The Restless Dead

Our parish holds an Adult Education Forum each month, and in October I enjoy releasing "Halloween Specials". This particular lecture was published on my old (now defunct) Xanga blog in 2012, but recent online discussions with friends have led me to re-post it here. Please to enjoy.

THE RESTLESS DEAD

When You Can’t Keep a Good Corpse Down

Let’s Talk About the Dead

Primitive religion—by which we mean those beliefs held by the vast majority of people throughout the vast majority of ancient history and prehistory—focuses almost entirely upon the dead.  From China to Africa, Europe to the Americas, living societies dedicated tremendous amounts of energy to placating the dead.  Indeed, the uniformity of practice amongst tribes and nations separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years tends to beggar the imagination, pointing to a shared reality of experience across cultures.  Perhaps our beliefs about the dead are hardwired into our being, a remnant of evolutionary psychology; or perhaps we’ve all been running into the same thing.

Speaking generally, human beings have always believed in a spiritual reality beyond the physical world that we can merely see and touch.  People in particular are held to consist of both a material and an ethereal component: a body and a soul, as we would say.  Primitive religion seeks to keep the dead at rest, treating the body in such a way whilst placating the soul, lest the ghost wreak terrible vengeance upon the living.  Usually this consists of proper funerary rites for the corpse and pious offerings (usually from family members) for the care and feeding of the spirit.  Not surprisingly, the lines betwixt gods and ghosts becomes blurred and often breached in such a system.

I once walked in on the undertaker wearing an Anubis mask. Untrue story.

African Afterlife

Consider ancient Egypt.  Human beings were held to consist of a body and a two-part soul: the ka, or individual identity, and the ba, or life-force.  The ka remained close to the corpse after death, and would decay with the body as the life-force left.  Such oblivion was held to be the common fate of most people early on in Egyptian belief.  Pharaohs, however, had their bodies preserved by mummification, their ba coaxed back to the ka via complex magical formulae (together reforming the ankh, or soul), and the soul then mollified by offerings and incense.  Thus could the immortal (or at least perpetual) pharaoh safely make the journey through the underworld to merge with the gods and work to maintain the natural order of good weather, full harvest, and stable government.  Later on this belief system became somewhat democratized to include a place in the afterlife first for nobles and then for anyone willing to prepare properly for death.

African tribes to the south of Egypt similarly reverenced their dead elders, placating them with food, drink, and prayer, that the elders might protect them from the afterlife.  Should the families of the deceased fail in this, however, the hungry ghosts, left to fend for themselves, would subsist on foul water and offal, seeking revenge upon ungrateful children and even upon unsuspecting passers-by.  Developments of this ancient theology may be seen in modern Voodoo, which, like most African tribes, maintains that there is indeed a good Creator God or Bondieu, but that He is too high above mortal concerns to be of any help.  Instead, Voodooists turn to the loa, or ancestral spirits, for aid.

Reign of the Dead

Japan and China maintain similar cults of ancestors, as did the various Celtic, Teutonic, and Italic peoples of Europe.  The Greeks feared the ghosts of those not given proper funerary rites; the Romans maintained temples to the death masks of perished relations.  Germanic tribesmen believed that those spirits not taken up to Valhalla or down to Helheim continued to hold court in their burial mounds, which are undoubtedly connected to Celtic “fairy mounds.”  The Celts never could differentiate readily between goblins, ghosts, and gods!  Similar mounds have been found throughout the Americas, and particularly large examples of the same include the great imperial pyramids of Giza and China.  It seems likely that such brobdignagian burials were piled up largely to keep the dead down!

As with the pharaohs, particularly revered ghosts were often fully deified.  The Greeks elevated Heracles to Olympus, and the Romans divinized great emperors and statesmen.  One school of mythological interpretation, euhemerism, holds that the gods of the ancient pantheons (and especially those of the Vikings and Germans) were one and all ancient heroes of old whose tales were retold and exaggerated over the centuries.  Such was the understanding of such laudable Christian authors as St. Augustine, Snorri Sturlsson, and the Venerable Bede.  Were the Greek deities not personifications of natural forces, as historians often hold them to be, but rather the hero worship of actual men?  We cannot know for sure.  But the link between the gods and the hungry dead is clearly expressed in the sixth tablet of Gilgamesh when Ishtar declares:  “If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven, I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld; I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!”

