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Prologue from Original Sin to Eternal Life

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Prologue from Original Sin to Eternal Life E Prologue From Original Sin to Eternal Life or a broad contemporary public, the vampire has become a star, a media sensation from Hollywood. Bestselling authors such as Bram Stoker, Anne RiceF and Stephenie Meyer continue to fi re the imaginations of young and old alike, and bloodsuckers have achieved immortality through fi lms like Dracula, Interview with a Vampire and Tw i l i g h t . It is no wonder that, in the teenage bed- rooms of our globalized world, vampires even steal the show from Harry Potter. Th ey have long since been assigned individual personalities and treated with sympathy. Th ey may possess superhuman powers, but they are also burdened by their immortality and have to learn to come to terms with their craving for blood. Whereas the Southeast European vampire, discovered in the 1730s, underwent an Americanization and domestication in the media landscape of the twentieth century, the creole zombies that fi rst became known through the cheap novels and horror fi lms of the 1920s still continue to serve as brainless horror fi gures. Do bloodsuckers really exist and should we really be afraid of the dead? Th ese are the questions that I seek to tackle, following the wishes of my daughter, who was ten when I started this project. As a professional historian of Eastern Europe, I am also interested in the actual origins of the belief in vampires. Clearly, not every vampire fan is aware that Transylvania is a real place rather than a fi ctitious location. Th e Latin term, meaning the ‘Land beyond the Forest’, refers to the present-day Roma- nian region of the same name, which lies in the Carpathian range and has been inhabited since the Middle Ages by, among others, German, or ‘Saxon’, settlers. Th e impression, created by Bram Stoker, of Transylvania as the homeland of the vampire is also problematic, since vampires actually app eared relatively rarely in this region. Instead, in reading reports from the eighteenth century, one cannot avoid the impression that vampirism was encountered above all in the overlapping contact and border zones of the multinational states and empires of Europe. A sort of ‘vampire belt’ clearly stretched along the fron- tiers of Kievan Rus’ and the Tsarist Empire, the Polish Lithuanian Union and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Habsburg Empire and Prussia, all of which "THE VAMPIRE: Origins of a European Myth" by Thomas M. Bohn. https://berghahnbooks.com/title/BohnVampire Prologue F xi meet in the heart of Europe (see Map 0.1). Th erefore, in both a literal and a fi gurative sense, and in both geographical and metaphysical terms, the vampire constituted a border phenomenon. With regard to vampirism, I identify myself with those writers who, in their works, have already begun to attempt a reconnection of this phenomenon to its historical location, whether this be Elizabeth Kostova in her novel Th e Histo- rian, Markus Heitz in his fantasy novel Kinder des Judas (Children of Judas) or Fred Vargas (i.e. Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) in her crime novel Un lieu un- certain (An Uncertain Place). If we wish to trace the origins of the vampire, our attention must in fact be directed towards the Ottoman Empire or the Balkan Peninsula in the premodern period. However, we should also not overlook the Sarmatian lands of East Central Europe. Furthermore, I am also of the opinion that the image of the bloodsucker in the Latin West was formed long before the discovery of the vampire in the Danube-Balkan region. Accordingly, in this book, I will seek to rehabilitate the vampire as a European myth. Seen in historical terms, modern Europe was founded on the processes of state-creation and Christianisation, which reached a high point around the year 1000 AD. A key precondition for the emergence of the belief in vampires was the gradual replacement of the practice of cremation and the funeral pyre with that of entombment or burial in the earth. From this point onwards, the condi- tion of deceased corpses fi red the imaginations of the living. Th is was true both with regard to the role of blood, on the one hand, as the source of life and, on the other hand, to the dualism of the body and the soul. In the New Testament, we read, in a somewhat disturbing manner, that Jesus Christ gave his own fl esh and blood to his disciples in the form of bread and wine, as a sign of the new covenant. From the fourth century, the ecumenical creed of both the Roman Catholic and the Greek-Orthodox Churches has, alongside Christ’s crucifi xion and ascension to heaven, acclaimed the resurrection of the dead. Th e immor- tality of the soul and the physical return of the body are therefore preordained in Church doctrine. Common