A. N. Afanas’ev’s work is a serious attempt to analyse the Slavic vampire of folklore, but by this time (late 1800s), mutations had already occurred in the Slavic vampire legends. The stories collected by A. N. Afanas’ev in his Russian Folktales give no hint of the origins of the vampire concept – but if we examine the social and religious forces that impacted upon the ancient Slavs before and during the time of the original vampire concept, we gain at least some idea of the seething cauldron of beliefs and cults that birthed the vampire.

The Belief Cauldron

It’s known that the pre-Christian Slavs had a pantheon of gods whom they worshipped, including Svarog (sun-generator). His son was said to be Xursu Dažibogu (personification of fire and rays), which name is derived from the Iranian Xuršid (Persian for the personified sun). This example of Iranian influence upon the pre-Christian Slavic culture and religion is just one of a series of borrowings that began with the Scythians (750-200 B.C.) and the Sarmatians (200 B.C.-400 A.D.), and continued up to the 15th century.

To understand the ease of these borrowings and the influence Iranian beliefs had upon the Slavs, picture the movements of the Slavs: their original homeland was north of the Carpathian Mountains, between the Vistula and Dnieper Rivers. They began to spread out southwards to the Balkan peninsula, northwards up to the Baltic Sea and eastwards down the Elbe River, in an expansion that lasted from the 5th century until the 9th century. As they expanded, they were moving into areas already heavily influenced by the Iranian beliefs – and what was more, further waves of other Iranian beliefs would encroach on them like a restless sea of the dark imagination.

Christianity was adopted by each of the Slavic states separately – the Great Moravian Empire in 863, Bulgarian Empire in 865, Poland in 966, and Kiev (the beginning of Russia’s conversion to Christianity) in 988. But Christianity was by no means the only influence upon the East and Balkan Slavs; even to the present day, the Slavic folklore lies powerfully in the underground of belief, and there is still a strong element of ‘dual faith’, in which their older religion persists with the old gods now considered devils – not nonexistent, but transmuted into an evil existence.

Now, just prior to the 5th century, the Roman Empire altered its religion several times. Christianity was brought to the Balkans apparently by St Paul during the 1st century, suffered persecution during Diocletian’s reign (303-313 A.D.), became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 312, was ousted by the Iranian cult of the Mithraic Mysteries (of which incredibly little is known!) during the reign of Julian the Apostate (361-363), and was re-instated as the official religion subsequently. But both the Mithraic Mysteries and Christianity suffered setbacks by yet another Iranian cult that flourished from the 4th century until the 7th century, Manichaeism, based upon the Persian prophet Mani (died 274 A.D.) Manichaeism swept through Southern and Central Europe, from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, in a second wave from the 9th to the 14th centuries, and took very firm hold especially in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Bosnia, only stopped by the coming of the Turks in the 15th and 17th centuries.