On the trail

Although I have had time to start reading Hagen Schaub's book on the history of vampires, I doubt that I will find time to finish it and write about it for a number of days. Suffice it to say, that it definitely explores some of the avenues that are along the lines of this blog and my own interest in 'living corpses'.

It's curious that a book that needs be must debunk the notion of 'vampire fangs' itself is being sold by showing those teeth on the cover :-)

Nostalgia

I have in my possession an old Danish comic book on ghosts, which is actually a translation of an original comic book from Classics International that published the well-known Illustrated Classics series. Published in 1961, which is a couple of years before I was born, I must have purchased it in some second hand book shop as a child (as a child I spent a lot of my pocket money on second hand books and comics) and for some reason I have kept it ever since.


The title translates as 'Superstition and Ghosts', and it was, of course, issue number 13 in a series on 'The world in text and pictures'. It contains a number of relatively archetypical examples of stories of ghosts and premonition, like e.g. the story of a man giving a girl a ride only to find that she was the ghost of a girl who was killed in a car accident and is buried in the cemetery where he saw her waiting for a bus.

Another example is poltergeist phenomena, which is also reported in some cases of magia posthuma. Like premonition, it is a subject that was of particular interest to those involved in parapsychology, a subject that was in vogue when the comic book was published, and a lot of the contents are concerned with 'telepathy', 'telechinesis' etc.

It's quite curious to be reminded of how popular 'paranormal research' was back then, as no one seems to care about it today. Well, I suppose it should be obvious that it was a dead end like the 'theories' of Von Däniken and others that were also widely studied when I was a child and a young man. I'm sure there are internet groups that cherish these theories and collect 'Forteana', but I'm not going to look for them. Even the subject of vampirism has its cultists, and I don't care to spend any time on them.

But it is very interesting to study how the conception of revenants and related 'supernatural' phenomena have changed over the years, e.g. from the quite corporeal revenants of earlier times to the rather incorporeal 'grey ladies' and onto the pseudo-scientific concepts of parapsychology. Unfortunately, very few books attempt to describe this evolution and explain it in terms of how our world view has changed over e.g. the past milennium.

The old comic book on ghosts isn't very well drawn, and maybe it's just because I read it as a child, but I think it does say something essential about the subject in a way that makes you say: 'What if?'

Click on the two pages from the comic book to see them in a larger format.

Criminalia and Curiosa

The German publisher Festa Verlag has published a number of volumes of curious and horrific tales and events. One of them, Kirchschlagers Criminal- und Curiositäten-Cabinett 2, contains a few pages on Peter Plogojowitz. An excerpt from the book is available.

Blutspuren

In my recent list of new books on vampires, I mentioned Hagen Schaub's Blutspuren: Die Geschichte der Vampire. Auf den Spuren eines Mythos (Leykam Verlag, 272 pages). Today I found time to go to the post office to pick up the copy I had ordered of this book. Never quite knowing what to expect of this kind of book, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that it actually is a book more or less along the lines of my own interest in magia posthuma and vampires. I hope to have more time to look at it sometime this weekend, but I can inform you that Hagen Schaub has studied history, German literary history and geography, and is the co-author of a book on mummies in Austria. But more on the book, when I have had time for a closer look!

Vampire art

Although purely a matter of art, I suppose that some of you might - also in light of recent ponderings of what to do with a lot of money - be interested in this blog post concerning the recent sale of one of Munch's vampire paintings.

What a day for a daydream...

Actually, the question asked by Abebooks - before answering it in bibliophiliac fashion - was:

'We're all counting our pennies pretty carefully right now. In these economically uncertain times, it's tempting to daydream. What if you had unlimited funds? A swimming pool filled with champagne? Pillows stuffed with genuine dodo down? What if you won the lottery, or an eccentric, distant and obscenely wealthy relative left you everything?'

And, apart from trying to save children from famine and supporting various struggling artists or whatever, of course, I would probably take a couple of years off - OK, it's quite hard because there are other things that I feel that I have devoted myself to, but... - to devote myself to travelling to sites relevant to magia posthuma and vampires and exploring the history of this subject, publishing source texts in luxury annotated editions etc., and in cooperation with various like minded people trying to write that elusive book to end all books on the subject...

Bibliophilia

Those of us who are inclined towards bibliophilia will probably be fascinated by this list of rare and expensive books currently for sale on Abebooks. The prices are astronomical - $ 1.800.000 for a book! - so there's no Cosmographia for me.

