Lilith, The Phantom Maiden (An Apocryphal Catechism)

In William Peter Blatty’s 1971 religious horror novel, The Exorcist, as well as the classic 1973 film based on the book, a demon named Pazuzu possesses a young girl and must be cast out by a stoic and dutiful Catholic priest. In the beginning of both the book and the film, the titular exorcist is present at an archaeological dig in Iraq, at which is uncovered a statue of Pazuzu, ancient Mesopotamian King of the lilu, or wind demons. This demon appears to be a chimera, with wings, bulging eyes on a canine face, feet like the talons of a bird of prey, and a serpent wound around his phallus and leg. A surface reading of the book or viewing of the film might cause one to think that the exorcist himself was ironically responsible for somehow freeing the demon by digging up the statue, but what was intended seems more like a portent of the imminent confrontation the exorcist will have with Pazuzu, whom he has struggled with before. However, it would seem that, maybe, Blatty chose poorly or researched only shallowly when deciding what Assyrian demon should be his antagonist. Pazuzu, in one aspect, was a domestic spirit of the home, and even in its more fearsome aspect, as depicted in the statue, was considered a protector. The lilu wind demons were considered evil spirits, it’s true, and Pazuzu chief among them, in that they were related to destructive winds and locusts that brought famine. But they weren’t associated with danger to youth. Quite the opposite. Pazuzu was called upon to drive off other demons. His statue was used as an apotropaic, an amulet, especially to protect the young from one particular demoness, Lamashtu. This she-demon, sometimes viewed as an evil goddess, was depicted much the same as Pazuzu, with talon feet and sometimes holding a snake, but hairier, without wings, and with the head of a lioness. According to Mesopotamian lore, she brought disease and nightmares, harmed women giving birth, abducted and slayed children, drank their blood, and chewed on their bones. Now there’s a villain Blatty might have made the torturer of a possessed child. But the lore of ancient Mesopotamian demons is all confused now. It has been combined and recombined with other folklore, evolving as the basis for new superstitions, incorporated into religion after religion, as the lines between what must have once seemed real figures have been syncretistically blurred. Here we see the protector become the ravager, but so too we see the evolution of Lamashtu, who eventually became identified with the lilu, her nature rewritten through the ages, reinvented by medieval Kabbalists who gave birth to an apocryphal legend.

As with my previous post on superstitions, this topic occurred to me rather organically while researching my Halloween series on vampire lore. Claims that lore about vampires extends all the way back to ancient myth are common. I looked into the assertions about links to Greek myth and the so-called “vampire bible,” the Delphi Scriptures, and found it utterly unconvincing and lacking support. I mentioned that at the end of my series. However, there are other prevalent claims that the lore and superstitions about vampires can be traced back to the figure of Lilith, and before her, Lamashtu. Unlike the supposed myth of Ambrogio, there is a lot of real history and folklore to unpack here, tangled up in syncretistic iterations, and I was not prepared to discuss its impact on vampire lore then. I am now. The connection seems clear enough. It is said that Lamashtu drank the blood of children. However, we know that the original vampire lore, deriving from claims about revenants, often had little to do with blood drinking. Also, to claim that Lilith was the prototypical vampire really doesn’t work, since she was known more for strangling that drinking blood, as we’ll see. Moreover, vampires are and always were the risen dead, humans transformed because of the circumstances of their death and burial, or due to the influence of the Devil. Their nature can be attributed to the various aspects of a decomposing corpse dug up by those who suspected its posthumous activity. In no way does this correspond to these spirits and deities, who were never human and appear as animal hybrids. Yes, I’ll get to the claims about Lilith’s human origin, but that’s irrelevant here, since according to her origin, as you’ll see, she was not a human, or undead. Moreover, revenants were never known to attack only children. The entire claim seems predicated on the detail about Lamashtu’s blood drinking, like someone went looking for the first ever thing thought to drink blood and then made the unsupportable assertion that there was some direct line of folkloric descent from that legend to vampires. A more logical but equally insupportable claim would be that the blood drinking aspect of vampires derived from other parasites known to suck blood, like leeches, or mosquitoes, which also spread disease like malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever, though we didn’t know it back then. But on another level, there are some clear parallels between folklore and superstitions about vampires and those about Lamashtu and Lilith. As with revenants, Lamashtu was a scapegoat, blamed for the spreading of disease, likely blamed for sleep paralysis since she was thought to bring nightmares, and held responsible for any number of illnesses that might result in a child’s death or the death of a mother during childbirth. Lamashtu was even said to kill the unborn, so she appears to have been the scapegoat for stillbirth as well. It is clear that the figure of Lilith descended in some ways from the demoness Lamashtu, and it is clear that she too served as a scapegoat for a number of misfortunes, some similar and some quite different, but her myth took on ever more strange aspects, and she developed amazing importance in more than one religious tradition. So let’s begin with a look at the first real appearance of Lilith, not as a creature but a woman, the so-called “phantom maiden.”

