Vampire Forensics (20 page)

The Prince of Hizen has fallen in love with a “lady of rare beauty, called O Toyo” who, unknown to him, is throttled to death by a giant cat and buried beneath the veranda. The cat then assumes O Toyo’s beautiful form and, lamia-like, begins preying on the prince while he sleeps. When eventually discovered, the beautiful woman transforms back into a cat, springs onto the roof, and gets away.

But not for long.

In classic fairy tale fashion, the cat “fled to the mountains, and did much mischief among the surrounding people, until at last the Prince of Hizen ordered a great hunt, and the beast was killed.”

That is one of the few vampire stories found in the monster-rich folklore of Japan. Fragments, and occasionally entire poems, from ancient Japan mention encounters with dead people out walking, and one poem in particular somehow protects its bearer should he meet up with such a strolling corpse. Yet these are only vestiges. Sepulchers from the Jomon period (4000 to 250 B.C.) have been opened in which skeletons were curled up, stretched out, or had stones placed on chest or head. Archaeologists still puzzle over some bodies buried in fetal positions, wondering whether they signify a return to the womb or represent precautions taken against the return of dead people. Even touching a decomposing corpse demands a purification rite, and Yomi, the Japanese land of the dead, is the decomposing corpse writ large: a domain of impurity that, like most underworlds, is also the source of eventual regeneration.

Yet, the exquisite refinement that is uniquely Japanese extended even to the ancient tomb. Mitford noted how the “rich and noble are buried in several square coffins, one inside the other, in a sitting position; and their bodies are partially preserved from decay by filling the nose, ears, and mouth with vermilion. In the case of the very wealthy, the coffin is completely filled in with vermilion.”

Japanese folklore had its share of demons, baby eaters, and ghouls, as Lafcadio Hearn made known in his
In Ghostly Japan.
The 19th-century literary critic and travel writer also belonged to that first generation of Westerners enraptured by Japan. Yet, he discovered something ineffably eerier in the appearance of a fleet of miniature “ghost ships.” During the Bon—a three-day festival of the dead held each year in late summer—tiny ship models, each bearing their own little working lanterns, were set afloat on the sea at night. Hearn swam out into the ocean to observe the spectacle firsthand:

So he whispered a hurried Buddhist farewell, then struck out for the shore.

R
ARE
S
IGHTINGS

Voyage across the vast Pacific, and the vampire gets only more elusive. In Melanesia, where chiefs were once buried standing up with just their heads emerging from the sand, the dead are envisioned as eating lizards and excrement, among other unpleasantness. In New Caledonia, the dead are likely to return in deceptive form, like that of a living man, but they can be detected at night because they snore, or by the more reliable sign that their body disappears and leaves only the head visible. In north Malekula, the dead are ever present, their skulls arranged on a flat stone in the men’s lodge, where people invoke them by spitting continuously in their direction.

Though such examples can be dug up indefinitely, few vampires are found.

Anthropologist George R. Stetson discovered evidence in Captain Cook’s voyages that, as Stetson put it, the “Polynesians believed that the vampires were the departed souls, which quitted the grave…to creep by night into the houses and devour the heart and entrails of the sleepers, who afterward died.” Other scholars, by contrast, have come up empty-handed. As in so many cultures worldwide, however, those of the South Seas warn the living that ominous occurrences should be expected when burial rituals for the dead are not observed, or if their resting places are disturbed later on.

A vampire tradition may not exist in the New World, either—but that hardly renders its every element absent. Among the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes region, for example, the soul that failed to enter the next world was doomed to return and to reanimate its body. In a Cherokee legend published in the
Journal of American Folklore
in 1892, some folklorists perceive an explanation of tuberculosis. A “Demon of Consumption,” goes the tale, once lived in a cave and possessed an iron finger. At night he would steal out, impersonate a member of a given family, enter his house, “select his victim, begin fondling his head, and run his soft fingers through his hair until the unsuspecting victim would go to sleep. Then with his iron finger would he pierce the victim’s side and take his liver and lungs, but without pain. The wound would immediately heal, leaving no outward mark.” With no memory of the assault, the victim would go about his business, growing weaker by the day until he wasted away altogether and died.

