Vampires Through the Ages (18 page)

• Marcelo Costa de Andrade, the “Vampire of Niterói,” who in the early 1990s killed fourteen young boys in Rio de Janeiro and drank their blood in order to become as “young and pretty” as they were.

• Deborah Jean Finch, a woman living in Santa Cruz, California, who murdered and drank the blood of a man named Brandon McMichaels in 1991.

• Joshua Rudiger, the “Vampire Slasher,” who killed a homeless woman in San Francisco, and injured three homeless men, all by slashing their necks in order to imbibe their blood. Rudiger believed he was a 2,600-year-old vampire.

This list could go on until there is no more stomach for it, as more join the ranks of those before them. But as frightening as it truly is, the most dangerous men and women are those who have plied their bloody trade unnoticed and have therefore failed to make the list. Again and again, the thirst for blood has cut across time, culture, and even gender, suggesting that the preoccupation harkens back through history to humanity's earliest beginnings.

As we have seen, even in our enlightened age of sensibility and access to information, there are still some who hunt their fellow man like solitary beasts preying on the weak and unsuspecting. There are also some who have immersed themselves in the vampire mythology to the point of committing unspeakable acts against humanity in the belief that they too will share in the mystery and darkness that is the vampire. Although reasons and methods vary from killer to killer, the twisted aim is the same: to taste human blood and the age-old forbidden power that courses through it.

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The blood is the life! The blood is the life!

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

9

Something
in the Blood

Throughout history, vampires have been portrayed as the destroyers of crops, the murderers of infants, the bringers of nightmares, and the carriers of plagues, but for all their evil machinations it is perhaps their desire for human blood that above all else causes people to fear their name. Regardless of whether they appear in the rural hamlets of Eastern Europe or the sweltering jungle temples of the Indian subcontinent, it is the power of blood that animates and drives them to claw their way out of festering graves and feast upon the living. In order to truly understand the vampire, therefore, or any blood drinker within the pantheon, it is important to examine humanity's own beliefs about blood and how its consumption came to be attributed to these creatures.

Modern medical books define blood as a specialized fluid filled with plasma, blood cells, and platelets circulated by the heart through the body's vascular system with the task of carrying oxygen and nutrients to the body's tissue while moving harmful waste away to be disposed. The average adult has as much as 1.3 gallons (five liters) of blood coursing through their system at any one time, which accounts for 8 percent of their body weight. Hemoglobin within the blood gives the fluid its distinctive bright red color when exposed to the air, but when present in the veins it appears as a dark bluish red.

Yet does a textbook explanation hold the key to the vampire's seeming fascination with blood, or does the answer lie somewhere beyond the current understanding of mere science?

Early Beliefs

We can only imagine what prehistoric people, observing the natural world around them, first thought when faced with the mystery of blood and how they wrestled with its connection to life and death. Perhaps the process began after noticing how a wounded deer stopped struggling when it lost too much blood or how one of their own tribesmen closed his eyes and ceased moving after being wounded in a skirmish with rivals. Modern archeological evidence suggests that even the Neanderthals of Europe and Western Asia 130,000 years ago understood the importance of blood in the life/death cycle and attributed a mystical quality to it.

On September 17, 1909, under a rock shelter in the Dordogne Valley of France, archeologists unearthed the bodies of eight Neanderthal skeletons buried in what appeared to be a highly ritualized manner. All of the fossilized remains were covered in a red pigment, which experts surmise was a primitive funerary custom linking the ideas of blood, warmth, and life together for those traveling to the afterlife.

As the eons passed and the earth's ice ages came and went, a Neolithic revolution occurred that allowed people to develop agriculture and permanent settlements. Through this series of events, people also found the need to account for the foundation of the world they lived in and the origins of the gods they worshiped. As part of these creation myths, there often existed the theme that blood provided the original spark by which life was created. For instance, in 1849 the British archeologist Austen Henry Layard discovered seven clay tablets from the royal library of Ashurbanipal, in the ruins of Nineveh, which contained the story of
Enuma Elish
, or, to Western scholars,
the Chaldean Genesis
.

