The Age of VAMPIRES

this video is brought to you by muie a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great Cinema from all around the globe get a whole month free at movie.com horses most people think of vampires as purely the domain of fiction but this isn't exactly correct in history and folklore vampires occupy a space that is quite similar to witches for many centuries people did not believe in Empires these Undead creatures simply were real they were Facts of Life as real as the grass and the sky there has been vampire frenzy vampire hunts and large-scale disasters attributed to

the work of vampires European Royals have been accused of vampirism government officials have traveled hundreds of miles to investigate reports of vampire outbreaks however these real vampires did not look like this they did not bite people's necks nor did they turn into bats our modern ideation of the vampire is in truth scores away from its folkloric origins in Eastern Europe in making this video I am asking the viewer to erase all of their preconceived notions about the vampire and begin with a blank canvas in this documentary we will investigate many things we will do so

mostly in the context of those earlier people who accepted vampire Ires as reality what did the vampire look like what did it do how did earlier people find hunt and kill the vampire furthermore we can see how and why the vampire strayed so far from its Origins and how modern science can explain early claims of vampiric outbreaks of course like any story wortht telling we must start at the beginning investigating the word vampire is not a simple task but this task does provide us with a lot of insight on the creatures of folklore there's no

broad consensus on the atmology of vampire there are instead many theories Lewis perovsky is a leading researcher on the folklore of these undead beings in his book The darkling perovsky suggests the word vampire has its roots in the old Russian name upir specifically with that name being a cognant of the serbo Croatian vampir the old Iranian religion of manism features A God Called bom who is said to carve a tomb as the grave of darkness slavonic is a term used to describe the family of Eastern European languages in slavonic bam would be pronounced vam the

slavonic name beer means a drinking bout so we could get something like van which would be a combination of a tomb of darkness and a drinking bout however there's not much research to indicate that manism ever made its way to Slavic countries a more detailed analysis shows that the old Russian namei comes from the Latin imp purus which means unclean specifically in reference to a corpse this feels most Like An Origin Point vampires are primarily revenants that is bodies who have risen from the dead we can also see other slavonic variants of the the same

name including the Bulgarian vapir the renan vapir or V the Russian upir or Ur and the Polish upor we can also get some insight from looking at the world of werewolves another common creature in Eastern European folklore much of the lore surrounding these two creatures overlaps insignificant ways vampires and werewolves often have the same abilities or even origin stories Serbian vampires and werewolves were both called vukodlak which is a 13th century term for a wolf pelt wearer Greeks also referred to vampires as verola case but record shows this word is borrowed from the Serbian language

in this instance etymology is a very imprecise science vampire as an English term first emerged in the 1730s and we don't really know how the word is the result of a rather unknowable everchanging stew of slavonic terms as we will see this is a recurring theme in the story of the vampire they are creatures which prove to be incredibly malleable in almost all facets before we proceed there's something we must discuss vampires exist in non-european cultures there are vampiric legends in Chinese Indian Native American and South American legends while I will not ignore these outright

I must say that an essay covering every single Empire in every single culture would be a truly Monumental effort the resulting video would be one that does not span hours but days or even weeks in the interest of palatability and Publishing an author must focus on something more specific this video like all of my videos is also based on what I find personally interesting lastly I do feel that the European vampire best represents the vampire of our modern culture so from a combination of logistics personal interest and what feels appropriate I will be focusing on

the European vampire specifically the idea of an undead or magical being drinking blood is nothing new Lilith was biblically described as the first female demon said to drink the blood of children indeed in some obscure translations her name has been expressed as vampire ancient Romans proliferated a rumor that the Germanic goth people consumed blood grindle from the epic poem Beowolf drinks blood 15th century witches likewise were said to consume the blood of Mortals but none of these are vampires in Earnest and so we reach our first hurdle we cannot pinpoint one group or persons originating

the idea of a vampire but in the early 14 century serbians were known to exume the bodies of suspected vampires and cremate them some 300 years before the English word vampire existed Serbian Emperor Stefan ducon enacted the following legislation when it happens that by Magic means people are taken out of their graves and cremated the village where that was done must pay a fine and the priest who came to the cremation must be deprived of his vocation we cannot either say why or how any individual came up with the concept of a vampire early people

were subject to tragedies which they could not have possibly understood disease famine natural disasters seems that vampires probably formed as a reaction to these incidents do in particular when epidemics swept through Villages the vampire was provided as likely cause Slavic peoples believed that the undead would rise from their graves wreak havoc on the village and spread pestilence through the land and exhuming Graves and cremating suspected vampires they hope to Halt these occurrences as I wrote this I was racked with the question of why why would these people believe such a thing come to understand that