Stetson, too, singled out a Cherokee tale. “There are in that tribe,” he wrote, “quite a number of old witches and wizards who thrive and fatten upon the livers of murdered victims.” Like medieval demons, they gather around those on their deathbeds, tormenting and eventually killing them. But mere death does not end the agony. After burial, the Cherokee demons dig up the body, remove the liver, and feast upon it. “They thus lengthen their own lives by as many days as they have taken from his,” Stetson continued. “In this way they get to be very aged, which renders them objects of suspicion. It is not, therefore, well to grow old among the Cherokees.”

Folklorist Stith Thompson includes this Abenaki tale in his
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature:
An old wizard had died and was laid in the branches of a tree in a burial grove. One evening, an Indian and his wife passed by, looking for a place to spend the night. They set up camp beneath the tree and cooked their food. Glancing up, the woman “saw long dark things hanging among the tree branches.” Those were merely the dead from long ago, her husband explained. He then unaccountably fell fast asleep. But the wife, understandably, could not close an eyelid:

When the body of the dead wizard was taken down and unwrapped, the “mouth and face were covered with fresh blood.”

Shift that setting to Russia and exchange the grove for a graveyard, and you would have a classic folkloric vampire tale.

Q
UICK OR
D
EAD?

“Zombi!—the word is perhaps full of mystery even for those who made it,” marveled Lafcadio Hearn, who washed up on Martinique after leaving Japan. Often erroneously credited with introducing the word
zombie
in its present meaning into English, in an 1889
Harpers
article, Hearn found that in Martinique, it applied to a wide range of goblins, specters, and other monsters of the nursery, but never to the dead. It was a word, he acknowledged, that must have “special strange meanings.”

Our modern word
zombie
has certainly taken a strange odyssey. It actually appeared in English 70 years earlier, in Robert Southey’s 1819
History of Brazil.
Describing an independent ex-slave republic near Pernambuco in the 1690s, Southey stated that its chief was called Zombi, which was the “name for the Deity, in the Angolan tongue.” Noting that the militantly Catholic Portuguese, colonizers of both Brazil and Angola, translated
Zombi
as “devil,” Southey checked certain books of religious instruction that were printed in both Portuguese and Angolan: “There I found that N’Zambi is the word for Deity.”

From deity to walking corpse is a very large leap, but perhaps the devil has something to do with it after all; missionaries and colonial officials denigrated native gods everywhere as demons. Lexicographers have been combing the jungles of African etymology for decades, hunting for the origins of
zombi.
Many have sided with Southey. In Kimbundu, the language of Angola, they find the word rendered as
nzambi
(“god”) or
zumi
(“ghost” or “departed spirit”). Other linguists derive greater enlightenment from Kikongo, a related language, where
zumi
means “fetish” and
nvumbi
is a body deprived of its soul. All point to the region bracketing the mouth of the Congo River, from Angola in the south to Gabon in the north.

The best-known zombie hails from a different hemisphere entirely. It is the grisliest component in the lurid assemblage of features—including pins stuck in effigy dolls, child sacrifice, and cannibalism—that for generations constituted the popular conception of Haitian voodoo. There, the zombie is a mindless if ambulatory corpse, like those spotted working in a sugarcane field by American writer William B. Seabrook. An avowed cannibal himself—he claimed to have shared with an African chief a human rump steak that was “so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal”—Seabrook spent months in Haiti while researching his 1929 book
The Magic Island
.

The zombies that Seabrook claimed to have encountered had “staring, unfocused, unseeing” eyes. Their faces were “not only expressionless, but incapable of expression,” and they harvested the cane stalks in a kind of unconscious suspended animation, showing no response even to Seabrook’s touch. Could these have been living men, put under a cataleptic spell by certain “substances,” recognized by the Haitian
code pénal,
that “without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less prolonged”? Perhaps. Yet in theory, at least, they also might have been reanimated corpses, bereft of speech and free will.

In Haiti, it seems, the sorcerer can suck a man’s soul out through the crack of his door and bottle it. This proves fatal; once the victim is buried, the wizard—like the resurrectionists of 18th-century England—sneaks into the graveyard and digs him up. After due propitiations to death gods, the wizard uncorks the bottle and waves it back and forth beneath the corpse’s nose. This waft of his own soul reanimates the dead man, but the wizard then promptly applies some baleful herb to ensure he remains a mindless slave.