This ancient Akkadian tale, which was old even at the time of its writing in the seventh century BCE, is a recounting of the struggle between the cosmic forces of order led by the chief god Marduk and those of chaos under the command of the evil sea goddess Tiamat, who appears as a fierce dragon. The two sides clash in a contest that shakes the very heavens, until Marduk at last triumphs over Tiamat, taking her body and ripping it in two in order to form the earth and sky. As punishment for ending up on the losing side of a divine war, Marduk has Tiamat's husband, Kingu, seized and his veins sliced open, letting the blood spill upon the newly created earth to become the first humans. The culmination of the tale, as translated by George Smith in 1876, was dramatically captured in the lines:

They bound him, holding him before Ea.

They imposed on him his guilt, and severed his blood (vessels).

Out of his blood they fashioned mankind.
(Reid 1987, 9)

A similar myth was told by the Nez Perce, a tribe of Native Americans who once inhabited what is today the Pacific Northwest of the United States. In their creation myth a gigantic monster came down from the north one day and began devouring all the plants and animals in the land. Fearing it would consume the entire world if not stopped, the great coyote bravely jumped into the monster's mouth and raced down into its belly. Once there he built a fire and cut out the heart of the beast with a flint knife, ending its life. Emerging from the body, the coyote began cutting it into pieces, each of which became a different tribe of men. When he was finished he washed the blood from his hands, which transformed upon hitting the water into the people of the Nez Perce (Leeming, 2010, 206–7).

Food for the Gods

Blood and the shedding of it was a sacred act infused with the power to not only maintain life but to create it as well; for some cultures this also meant that it was a ready substance to be harnessed for their own ends when their priests needed to reach beyond the physical world and tap the power reservoirs of the spiritual. Many such groups came to practice ritual blood sacrifices for a variety of reasons. Among the Greeks, for instance, it was thought that the shades of the underworld relished the taste of blood and that through its consumption they grew strong enough to communicate with the living. In Homer's eighth-century BCE epic poem
The Odyssey
, the Greek hero of the tale, Odysseus, pays a visit to the witch of Crete to aid him in his quest to return home. She, however, advises him to seek the council of the shade Tiresias, who during his mortal life was a renowned soothsayer.

Odysseus travels to the very entrance of Hades but finds the spirits too weak to speak with him until he pours the blood of two butchered sheep into a shallow trench for them to feed upon. The result is immediate and described by Homer in chilling detail: “The ghosts came trooping up from Erebus—brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with their armor still smirched in blood; they came from every quarter and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear” (Homer 1900, 140).

Other groups such as the Germanic Anglo-Saxons or the seafaring Norsemen also placed importance in the ritual spilling of blood during ceremonies known as
blot
, which in its verb form
blota
means “to worship with sacrifice.” On these occasions animals such as cattle, pigs, or horses were sacrificed and boiled in large caldrons with heated stone. The meat was then shared among the participants, as well as the gods and spirits they believed were in attendance. The blood that had been collected was sprinkled on the statues of the local gods, the walls of buildings, weapons, and even the worshipers themselves. The act of sprinkling blood on objects for protection was called
bleodsian
in Old English, which in turn became the word
blessing
when the Roman Catholic Church adopted a watered-down version of the pagan rite.

Many other societies engaged in blood sacrifice, but some, like the ancient Druids of Gaul, practiced a form that only the power of human blood could provide. Very little is known of the enigmatic early Druids, since the only accounts of their activities are handed down from Greek and Roman writers who were themselves not averse to coloring their descriptions with conjecture and hearsay. What is known is that they were a priestly caste that came to power in Central and Western Europe during the Iron Age and that they engaged in an esoteric form of nature worship, which they passed down orally.

In the first century CE, the Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus wrote that Druids of Gaul (living near what is now Marseilles, France) sacrificed criminals, and other types of people when criminals were in short supply, in magical oak groves known as
nemetons
after the goddess Nemetona. These important religious sites were often enclosed in a wooden palisade or ditch and appeared throughout Gaul until the Roman invasions of the first century BCE. Those unfortunate enough to fall under the priest's knife had their blood ritually drained and sprinkled on the sacred oaks to imbue the trees with magical power. So feared were these places that it was said no birds nested in the trees nor wind stirred their leaves, and not even the heartiest priest would venture through the grove at midday or midnight lest he encounter one of its blood-drenched guardian spirits.