like many folk believe this is kind of the wrong framing it is science which leads us to ask why and generally speaking science basically didn't exist at the time at least certainly not in a capacity which resembles today's science I think it is more helpful to take these beliefs as consequences of their time we should not expect proof to the concept but instead accept that lack of proof to the contrary was plenty in these earlier times certainly this way of thinking provided the landscape for Europe's first vampires there are a few accounts which catapulted vampires

from the backwoods of Eastern Europe into mainstream European Society the most famous and perhaps most influential is the PO account in the early 1700s reports arrived to the Serbian capital of a vampire tormenting a nearby Village the government dispatched police and medical officials to investigate this is what they found Arnold pal was a Serbian soldier who lived in a small village likely near modern-day Kosovo pal recollected being harassed by a vampire in Turkish Siberia when he was a soldier to deter the vampire he ate Earth from the vampire's grave and smeared himself with the vampire's

blood likely stolen from that grave this was a story he recounted many times to virtually anyone who would hear it in his village years later in 1726 pal fell from his Wagon in Kosovo he broke his neck and died after his death villagers complained that they were still being bothered by pal at night indeed The Village claimed that four people had been killed by pal up to 30 days after his death the alleged vampire also attacked cattle and drank their blood when the villagers ate meat from these cattle 17 people died in just 3 days

a girl named stasa reported that she was a attacked by one of the dead and throttled in her sleep after the attacks denosa experienced chest pains she fell ill and she died on the third day of her Affliction the villagers dug up pal and found his body entirely undecayed fresh blood was flowing from his eyes nose mouth and ears he had freshly grown fingernails and skin that looked undisturbed and undecayed the corpse met all of the qualifications for a vampire so they drove a stake into his heart Pal's corpse bled copiously and allegedly he groaned

in pain the villagers burned the body and threw the ashes onto his grave they then exhumed all of the bodies of those who had died they found 14 corpses of all ages and genders showing the same signs of vampirism this report was eventually sent to a magazine called glenor historic where it caught the attention of mainstream European Society alongside the pal report another story story soon followed to help ignite the European vampire frenzy in 1725 a report came to the desk of a medical officer named fald in Vienna he claimed a corpse in a Serbian

Village had risen from its grave to strangle victims and infect them with a condition that caused immediate death this report mirrors the pow incident in many ways but in Folts we have the first European example of the term vampiri fromal used this word to describe the undead corpse and his victims so perhaps our vampire was born vampire Obsession spread across Europe in 1732 12 books and four dissertations were published about vampires 22 papers were further published and circulated around European cultural centers like Amsterdam leipsig and Vienna there were poems stories and novels published with vampiric

themes if ever there was a golden age for the vampire this was it at one point there were widely accepted r rumors that the princess of Vienna had risen as a vampire after her recent death when stories spread in Paris that Louis the 15th had kidnapped children to drink their blood riots broke out and 20 people died fueling all of this reports of vampire outbreaks from these Slavic countries came inbounding to Europe like never before this was happening amid a swirl of circumstances which made Europe Rife for vampiric fascination in the era Europe was making

great strides in medicine and science the intelligencia was constantly looking for new puzzles to solve vampires were an ideal candidate it could be argued that if Europe didn't solve the vampire this failure would bring into question much of their supposed scientific progress the vampire spread disease in a time of alleged medical breakthroughs this alone was problematic enough but the vampires Hallmark ability to rise from the dead its status as neither dead nor alive these things def the very foundations of so exalted European science one common proposition was that drug use caused vampirism German historian Johan

Kristoff harenberg linked vampire outbreaks to the use of opium in a drug called detura although not strictly a hallucinogen datura does cause auditory and visual delusions which harenburg believed could compel one to vampirism there was a broader idea that vampirism was caused by consuming a number of materials poisonous plants tainted meat or just an unhealthy diet being the most likely another man named Deboer proposed that blood found in the bodies of alleged vampires was the result of body fluids mixing with nitrogen in the earth after burial indeed there had been reports from years prior that

certain soil could produce abnormal forms of body decomposition a Lutheran Pastor suggested that vampirism was caused by rats and Vermin infiltrating coffins and somehow maintaining a level of Consciousness in the deceit East even those who rejected vampires as Superstition did so with the qualification that vampire outbreaks were indeed real but caused by mass hysteria or psychological disturbance one of the Roman Empress Maria Teresa's closest advisers was Gerard vanon he was given the duty of drafting A Treatise on vampirism van spon's conclusion was that the Slavic people were barbaric Primitives who were more susceptible to mass