Alternatively, the wizard can simply wait until somebody dies and then, like sorcerers in Gabon, revive the body by recalling its soul—which, if not still lingering inside the cadaver, is at least hovering nearby. Either way, time is of the essence: Once decomposition sets in, the dead body is useless as a slave. It might just as well be transformed into animal meat and sold in the market. Unsurprisingly, it is reputed to spoil quickly.

Waiting to drop down upon the unwary, multitudes of bloodsucking, bloodcurdling creatures infest the forests of the African imagination—just as they do the Indian and the Malaysian. Whether or not he originated in the cult of an African snake god, the zombie is not a bloodsucker. Nor is he—despite the mindless cannibals of moviedom—a midnight predator. Rather, a zombie is simply a reanimated corpse, directed by a sorcerer. In this shaman-centered world of divisible souls and of cadavers restored to dimly fluttering life, we can glimpse yet another clue to the origins of the primitive vampire.

The deeper in time we venture—and the farther from Eurasia—the more elusive the vampire grows. He may not appear at all times and in all places. One element, though, seems universal: The dead body must undergo a fixed sequence of changes before being reduced to its fundamental form, the skeleton. That transition, from demise to dissolution, is everywhere deemed a dangerous interlude for both the quick and the dead.

I
N
1781,
IN THE
C
AUCASUS
M
OUNTAINS
near what is now North Ossetia, Russia, a traveler named Stöder witnessed a gripping and no doubt ancient ceremony. A young woman had just been struck and killed by lightning. Immediately afterward, the residents of her village, heedless of the storm, rushed to her body, crying joyously and dancing in a circle around her corpse while singing a song to Elias, or Elijah the Thunderer—the ancient Indo-European god of storms and lightning, draped in the more acceptable garments of an Old Testament prophet.

The dead girl was dressed in new clothes and placed in a coffin atop a platform. For eight days, everyone—including the girl’s parents, sisters, and husband—celebrated. A fire was kept burning, and all work was suspended. Any expression of grief was thought to be a sin against Elijah. Present at the ritual was a youth who had himself survived a lightning strike, which gave him special status as a servant and messenger of Elijah. He sang and danced, then fell into convulsions; when he opened his eyes, he told what he had seen in the heavenly company of Elijah, naming previous lightning victims who were standing at Elijah’s side.

On the eighth day, the dead girl was laid on a new cart, pulled by a pair of oxen with white spots, and paraded through the neighboring villages, accompanied by singing youths and relatives who collected gifts of livestock and food. Then the oxen were turned loose; the patch of grass on which they stopped nearby was designated the burial spot. The coffin was placed on a rectangle of stones several feet high; next to it villagers erected a pole, on which they stretched the skin and head of a goat. Here, everyone feasted.

Remarkably similar ceremonies were once reported all over the Caucasus—among the few commonalities in a fragmented region where each valley otherwise seemed to be its own tribal enclave, speaking its own language and practicing its own traditions. In some places, the lightning-seared body was left on the platform until it decomposed. In others, the body might be hung from a tree for three days while dances and sacrifices took place. Sometimes a “banquet of the thunderstruck” was held on the anniversary of the unfortunate soul’s death. And always the victim’s livestock were released into pastures, specially marked to warn the shepherds away.

Most important, a nimbus of the holy surrounded the lightning’s victim. The survivor was endowed with prophetic powers, to be sure, but the dead were assumed to be sitting among the heavenly elite. Whether quick or dead, these people were charged with a divine energy; they were
tabu, hieros, sacer,
all meaning “consecrated, holy, untouchable”—and “terrifying.” For it’s not the lightning, but what it illuminates: The joy evident in the community often hid a deeper fear, because the newly dead were believed to enjoy sudden access to supernatural powers. And “primitive man,” as anthropologist Sir James Frazer put it in 1933, saw the handiwork of the dead everywhere, particularly “in earthquakes, thunderstorms, drought, famine, disease and death. No wonder that he regards the supposed authors of such evils with awe and fear, and seeks to guard himself against them by all the means at his command.”

