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C h a p t e r 8

CONCLUSION

In the preceding chapters we have marshaled support for two

basic hypotheses, namely (1) that the folkloric vampire in

Bulgaria and much of the Balkans serves primarily to provide

a scapegoat under appropriate circumstances, and (2) that

the folklore of recent centuries encodes, as a system of

“survivals,” a pattern of hostility toward paganism (and,

later, heresy), which was epitomized by blood sacrifice.

Such functionalist assertions, if they can be proved, are

useful enough for explaining many of the details and

features of vampire folklore. Understanding that sacrificial

ritual was associated with the earliest ‘vampires’, who were

neither demonic nor otherwise supernatural, provides a means

for approaching the highly ritualistic nature of later

vampire lore. It also accentuates the essentially Christian

basis of the vampire, by identifying the locus in Christian

eschatology where the embers of the pagan view of death, the

body and the afterlife were most difficult to extinguish.

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The notion of the vampire as a scapegoat, on the other

hand, is not new. What we have done here is simply to

further articulate that theme, since the scapegoat mechanism

may be viewed as special type of sacrifice.1

However, having demonstrated that the vampire is

historically bound up with paganism and sacrifice, we must

go one step further. We have yet to conjecture why this

connection with ritual sacrifice holds such imaginal power.

Even if it is provisionally admitted that the Western,

literary vampire is a completely different sort of thing

from its Balkan precursor, the fact remains that the vampire

is the most long-lived and well-known of the demonic figures

of Europe — Satan himself aside. Whatever it has come to

mean as a complex metaphor in contemporary culture, the

modern vampire can no more be separated completely from its

early history than the meaning or sound of a word can be

entirely divorced from its etymology. In fact, the changes

in the shape and meaning of the term vampir over time are

1 Objections to this claim have been made, and in fact follow a distinction made earlier in

this work. Henninger points out that “eliminating rites, though they may include the slaying of a living being, are not directed to a personal recipient and thus should not be described as sacrifice.” (Henninger, “Sacrifice”) Hubert and Mauss, on the other hand, see elimination as the simplest form of expiation. (Sacrifice,53). This ambivalence is demonstration enough that there is a strong link between the two practices, even if we wish to distinguish between them. The difference is made explicit in Leviticus 16, where the two kids are separated into a sin offering (expiation) and scapegoat.

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due to the same sorts of cultural contact that contribute

to linguistic change in general.2 At no point in the history

of the concept, in other words, was the existing definition

suddenly abandoned in favor of a completely different sense

when the word was uttered anew. On the contrary, over the

centuries the term was used in various cultural situations,

spreading not only across the Balkans, but west and north

into Europe (eventually the New World), east into Russian

lands, and south into Greece and Turkey. Each time the word

was spoken, the possibility arose that either its meaning or

its sound would shift, if ever so imperceptibly, to accord

more closely with the understanding or speech habits of its

most recent utterer. Furthermore, since cultures neighboring

Bulgaria had their own beliefs (themselves often in flux

thanks to invasion and migration), which in some cases

included demons that resembled the vampire,3 under conditions

of cultural contact the concept might easily have been

adapted into an existing category. This syncretic process of

adaptation has been aptly termed “demon contamination,” and

it is critical to remain aware of the variety of forces that

2 Raimo Antilla, “Why Does Language Change? Social and Linguistic Factors,” chapter 9 in

An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (New York: Macmillan Co., 1972). 3 Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore, 412ff.

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have influenced the notion of the vampire.

Despite the multiplicity of manifestations of the vampire,

and even in spite of an apparent difficulty arriving a

definition of the term that is both comprehensive yet not so

all-encompassing as to be meaningless, we feel intuitively

that the futuristic vampires of a millennial Hollywood movie

like Blade, for example, must share something fundamental

with a Balkan or Russian pagan at the last millennium, whose

practices the early Orthodox church found repugnant, and who

was also called a ‘vampire’.