hysteria it was the duty of advanced peoples like his to civilize these groups indeed the empress decreed that vampires were figments of the imagination at this time vampires were firmly rooted in their folkloric Roots they had not been adopted entirely by fictional Works nor had the folklore been manipulated for the sake of good fictional storytelling this is precisely the vampire which this video seeks to investigate what was a vampire what does the folklore tell us and what of our modern vampire Empire is contemporary invention furthermore how can modern science explain these early vampiric outbreaks well

throughout all folklore descriptions of vampires their abilities and everything else varies widely but if we regard all of these and produce something of an average we can understand the folkloric vampire and the world in which he lived in folklore people generally did not find vampires walking around instead they suspected a dead person of being a vampire exuded the body and examined it for signs of vampirism so as we typify vampires here remember that these are things found on corpses typically not on the moving living human body today our vampires have a wide range of appearances

they may be dashingly good-looking outright monstrous or anywhere in between but slavonic folklore provides us with a pretty exact physical description of the vampire so we will first examine this description and then pose it against some Modern scientific explanations vampires were not the palad corpse-like figures of Dracula and NOS veratu in fact the corpse of a vampire was usually described as healthy or even darker in color than the living with the face occasionally being lighter in tone some Yugoslavian accounts even say the vampire was a dark blue color one old world Serbian described the redin

face of a local alcoholic being blood red as a vampire it was believed that this darker than normal appearance came from the vampire drinking blood it was often noted that vampires had blood at the mouth when exhumed to earlier people this Blood indicated that the corpse had been drinking blood Additionally the blood of a vampire was still liquid rather than the coagulated jelly which typically comes with human decomposition there are accounts of dead bodies being staked only to gush with liquid blood in most slavonic cultures this was a Surefire way to diagnose a vampire across

virtually all early vampiric accounts the bodies of these Undead were said to be grotesquely swollen a Greek text notes of their bolus it is an infallible sign of a vampire when the body does not decompose in the grave but instead swells up while the skin becomes taut like the skin of a drum a Serbian account reads when he is dug up he will be bloated with blood and uncorrupted meanwhile the South Slavic assessment of vampires included this the vampire has no bones but is a blood-filled sack that comes into being when the devil pulls the

skin off a particular body and blows it up so rather than the humanlike or outright beastial appearance of today's vampires early revenants were somewhere in the middle they resembled humans but with darker skin and bulbous swollen bodies there were a number of other vampiric Hallmarks The Corpse's Nails would be regrown and appear healthy the skin likewise with observers recording that the corpse seems to have shed its old skin and grown a new one the liver was white in color the mouth and or eyes may have been open you may notice that teeth have not been

discussed this is for good reason according to Folklore and slavonic Records sharpened teeth were not relevant or existent in Vampires the long razor sharp canines are an invention of modern fiction in fact some folkloric vampires did not even use their teeth to drink blood the Russian vampire had a pointed sharpened tongue other vampires strangled or sliced their victims open most vampire accounts from history are true true in their description of events but unlikely accurate in their diagnosis it is very probable that early syonic people exed bodies only to find them with all of the above

features darkened skin a swollen thorax liquid blood Etc but if we can say with almost certainty that vampirism wasn't the cause of these things what did cause them well bodies can do a lot of things when they decompose these processes are complex and can shift widely based on a huge amount of variables as we examine each of these to a degree they all provide obvious answers for a would be vampire so let's begin with the darkened skin the liquid blood and the blood at the mouth in death the oxygen in the blood is all used

up this means the blood becomes darker like on an exterior wound a scab or dried blood on a cut this can cause the corpse itself to take on a darkened appearance if a body is buried on its back the lack of circulation will cause the remaining blood to seep into the lower parts of the anatomy hence a lightened color in the face in a process known as saponification the epidermis can vanish and give way to a new skin to preserve the body in this process the new skin is often darkened to a shade of brown

or even black this is all to say there are a lot of reasons a body may appear dark in color by today's standards none of which are vampirism Blood also changes due to bacterial action which varies widely based on time and place of burial blood does does coagulate after death but it may reliquify depending on how a person died sudden deaths which were often said to cause vampirism can cause the liquefication of blood things like concussion Suffocation or other violent incidents vampires were often blamed for the outbreak of disease many life-threatening illnesses including the plague