The Israelite Exception

We might think that the notable departure from such paganism would be the ancient Hebrews—descendants of Abraham, the world’s first monotheist, and inheritors of his divine promises.  In part this is true.  Obviously the Israelites worshipped one God alone, to the exclusion of any ancestor worship.  But they still held that they way they knew this God was primarily through their ancestors: through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; through Moses and Samuel and David.  And Israelite beliefs concerning the dead were not so different from those of the polytheistic cultures around them.

Like the Greeks, the Israelites believed in a subterranean land of the dead: Hades to the Greeks, Sheol (“the Pit”) to the Israelites.  As all our bodies share a mutual destination in the dust, so did all souls share a mutual destination in Sheol.  “Eternal life” as such was not yet a concern, save in the abundance of descendants, and Heaven, the abode of God and His holy angels, was no place for the spirits of mere mortals.  For the particularly wicked, however, there existed a second destination, an underworld beneath the underworld, home to Titans and fallen angels.  Greeks knew this great Abyss as Tartarus, abode of the damned; Israel referred to it as Gehenna.  Also in union with the Greeks, ancient Israel feared the restless dead.  Such evil souls, expelled from Hades or unable to reach it in the first place, plagued the living as dybbuks, or cruel ghosts.

 St. Vitalus, looking somewhat less than vital.

Jesus Saves

Over time, Judaism came to expect a general Resurrection of the dead, when bodies would be reconstituted, souls lifted up from Hades, and all peoples brought back to life—some for eternal punishment, and others for eternal reward.  Christians believe that this Messianic Age began with the Incarnation of God as Jesus Christ, Who conquered death and the grave.  His triumph lifted Paradise—that section of Sheol reserved for the just souls who had faith in God—up from the underworld and into the very presence of God in Heaven.  Moreover, all those who joined in Christ’s own death and Resurrection through Baptism were promised an afterlife of sanctification and joy in the Beatific Vision of God, until that time when Christ would come again and inaugurate the general Resurrection of all peoples.  Then would His Kingdom, mystically present in the Church, truly be all in all.

Because those saved by Christ were promised perfect union with Him in Heaven, serving as icons for the visible Image of the invisible God, the Cult of Saints arose.  As God and Man became one in Christ, so now did the saints of God perfectly reflect divine glory, and prayers offered to them were perfectly reflected to God.  The anthropological and ecclesiological implications of the Incarnation are thus extreme and wonderful; they also fulfill that instinctual desire of ancestor worship found deep in the heart of Man.  At last our ancestors reclaimed their lost divinity, not as pagan gods of their own but as perfect reflections of Jesus’ divine Light.  Christ exceeds the hopes of both Jewish prophecy and pagan dreams.

Due to this Christian understanding of life, death, afterlife and Resurrection, Christians treated the corpses of Jesus’ faithful not as lost but as sleeping.  Holy saints in death were still adorned with finery and treated with honor, as though one day they would simply sit up and live again—which, of course, they will.  Alive in Christ, the saints participated in the prayers of the faithful and in the attentive response of God, and some of their bodies yet on earth gave signs of this.  Some primary relics (as the bodies of saints are still called) remained incorruptible, not rotting but releasing fragrant incense.  Some secreted copious amounts of healing oil.  Others would, on occasion, respond to questioning or even move over in the tombs to make room for the body of a newly passed holy soul.

Holy Ghosts

Ghosts still had a place in the Christian understanding, however, due in no small part to their appearance in the Old Testament and Jesus’ references to them in the New.  The Catholic understanding held that ghosts might haunt the earth as part of their Purgation, the process of sanctification for the faithful that continued for a time after death.  Purgatory prepared a soul to meet God in Heaven and to perfectly reflect His light.  This meant, however, that if a ghost were indeed haunting as part of his or her Purgation (see, for example, Hamlet) then there might be little the living could do to rid themselves of a soul placed amongst them by God.  The faithful were encouraged to pray for the dead and to offer funeral Masses in their honor, speeding them along to their goal in Heaven.

Christians in the East, moreover, believed in a second sort of haunting, not as part of divinely ordained Purgation but due to dying a death “not one’s own”—that is to say, an untimely, sudden, violent, or unjust death.  In this case the soul seems not to be in the process of sanctification but to have trouble leaving this world in the first place.  Russians maintained that such deaths caused ghosts to linger until they would have died naturally; others believe that the haunting will be resolved with the ghost’s unaddressed concerns; and still others go to great lengths to insure that a departed relative will not become a “lost soul.”  Such are the Orthodox concerns regarding death.

