Born to Darkness: Recipe for a Vampire
Following on from the above, the Slavic countries seem to have held very firm ideas about how one became a vampire, so let’s have a look at some of them here.
Dabbling in the black arts, being a conjurer or magician
Being a person of poor moral fibre
Unnatural death
Untimely death
Suicide
Born with a caul
Born with a tail
Improperly buried
Animal jumping or bird flying over the corpse or the empty grave
Incest between mother and son
Living a life that was not pious
Dying alone or unseen
Corpse swelling or turning black before burial
Some Slavic regions believed the genesis or birth of the vampire was a gradual event which went in stages. In the first forty days the vampire was most vulnerable, as it started out as an invisible shadow (?) and then as it fed gradually got stronger, forming an invisible (again) boneless, jelly-like mass before finally taking on a full human body. It was then free to roam, even visiting its widow or other women and having children by them. These children had the special sight that resulted in their being the dhampirs as noted above, preparing them for a life as vampire hunters. Not quite following in father’s footsteps, then!
So much for “real” vampires, so far at least. We’ve explored how vampires are supposed to be created, how they can be killed or thwarted, we’ve looked into some of the beliefs surrounding them (and will again later, going a little deeper) and we’ve theorised about who or what the very first vampires were, where they came from. We’ve outlined the characteristics, powers and the various Achilles heels of vampires, and seen the role religion, especially Christianity plays or played in keeping them at bay or destroying them.
But where vampires really started to come to life, so to speak, was in the pages of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature. Gothic fantasies, horror stories, even romances as humans began to have encounters with these evil but fascinating beings. In fact, were it not for the various stories and novels written about them, it’s likely the vampire would be forgotten now as an ancient remnant of an ignorant belief, the name Dracula would mean nothing to us, and Hollywood would have had to look elsewhere for its big moneyspinners.
So let’s look next at vampire literature, and media later, but written material first. And if I can, I want to try to do this chronologically. Which means we begin with this.