Those who are inclined towards fictional vampires will be drawn in by this edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with its reference to 'the foul German spectre - the Vampyre', see e.g. James B. Twitchell's The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Duke University Press, 1981), itself a nice book for bibliophiles because of the dust jacket with the two holes punched out to look like the mark of a vampire's bite on the neck of the woman in one Fuseli's Nightmare paintings.

One may wonder what the price would be of an original copy of von Schertz's Magia Posthuma. I know of at most three (3) copies of this book, so it would probably fetch a high price if set for sale on auction, but who knows.

Fortunately, an increasing number of those early books are now available digitally. That's not quite satisfactory for those who like to have a physical copy of the original book, but we are at least allowed the possibility of reading the text. Anyway, the owner of that edition of Jane Eyre which costs $ 122.107,03 probably wouldn't dare to sit comfortably on the settee reading it. He or she would probably rather buy a cheap paperback edition in order not to damage the expensive investment.

Nosferatu annotated

Following up from my list of annotated editions of Dracula, I always find it interesting to see what they have to say about the origins of the word 'nosferatu' in connection with Abraham Van Helsing's words about the 'Un-Dead':

'Before we do anything, let me tell you this; it is out of the lore and experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers of the Un-Dead. When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead becomes themselves Un-Dead, an prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die; or again, last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have fill us with horror.' (chapter XVI, 29 September)

So here is what the editors of the various annotated editions have to say:

Leonard Wolf (1975, 1993): 'A Romanian word meaning "not dead".'

Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu (1979): 'Stoker got this name from Emily Gerard's book The Land Beyond the Forest; the word may be a distortion of one of the Romanian words for devil, necuratru, which also means 'unclean'.'

Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1997): In a note to the appended excerpt from Emily Gerard's Transylvanian Superstitions they say: 'The word nosferatu appears in no Romanian or Hungarian dictionary, nor in any standard text on Eastern European folklore available to Gerard. It is possible she mistook a usage of the Romanian adjective nesuferit ("plaguesome") in connection with vampires and inadvertantly coined the now familiar term.'

Clive Leatherdale (1998, 2006): 'The word comes from 'Transylvanian Superstitions'.' He also comments on Van Helsing's speech by saying that 'to claim that vampirism spreads exponentially cannot be sustained, for otherwise the world would have long been vampirised.'

Leslie S. Klinger (2008): 'The term "nosferatu" is borrowed from Emily Gerard's 1885 "Transylvanian Superstitions," although subsequent scholars believe she misunderstood the actual Transylvanian word. For example, J. Gordon Melton (The Vampire Book) states that the word is a derivative of the Greek word nosophoros, meaning "plague carrier," whereas David Skal (V is for Vampire) contends that Gerard "must have recorded a corrupted or misunderstood version of the Roumanian adjective 'nesuferit' from the Latin 'not to suffer.'" Klinger then adds: 'In Mel Brooks's delicious Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), Van Helsing (played by Brooks) advises the disturbed Jonathan Harker (Steven Weber) about the recently turned Lucy. "She's alive?" Harker asks. Van Helsing replies, "She's Nosferatu." Harker blurts out: "She's Italian?"'

Election time

Inspired by another blog, I find it appropriate to promote the following video:

Modern 'vampirism'

In my recent post on Rita Voltmer's Hexen. Wissen was stimmt, I mentioned that she says that she refers to modern claims of vampirism in Africa. She refers to a book by Wolfgang Behringer which I haven't seen. However, some claims of 'vampirism', which in this case refers to blood drinkers who may not necessarily be dead people, are investigated in a book called Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa by Luise White (University of California Press, 2000). I admit that I haven't read it, and it isn't really about the vampires that this blog is about it, but from what I have noticed it looks like a very interesting book about history writing:

'Historians should, I think, find vampire stories good to write about, just as the people quoted in this book found vampires good to talk about. They make for better, more comprehensive histories. As chapter 1 argues, vampires themselves are revealing beings: a separate race of bloodsucking creatures, living among humans on fluids that they extract from human bodies; vampires mark a way in which relations of race, of bodies, and of tools of extraction can be debated, theorized, and explained. No vampire stands alone. The incorporation of vampire stories in any historical reconstruction allows for a description of these debates. And that description alone should generate a more nuanced reconstruction of the past. The reconstruction does not come from vampire stories alone, but rather from how those stories feed off the other stories through which a past is known. The vampire stories that prostitutes told in colonial Nairobi, for example, did not change the way I thought about the history of that city, but they did allow me to access changing ideas about gender and culture, about menstruation and property and its transmission in colonial times.' (p. 307-8)

If you're intrigued, go to the excerpt available on Amazon to know a bit more about those 'vampires'.