caus blood to seep from the body's orifices this would certainly explain blood at the corners of the mouth these early people believed corpses to be ingesting blood when in fact they were likely regurgitating it considering that the person who witnessed an individual die was not the same person who Exum the body we can further grasp this misunderstanding as for the bloated appearance of early vampires we have another straightforward answer in decomposition microorganisms produce gas throughout the tissues of the body without any sort of way to exit the body the gases collect and cause the body

to swell now what of the new skin and Nails skin slippage can be another part of decomposition wherein the epidermis deteriorates and reveals raw skin underneath this can also happen to Nails hence we have the vampire's new skin the white liver of the vampire too has a simple explanation therosis of the liver is a condition brought on by excessive alcohol consumption in curosis the veins of the liver become clogged which can cause a lack of blood circulation in the organ without the appropriate amount of blood the color of the liver can lighten noticeably early Slavic

people were hard drinkers so it's no great reach to think they had high rates of therosis the disease does not really turn the liver white but more of a yellow shade perhaps the usage of white in vampiric accounts is just a linguistic idiosyncrasy or the consequence of a few retellings and retranslations of folklore furthermore the liver is the largest internal organ in the human body when Afflicted with therosis the liver swells and distends so if early exumer cut open a body the liver may have been the cavers most noticeable organ with all this in mind

it makes sense that white livers would appear so frequently in early vampire accounts there is also some interesting psychology at play in the diagnosis of vampirism and virtually all of the vampiric literature when people exume bodies looking for vampires they find them people found what they wanted to find damningly exam records often Proclaim that bodies haven't decomposed and unknowingly go on to describe symptoms of decomposition consider the above science and then the Litany of reports which claim the body was fresh but it was bloated or the body seemed untouched except it had new skin this

is really only a small selection of ways a body can decompose once placed in the earth truly bizarre things can happen things which the people of yester year have had no way of understanding so we should perhaps not hold this ignorance against those people but ultimately these strange decompositional events accurately explain early vampiric diagnosis people of the time obviously didn't know any of this so in the context of their day these medical explanations were neither existent nor relevant these features the darkened skin bloated body Etc were the features of the vampire so we now have

an understanding of the vampire's folkloric appearance but when these creatures rose from the dead what did they do what was the for lack of a better term lifestyle of a vampire modern vampire media tells us these Undead can lead a great number of lifestyles in some depictions they are reclusive monsters Who come out only to feed other Medias portray them as hellbent on world domination Keen to build an Army of Darkness meanwhile still we have seen vampires as distinguished and debonaire intellectuals who feed some sorrowful void through life's cultural and material Pleasures the folkloric vampire

of slavonic and Greek cultures though had a very defined way of being they were basically mindless borderline catatonic entities who had Little Agency over their own actions these vampires did not wreak havoc spread disease or attack humans out of malevolence rather it was something of an instinct far removed from from any sort of intention the vampire did not defend himself when attacked or exhumed he rarely spoke in anything more than a groan this is reasonable to expect these alleged vampires being attacked and executed were in fact just dead bodies folklore and historical literature indicates that

vampires spent the vast majority of their time in their graves in some parts of the Slavic World a vampire could only Feast on Saturday but across folklore there's nothing to indicate that vamp Empires were allergic to Daylight this is a modern invention the creatures of course drank blood the modern vampire leaves the Hallmark of two small incisions on the neck of his victim as mentioned folkloric vampires typically bit their victims somewhere on the thorax according to the Russians the vampire bit at the chest near the heart in Romania they did the same in Poland vampires

bit their victims on the left breast in recent years there has been an attempt attempt to explain vampirism by way of a disease called porfiria this disease disfigures victims sometimes causing gums to recede which can make the teeth look elongated the disease can also cause a sensitivity to sunlight to treat pereria medieval doctors suggested injecting or intaking heem which is found in blood the logic then follows dubiously that victims of the disease once spent their days consuming human blood the problems with this Theory are are abundant most primarily these symptoms do not describe folkloric vampires

but instead modern fictionalized vampires additionally here we are put on a slippery slope towards stigmatizing those who suffer from the condition pereria is not a vampire disease and it does not explain in any part early European vampirism you see blood was not the only thing that vampires consumed they were said to mangle and eat livestock or even humans an explanation for this is simp simple enough wild animals attack domestic animals and occasionally they also attack people Europeans of yester year never actually saw the undead walking around and attacking the living so they prescribed the vampire