Indeed, we are tempted by that very tenuous link, stretched

over centuries and continents, to speculate that repugnance

itself may be a defining feature of the vampire. Then how do

we account for the twentieth-century transforms of the

vampire that include “friendly” folkloric vampires4 and

literary vampires that are virtual romantic heroes?5

Repugnance alone thus does not characterize the general

attitude toward the vampire, either now or in the past. The

antipathy we might feel toward the vampire is mixed with

4 Perkowski, “Update,” 161. 5 The vampires of Anne Rice and her followers come to mind. See also Kristine Habacker,

“The Image of the Vampire in the Works of Three Nineteenth Century Russian Writers.” MA thesis, University of Virginia, 1996.

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sympathy: even Upir’ Lixij, if we are at all close to

being correct in our interpretation of his marginal graffito

in an eleventh century manuscript, was drawn into a practice

that his Christian comrades considered anathematic. That is

to say, even Christian monks could, for whatever reason, be

attracted to the practices and beliefs of marginalized

groups. In the battle for the soul of the Slavic peasant,

Christianity found itself not always successful in either

eliminating or absorbing traditional rites and beliefs.

Because of the inadequacies of our documentation, we cannot

describe with any certainty the process by which a once

merely pejorative ethnonym began to be used “folklorically”

rather than politically. Written references to the vampire,

as we have seen, before the seventeenth century are both

rare and vague, but the use of the term vampir to designate

some sort of revenant or animated corpse probably occurred

much earlier, perhaps in the twelfth or thirteenth century.

The shift in the attributes of the vampire represents a

merger of the figure of the undesirable religious outcast

(pagan, heretic) with an undesirable personification of

“evil” (such as disease; the ne¾it). The continuators of

pagan ritual were accused of serving the Devil. The evil of

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their practices, from the perspective of those whose

brand of Christianity was itself not totally free of a

belief in the need for expiation, might certainly have been

held responsible for adversity. Two concomitant processes

must have led to the demonization of the vampire: first,

pagan rituals must have either disappeared or gone

underground (or, in many cases, been absorbed and supplanted

by Christian ritual); secondly, the shift in the focus of

Christian enmity from pagans to heretics meant a semantic

broadening of the term vampir to include people who in fact

probably had a very simple liturgy, certainly free of

sacrifice. The exaggerated accusations against heretical

groups, intended to brand them as threatening outcasts,

often lacked a basis in fact, but the usefulness of such

accusations for purposes of scapegoating remained. We may

suppose that the emergence of the vampire as an autonomous

demonic being occurred some time after the demise of the

political threat posed to the expansion of Orthodoxy by the

dualists. As dualism, too, went underground, so literally

did the vampire, yet it was always alive in the Slavic

worldview, representing a threat of return. This anxiety

about return reflects an awareness of a persistent

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vulnerability in the belief system put forth by the

Christians.

What, exactly, was the nature of this vulnerability? What

threat did pagan “polytheism” and heretical dualism pose in

common to the forces of Christianization among the Balkan

peoples? Surely, this was not merely a political threat.

Paganism had lost virtually all its political power after

the fifth century, while Bogomilism, although it was an

attractive dissident sect for many disenfranchised peasants,

never really constituted a viable threat to Byzantine

Orthodoxy — even in Byzantium, where the movement spread

from Bulgaria after the eleventh century.6 In order to answer

this question, we must distill from our earlier conclusions

those features in the history of the vampire that are most

central.

The vampire, above all, is both an outsider and a threat.

Regarding the folkloric vampire, the threat is intimately

bound up with the ambiguous status of the corpse, or of the

relationship of the individual both to death as space (the

“other world”) and to the rituals and taboos that surround

6 Hamilton and Hamilton, Dualist Heresies, 175-80.

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death (that guarantee proper transmission into that other

world). Ambiguity and resulting anxiety about the proper

performance of funeral rituals, which themselves had been

incorporated into the ritual scheme of Orthodoxy from pre-

Christian times (and therefore represented pre-Christian

beliefs), lie at the heart of vampire folklore: by far the

most frequent cause of vampirism is a lapse during the vigil

over the corpse, permitting the violation of the sacred

space around the body by domestic animals or profane

gestures.