conceptions of death in Europe held that the divine plan for salvation envisaged that the body would fall to dust and that the soul would enter paradise. By contrast, how and why the dead were to spend their time in heaven or hell until the Last Judgment remained largely unclear. Following the pattern of biblical reports on the resurrection and ascension of Christ, the third day after death and the subsequent time period of forty days was also considered to be precarious for normal mortals. During this time, by holding rituals marking the taking of leave from the dead, those left behind were entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring the transition of the de- parted’s soul into heaven. However, the only information we have about the activities of the dead or ‘living corpses’ comes from a second or third-hand per- spective; hardly a single witness claims to have seen them with their own eyes. As a result, we are only ever dealing with fantasies. What, then, is this book really about? In essence, it is an investigation of disturbances to the peaceful "THE VAMPIRE: Origins of a European Myth" by Thomas M. Bohn. https://berghahnbooks.com/title/BohnVampire xii F Prologue taking of leave from the dead by the living and of the consequences emerging from these. Both have their underlying causes and manifestations in interper- sonal confl icts, which have not been resolved by death, or in the outbreak of mysterious diseases, which gave rise to numerous suppositions about a root cause of the epidemic. Regardless of this, there is no need to fear the dead. Here and there, they merely have to serve as scapegoats. What is truly troubling for the living is only ever the guilty conscience arising from moral transgressions or feelings of impotence in the face of a deadly threat. Such forms of stress fi nd their expression in feelings of fear and in nightmare visions. Apparitions, the spooky and the supernatural have plagued human minds since the beginnings of time. Whereas, in popular belief, ‘ghosts’ are generally linked to the concrete appearance of persons returning from the dead, ‘spirits’ represented transcendental phenomena of a very diff erent shade. In terms of superstitious beliefs, their spectrum ranges from natural spirits to spirits of the dead and, in the context of the Bible, from angels to demons. Since popular piety initially ascribed an actual physical presence to those returning from the dead, the Western Church in the Middle Ages sought to replace the belief in ‘revenants’ with the belief in ‘poor souls’ who, in purgatory, found a third place between heaven and hell. In opposition to this, the era of the Reformation saw, on the one hand, the strengthening of the belief in a diabolic possession of revenant bodies and, on the other hand, the growing accusation that supposed revenants were nothing more than fi gments of the imaginations of the living brought about by Satan. By contrast, the horrifi c visions of the modern period once more viewed the ‘undead’ as reanimated, albeit soulless, bodies. In the fi nal analysis, ghosts are to be seen as dead spirits who, it is claimed, both bring mes- sages from the afterlife and also, motivated by vengeance, seek to gain retribu- tion for the injustices they experienced during their lifetimes. Since the Western construct of the fi gure of the vampire is essentially the product of a literary discourse, this book begins with a discussion of the rel- evant motifs from Eastern Europe in the Introduction. At the same time, a framework will be constructed from this for the discussions to follow. In the fi rst chapter, taking the conceptions of revenancy in the Latin West, we will then examine the Central European belief in so-called Nachzehrer in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Th is concerns a more harmless and in the meantime largely forgotten variant of the vampire fi gure in the German-speaking world. Nachzehrers are allegedly active deceased persons who, whilst they remain in their graves and can only be identifi ed through a widely audible chewing on their funeral shrouds, do nevertheless threaten their relatives with serious dis- eases in a telepathic manner. In this context, in a further step, we also investi- gate the specifi c characteristics of the Eastern European belief in vampires. A second chapter will then demonstrate that the so-called upyr or upiór was al- ready known in the territories of Kievan Rus’ and the Polish-Lithuanian Union in c. 1000 AD. Following the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in "THE VAMPIRE: Origins of a European Myth" by Thomas M. Bohn. https://berghahnbooks.com/title/BohnVampire Prologue F xiii 1453, the Ecumenical Patriarchate moved towards an unconventional inter- pretation of the Greek variant of the revenant in order to preserve its authority over the Orthodox population.
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