as a shape shifter often able to transform into a wolf or dog but notably never a bat indeed bats have no place in the early folklore of vampires this is a modern invention based around the animal desmodus rotundus or the vampire bat we know this is a modern notion because vampire bats do not live in Romania Transylvania or Eastern Europe they are found only in Central and South America vampires were also said to consume the Flesh of the Dead early Slavic reports indicate corpses which have been mauled mangled or scavenged this is easy to explain

vampirism was usually suggested in times of disaster but during these disasters protecting and treating the living was was the primary priority so burials were undertaken hurriedly and often halfhazard a corpse in a shallow unprotective grave would certainly be an easy target for Scavenging animals there were many many other abilities which vampires were said to possess we can now turn to a piece of Galician folklore which I believe to be quite revealing it reads the power of the vampire is very great and many sighted even in his lifetime he kill people and even eat them alive

can bring into being or remove various sicknesses and epidemics storms rain hail and such he casts spells on the cows and their milk the crops and the husbandry generally he knows all secrets and the future Etc besides this he can make himself invisible or transform himself into various objects especially into animal forms suddenly the folkloric vampire has become all powerful he could cause cuse sickness he could change the weather and spoil livestock he further knew all secrets and could tell the future or turn himself into an animal the author here even included Etc which practically

draws an infinity symbol over the vampire's abilities while not all pieces of vampire literature Proclaim so boldly this is emblematic of the vampire's true function for early people catastrophes happen famines disease pestilence natural disasters were all unpredictable and unknowable parts of life for earlier people vampires were essentially the catchall as witches would too become later in history indeed we see vampires having abilities which almost suspiciously match their native lands in Serbia where Travelers were common vampires were known to turn over carriages in Iceland vampires stomped loudly on Frozen roofs in the winter vampires did what

people needed them to this is the prize which eventually lies at the part of our entire investigation but we should not get ahead of ourselves so we will return to this point later for now there is still much to learn about the vampires of folklore the Contemporary notion of creating a vampire is simple one needs to be bitten by a vampire here we have an instance where the Contemporary matches its folkloric counterpart in the old world vampires were said to bite humans those humans would then die only to return as similar Undead but this was

not the only way to create a vampire far from it in fact much folklore indicates that certain people were destined to become vampires through choices they made or even circumstances of their birth in Greece simply being a poorly behaved Troublesome individual was cause enough in Bulgaria we have an account that reads haukes robbers Highwaymen and arsonists who lead their asocial life in a nurturing wild and also die there decompose unburied or are eaten by wild animals alcoholism was another common way to become the undead in Russia villagers Unearthed alcoholics as Prime suspects in Vampire outbreaks

committing suicide was also a common path to vampirism as was being a sorcerer or a witch in many cultures certain Offspring were believed predestined to be vampires across various Slavic cultures there were numerous ways to identify such a child if a baby was born with teeth the poles believed them to be vampires a split lip an extra nipple or a vestigial tail also marked future Undead certain cultures also believed a body could become a vampire if an animal jumped or flew over it in Romania this was specifically a black hen but the precise animal varies

widely based on Country another broader way to become a vampire was to die with a sort of unfulfilled life this took a few forms notably unfinished business or a premature death in Greece one text notes dead people who had died alone and had no one there to take care of them and when people die of a contagious disease and no one will go near them and they bury them without a priest without anything they become verola case serbians believe that if somebody died without any Witnesses they became a vampire fins had a similar Superstition believing

that a neglected corpse would return to torment the living in Hungary deceased soldiers were often turned into the undead due to the absence of proper funerals other Slavic people believe that a mother may return from the dead if no one adopted her child interestingly these sudden deaths can often accompany A hurried and halfhazard burial War disease and crime usually resulted in the dead being rushed to their grave it is precisely this sort of half-hearted burial which can cause many of the previously discussed decompositional issues we now have a broad understanding of the folkloric vampire in

appearance activity and even origin so once these vampires began to roam the Earth what was to be done what did it look like to fight or even hunt the vampire the best way for early Europeans to destroy vampires was through prevention and so most vampire deterrents took the form of ferary Rights one popular motive of thinking was that people must identify things which would compel the dead to rise and satisfy those needs preemptively some people believed that vampires were compelled by a need to chew that was why they ate the Flesh and Blood of the

living so it was quite popular to bury people with items they could either chew on or which would prevent the action of chewing in Prussia people filled the mouths of the Dead with broken pieces of ceramic other times they used dirt or an old book Western Slavs often placed a brick under the chin or in the mouth of the corpse so that the teeth would shatter if the body began to chew in a more hospitable custom many Europeans provided the corpse with food thereby the body would not need to seek food by attacking humans or