While many cultures engaged in human sacrifice during some portion of their history, none were as accomplished or as feared as the Aztec Empire, which dominated portions of Mesoamerica in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Enemies captured in battle or given over as tribute from weaker vassal states made up the vast majority of the victims who met their end atop the Aztecs' blood-covered temples. While several gods within their pantheon demanded human blood, none was as voracious in their appetites as the sun god Huitzilopochtli, whose victims had their hearts torn from their chests with obsidian-bladed knifes and held aloft to the sky still beating. During the Aztec's reign of terror, it is estimated that as many as 20,000 prisoners a year were sacrificed (Hanson 2001, 195).

Critical to understanding the Aztec need for human blood was the concept of
tonalli
, or the animating spirit of a person, which was often linked to an animal spirit. This powerful interconnected totem became concentrated in the heart when the victim was frightened. Once released through sacrifice it was used by the sun god to continue his motion around the earth. Failing to appease the bloodthirsty god meant the sun would stop and the earth would end. To the warlike Aztecs, blood made the world go round, literally.

Healing Powers

Because of the mystical associations that blood had in many cultures, it was only natural that practitioners of the magical arts and early men of healing explored its curative powers. In the first century BCE, the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote that the pharaohs of Egypt bathed in the blood of humans to prevent leprosy. While such claims are questionable and suggest Roman disdain for cultures they felt were inferior to their own, this particular remedy against the disease later reappeared in a tale about the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great. In 337 CE after the feast of Easter, the great emperor fell seriously ill from an unknown disease and called upon his pagan Greek advisors for a remedy. Their prescription was that he bathe in the blood of murdered infants to exact a cure, a course of treatment he mercifully did not follow.

In the lands of the ancient Israelites, the remedy for leprosy included taking two live birds to the leper's home after a prescribed period of purification. The first bird was ritualistically killed and the second dipped into its blood. The remaining live bird was then used to sprinkle the leper seven times with the sacrificial blood before being let go to fly away. After a second period of purification, an unblemished male lamb was slaughtered and the blood wiped on the patient followed by a second sprinkling, this time with oil and wine.

Often the lengthy process was repeated many times before it was thought to produce results. Other blood cures involved the actual consumption of human blood to be effective, as in the case of the ancient Koreans who believed that the blood of a family's eldest son held magical healing powers. If a member of the household lay dying, the son in question opened his thigh with a blade and let the blood stream into a wooden bowl, which could then be used by local sorcerers to create healing elixirs guaranteed to restore the patient's health. Thousands of miles to the south, the Aboriginal people who lived near the Darling River in southeastern Australia practiced a similar custom, using the blood taken from the forearm of a friend instead.

Drawing blood or bloodletting was also used by early medical practitioners to treat a number of ailments, ranging from the common cold to more life-threatening diseases such as smallpox or tuberculosis. Blood was thought to be one of four “humors,” along with black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, that circulated through the body and were responsible for maintaining good health. When any one of these humors was out of balance they could lead to illness, disease, and even death. The cure then was to drain the excess fluid and return the body to its normal level. The custom of bloodletting is one of the oldest medical arts known to man and was implemented by numerous cultures throughout the world, including the early Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Mayans, and Aztecs.

One of the most common methods was to puncture a large vein in the forearm or neck with a lancet and place a heated glass cup over the wound to create a vacuum and assist in draining the blood. At times leeches were used to the same effect, although they took longer to accomplish their goal. One rather wicked-looking device developed in the nineteenth century was known as a scarificator and consisted of a series of small blades spring-driven to cause many shallow cuts in the belief that it was more merciful than earlier methods. Normally between sixteen to thirty ounces of blood was collected at a time, and the procedure was repeated until the patient became faint.

Interestingly enough, in Europe during the Middle Ages both surgeons and barbers specialized in the custom. Barbers even advertised their services by hanging a red and white striped pole outside their place of business much as they do today. The pole itself represented the stick the patient squeezed to increase the blood flow, while the red stripe was for the blood being drained and the white stripe for the tourniquet the barber used to stop the bleeding.