T
HE
P
OWER OF THE
P
ERISHED

In
Curiosities of Olden Times
(1895), the English reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, best known for penning the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” quotes two lines from the priest officiating at the funeral of
Hamlet
’s Ophelia, who has drowned herself in a brook: “For charitable prayers / Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.”

“Unquestionably it must have been customary in England,” Reverend Baring-Gould observes, “thus to pelt a ghost that was suspected of the intention to wander. The stake driven through the suicide’s body was a summary and complete way of ensuring that the ghost would not be troublesome.”

Fear of the dead: Just as it has cast its dank shadow over myth and legend worldwide, so too is it apparent in the tangible artifacts of funerary practices. In graves thousands of years old, skeletons have been found staked, tied up, buried facedown, decapitated, pinned with arrows, crushed by boulders, partially cremated, or exhumed and then reburied—all well-attested ways of preempting the depredations of wandering corpses.

The ancestors are the apotheosized dead. Having been gathered unto their forefathers, they now dwell in an idealized, timeless realm. The recently dead are another story: No matter who they are—parents, siblings, children, friends—they are often conceived as resentful, aggressive, and willing to use their newly enhanced powers against the living. As anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington wrote in 1991, “[t]he corpse is feared because, until its reconstruction in the beyond is complete, part of its spiritual essence remains behind, where it menaces the living with the threat of further death.” So mortuary rites were devised primarily to help the spirit adjust to its new status during this perilous period, to push it on down the line, and to isolate it from the living.

Among the forest tribes of South America, dead bodies were often buried in a fetal position somewhere out in the woods. There were no cemeteries, because cemeteries “incorporate” the dead into the larger community. These tribes wished to do the opposite: They wanted to exclude the deceased, and even banish their memory. Nevertheless, the spirits of the recently dead were believed to wander about at night, sowing illness in their wake.

Occasionally, after a member of the community died, people simply abandoned their village altogether. Sometimes they indulged in a bit of preliminary flattery instead, as among the Bororo of Mato Grosso in Brazil: A death would be followed by an elaborate, two-stage burial. First, the body was interred, and it was permitted to remain for several weeks while ritual hunts and dances took place to honor the spirit. Next, the body was exhumed and defleshed. The skeleton was then painted with
urucu
—a red dye from a local shrub—and plastered with feathers. In a final indignity, it was placed in a basket and cast into the river.

“There is almost no end to the expedients adopted for getting rid of the dead,” marveled Reverend Baring-Gould:

The primary defense against such malevolent spirits was a good offense—that is, the proper care of their dead bodies. “It is affirmed that persons who have been struck dead by lightning do not decay, and for that reason the ancients neither burnt them nor buried them,” wrote Benedictine exegetist Dom Augustin Calmet in the 18th century. The “reason they are not subject to corruption is because they are as it were embalmed by the sulphur of the thunder-bolt, which serves them instead of salt.”

But “unenlightninged” bodies
are
subject to corruption, and the history of disposing of such noxious corpses is novel indeed. It has ranged from exposing them to scavengers, to burning them to cinders, to burying them in the ground, to simply eating them. The sequence has varied from place to place; most cultures have had recourse to some mixture of all these elements.

Not that it has helped them understand one another. Two and a half millennia ago, the Greek historian Herodotus told how King Darius of Persia once gathered some Greeks who practiced cremation of their dead and asked what it would take to eat them instead:

D
EATH
L
IFTS
U
S
U
P
W
HERE
W
E
B
ELONG

Several centuries ago, when travelers returned from the Caucasus Mountains and reported having seen dead bodies carefully laid in tree branches, they were describing a tradition that was already venerable when the kings of ancient Colchis—keepers of the Golden Fleece—ruled the area. Deliberate exposure is perhaps humankind’s oldest way of disposing of cadavers.

Chimpanzees, when faced with the corpse of a fellow chimp, prod it gingerly a bit and then take to their heels, abandoning it to forest scavengers. Early hominids probably fared no better. “When they died,” archaeologist Timothy Taylor wrote in 2002, “there was little to stop ape-men, ape-women, and ape-children from being torn to pieces. The dead were edible. Vultures, hyenas, crocodiles, rodents, insects, fish and bacteria each took the meat, blood, and fat they wanted. What remained was scattered and trampled, then shattered and powdered by wind and rain.”

