durch einen Fall vom Heuwagen den Hals gebrochen, bei Lebzeiten von der Erden eines Vambygrabes gegessen und sich mit dessen Blut beschmiret und deswegen nach seinem Thode vervambyret und würklich auch vier Personen zu Tode brach habe. Umb dies Übl einzustellen seind wir auf den Fridhoff gangen, um die verdächtigen Gräber öffnen zu lassen. Der Pavle wurde ausgegraben und dabei gefunden, daß er ganz unverwesen seye, auch ihme das frische Blut zu denen Augen, nasen, Mund und Ohren herausgeflossen, auch ihme neue Nägel an Händen und Füßen gewachsen. Weillen nun die Leuth daraus gesehen, daß er ein wirklicher Vambyr seye, so haben die denselben eine Pfahl durch das Herz geschlagen, wobei er einen Grächazer gethan, dann ihme den Kopf heruntergeschlagen und sambt dem Körper verbrennet.... Andere Tote, wo die Leiber so verwesen, wie es sich auf einen rechtmäßigen Leichnamb gehört, wiederumb in Ihre Gräber gelegt worden." (Ärztlicher Visitationsbericht, mit vier Zeugen, Hofkammer-Archiv Wien), steht darunter.'

Apropos of Vienna, last year a book on the more horrific sides of Vienna was published: Unheimliches Wien: Gruselige Orte, Schaurige Gestalten, Okkulte Experimente by Robert Bouchal and Gabriele Lukacs (Pichler Verlag), fully illustrated with a lot of gloomy photos and including a chapter revenants, prematurely buried and vampires. The vampire related parts focus on the places associated with Erzsébet Báthory and Eleonore Schwarzenberg, as well as the story of Gerhard van Swieten's involvement with vampires and magia posthuma. In this part some photos are included of the copy of the letter from Frombald on the Kisiljevo vampire case. Other parts deal with the Narrenturm and the Josephinum. So if you are going to or living in Vienna, this book could probably serve as a guide to some interesting sightseeing.




Some videos relating to the book can be found here.

Swieten's Vampyrismus as paperback

'Wo sind die Gesetze, welchen einen solchen Auspruch rechftertigen? Man bekennet, es seyen keine Gesetze vorhanden, hingegen zieht man zur Rechfertigung ganz kaltsinnig an: es sey also der Gebrauch.'

I recall having to wait some time and pay a lot of money to get a microfilm copy of the Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster (Augsburg, 1768) some years ago, because I wanted to read the Gerard van Swieten's appended remarks on vampires. I later found them included on the Vampir Prinzessin DVD and reprinted in the 100 Jahre Dracula issue of Maske und Kothurn (41. Jahrgang Heft 1-2) edited by Rainer M. Köppl and published in 1998.
Now, a paperback of the text has been published by Europaïscher Hochschulverlag. 40 pages for € 16.90, it is certainly much cheaper to obtain than the prints I made from a microfilm. But cheaper still is the Wikisource edition of the whole book that I link to in the right hand panel.

Of particular interest is the Italian edition of Swieten's text reprinted by S. F. Flaccovio Editore in 1988. It contains an essay on I Vampiri di Maria Teresa by Pietro Violante, as well as of Italian translations of some of her decrees on superstitious acts. It is actually still available at the price of € 9.30.

You can take a look inside the new book on German Amazon.