#folkloric vampires

[adrianastrix]

Pre-Dracula vampire fiction (1)

Since Halloween is upon us, I decided, as a treat, to rescue my "live reading" tweets about the most important books of vampire fiction (according to Myself, of course) in the form of a reading log. (The things between [ ] are notes I'm interpolating now, for clarity.)

And, since Dracula Daily is coming quickly to a close, I'm inviting you all to a deep dive into the almost two centuries of vampire tradition that Stoker had behind him when he wrote Dracula.

We will start with Augustin Calmet's treatise on the undead (1749), then we will jump to a special edition I have of The Vampyre (the first vampire piece of prose, that we know of, from 1817) with some fanfic short stories based on it attached and then we will visit the Dracula's Brood anthology and a few similar ones (that you only find on Amazon BR). Depending on my ADHD, we may or may not have some highlights of books on folklore vampires (mainly my complaints about them, but there are positive highlights).

ANYWAY LET'S GOO

17/07/2002 - 12:35 am

"I'm reading the vampire reports analysed by Augustin Calmet (a monk that lived around the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th and OH MY GOD MY BRAIN IS SCREAMING. It's too much information in a huge tangle. But the reports he collected ARE the materials that most classical vampire writers read.

I've previously read summaries of his work, not the book itself. I'm reading this free version: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/29412 This log is my way of organizing all the info in a way that is useful to me.

17/07/2002 - 12:56 am

I'm reading a PT-BR version of the vampire reports, they start at page 243 of the Gutenberg ebook.

In case you don't know, Calmet's treatise is his way to give a Catholic Church perspective on what are essentially paranormal stories that were spread by magazines and newspapers as true. [It was written in 1745, a few years after the Vampiromania started in Europe (we will talk more about that later).]

He talks about ghosts, vampires, revenants, angels, demons and more. We will focus on the vampires.

17/07/2002 - 12:57 am

We start with the first (highly controversial) folk ethymology for "vampire" as a derivation of "oupire", both meaning "bloodsucker". They are classified here as a type of revenant, or "those who come back".

[You would THINK we know what the word "vampire" actually means and from which language it originally comes, by now, given how much interest there is on the topic, and you would be naïvely, DELICIOUSLY wrong.]

17/07/2002 - 12:58 am

Another cool fact he adds is that vampires only *sometimes* cause their victim's deaths. As for what causes the vampirism cases known at the time, he lists four possible things: 1 - nothing, it's just superstition; 2 - people buried alive [yikes]; 3 - dead people that God allowed to come back and haunt the living; 4 - Satan shenanigans

17/07/2002 - 12:59 am

I think cause 3 is cool, because when was it the last time you've read a story of a person that became a vampire because God Himself told them "no, no, they really screwed you over, go back and drink a couple liters of their blood to teach them a lesson"?

17/07/2002 - 1:05 am

Here Calmet enters a tangent about cases of actual ressurrections, Lazarus-style. I'm skipping that, it doesn't interest me. Let me get back to action on page 261, with M. Vassimont's case.

17/07/2002 - 1:13 am

Hahahahahaha oh my GOD this is my favourite case. So, the vampire is the ghost of a shepherd that sometimes appear as a man, sometimes, as a dog. He attacks people [not by drinking blood, but] by making them feel weak, and he also ties the tails of two or more cows together [because he is also a petty jerk, apparently].

So, when the peasants decide to stake him to pin him on the ground, he flat out LAUGHS at their faces. The corpse mocks them, saying that the stake is just a stick to shoo dogs, and keeps tormenting him until he is dragged out of the village and burned to ashes.

17/07/2002 - 1:22 am

I love so much the mental image of a group of peasants around the coffin, tired and soaked with blood after staking that jerk and he just keeps LAUGHING at their faces.

17/07/2002 - 1:28 am

Calmet keeps repeating the signals that a corpse is a vampire: its blood is still red and liquid, rosy faces and flesh that is soft, pliable and devoid of worms. And to illustrate it, he offers cases of people that didn't decomposed after death and how things around them sometimes move by themselves.

17/07/2002 - 1:29 am

It's interesting because the vampires in those reports are considered revenants, too, but they don't rise from their tombs and drink blood. Instead, they cause poltergeist phenomena in their former homes, throwing rocks and messing things around.

