Your research focuses on vampirism in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment. In what ways does the historical vampire differ from our current image of this creature?
For one, 18th century vampiric creatures were real. They were as much part of physical reality for various communities in East-Central and South-Eastern Europe as the landlord’s cane or the soil they were tilling. These returning dead were not elegant, pale-skinned aristocrats born in distant lands hundreds of years before. They were everyday peasants who, while alive, had been known as lovers, relatives, friends, and neighbours, and whose main postmortem aim was the destruction of their family and community.
Bloodsucking is of course a must for vampiric revenants in fiction and folklore alike, but the way it is done, is strikingly different. The carnal image of the vampiric bite, inflicted by pointy teeth is a literary invention that does not surface in historic data. Sources tell us instead about a spiritual draining of blood and life force without a wound, and victims of night-time vampiric attacks described sensations of intense fear, strangulation, and pressure on the chest, an experience perhaps closest to sleep paralysis.
The other well-known trait of fictional vampires is their ability to turn their victims into vampires; while this uncanny self-reproduction is present in historic and ethnographic sources as well, it is just one of the many origin stories. The tumultuous history of the region, with its warring empires, and migrations of peoples of various religions, cultures, and ethnicities resulted in a vampiric diversity that differed from village to village. Vampires could arise among others from people born in a caul, from dead witches and criminals, even from regular people, in case an animal jumped over their corpse during the wake. What is more, we also hear about non-human vampires: while movies and fiction feature bloodsucking machines or plants created by science, ethnographic sources describe vampiric entities born out of human neglect, such as unharvested pumpkins or abandoned agricultural tools.
In the Habsburg Monarchy, professionals like surgeons and physicians were entrusted to apply their expertise on diagnosing vampiric attacks that local communities had reported to the monarchy’s administration. How did this interaction between dominant ideologies and local cultures shape knowledge about the supernatural in Central-Eastern Europe?
The Enlightenment is often told as a story of disenchantment, of the gradual ousting of the magical, the supernatural from the physical world. By contrast, the story of vampirism went in the opposite direction for a brief period: It is the story of an ephemeral enchantment. In several provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy, local communities in the early 18th century forced the monarchy’s secular and clerical authorities to alter their existing theoretical frameworks about how nature and the supernatural were supposed to work. Faced with a series of unexplainable deaths, mass experiences of hauntings, and strange phenomena exhibited by human corpses, agents of the Habsburg administration succumbed to local explanations and local expertise. This, in turn, resulted in the repeated, state- and church-approved mass execution of corpses that lasted for almost half a century, when Queen Maria Theresa finally put a stop to the practice.
To give a concrete example, in current-day Serbia, local Orthodox settlers taught Habsburg medical personnel that certain corpses simply refused to decay, although they had been buried in the very same cemetery soil and had spent roughly the same time underground as other corpses, that putrefied in an orderly fashion. The medics were told that such corpses were self-reproducing, murderous ‘vampires', a term and concept completely unknown to these state servants at the time. Having failed to come up with a naturalistic explanation, the Habsburg officials thought this must be witchcraft. Locals, however, insisted that none of the vampires had done anything diabolical in their lifetime: they used to be average, God-fearing people. In the absence of incriminating witness accounts, the witchcraft explanation collapsed. In the end, the medical experts and through them, the Habsburg administration had to accept the existence of a hitherto unknown, strange contagion. It was a vampire epidemic; the surest cure for which was the exhumation and annihilation of all abnormally undecayed corpses in the cemetery through staking, beheading, and/or burning.
Do contemporary perspectives on professionalisation and secularisation help us to better understand supernatural phenomena?
While it is an understandable need to build large-arched narratives about how we got to where we are, they are not very helpful in making sense of the past, for instance, why the supernatural made (and continues to make) sense for many. Such narratives often portray decisions that ended up being instrumental in creating our current world as the only logical choice. By doing so, they eclipse the range of available alternative choices and the various social and political factors that filtered into the decision-making at the time. They also sideline questions of why one explanation seemed more powerful than the other.
When it comes to professionalisation, the state’s growing trust in institutional medicine in the 18th century does not mean that medics had superior expertise in all fields. They had precious little knowledge of what a several months-old decaying corpses should or shouldn’t look like. Uneducated gravediggers and other, local ‘vampire experts’ had way more experience in this field. In the eyes of secular and clerical provincial administrators, hands-on expertise often outweighed learned theoretical explanations which certain critics of vampirism could offer at the time.
Secularisation narratives harbour similar pitfalls – the story of an enlightened ruler, Maria Theresa outlawing vampire executions is easily interpreted as a straightforward secularising move. At the same time, a closer look at the sources reveals that the same ruler ordered Jesuit priests to carry out the actual enlightening job in the villages, to enlighten people about what demons are capable of and what they aren’t; because while vampires were no longer seen to be part of reality, demons remained to be so.
Once we forget for a second what we, in the 21st century see as right and true, the past becomes much more alive, diverse, and much more real.
Do you think that the study of early modern supernatural phenomena could provide insights into current debates about alternative medicine?
This is a difficult one, after all, you can’t step into the same river twice. However, there are two considerations that keep resurfacing regardless of the time period. For one, it is a fair thing to expect from science to live up to its own standards. Most 18th century university-trained critics argued against the existence of vampires without having seen, much less examined any. Mainstream science did perform experiments on organic putrefaction, but researching ‘human’ corpse decay remained frivolous: It promised no foreseeable use for curing the living. They rejected vampirism largely because it reeked of superstition: Enlightened sensibilities abhorred the gruesomeness and literal stench of the corpse execution as well as its undereducated environment.
The necessity to demarcate science from pseudo-science should motivate today’s scientists to try and understand how alternative healing works, not deter them from the task. It is fair to expect clinical testing to be done as unbiased as possible, and to support research among others into cognitive aspects, such as determining what placebos are able to do, and what they aren’t (e.g. suppressing symptoms but not curing cancer).
In 18th century negotiations between local communities, administrative officials, and various experts (i.e., those who did examine vampiric corpses), personal experience-based arguments dominated those based on a learned, medical, philosophical, or theological pedigree. Physicians could theorise as much as they wanted about various known natural diseases and processes behind the vampire phenomenon, but this did not mean much when whole communities and administrative staff swore that on an earlier occasion executing the corpses made the epidemic stop: no more deaths, no more hauntings.
In a similar vein, people who go to paranormal healers today keep referring to the experiences they had as evidence of efficacy, and they won’t be convinced by arguments based on authority or abstract bodies of knowledge. Especially not if the institution they should trust suffers from a chronic lack of funding, and/or appears to be a vehicle for ulterior business interests and political agendas. We cannot expect people to trust biomedicine by default, this trust needs to be earned and maintained through accountability and transparency on the one hand, and the provision of personalised care on the other.
Ádám Mézes is a fellow at the EUI’s Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, the largest international postdoctoral programme in the social sciences and humanities in Europe. He is affiliated with the Department of History. His research interests lie in the intersections between religion and science.
Photo credits: "The Nightmare" by Johann Heinrich Füssli via Wikipedia Commons