The response to this threat, meanwhile, involves techniques

designed to re-establish order. From the folkloric accounts,

many of the techniques used to dispense with a vampire, when

taken together, seem to suggest that the un-corpse is

“sacrificed,” subjected to collective ritual activities that

resemble those of blood sacrifice. The actions taken against

an unholy being, in other words, themselves violate the

Christian canon and the Christian ethic. Yet, paradoxically,

it is the presence of the Christian ethic that softens the

blow against the monstrous outsider, by first ensuring that

he has no sentience at the time of destruction – that he is

dead. It is the weirdness of this ‘punishment of the dead’

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that makes vampire folklore so unique. As Bruce Lincoln

observes,7 “how do you kill something that is already dead?”

The historical, or “pre-demonic” vampire, meanwhile, is an

outsider and threat because his presumed belief system

itself causes the ambiguity that is later characterized by

the folkloric vampire. The ostensibly immediate relationship

between the sacrifier and the divinity, which centers around

a public, physical display of generosity, if not intentional

waste,8 was not so easily supplanted by the delayed benefits

of Christian humility and prayer. That is to say, to the

extent that sacrifice guaranteed (all other factors being

eliminated) such benefits as fertility, absence of drought

or plague, or any of the other things that people had in

mind when sacrificing (health being the most important),9 it

constituted something of a risk to cease the practice

altogether. Thus, in the Balkans at any rate, the Christian

mission found itself having to accommodate sacrificial

7 Personal communication, Feb. 22, 1999. 8 Bataille’s view of sacrifice is an appropriate lens for viewing not only agrarian sacrifice,

but perhaps also the vampire as an object of sacrifice. “To sacrifice is not to kill but to relinquish and to give…Sacrifice is the antithesis of production, which is accomplished with a view to the future; it is consumption that is concerned only with the moment…To sacrifice is to give as one gives coal to the furnace.” Theory of Religion, 49. The last sentence here ought to remind us of the incineration of the corpse as a means of disposing of the vampire. Cf. chapter five, above, 191, fn. 20.

9 MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 56; Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 75.

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ritual by redirecting its intention. The actions of

ritual slaughter were reinterpreted as celebratory feasting,

for example, in honor of St. George, and the roasted meat

was distributed to the entire community or to the poor.10 The

idea of killing an animal to secure some direct, material

benefit was not allowed to persist. The incursion of the

Ottoman Turks into the Balkans, however, eventually meant a

reversal of the Christian attitude toward sacrifice: the

kurban was readily accepted, spreading even into non-Muslim

areas, since it conveniently replaced the pagan sacrifices

that had come under attack by the Church. In regard to the

practice of sacrifice in Bulgaria, then, on the one hand it

was associated with paganism and thus a practice to be

avoided. On the other hand, at the practical level it would

not go away, since the agrarian faith in its efficacy was

never wholly abandoned.

The Unclean Days revisited: Vestigial paganism If we recall for a moment the semantic equivalence between

three different names for the same calendrical period,

namely the “Unclean Days,” the “Pagan Days,” and the

“Vampire Days,” we are promptly provided with a clue as to

10 Teodorov, Drevnotrakijsko nasledstvo, 85.

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how Christianity seeks to contain the pressure of

vestigial paganism beneath the surface of a Christian-

agrarian society. During this period of twelve days in the

dead of winter, there is a high degree of risk and

uncertainty. Traditionally, the boundary between the old and

the new year was a period when anxiety about the coming

year’s fertility and benefits was at a peak. Prognostication

in the form of games or rituals was very common. It was also

a time of year for sacrifices, and excessive feasting and

celebration – behavior which was not looked upon by Orthodox

theologians with any sort of amusement.