17/07/2002 - 1:37 am

Another case of vampirism. This time, the vampire appears to his son after his death and asks for dinner. The son feeds him and the old man disappear. The next day, he does the same. The next morning, the son dies. When they exhume the old man's corpse, it's *breathing*.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

This was an eventful early morning. It was 5 months after the beginning of the quarantine and I my home office work didn't have official hours, so my sleep patterns had already gone to space at that point.

At this point, I think it's important to notice how vampires bring signs of life to the corpses they inhabit, and sometimes these signs not necessarily include the corpse moving around. I mean, for all his laughing around, the jerkish vampire shepherd above never did anyting to stop the stake or his own burning.

You will see so much more that sadly never made its way into fiction tomorrow. At the end, I'll make a summary of what was a vampire at that point, before the Germans muddled it all (yeah, the Germans, bet you didn expect it - although the French also had a hand on it). Stay tuned!

[vyvilha]

happy pride!

what is better than vampire x werewolf lesbians? only ukrainian opyrica x vovkulaka lesbians

[oliviarampaige]

“Carpathia”

Day 3 - Vampire

Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make.

[candela888]

After much research I have decided that vampiric entities in the Americas come in three different types, based on region. If u have any questions feel free to ask.

Vampiric entities of Mexico & Southwest USA:

Ojai vampire

Chupacabra (dog-like variety)

Tlahuelpuchi

Lechuza

Vampiro de Belen

Cihuateteo

Witch-like or animalistic. Tend to feed on defenseless children or animals. Many can shapeshift, usually into animals like wolves or owls.

Vampiric entities of South America:

Pishtaco

Abchanchu

Peuchen

Chonchon

Capelobo

Patasola

Tunda

Boraro

Animalistic and monstrous, many of these are barely even humanoid, usually horiffic to look at. Tend to go after adults, and are usually malicious. Many have backwards feet.

Vampiric entities of the Atlantic Coast:

New England Vampire panic

NYC vampire sightings

Hag, Ole-Higue, & Boo Hag

Chupacabra (alien variety)

Vampiro de Moca

Loogaroo/Rougarou

Soucouyant

Asema

New Orleans vampire sightings

Jacques St. Germain

Almost always humanoid, usually undead, sometimes witch-like, tend to attack people of all ages.

[prokopetz]

Hi! In your post about vampires you mentioned that Stoker's vampires can't be drawn or otherwise depicted. I haven't been able to find anything online that mentions this, do you recall where in the book this is mentioned?

(With reference to this post here.)

The idea that vampires can't be drawn or painted appears only in Dracula's early drafts; the novel's cast of characters originally included a subplot involving a painter named Francis Aytown, but the character (and associated subplot) were eventually dropped from the published text. I brought it up to illustrate that the oft-cited "well, mirrors are silver and photos are prepared with a silver emulsion" explanation probably isn't what Stoker had in mind regarding the business with the mirrors – entirely apart from the fact that the novel's text never mentions silver being particularly baneful to vampires in the first place!

[guardcanine]

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Suicidal Vampire by Jesús Bey

[marzipanandminutiae]

Being Spooky Season, it's a good time to remind everyone that those "vampire hunting kits" were not a thing in the 19th century and that they're all fakes made by assembling various real antiques in fancy boxes, which sellers started doing sometime in the late 20th century!

Important reminder thank you!

In many places in the 19th century, “vampire hunting“ worked more like “there has been a tuberculosis outbreak; let’s dig some corpse up, burn their heart, and feed the ashes to a sick family member to see if that helps.” Google Mercy Lena Brown, for one notable case much later than you might expect to see it

Or the truly fascinating story of people in Eastern Europe who claimed to be half – vampires (dhampir) and went around “fighting vampires“ for money or just food, in small villages. I’m told this would sometimes involve pretending to wrestle with invisible vampires for the benefit of people watching, and that the last known instance of it was in the 1950s.

[victusinveritas]

[trupowieszcz-moved]

fun facts about (polish) vampire folklore because i'm too autism

(disclaimer: my source for all of this is the book "Upiór. Historia naturalna" by Łukasz Kozak i'm not pulling this out of my ass)

The word "vampire" came from a mistranscribed Serbian word, written down by Austrian officials informing about a panic among the locals, who claimed that during a plague their dead were rising and biting them and spreading the plague further

In Poland, the words used to describe what later transformed into a "vampire" in literature were: upiór (and variations thereof - the word came from Ukrainian, and the Ukrainians got it from Turkish "ubyr"), strzyga (f)/strzygoń (m) and wieszczy (m)/wieszczyca (f). "Upiór" was used in the southeast, "strzyga" around the central regions, "strzygoń" (as well as strzyga) specifically in Lesser Poland (Małopolska) and "wieszczy" in Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) and in Kashubia. "Wąpierz" was not a word until some writer in the 19th century made it up!

