The vampire was truly a horrible figure – a corpse in the most ghastly stages of putrefaction, its bloated appearance being interpreted to mean that it was feeding off the living. This is in contrast to today’s much romanticised image of a seductive vampire of uncorrupted appearance – perhaps pale, but not showing those tell-tale signs of rotting interpreted by the Slavic peasants as signs of vampirism.

Plague-bringers

It is no surprise that reports of vampires were rampant during the mediæval period in Slavic Europe when the Black Death killed probably a third of the population of Europe. With the frightened peasants in a state of ignorance, educated nobles at a loss, and science of the day limited by assumptions carried over from classical Greece, made hideous by nightmares and riddled with superstitions, there was no unambiguous way of telling what the truth of life, death and more could be. Thus, when a hitherto healthy village was suddenly filled with dying villagers – with the culprit unseen (as with the bubonic plague – or the various killer alternatives that modern science has suggested might be the cause of the Black Death) – one can see the desperate attempt made by those yet living in that village to explain what seems inexplicable.

To see this in context, bear in mind that no cause for the Black Death was uncovered, and that even today, science is divided upon what its cause was. The more modern-minded mediæval Europeans, Chinese and Arabs felt it was a plague caused by something physical – but Slavic peasants were not sophisticated enough to be certain of this. The Black Death was hitting Russia and the Baltics in the mid-1300s, when the folklore-based cultures were already using the word vukodlak to describe a mythological sun-eater. In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that this term, originally designating a voracious killer of heavenly bodies, should change in meaning, during the terrifying and destructive onslaughts of the Black Death, to a mysterious and monstrous creature that devours the life of humans.

There would be the first victim – succumbing to a feeling of listlessness, of fever and raving for a short period, and the plague spot and the painful buboes – succumbing to a swift death. There would probably have been no history of illness to account for his or her death. The biting of fleas from infected rats would never have been considered the cause – that would have sounded more bizarre than the vampire theory at that time! It was believed that the listless feeling was due to the attack of a vampire at night, sucking the blood from its victim. The vampire’s activities were presumed to be driven by its soul’s refusal of entry into heaven and subsequently its terrible requirement for nourishment (i.e., blood) to sustain its re-animated corpse.