At some point in the distant past, our forebears made a virtue—or something like it—of necessity deliberately by exposing human bodies to scavengers. Not just any scavengers, however. Nearly everywhere there was a decided preference for birds of prey, no doubt because they descend from the heavens. Whether standing in the desiccating wind of the Dakota prairie or hanging from the branches of an Australian eucalyptus, exposure platforms therefore served a dual purpose: They kept terrestrial scavengers at bay and brought the body nearer to heaven, where the vultures wheeled.

At Çatal Hüyük, a Neolithic village excavated in southern Turkey, 8,000-year-old wall paintings seem to depict vultures alighting on headless corpses. The “birds” might instead represent women dressed as vultures, however, engaging in some long-forgotten funerary rite. If so, they may be prototypes of the classical harpies (called snatchers in Greek)—ravenous, loathsome mythological birds with the faces of women. Certainly vultures carried an association with the divine into historical times. The Vaccaei, for example, who inhabited parts of Spain and Portugal during the third century B.C.E., sneered at those who succumbed to disease; let them be cremated. Death in battle was the nobler quietus; the bodies of those so righteously slain should be entrusted to nothing less than vultures.

For more than 300 years, the Parsees of Mumbai have been famous for their Towers of Silence: Atop these circular stone platforms, they expose their dead for vultures to devour. Earth, fire, and water are all sacred elements, the Parsees believe, and are essential for life; they must therefore not be polluted by exposure to death. This rules out disposing of corpses by burial, burning, or consignment to a river. Instead, they are carefully laid out on these stone floors—men here, women there, children in another place—for the circling birds to feast upon. “One afternoon,” wrote Edward Ives in the 1750s, “I resolved to satisfy my curiosity so far as to peep into one of these edifices. I perceived several dead bodies, but there was little flesh left upon the bones; and that little was so parched up by the excessive heat of the sun, that it did not emit those stinking effluvia which there was reason to expect.”

In fact, until quite recently, when India’s vulture population crashed after widespread poisoning, this method of disposing of the dead was both highly organized and extremely hygienic: Nobody was allowed to touch the bodies, lest they spread contagion around the city. The corpses were instead maneuvered by means of metal hooks. Vultures, moreover, worked “more expeditiously than millions of insects would do, if dead bodies were buried in the ground,” as the Parsee Sir Ervad Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (1854–1933) explained. “By this rapid process, putrefaction with all its concomitant evils, is most effectually prevented.”

On the treeless Tibetan Plateau, where the soil is thin, rocky, and often frozen, the Buddhists don’t worry about even the leftover bones. In their traditional “sky burials,” the corpse is first defleshed by ritual specialists. Its skeleton is then pounded into fragments with hammers. Within an hour of the first vulture’s arrival, not a scrap is left, making this perhaps the most ecologically pure of all methods for the disposal of human remains.

Elsewhere, carcasses were often left exposed on platforms for months on end. Some Australian tribes occasionally gathered beneath such podia, which had been suspended from trees, to anoint themselves with the fluids dripping down from their decomposing cargoes. Eventually, whatever bones remained would be collected and buried. Funerary groves such as these—be they in Australia or the Caucasus or North America—were sites both holy and dreadful. Nevertheless, as a Goulburn Island Aboriginal woman once commented matter-of-factly, “It’s cleaner on a tree than under the ground—and we can go back and look at them sometimes.”

I
T’S A
M
AN
-E
AT
-M
AN
W
ORLD

Exposure is often associated with excarnation—deliberately stripping the flesh from a corpse to turn it into a skeleton as quickly as possible. Sometimes the reason has to do with ritual, as in Tibetan sky burials. At other times, the goal is the brutally immediate—and nutritive—one of the human flesh itself. “All the vampire stories have developed out of facts concerning primitive cannibalism,” declared MacLeod Yearsley in
The Folklore of Fairy-Tale
(1924). His facts may be suspect—anthropologists have debated the scope and extent of human cannibalism for decades—but how much does the grisly practice pertain to the origin of vampire stories?