The upiór actually very rarely drank blood. It happened, sure, but a much more bloodthirsty creature was zmora/mara. However, upiory often drank milk, stealing it from cows and horses. Both are life-giving bodily fluids, after all.

The above might make you think about witches, who were often blamed with stealing or spoiling milk, and you wouldn't be far off. You see, you had to be born as an upiór (these ones weren't contagiously biting!), and while you were alive, it would give you various magical powers, like clairvoyance and detecting the dead upiory, and so the upiór was practically a synonym of a sorcerer or witch. Of course, the sources vary, but depending on who you asked, they could control weather bringing heavy rains or droughts, see the future, know literally everything and so on. Those so-called "living vampires" knew who they were since birth and were often helpful, until they died.

After an upiór died, that's when the bad things happened. They disappeared from their graves, destroyed churches, broke candles, brought plague upon the people, scared their neighbors, and if one puffed in your face, you would soon die. They were said to be able to walk around with their decapitated head, so anti-vampiric burials often had to be very thorough and decapitation wasn't enough.

The signs that were supposedly telling of a living vampire were, among others: being born with teeth, being born in a caul, not having armpit or pubic hair BUT having a hairy chest, not having undergone confirmation (i'll come back to that in a moment), having a very red face and easily and often blushing (not being pale!), or being born with a deformed foot.

Not having participated in the confirmation sacrament was especially damning, because it was believed that upiory had two souls (and two hearts). When they were baptized, only one soul was being saved, and the confirmation sacrament was supposed to protect the second soul. This, of course, was extremely against the catechism, so the first "official", church-related sources recording those beliefs had to invent another "backstory" for upiory, and they claim that an upiór is a dead person specifically, who was given to the devil at birth, the baptism saving their soul, but their body still belonging to the dark forces, which was why they rose from their graves - the devil basically hijacked their corpses.

I won't make this post much longer but I will GLADLY answer any questions because this is my special interest and I just came back from an exhibition where the author of the aforementioned book talked about all of that so. me right now ⬇️ (readmore so you dont get continuously blased with the gif under it)

[maxyvert]

🦇Hexoween 2023 masterpost!🦇

1 - Button eye

2 - Bloody desire and its consequences

3 - Demon shop and dark deals

4 - Sea of Monsters

5 - Sisters of the Night

6 - Ominous Children

7 - Curse of the Full Moon

8 - Secret of the Antique Talisman

[cheesy-cryptid]

tw // blood, body horror

“Honora…“

“Not now, Benito! We've just uncovered—-“

“No…look!”

🥀🐦‍⬛🧛🍂

Tropical gothic my beloved i am SO back 🩸 decided to make a fake book cover about filipino monster hunters solving mysteries together

[vyvilha]

fun facts about ukrainian vampires (opyr)

• opyri can be of two origins: born and made. made opyri are made by witches, who can smear a baby with blood of a man who went to sleep without praying, thus making the child an opyr.

• opyri have two souls. when opyr dies, only one soul goes to the otherworld. this is why they continue living after death. they aren't immortal though, and only live post-death for seven years. you can presume the person who died was an opyr and will return later if right after their death was a great storm.

• they are very merry fellas and are known to sing, dance and play musical instruments. you can see them partying if you go to the village border at midnight. they also can be spotted smoking a pipe while laying in their coffin.

• opyr can turn into variety of different things: a child, a white or a black dog, a cat, a wolf, a horseman.

• if someone sneezes and you don't respond with "bless you" such person can become an easy target for opyr.

• to get rid of the opyr, you must take them into your arms and carry them across the town or village three times. classical stake to the heart works too.

[belle-keys]

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

– Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice (1976)

[lifenconcepts]

*because I don’t like to be perceived and that seem cool yeah

**Because I am a forever changing creature, I demand to be formless because I’m both everything and nothing, I can’t be defined or destroyed, never caught or set in stone - forever a tale carried on by mouth until inevitably fading into history and obscurity.

if you have any cool powers is subjective entirely on your own experience in media representations of that creature. You think vampires are immortal and can turn to bats? Well if you choose that then you are too. You think they can actual live in the daylight and eat garlic? Well so can you. You think they cant? Well, then you cant. It’s simple, really.