Review of John Blair’s Killing the Dead – A Horrific and Glorious History of Vampires | History books

TThe word “vampire” first appeared in English in sensationalist accounts of the Panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 involved a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojevich, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to claim his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was exhumed, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers hung the body and then burned it. In 1745, the clergyman John Swinton published an anonymous pamphlet, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburg, in which he wrote: “These vampires are supposed to be the bodies of dead persons, animated by evil spirits, which emerge from the graves at night, and suck the blood of many living, and thus destroy them.” Thus the modern legend was born.

But it is not very modern, or exclusively European, as this extraordinary survey shows. Instead, the author, a historian and archaeologist, says belief in the restless dead exists in many cultures and periods, where it can lie dormant for centuries before erupting in an “epidemic,” as in Serbia. In the absence of a written source, John Blair makes convincing use of archaeological finds in which bodies have been found decapitated or nailed. In 16th-century Poland, a woman was buried “with a scythe held to her throat and a padlock to the big toe of her left foot.” Our author reasonably concludes that someone wanted to keep these people in their coffins.

The familiar horror categorization of zombies versus vampires and so on is relatively recent; They are variations on the one ancient theme that the dead can rise from the grave and persecute the living. Blair calls them “dangerous corpses,” “the disturbed dead,” or “the walking dead.” But they still come in different forms, as we learned on this wonderful and harrowing journey. Some are “shroud chewers,” some are “lip chewers,” and some are “suckers.” Others are “puffers,” “cursed hunters,” “nightmares,” or “nightmares,” in the original sense of a demon pressing a person to bed during the hours of darkness. A dead 15th-century baker in Brittany kept getting up at night to help his family knead dough, but he also walked around other houses “throwing stones at people.” In late 19th century New England, people who died of tuberculosis were suspected of killing others from graves, so the bodies would be exhumed and burned.

Such beliefs can float to the surface for a long time. But corpse-killing episodes only arise, Blair says, when an endemic belief system is activated by a particular set of “pressures and anxieties.” In early medieval England, vampire epidemics accompanied the Black Death; Later, in Saxony, the Lutheran Reformation abolished purgatory, leaving grieving families in need of “new answers” ​​about the fate of the dead. The largest “corpse scare” in history, involving hundreds of bodies, occurred in 18th-century Moravia: Blair diagnoses a “feeling of unfinished business” from the decades of witch trials that preceded it. Shortly thereafter, vampires were first reported where innocent people would have assumed they existed all along: in Transylvania.

In conclusion, Blair claims that killing the dead again is actually “therapeutic”: “Like other extreme rituals, it is sad at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.” This form of treatment has not yet been consigned to history: vampires still harass people in pockets of rural Greece and the Baltics, and a Serbian priest was suspended by its bishop in 2019 for participating in “the exhumation and hanging of a woman’s body.”

Unfortunately for Bram Stoker fans, who regard Dracula as the Christmas horror par excellence, the old Count himself gets little attention here, because he is “so different from the menacing corpses people actually believed in.” Blair even called Stoker’s novel “misleading,” which is an odd thing to say about a work of fiction. But he gives the Irishman good marks for coining the excellent word “undead.”