Sturm und Völker 40th Anniversary

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first edition of Dieter Sturm and Klaus Völker's classic anthology, Von denen Vampiren oder Menschensaugern: Dichtungen und Dokumenten, originally published by Carl Hanser Verlag. It has been reprinted and published in new editions several times, including paperbacks that only contain certain parts of the original book, making it perhaps the most bestselling anthology of vampire fact and fiction!

Certainly, Sturm and Völker's book must have been a very important book for many who have become fascinated by this curious subject. This was the book that first introduced me to the text of Flückinger's Visum et Repertum, as well as to e.g. Luther talking about the mastication of the dead in his Tischreden. I can recall struggling with reading and understanding the old German texts back in my youth, and studying the extensive bibliography. This was indeed a ground breaking and inspirational work, and the continued reprinting is a testament to the quality and scope of the work. In the light of what has been printed later on, e.g. Hamberger's anthology, Von denen Vampiren is no longer up to date, but it is still a good starting point for anyone with an interest in vampires who can read German.

Both Klaus Völker and Dieter Sturm are around 70 now and have no doubt been active in various areas during the past 40 years, but for some of us 'Sturm und Völker' is simply another way of referring to their 1968 anthology Von denen Vampiren oder Menschensaugern!

Die Geisterwelt

Nicolaus Equiamicus has kindly recommended both this blog and Rob Brautigam's Shroudeater web site. Another book edited by Equiamicus has just been published, Die Geisterwelt. Apparently, a book originally published around the middle of the 18th Century, it deals with witches, werewolves, vampires, fairies and much more. More information is available at the blog of Equiamicus.

Handling a suicide

The above illustration is from the 16th Century Schilling-Kronik from Luzern in Schwitzerland and illustrates a practice used to prevent the corpses of suicides to return and haunt the living, either as a revenant or as the cause of bad weather and other calamities: The corpse - in this case that of a monk - is put in a cask and thrown into the river. The practice is known from medieval times as well as the early modern period. Unfortunately, I only have the illustration in black and white.

New Annotated Dracula

As those of you who read this blog as a feed probably aren't aware of comments left by other readers, I would like to mention that the editor of a new annotated edition of Stoker's Dracula left a comment here.

The silly season

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about a poll concerning the superstitions of modern day Danes. Now, a few days ago I concluded that 'the silly season' has begun, because another newspaper published yet another poll on the same subject. The above newspaper front page says: Is there anyone out there?, and claims that 1 out of 4 Danes believe in ghosts, and that no less than 1 out of 6 have had an experience with a ghost!

Well, personally I find the text below more interesting. It's a scan of a 1732 letter mentioning the Medvedja vampire case!

Stoker's notes

As I keep saying: this blog is not about Dracula, however, I think a lot of people will be pleased to know that McFarland will be publishing a facsimile edition of Bram Stoker's Notes for Dracula this fall or winter. Annotated and transcribed by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, this will be first time that the complete notes will be published, finally enabling every scholar or Dracula buff to study these notes for a better understanding of the genesis of the novel Dracula.

Dark cultural history

The person who uses the pseudonyms Nicolaus Equiamicus and Abraham Silberschmidt as editor and translator of recent editions of Ranft, Calmet, and other 18th Century authors of books on vampires, has launched a web site and blog, both titled Dunkle Kulturgeschichte, Dark cultural history, focusing on what's true, false and strange about witches, vampires, demonology and more!

Speaking of blogs and the darker sides of cultural history, some of you may find the engravings concerning the Ars moriendi on this blog interesting.

The Complete Book of Vampires

I recently acquired Leonard R. N. Ashley's The Complete Book of Vampires. Ashley is a Professor Emeritus and the author of several books, including a series of complete books on 'occult' themes. The vampire book is a mixed bag of all sorts of information gathered from a vast number of other books, all presented in a very entertaining manner. In the preface Ashley says that 'the book attempts, as do all the other books in my series, to bring scholarly research to all readers in a user-friendly sort of way and to entertain as it educates.' I honestly find that it is more entertainment than a scholarly book, as he doesn't really try to establish any genuine context for understanding e.g. the portion from Van Swieten's commentaries on vampires that he translates. So this is in short an ertaining introduction that will no doubt delight the casual reader, but is of very little use, if any, for the study of the historical aspects of magia posthuma.

International Vampire

So what could this blogger be doing? Well, it would probably be too boring to mention all that has kept me busy lately, but currently I'm going through a lot of my books and papers to try and clear out what I might do without so I can get a little more room for, say, new and interesting books on the subject of posthumous magic :-) Anyway, this business has also led to a few discoveries of interesting stuff. I am particularly amazed at how many magazines (fanzines?) on vampires I have lying around, mostly from the Eighties and Nineties. And as I had come to believe that it was an error on my part to think that I had a couple of issues of International Vampire, it was very nice to find three issues. This was a magazine published by Rob Brautigam, the webmaster of the Shroudeater web site. The final issue, no 20, is shown on top of the other issues in the photo below, and was published in May 1996. I notice that my name is mentioned in that issue :-)

A few other magazines or fanzines were mentioned in a post that I wrote one year ago.

Czech magia posthuma

Incredibly, almost a month has passed since my last post. I hope to be more active in the future.

Anyway, I happened to switch to the History Channel last weekend and found myself watching Michael Bell in a documentary about vampires. Unfortunately, I haven't identified the title of this documentary, but it's from 2007, and the major part concerns vampires and magia posthuma in the Czech republic, featuring anthtropologist Giuseppe Maiello and archaeologist Jaroslav Spacek. You can read about both and listen to an interview in English with Maiello here.


The documentary is a bit inaccurate on the sources for the interest in vampires in 18th Century Europe, but otherwise it contains some interesting insights into the Czech archaeological evidence of magia posthuma.