In this column Cecil points out the flaws in the hypothesis that vampire legends were inspired by victims of porphyria. OK, but could they have been inspired by people with rabies? It’s bite-transmissible and it makes the victim go crazy. (Speculation inspired by a scene in the Cross-Time Engineer series by Leo Frankowski, where knights in medieval Poland are camping in a cave and kill a “vampire” whom the time-traveling protagonist recognizes as rabid.)
You think a disease characterized by people having an aversion to drinking things gave rise to a legend about monsters that drink peoples blood? Plus, rabies is one of the oldest recorded diseases. Pre-moderns understood it as a disease transmitted by animal bites, not random people returning from the dead to attack the living.
(generally, I’m pretty skeptical of attempts to explain myths and legends as misunderstandings of naturally occurring phenomenon. They tend to be a lot of “just-so” stories with no evidence. And they tend to ignore the obvious, which is that people spend a lot of time just making stuff up.)
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (an excellent book, IMHO) says that humans don’t display the “classic” symptoms of attacking people when they’re infected. Actually, many animals don’t either.
Or how about vampires are inspired by ghost stories about rotting corpses clawing their way out of the grave to feast on the blood of the living?
It always seemed to me that, if any disease was behind the various folk myths that get grouped together under “vampires,” it would be any of the diseases that cause anemia or severe wasting - in other words, the myth grew up around the symptoms of the victim, not the alleged monster.
Although, honestly, humans have never needed an excuse to just make shit up. “What if dead people came back to kill us?” is one of the great Obvious Stories that pretty much every human culture invents.
Well, a fair number of cultures practiced cave burials, and it has been noted that the body does funky stuff after it dies - hair, teeth and fingernail “growth”, bloating, bodily fluids seeping out of the mouth and looking like blood, and in the coolness of a cave [and some caves are damned cold at certain depths] the body not rotting like it does on the surface [they would have been able to observe rotting animals in the garbage middens and away from the community.] Combine that with some wasting disease [like the dead guy had tuberculosis and spread it to his remaining family] Og’s your uncle.
This is, to my mind, probably closest to the truth, combined with [Lemur’s suggestion See Barber’s book Vampires, Burial, and Death. Most people speculating on the origins of the vampire legend use as their basis the image of vampires we have from movies and novels, which don’t really match up very well with the vampire legend circa 1800, before all of that started. As you suggest, the visitations by vampires were often implied by wasting away from apparently unexplained causes. the supposed vampires, if known, were not characterized by blatantly open graves, but were supposed to be emerging by some subtle means.
The whole idea of people “wasting away” from some supernatural agency still had great power, even into the 20th century (and today). Have a look at H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, in which the agent isn’t a vampire, but a color (or, arguably, an element or some other thing) borne by a meteor. The story has been filmed or otherwise adapted multiple times.
BTW, ISTM the most important difference between vampire legends (i.e., folktales) and vampire stories (by known writers) is that in most of the orginal East European legends, vampires don’t have much personality; they’re as mindless as Romero slow-zombies.
Absolutely right. Also, in old vampire accounts, the vampires don’t “pass” for living people. They’re people known to be dead. They are also said to be obsessive-compulsive (to stop a vampire, spill seeds on the floor. They’ll feel compelled to count them, and leave you alone. Better than a stake.)
I recall one film where the heroes try to baffle Dracula that way, but he counts 'em up faster than Rain Man.
Just beware of the lightning that inevitably accompanies such counting.
Huh. I never connected the Count with the old folk myths about OCD vampires.
I’m pretty sure it’s pure coincidence, but it’s still kind of neat.
IIRC there was a thread on it a few years ago, and the conclusion was the Sesame Street people were unaware of the legend when they made the Count character (there were just making a word-play on the word “count”).
It is kind of a crazy coincidence, though.
Paul Barber marshals a pretty definitive argument in his 1988 book Vampires, Burial and Death that all vampire legends have their roots in the observation of different stages of decomposition.
He starts with how vampires are depicted in actual folktales (not the modern Dracula-inspired versions) and shows how closely those traditional depictions mirror the stages of decomposition you see if you keep scavengers away from a human corpse.
One of the great things about the book is that he doesn’t just say “Hey, here’s a possible explanation!” He’s got tons of real-world evidence from both forensics and folklore to back up his argument.
Cited in post #7 above