Everyone was to have a good time and feel happy because the Kalends had a prognostic quality: as on that day, so for the whole year...On the night that began the kalends one never went to bed, instead joining in dancing, singing, joking, drinking and feasting with one's neighbors at tables set up in the streets and plazas.11

This important Roman festival lasted in the Balkans long

past the arrival of the Slavs. Reflexes of the word kalends

show up in South, West, and East Slavic languages,12 now

11 MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 37. 12 For example, Bulgarian коледа, ‘Christmas’; Serbian koleda, ‘Christmas carol’; Polish

koledy, ‘Christmas songs’; Russian коляда, ‘caroling’, etc.

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designating a Christianized festival, not unrelated to

caroling, but of unmistakably pagan origin.

So the period stretching from Christmas across New Year is

noticeably tinged, in parts of Europe, with pre-Christian

symbolism and customs, including sacrifice, foretelling the

future (itself accomplished by a form of sacrifice, perhaps:

throwing of coins or splaying of an animal pelt for

interpretation smacks of an offering: “we offer this (money,

animal) in order to learn what will happen”13), feasting and

abandonment. In Bulgaria, during this period, bands of men

would leave the village to fight with evil spirits. Upon

their return, they must be purified inside the Church.14

We may interpret the Bulgarian adaptation thus: for reasons

which are important in an agrarian society, where a good

deal depends upon the beneficence of natural forces, the

ancient pagan festival was retained, but tied closely to

Christian belief. The twelve days correspond, according to

popular notions, to a period when Christ was yet

13 Dvornik cites Procopius on the pagan Slavs: “Besides that they venerate rivers and

nymphs and some other demons. They bring sacrifices to all of them and when bringing them they make divination (in order to know the future).” Dvornik, The Slavs, 50.

14 McClelland, “History vs. Nature”; Raèko Popov, “Kâm xarakteristikata na bulgarskite narodni vjarvanija,” 52-74.

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unbaptized.15 During this period, the demonic holds sway

on earth, and it is thus a very dangerous period. By

‘demonic’ is meant that pagan demons (or: paganism itself,

already demonized) reemerge and allow the good Christians to

get in touch with a set of beliefs about man’s place in the

natural world that is substantially different from those

beliefs that are proposed by Christianity. We are making

here no claims about a collective unconscious, as though the

unhappy demons were a mystical force climbing up through

various layers of repression in order to be heard. There is

no need for mystification: what has happened is simply that

the sacrifices, feasts and general merrymaking of a pre-

Christian holiday have been retained in spite of the

protests of the Church. The Church’s strategy, it would

appear, was to permit the community to periodically engage

in this contact with the “unclean forces” (that is, the

vestiges of pagan belief and rites), but to contain it

within a bounded period, which ended with a ritual

purification to eliminate any traces of contamination. From

a social point of view, this permission functions as

something of a release valve, permitting a temporary return

15 For purposes of prognostication, furthermore, the twelve days correspond to the next

twelve months.

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to the less constrained form of relationship to the

sacred,16 in which direct access to knowledge of the future

is not disallowed. By setting a limit upon the period,

however, the Church also maintains its authority, since it

dictates the point of closure of this portal, and demands

purification (restoration of order). The Church insulates

itself from any contact with paganism, meanwhile, by

formally cutting this period out of the Church calendar.

During these days, no Christian rituals may be performed,

and Christ himself is otiose (that is, unbaptized,

unitiated, therefore unable to interfere).

It is instructive, then, to notice how the same stretch of

time is associated simultaneously with uncleanness,

paganism, and vampires. Since it is during this period that

the possibilities for the coming year are determined, it is

a time fraught with taboo. Violations of those taboos are

held responsible for ensuing natural adversity and, as we

mentioned earlier, people born or conceived during this time

are likely to become vampires or to possess vampire-like

powers.