Truly the only thing that scares a live Viking is a dead Viking.

The Undead

This brings us to a creature of particular horror, as ubiquitous amongst cultures as the funerary rites discussed above.  It is neither ghost nor demon but something in between, and yet more tangible than either.  It has gone by many names—revenant, ghoul, nosferatu—but we know it best today as the vampire.  In the words of the Twelfth Century English historian William of Newburgh:

One would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around, animated by some evil spirit, to terrorize or harm the living, unless there were many cases in our times, supported by ample testimony… Were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.

The vampire has been encountered in China, Malaysia, Assyria, Israel, Islam, South America, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, New England, and everywhere in between.  We find references to them in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.  The basic notion of the vampire is that of a corpse somehow defiled, usually by a wicked life, inhabited and reanimated by an evil spirit or demon so that it might rise from its grave and torment the living.  Such revenants are known to consume corpses in tombs and to exsanguinate livestock in the fields, but their preferred nourishment has always been human blood—presumably to keep the corpse from decay.

The life of a creature, human and beast alike, has long been held to reside in its blood.  Blood allowed the ghosts of Hades to speak in Homer’s Odyssey.  Blood was reserved for God, the giver of life, in the Hebrew Bible.  Blood, and the life force it contains, alone can prevent the natural dissolution of a dead body for the use of the demon that resides within.  Vampires are evil spirits given substance; devils wearing borrowed flesh.  And the odd specificity of this monster’s hybrid nature, neither fully a dead man nor simply an incorporeal fiend, can be traced back to ancient Assyria and beyond.

 Definitely somebody's ex-wife.

Satan’s Wife

We cannot review ancient vampire beliefs without a mention of Lilith.  Prevalent in Assyrian mythology and prehistoric sculpture, this winged and taloned she-demon entered Jewish legend and a succubus.  Mating with sleeping men in the night and strangling their infants in the crib, Lilith was a demon both of blood drinking and sex, two things all too horribly intertwined in the vampire mythos.  Middle Eastern depictions of a decapitated Lilith copulating with a man—the message presumably being, “Stay away from visiting mortals in the night or we’ll cut off your head!”—have been claimed as humanity’s earliest images of bloodsuckers, with Lilith as the Mother of All Vampires.

From Jewish legend she entered medieval Christian fears as the demon of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.  Protective amulets and songs of banishment guarded newborns from her depredations: the phrase lilu abi, “Lilith, go away!” evolved into the lullaby.  Later in Jewish thought, Lilith became identified with the first wife of Adam alluded to in Genesis 1; she left him to become Satan’s bride, and still rages at the children of her replacement, Eve.  Like Judas, Cain, and so many other potential vampires, Lilith is said to have red hair.

[Update, 2015: The demons of Jewish folklore have little in common with Christian notions of fallen angels and more closely resemble Islamic jinni or European elementals. One minority tradition in Judaism is that Lilith was not human but daemon/fairy, created on the Fifth Day along with other flying creatures. For more, see our 2015 presentation on Faeries and Daemons.]

The Anti-Saint

For Christians in particular the vampire is understood as the anti-saint.  As the Church Fathers wrote, “Diabolus simia Dei”—the Devil is God’s ape, always trying to mimic Him, mock Him, darkly reflect Him in a hellish manner.  As God took on flesh in Christ and with the saints who are Christ’s Body, so the Devil animates flesh to make his revenant ape God’s saints.  In life, a saint by God’s grace consistently chooses the proper path, ever electing to walk in the Way of Christ.  He who would be a vampire in death lived in just the opposite manner, ever choosing sin, always at the most extreme end of the moral spectrum.  Just as true saintly goodness is rare, so is utter demonic depravity.

Sorcerers, witches, werewolves, excommunicants, the accursed, and suicides were all held likely to become vampires in death.  Their bodies were often burned, or at least interred at crossroads, where in their confusion they could not return to plague the living.  Should they rise, they would not only drain blood in mockery of the Eucharist, and breathe out plague in mockery of the Holy Spirit, but they would also ape the properties of the glorified human body at the Resurrection.  St. Thomas Aquinas held these properties of the risen saints to be fourfold: (1) impassibility, unable to suffer sickness, death, or corruption; (2) subtlety, a perfect merging of the spiritual and physical, able to pass through doors as the risen Christ did; (3) agility, with a speed, strength, and coordination unknown to humanity since the Fall; and (4) clarity, beautiful and radiant with the Light of Christ.

