Year: 1984
Type: article
Abstract: the land of darkness and the shadow of death, and who have still refused to conform to Pascal's maxim 'On mourra seul/ The troublesome walking dead belonged, of course, to the beliefs and superstitions of all times and nations.Preternatural beings that are said to suck the blood of persons at night seem to have been known in most regions of the world at least since the times of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, the Egypt of the pharaohs, and the Jews of the Old Testament, as well as in the younger civilizations of India, China, and Japan, and in the Graeco-Roman and Arabic cultures.In literature, the most famous infamous feeders on blood, among many ancient ones, have been the Indian and Arabic ghoul the Greek Xotfxia, and Roman larva.3 In the Middle Ages, rulers and church dignitaries often had to forbid the opening of graves and killing of corpses, regardless of the deceased's reputation.Such prohibitions were made or mentioned by Charlemagne in the eighth century, by Bishop Burchard of Worms around 1000, the Second Council of Limoges in 1031, the theologian Guillaume d'Auvergne in the first half and the Dominican judge Etienne de Bourbon in the middle of the thirteenth century, and by the Serbian emperor Stefan UroS DuSan Nemanjic in the middle of the fourteenth.Fairly clear cases of the un-dead who attacked the living were described by William of Newburgh, who under the year 1196 notes in his chronicle the case of a 'sanguisuga.'Such episodes appeared also in various Icelandic sagas, which were usually recorded about the middle of the thirteenth century.The oldest Slavic stories appeared in a Czech chronicle of the f ourtheenthcentury, but are preserved only in a dubious manuscript of 1587.In the Balkans, there are reports in Latin, German, and the native tongues dating from the fifteenth, sixteenth and especially the seventeenth centuries.During the sixteenth century, such anecdotes were related in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and particularly in German speaking countries, so that Martin Luther once had to reassure a fainthearted priest from Wittenberg that they were 'des Teufels Betrugerei und Bosheit; wenn sie es nicht glàubeten, so schadete es ihnen nicht' (Tischrede Nr. 6823, Weimarer Ausgabe).A few of the seventeenth-century rumors from many corners of Europe were printed in a number of languages.For some 'incidents,' up to twenty-three versions and re-editions have been identified, for example those in François de Rosset's Les Histoires tragiques de notre temps (1605) and its German adaptation by Martin Zeller (1625).Corpses able to kill and to die a second time appeared also in such popular German anthologies of magical phenomena as Henning Gross' Magica (1600) and especially Erasmus Francisais' Der hôllische Proteus (1690 and 1708).
Source: Man and Nature
DOI: 10.7202/1011822ar
Author: Milan V. Dimić
Institution: University of Alberta
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2142622322