16 Cf. Bataille: “The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of

duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence. It constantly threatens to break the dikes, to

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The fact that the Unclean Days persisted in Bulgaria as a

widely observed ritual period can only indicate that its

meaning remained intact even under the strong influence of

negative Christian attitudes. It is this very unwillingness

to relinquish all contact with forms of pre-Christianity

that is involved in the continuation of sacrifice, however

it may now be interpreted. And, we would propose, in the

continuation of the belief in the vampire.

The vampire, the dead and the future There should be, by now, no doubt that the Bulgarian vampire

is deeply rooted in pre-Christian rituals as they were taken

up by Christians. Regardless of modifications to the

folklore as a consequence of the addition of Islam to the

syncretic Balkan mix, the scapegoat function of the vampire

is something of a constant, and is probably also at the core

of much Western vampire literature.17 We now have to grapple

with a logical problem. This scapegoat aspect of the vampire

is both secondary and projected: a vampire can be used as a

scapegoat because of his marginal status (marginalized or

confront productive activity with the precipitate and contagious movement of a purely glorious consumption.” (Theory of Religion, 52).

17 In another context I intend to argue that even Count Dracula in the novel Dracula is a scapegoat, hounded by the mob comprising four men and a woman.

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marked individuals being highly selectable for both

sacrifice and scapegoating18), yet that status is acquired

through attribution: one becomes a vampire in order to serve

as a scapegoat. Put differently, a vampire is instantiated

when the need for one arises. Yet, of course, the category

pre-exists the instance, and the category itself does not

exist merely to supply scapegoats.

Referring back to our discussion of the Unclean Days, we can

see that during that period of transition, it is imagined

that one has access to the future, at least within the

limitation of the next twelve months. It must be the case

that this special dispensation, to see into the future, is

granted in accordance with contact with pre-Christian

(chthonic) deities.19 The vampire does not represent a deity

per se, but rather the entire possibility that the boundary

separating the land of the living from that of the dead can

be crossed in both directions. It is from the land of the

dead, perhaps, that knowledge of both the past and the

future may be obtained. The Christian view of this,

18 Eliade, Zalmoxis, 359. 19 Rohde, discussing Greek chthonic deities, writes, “They are the gods of a settled,

agricultural, inland population. Dwelling beneath the soil they guarantee two things to their worshippers: they bless the cultivation of the ground and ensure the increase of the fruits of the soil to the living; they receive the souls of the dead into their underworld. In certain places they also send up from the spirit-world revelations of future events.”

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naturally, is hostile: the important notion of redemption

depends upon a linear view of time, an end of an unfolding

temporal process, which does not permit foreknowledge (which

challenges free will).20 Time, in the Christian sense, is

unidirectional: the barrier of death, once crossed, is

crossed until the end of time, at which point there will be

a general resurrection. The notion that the dead can return

prior to the return of Christ is an absolute impossibility

in Christian terms. Therefore, any belief system in which

time is not linear (i.e. that proposes that the future can

be intercepted) represents a philosophical challenge of the

greatest magnitude. The vampire’s existence represents the

persistence of an agrarian view toward time and history that

is anomalous (and therefore unnatural, evil) and thus cannot

be allowed to exist. In the Christian worldview, the

individual is unique, and his actions are the sole

determinant of his fate at the Last Judgment. The vampire,

as simulacrum, threatens the notion of identity. Identity

itself is confirmed by individual death, and if death

becomes a permeable, rather than a semi-permeable membrane,

the entire system of judgment, retribution and forgiveness

(Psyche, 162).

20 Florovsky, Creation and Redemption, 244.

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(and the moral consequences of that system) is threatened

at its core. There is no choice but to destroy the vampire.

Since the vampire must be destroyed categorically, it

becomes a suitable scapegoat, morally tolerable in a

religion that does not permit either retribution or

injustice, precisely because it is not sentient.

