Many people are familiar with mythology. Every single culture in the world has their own mythology, all with their own creatures and wonders, and this is for a reason. The people who made and shared mythology lived in a time when natural phenomena, as well as the human condition, were misunderstood. Myths offered a sense of control and of understanding of not only the world, but themselves. When a group passes down their mythology to the next generation, they share important revelations about the group’s origins, history, and who they are as a people. These are all important parts of preserving any culture and it is no wonder that, despite the huge amount of time between now and when they were started, myths have continued being passed down in humanity’s collective consciousness.
The days when myths were regarded as reality are long past, though. Much has changed. As the world has continued to develop, science has taken the place of mythology when it comes to giving explanations. Myths that were once regarded as sacred facts have slowly turned into stories passed down; widely regarded as untrue, but still a large part of certain cultures. However, many of these tales might actually be rooted in truth.
It sounds impossible for mythological creatures to exist, and that is because it is; but even though the stories told about the creatures may not be true, that does not mean that those stories were not based on real events. Many fake mythological creatures, such as vampires, may have been created from very real events and influences.
The actual folklore behind vampires, also known or vampyres, varies by region. The main characteristics of drinking blood and then turning or killing people seems to stay the same for the most part, but depending on the region and story vampires have many other attributes, such as having no shadows, no mirror reflection, a weakness to sunlight, super strength or being able to turn into a bat or wolf.
According to one research paper by Lennon da Costa Santos, et al., “Vampires do not rest in their graves and spend their nights searching for of victims into which they will sink their fangs and drink their blood. But when the rooster crows, when the sun rises or when the morning bells ring, they return to their coffins – sunlight would be an important source of discomfort for such creatures. Bells, mirrors and garlic too. They are considered effective weapons against vampires. According to popular culture, anyone bitten by the vampire becomes one of them upon death. In that transformation process, the body is preserved from decomposition and the individual maintains the appearance of a living [person] with red mucous membranes and blood stains around the mouth. These creatures could only be exterminated by decapitation, burning, burial or be hit by a wooden stake driven through your heart, as depicted in the engraving of Moraine,” (passage translated from Portuguese).
When Christianity was incorporated into the mythology of vampires, they were seen as demons hunting down humans for their blood. Due to this, they mostly existed as terrifying mythology during the 17th and 18th centuries, as human blood, at the time, was believed to have special properties, including “hold[ing] body and soul together.” Vampires only became more mainstream in the late 1800’s, with early works such as “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fan and Bram Stoker’s famous “Dracula.” However, unlike in “Dracula,” a vampire’s involvement was very real to medieval rural towns.
Starting in Eastern Europe and traveling from there, stories of vampires became more and more common during the Middle Ages, specifically when diseases were involved. Back then, medical and scientific knowledge were too inadequate to explain or help the diseases people faced – and so vampires were one of the many different folklore creatures people could blame for any diseases and symptoms they may not know or understand.
The first record of vampires is thought to be due to rabies, in which a rural town’s residents believed one dead man, Petar Blagojević, had come back to life and ran around the town strangling people. He allegedly attacked nine villagers over nine days, with each person subsequently falling ill and dying within 24 hours. Rabies victims often bite to infect others once the disease has taken hold of them, which is a link to the most fundamental vampire trait: biting victims. Vampirism being based on rabies could also explain why bats, who are one of the largest carriers of rabies in the United States, become associated with them.
Finally, there are a few links to the severe hydrophobia that comes with rabies in vampire mythology, which are that in certain myths vampires cannot cross water by themselves, and that one of the ways to permanently kill a vampire was to put it, or its ashes, in running water.
There are also a couple other diseases that may have inspired the different aspects and mythology behind vampires as well. For example, the New England Vampire Panic that struck the Americas in the early 1800’s, not to be confused with the Great Vampire Epidemic in Europe during the 1700’s, occurred in the midst of large and deadly tuberculosis outbreaks.
According to History.com, it was common to blame several deaths in one family on the “undead,” and at the time it was common for tuberculosis, or “wasting disease,” to wipe out entire families. To the people who experienced their families wasting away, and then fell sick themselves, believing in vampirism was their attempt to survive – to stop what was killing them and their family.
As one consulting folklorist at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, Micheal Bell, puts it, “People find themselves in dire situations, where there’s no recourse through regular channels… The folk system offers an alternative, a choice. Sometimes, superstitions represent the only hope.” That is why most accusations of vampyrism, and the subsequent exhumations of the graves, were requested by family members of the recently deceased, who had often died of the same disease the family was now suffering.