livestock some burial rights sought to solve other issues Pomeranian slaves provided their dead with a candle so the corpse could find its way to heaven rather than roaming the Earth as a Revenant there were also more forceful Traditions wherein bodies were bu bued with poppy seeds due to their supposed sedative effects there's a modern Superstition which claims if a vampire sees a knot he will be compelled to untie it this was true of early folkloric vampires as well many cultures buried the Dead with Nets and ropes which were tied in dozens of complex knots if

the dead did awaken they would be forced to remain in their coffin untying these objects for years on occasion bodies were exhumed treated in any number of these ways and then Reb buried there exists the following polish account the wife of the peasant who had met the Revenant told about it in the whole village but people did not want to believe her only when a number of people had convinced themselves that the Revenant was actually coming into this Village did they tell the priest he then had the Revenant taken out of the Grave had a

slip of paper put under his tongue with his name on it had him laid face down and struck with a shovel on the hind end since then he never came into the village again across much of the Slavic countries bodies were buried with sharp objects to prevent vampirism the sickle was a popular option placed upon the stomach to prevent the swelling which marked the vampire in Romania there is an account that dictates a sickle must be inserted Into the Heart of the corpse there are also reports of knives pins and wooden Stakes being buried alongside

a body early Romanians inserted sharpened sticks into the ground above the body so that if the corpse attempted to rise it would be punctured and returned to death but suppose all of these precautions were thwarted or just neglected entirely in the first place it then falls to the living to ward off vampires here folklore has been well preserved it was broadly believed that vampires were repulsed by strong smells and so garlic was a common deterrent in a similar vein so too was mustard cow dung and human feces all of which were smeared around the person

or home to repel vampires as we saw in the pow account the blood of the supposed vampire itself was a common deterrent this was often smeared on a person's clothing or body in Pomerania people made a mixture of this blood and Brandy to drink which would likewise protect the Drinker against the vampire as Paul Barber points out in his book vampires burial and death this custom produced a Darkly comedic result vampires probably never drank the blood of humans but indeed humans drank the blood of vampires the sign of the cross is another piece of folklore

which has survived into our modern vampire landscape in Serbia a wooden cross over the doorf frame kept vampires out of a house tar was also smeared in the sign of the cross on doors for the same effect making the cross with one's fingers near a graveyard could also keep away Revenant perhaps more kindly in Serbia it was said that one could simply direct a vampire into a forest there the vampire could eat the animals of the forest and remain saded forever perhaps the implication was that the vampire could alternatively be killed by those animals either

way the issue was solved but let's suppose none of these work and the individual encounters a vampire thankfully folklore has provided us with many many ways to hunt the undead the first step in hunting the folkloric vampire is of course finding that vampire in cases of disease outbreaks the easiest way to find the vampire was to determine who succumbed to the illness first that body would be exhumed dealt with and the village would be free of their vampiric problem in less clear-cut circumstances a number of bodies may be exhumed and the one who showed the

least amount of decomposition would be deemed the vampire and then dealt with we will soon discuss these methods of dealing with but as far as finding the vampire this was an easy solution the process was not always so simple another way to find a vampire in many Eastern European cultures was to lead a horse through a graveyard it was said that the horse would refuse to walk over the grave of the vampire Albanian Legends says the horse must be black While others indicate a blond or a white color failing this a person could also investigate

the burial plot itself to find the vampire an early Serbian school book reads if the grave is sunk in if the cross has taken a crooked position and if there are other indications of this sort they suggest that the deceased has transformed himself into a vampire this was presumably owing to the vampire's regular excursions from its grave the more quote real explanation for this would be that bodies buried quickly in Shallow Graves were more likely to show a patch of disturbed Earth other texts indicate that the grave of a vampire would emit a blue glow

or even a blue flame modern science does well to explain this belief when bodies are buried they do emit gases and attract various bacteria these gases could cause a sort of glow around a grave if caught in the right Moonlight likewise there exist a number of bioluminescent bacteria which could give the impression of a light as for a flame specifically the culprit may be linguistic perhaps we have generations of translation retelling and retranslation to blame it was also said in many instances that vampires had the ability to turn invisible this power mostly seemed to manifest

perhaps conveniently when the vampire was out of his grave see there are no records of attempted exhumations wherein the exhuming party found an empty coffin in each culture where invisibility was part of the vampires repertoire there were wildly different ways to solve this problem in Yugoslavia it was said that invisible vampires could be seen by twins born on Saturday provided those Twins were wearing their clothing Inside Out dogs were often able to see invisible vampires it was said by Russians that a dog would snarl and bark in the presence of such a Revenant back in