The vampire as a sacrificial victim The emergence of a vampire into the community portends or,

more often, explains disaster; the elimination of the

vampire effectively removes the threat of the disaster (or

some less consequential adversity). If we read folkloric

accounts logically, we must conclude that the elimination of

the vampire is actually not accomplished until the threat

has already been removed,21 since the outcome of collective

action is always that the vampire does no further harm. A

vampire is not chosen until it is safe to do so.

The elimination of the vampire thus constitutes a form of

expiation. The rituals performed, as Perkowski points out,

21 We will not attempt to answer here the question of whether or not real action is taken

against buried corpses. On the one hand, there is documentation that communities have carried out real or symbolic actions against purported vampires; on the other hand, many of the collected reports may be fabulates. Finally, there is the possibility that such actions, if actually taken, are taken in secrecy and not divulged to interviewers. Suffice it to say that the destruction of the vampire is supposed to have taken place.

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serve to relieve tension and anxiety,22 but they also

simulate sacrifice, intended as atonement for whatever

transgression was responsible for the recent catastrophe. A

problem arises, however. Something sacrificed must have an

appropriate value. What value does a corpse have?23

Baudrillard looks at the economic situation slightly

differently, but raises a similar issue:

...death, birth or disease, everything that comes from nature and that we accord the privilege of necessity and objectivity, quite simply has no meaning for [savages]. This is absolute disorder, since it cannot be symbolically exchanged, and what cannot be symbolically exchanged constitutes a mortal danger for the group. They are unreconciled, unexpiated, sorcerous and hostile forces that prowl around the soul and the body, that stalk the living and the dead; defunct, cosmic energies that the group was unable to bring under control through exchange.24 [emphasis added]

Sacrificing a corpse, under ordinary circumstances, makes no

sense whatsoever, since it constitutes no legitimate

22 The Darkling, 123. 23 In the previous chapter (p. 309), we noted that scapegoats do not have the same value as

sacrificial objects: they are unclean and are not consecrated. Further, it has been argued that the vampire is a scapegoat. However, the symbolism of eliminating a vampire is akin to sacrifice. We might postulate here that the oscillation between consecration and desecration exemplified by the vampire is itself a manifestation of ambiguity surrounding the scapegoat/sacrificial victim complex.

24 Symbolic Exchange, 131.

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offering. Even in strict Keynesian economic terms, the

supply far outweighs the demand, bringing the exchange value

of the corpse to essentially nil.25

For some reason, Christianity’s proposition of divine will

as an answer for events that cannot be explained by a simple

system of action-consequence could not supplant a more basic

sense that evil was a type of punishment. Yet neither human

nor animal sacrifice was legitimately available to provide

expiation in an ostensibly Christian culture. The sacrifice

of mere effigies, meanwhile, had lost its meaning:

As soon as an effigy is substituted for a human victim, the rite tends to lose its expiatory and fecundating value, its double aspect of liquidating past defilements and creating a new world. It takes on the character of parody.26

Given the problem of needing to seek expiation in the face

of irrational adversity, and lacking a suitably direct

mechanism thanks to Christianity’s dubious insistence (from

25 Modern medicine, in its search for suitable cadavers for purposes of education and

experimentation, has added an artificial value to the corpse. This led, actually, to the late eighteenth and nineteenth century phenomenon of body snatching. Nevertheless, aside from such restricted purposes, the still corpse is valueless to the community, especially to the degree that it has no capacity for production.

26 Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 122.

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a purely pragmatic point of view) upon the sacrifice of

Christ as the only redeemer of sins, one novel option that

arose in the early Balkans was to provide value to that

which previously had no value. When life is conferred upon a

lifeless corpse, it becomes an object worthy to be

slaughtered.

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CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 376 The Unclean Days revisited: Vestigial paganism............................................... 386 The vampire, the dead and the future ................................................................. 391 The vampire as a sacrificial victim........................................................................ 394