Tuberculosis is not the only disease that could have influenced the myth, though. Pellagra, a disease affecting the digestive system, skin, nerves and brain, has been pointed to as a potential cause for the myth due to the dermatitis and other symptoms caused by it, but others discredit it due to the disease only occurring around the 18th century, when the myth had already been in circulation for centuries. In support of the theory is the fact that Pellagra is caused by a lack of nicotinic acid, or vitamin B3, and alcoholism is a risk factor; during the Great Vampire Epidemic (about 1725-1755) and the New England Vampire Panic (early 1800’s) it was safer to drink liquor than the contaminated water, and so people drank heavily.
Finally, scholars point to one other disease as a potential influence for myths of vampyrism: porphyria. Porphyria matches to a tee; the blood disorder can cause severe blisters on skin exposed to sunlight, and some symptoms can be temporarily relieved by drinking blood. In extreme cases, gums recede, making teeth more prominent and people can lose noses and ears. All this is in line with mythological vampire traits, and matches the mythology closely. Porphyria is rare, however, but some scholars believe that the lack of genetic diversity found in the small, rural towns reports of vampires first originated in could have led to a higher instance of the disease.
It is also likely, though, that all of these diseases caused and/or helped the myth of vampirism gain traction. As one source points out, “beliefs about vampires changed over time.” It could be that someone with porphyria caused the origin of the myth, but that many of the cases of vampyrism described in literature were rabies or pellagra victims instead.
There is another line of thinking that explains some of the traits of vampires as well – namely, natural phenomena and human bodies after death. Many reports blame vampires when bodies do not decay at a normal rate, have been dug out of graves, or rise out of the ground or coffins when this was probably due to their own practices.
According to the Smithsonian, “When all the plots in a graveyard were full—as was happening more and more by the end of the 17th century—sextons added another layer, digging graves two, rather than the customary six, feet under. The bodies of the poor, or plague victims, were dumped, en masse, into pits.”
It is no wonder that sometimes animals, or a heavy rainstorm, were enough to bring these bodies to the surface ‘on their own.’ To people who do not understand decomposition, though, vampyrism seemed as good an explanation as any for why a person’s body may have risen to the surface.
There were supposed vampires who did decay abnormally, but due to, once again, the actions of people. Many accused of being vampires were exhumed from their graves or kept in places that slowed down decomposition. In one case of supposed vampyrism, the case of Mercy Brown, the woman in question displayed a notable lack of decay – which would have been miraculous, had she not been kept above ground during the English winter. Cold is one factor that can slow decay, but decomposition, in general, is a varied process, especially in nature; many things can influence it. Even normal decay, though, was considered vampyrism.
The blood reported as coming from vampire’s mouths? Caused by a fluid created from the decay of the gastrointestinal tract contents and lining. Worn clothes and a gaping mouth? Horrifying, but completely normal for a decaying body. One source focused on this theory concludes that “The fear of these ‘vampires’ embodies our fear of the corpse. As a quasi-object, nothing is really definite about the corpse, except that it is dead. So when a corpse comes back to life, our world turns on its head because now we don’t know anything for certain at all.”
Continuing the thought of vampires being used as explanations for horrific sights and actions, there have been a few killers who were labeled as vampires. This was not common; luckily, excluding these killers, it seems that everyone accused of being vampires were dead at the time and that the belief was that a person only needed to be watched for signs of vampyrism once they died, not killed for it. Though no deaths may have resulted from the mythology surrounding vampires, these so-called vampires did cause many deaths themselves.
Probably the most famous candidate, and who some think Count Dracula from “Dracula” is based on, Vlad III, also known as Vlad Dracula, was the ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s. He was known for impaling his rivals’ armies, and was accused of drinking the blood of his enemies as well.
Elizabeth Báthory, who lived in Hungary in the late 1500’s as a noble woman, was labeled as a vampire due to her reportedly keeping and killing hundreds of women and girls and bathing in their blood. Many believe she only got away with these horrendous crimes for so long because of her status, and that she avoided the death penalty for the same reason. Vampyrism could have been seen as an explanation for how these people could do such heinous and horrible things; if they are not human, of course they would not see anything wrong with what they were doing.
In the end, though, vampyrism is more than just a myth: it is an important part of humanity’s history. Understanding why people in the past believed what they did can give insight into the human condition as vampyrism, and mythology at its core, is the result of humans trying to make sense of the world long before they had the tools to understand it. Although people today may never know why the mythology behind vampires was created, it is still interesting to learn about what may have inspired the famous blood-drinking lurkers that dominate today’s public consciousness.