The Devil provides a mirror reflection of these perfected human powers in his corrupted revenant: imperviousness to most forms of harm; the ability to pass subtly through doors and cracks, not to mention grave dirt, as though a mist; speed and strength beyond mortal men; and a hypnotically dark and hideous aspect.  Vikings feared the undead draugr, which could change size at will and swim through earth and rock as through water.  Though recognizable as the individual he was in life, the vampire also possesses eyes red with the glowing fires of Hell, birdlike talons, elongated canine teeth, and a soft down of hair sometimes identified with mold and moss.  This description is consistent from Mexico to China, with some flamboyant exceptions: African vampires have iron teeth and hooks for feet, whilst Malaysian revenants consist of undead heads with a flying gastrointestinal tract!

Vampires often attack lone travelers, pound on the doors of associates (crying out their name only once), and concentrate on draining close friends and family.  Nighttime exsanguination and “the Devil’s stigmata”—XXX, the sign of Judas’ silver—are clear giveaways that a ghoul has risen from the grave.

 You've got a little something stuck in your teeth, right... there.

Killing the Dead

Once the presence of a vampire has been established, it remains to dispatch the fiend.  Yet how does one kill what was dead to begin with?  Preventative measures include burying the corpse upside down or (illicitly) with the consecrated Host upon its breast.  Burial at crossroads and transfixing the body with a stake are also recommended.  Once up and about, however, the vampire is best dealt with by discovering and returning to its grave.  Many methods exist for divining the vampire’s identity, though the surest is simply to dig people up until a corpse is found undecayed, swollen with (or sometimes swimming in) blood, exhibiting the telltale signs of vampirism listed above.  The most effective strategy involves decapitation with a gravedigger’s spade, followed by cremation.  Some vampire hunters insist that the heart be removed and boiled to bits in wine or oil as well.

Contrary to popular belief, however, most vampires are held to be able to stalk in the day as well as the night, though their powers are diminished.  Such monsters only return to their tombs on Saturday, the biblical Sabbath—when even God rested in His tomb.  Given the difficulties involved in catching a vampire sleeping, as it were, there are ways to slay the beast “on the fly.”  The most popular of these is the use of a wooden stake impaling through the heart, preferably with wood from a tree associated with blessing, such as ash or whitethorn.  The stake must be run through with but a single blow, however, for additional strikes shall reanimate the revenant.  Silver bullets also have a history of dealing with bulletproof diabolical foes, from witches in the Brothers Grimm to werewolves of popular lore.  Such a bullet, blessed by a priest and inscribed with “JMJ” for the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, will often lay a vampire low.  Like the stake, however, this tends to be a temporary solution, as moonbeams reawaken him.

Natural magic can help, as regards garlic to repel him and seeds to preoccupy him.  Best of all, however, are blessed items, such as holy water, crucifixes, and the Body and Blood of Christ.  Some vampires have been laid to rest by the absolution of the local bishop.  Indeed, despite the snubbing of Christian solutions, modern descriptions of the vampire’s appearance and weaknesses prove surprisingly traditional.

 Yeah, that's pretty much what all clergy studies look like.

Not Dead Yet

As William of Newburgh said, the notion of a vampire would be ridiculous, save for the fact that people throughout history report seeing them all of the time.  Indeed, they seem to have been a particular plague in William’s England.  Today we still hear of chupacabras draining farm animals and of the dead lurking about, but those of an occult bent insist that embalming, steel coffins, and vaulted graves have all but eliminated the threat of our reanimated dead.  The revenant of legend has branched out into the Dracula of Bram Stoker, the lich of Dungeons & Dragons, and the zombies of Hollywood.  Pop culture aside, however, possessed corpses have been with us since prehistory, and seem unlikely to depart from us anytime soon.  So wear your crucifix, eat your garlic, and remember to give the dead their due.

Postscript—I ought to acknowledge a few other things that Hollywood inadvertently got right.  We do have rare reports of particularly old vampires immediately crumbling to dust, Buffy-style, upon staking, but this seems to be one case in a hundred; typically the vampire hunters should be prepared to put some elbow grease into dismemberment and immolation.  Also, there are occasional stories (mostly but not exclusively Arabian) of ghouls passing themselves off as living human beings for long periods of time, even to the point of marriage and child bearing.  Such descendants of vampires are known as damphyrs, and they make excellent vampire killers, as they inherit both the revenant’s unholy strength and an uncanny ability to sense the undead.