Yugoslavia though this was precisely not the case a text from that region reads there is no vampire in the village if the dogs are barking but if they are quiet then the vampire has come so let's suppose you've identified the vampire it is now time to kill the undead vampires were considered sorrowful creatures they did not want to be vampires they did not want to be still alive so killing was often referred to as putting them at peace it was not really an act of violence but an act of Mercy today staking a vampire is

the most famous way to kill the creature indeed this is a piece of folklore that has survived Through the Ages staking was one of the most common ways for early people to kill their vampires folklore does provide us with more specific instructions than simple impaling however generally the type of wood used for staking was quite important in many northern areas surrounding the Baltic Ash was the ideal wood in Poland Oak Serbian custom dictated Hawthorne it's not entirely clear where these rules came from there are some linguistic options that have been explored but to no significant

conclusion what is clear though is that staking killed a vampire simply because it killed a human Serbian Travelers claim that a sharp knife worked just as well as a wooden Stak other accounts indicate swords or even nails are perfectly effective broadly it seemed anything that would certainly kill a human could kill a vampire this has included shovels fire and even decapitation the Russians had a markedly unique way of dealing with their vampires in their part of the world the undead were often blamed for droughts so perhaps to counteract this ability the body of a supposed

vampire was to be thrown into a body of water we have a similar deathly relation to water in Albania there the soul was believed to seek water after death but this water was also a danger to the soul in Bulgaria containers of water were covered or emptied after a death it's not hard to see how these cultures and their beliefs could have cross-pollinated in regards to vampires today there is a piece of lore which indicates vampires are required to rest in their native soil each day the vampire must return to rest on Earth from his

homeland to kill the vampire may be as simple as disposing of or replacing this soil this is another modern invention another which seemed to begin with brah Stoker's Dracula itself the folkloric vampire generally did not track in the rare instances a vampire did roam to other countries no mention was made of his native soil being relevant creation was the preferred method of vampire killing in Greece it has also been seen in most European countries which held vampiric folklore however outside of Greece cremation was sort of a last resort this was due in large part to

simple Logistics an adult body can take one to 3 hours to cremate which requires a constantly burning fire and large volumes of fuel oil burning furnace for example can require up to 24 gallons for a single cremation Additionally the body will not simply ignite in Flames it will require an accelerant in Greece for example people have used fabric soaked in animal fat now suppose you did not have a modern furnace or large amounts of fuel likewise consider that accelerants like animal fat may have been scarce to replicate this furnace cremation over an open fire would

have been prohibitively laborious and expensive offensive indeed there is at least one account of these troubles impacting the killing of a vampire in this instance burning the vampire required an enormous amount of wood and the fire still would not destroy the body the Executioner cut the body into small pieces which still proved difficult to burn we should also keep in mind that vampiric outbreaks occurred in times of Crisis this would hardly be the circumstance for early people to literally burn their most precious resources broadly staking and decapitation were the most common ways of dispatching suspected

vampires so at this point we have a very strong understanding of the folkloric vampire especially with regards to how he differs from his more contemporary counterparts but how did these blue bodied swollen catatonic Revenant become this or this braah Stoker's novel Dracula is without a doubt the most significant work of literature ever produced about vampires it is so influential in fact that some authors have suggested the study of vampires can be divided into BD and AD periods the book has no real protagonist but follows a businessman named Jonathan Harker as he travels to Transylvania and

visits a nobleman named Count Dracula Harker discovers that Dracula is a vampire and flees the castle the count moves to England and brings a pestilence on a small Seaside town before being killed by the vampire Hunter and helling and his comrades the book has an interesting structure it is not written in clear narrative form instead the story is a scrapbook of letters diary entries and newspaper articles attributed to various fictional individuals and sources Dracula is the culmination of centuries of vampire folklore and authorship accordingly stoker spent years researching for his book it would perhaps be

an understatement to call his research impressive in fact it could be argued that was know more about Stoker's research than about vampires themselves stoker spent his time on a wide variety of subjects including geography political history folklore Natural History medicine language and psychology consequentially among these stoker found the Hungarian book account of the principalities of wakia and movia indeed large sections of Dracula seem to be plagarized from this work in particular was also here that stoker found the names no Fatu which refers to a Empire and Dracula which is Romanian for the son of dracul

today in Romanian dracul refers to the devil in Stoker's time it was likely a word for a dragon it has often been said that the Romanian Prince vladus is the inspiration for the character of Dracula it is true that Vlad tus was known as Vlad Dracula being that he was the son of Vlad dra although test Reign was marked by brutality there is no evidence that he drank human blood Stoker may have come across blad in his research but there is no strong evidence from the author himself or otherwise that t has served as anything

more than a name's sake if even that Stoker's research was remarkable in labor and time spent perhaps but when we look at his sources we find names like Andrew cross Charles boner and Nina mazzuchelli without getting into specifics we can broadly say there is a distinct lack of Romanian Transylvanian or even Eastern European authorship in STO sources and indeed stoker never traveled to any of these hot beds of empiric activity not Romania nor Greece nor turkey or Transylvania by the time stoker wrote Dracula these areas had cast a spell of intrigue over much of Western

Europe but not only for their reported vampiric activity there was an increasing Calamity in Western Europe over the prospect of trade and cultural exchange with these areas these countries which were not exactly regarded am by well-to-do Europeans there's not much to prove intention but Dracula can be interpreted as an exaltation of English Power a foreign monster from the East invades Britain and spreads a pestilence only to be vanquished by a group of Warriors Warriors who all have some amount of experience in colonial efforts and who are all English or English adjacent to investigate this much

further would plunge us into a world of interpretation and Analysis of Dracula so I will just say the above is one inter interpretation among thousands none of which are objectively more or less correct than any other more relevant to this video is the reception of Dracula upon publishing it was a hit debuting just at the height of Europe's vampire Obsession and Eastern European diset critics heaped praise upon the novel and it immediately inspired two stage plays one of which was written by stoker himself but what truly catapulted Stoker's work into the archetype for our modern

vampire was the medium of film in 1922 the German filmmaker FW mow created no Fatu a symphony of horror based on Stoker's novel the film would go on to be regarded as groundbreaking in visual effects and storytelling though it was certainly not a commercial success still it propelled Hollywood to cast the Hungarian Bella Lugosi in Todd Browning's 1931 Dracula meanwhile a Dracula stage play was touring through Europe and pouring fuel onto the fire of vampire Obsession vampires did very well in the context of film at the time the black and white color palette made for

a dreary spooky tone in which vampires excelled Hollywood began to change the vampire though the blood at the corners of the mouse didn't read well in black and white so they abandoned it instead of the vaguely grotesque form that folkloric vampires took Hollywood injected the creatures with a tone of feminine sexuality the industry propped up the actress Thea bar as one of America's first outright sex symbols indeed her nickname was the vamp in keeping with this new tantalizing sensibility folk vampires were replaced by a carnal sort of thrill still scary sure but wrapped in a

veneer of intrigue and fiction over the following decades the modern vampire continued to emerge out of Stoker's design TS Elliott inserted vampires into his 1922 book The Wasteland Cinema saw the Golden Age of horror where vampires appeared in any film they could possibly fit we see vampire making her debut in 1969 1972 Marvel published the tomb of Dracula these are just a few examples but the result has been a creature who is quite distant from his European precursors with each new Incarnation the modern vampire changes in shape abilities and Origins it has moved increasingly far

from its original folkloric form and perhaps that is the whole point many people would regard the vampire as being emblematic of the human relationship with death that it is a creature conjured up to help solve our mortal woses the vampire has indeed been this at times but on the whole I think this is far too shallow the folkloric vampire is often said to be a shape shifter this is true in ways far far beyond the reaches of Legend the idea the fundamental concept of the vampire is to a shape shifter a able to change with

the needs of his time while the vampire and his abilities have come a long way from the original folklore the vampire as a tool for The Human Condition has remained the same the vampire is whatever we need it to be when early Europeans needed an answer to their catastrophes so was the vampire as Western Europe scrambled for puzzles to solve and science to apply there was the vampire when Braum stoker and Europe had to reckon with unease over Eastern Europe so too appeared the vampire as Hollywood and American culture demanded thrilling vaguely erotic subject matter

once again enter the vampire future vampires of which there will be many will not come bounding from the pages of Slavic folklore instead they will be projections of our needs as a people just as they have always been the vampire is a house built upon destroyed and then built upon infinitely again constructed to suit the cultural or spiritual needs of its residents the vampire may not be real as a physical entity but certainly he is more than a fiction movie is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great Cinema from all around the globe from

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