A Pazuzu statue like the one shown in The Exorcist. Image credit: Lamiot (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I have spoken at some length, in my series on giants and my series on Flood Myths and Noah’s Ark, about the Epic of Gilgamesh. In case this is your first episode or you missed those others, the Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem that may have served as the source material for numerous biblical traditions. I spoke about the Flood Myth of Utnapishtim serving as the basis of the story of Noah, but additionally, there appear to be parallels and connections to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in Eden. For example, the eating of the forbidden fruit appears to correspond to the Sumerian god Enki eating forbidden flowers and being cursed by his goddess wife, Ninḫursag, and dying. Each part of his body died, and when Ninḫursag relented in her curse, giving birth to goddesses who would each heal a part of Enki’s body, especial focus is given to his rib, and the goddess Nin-ti, or lady of the rib. Indeed, the Sumerian word for rib, ti, apparently also meant “to make live,” so Nin-ti meant both “the lady of the rib” and “the lady who makes live.” Some scholars believe that this ancient pun may be the origin for the part of the story of Genesis in which God makes a woman live from the rib of Adam. This aspect of the Genesis narrative will be very relevant to our discussion of Lilith later, but right now, what is more relevant, is the story of the Huluppu Tree, which some see as a parallel of or perhaps the origin of the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in which dwelled the Serpent. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Inanna finds a primeval tree growing on the Euphrates River. In its roots, a snake or dragon nested, and in its uppermost branches, a massive, fire-breathing bird. Inanna wants to make a throne and bed of the tree, but these creatures stood in her way, and worse than they, in the trunk of the tree, so the poem states, Lilith, the phantom maiden, made her home. The word translated as Lilith here is Lillake, meaning ghost or phantom. In the Sumerian King List, an ancient chronicle kept to legitimize and delegitimize the reigns of various rulers, it is said that Gilgamesh, the basis of the poem who likely was a real king, was himself the son of a lilu demon. There is a strong sense among scholars that gradually, the monstrous she-demon Lamashtu and the evil lilu wind demons like Pazuzu, who were called lilitu in the feminine form, gradually came to be viewed as similar or the same. Such that the Lillake described in the Huluppu Tree was described as a ghostly young woman, a phantom maiden. Here is an inflection point in the development of the myth of Lillith. Gilgamesh drives the serpent from the tree roots, the great bird from its branches, and the phantom maiden from its trunk, and it is said that she flees from there into the wilderness or desert. It is there where we next find her.

Only once in all of the Bible is Lilith mentioned, and even then, the mention is dubious and demonstrates the nature of the figure as well as how she changed through the ages. In the book of Isaiah, chapter 34, verses 13 and 14, as the 8th century Israelite prophet, speaking of God’s judgment on nations and listing the many misfortunes that will befall a nation being divinely judged, talks of wild beasts and other creatures overrunning it: “Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with hyenas; goat-demons shall call to each other; there also Lilith shall repose and find a place to rest.” There is some debate about the historical context of the book of Isaiah, as well as its authorship, owing to changes in style and anachronisms that suggest everything after chapter 39 or 40 may have been written by a different, later author, but this chapter that makes mention of Lilith, quoted here in the New Revised Standard translation, is believed to represent the words of Proto-Isaiah, the prophet himself, who lived in the 8th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah. A closer look at the original Hebrew and a comparison of the various translations may help us better understand this reference. The word lilit, taken in some translations as a proper name, is in other versions translated as night-spirit, night-monster, night-demon, night hag, night animals (plural), night bird, and screech owl.  Some versions even change the name entirely to Lamia, an analogous child-eating female spirit from Greek myth who seems to be yet another iteration of the original Lilith figure, likely itself derived from the ancient Lamashtu. But this is a leap, for the Hebrew word being translated is lilit. I find the New Living Translation’s choice to refer to a plural, night creatures, as apt, since otherwise the verses in question are referring to plural beasts taking residence in the desolate nation. Remember that the original basis for the name Lilith seems to have been the plural word for Mesopotamian wind demons, lilu in the masculine, and lili or lilitu in the feminine. Thus the verse may not be referring to a singular figure, as many have believed, but rather a class of demons. Many translations view the previous creatures mentioned as goat demons, sometimes translated as satyrs; therefore, the verse would be describing both wild creatures and demons making the judged nation their abode. Other translations have it, however, that these verses are only describing wild creatures, specifically wild goats, and they translate lilit as a kind of bird, or specifically a screech owl. This seems questionable to me, since a few verses earlier, in verse 11, an entirely different word is widely translated as screech owl. However, the mythical Lilith, or particular female examples of the class of demons called lilitu, had long been associated with owls. One terracotta relief out of Babylon, the Burney Relief, has been discovered depicting her as a beautiful nude woman with wings and the feathered talon feet of an owl. And this image of her as a chimeric hybrid appears contemporaneous with the account in Isaiah, as on a 7th-century BCE tablet out of Syria, the Arslan Tash amulet, she is depicted as a kind of winged sphinx creature. Thus she may have been viewed as both a demoness and a wild creature, as she had previously been portrayed nesting in a tree in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Strange then that she would later be viewed as so human, less beastly and more beautiful.

The Burney Relief, depicting a monstrous Lilith. Image credit: Aiwok (CC BY-SA 3.0)

To make a clear and striking juxtaposition, Lilith today is viewed as a dark and beautiful woman with long hair. When we aren’t hearing about her as the progenitrix of vampires, she is thought to be the mother of all demons. Rather than originating as an offspring of a god, as did Pazuzu and Lamashtu, making her a kind of demigoddess, as were the demons from which her lore derives, she instead is claimed to have originated in Paradise, when the Judeo-Christian God created man and woman. She in fact is said to have been the first wife of Adam, formed from the dust just like him and therefore equal to him, not formed from a part of him like Adam’s second wife, Eve, and thus not subservient to him. Because of this aspect of her myth, she has become something of a feminist icon, representing an empowered and coequal gender, whom Adam rejects for not acquiescing to his domination. Thus Lilith, spurned but also defiant, sprouts wings and flies to freedom. In some depictions of her, like Pazuzu before her, she is associated with a serpent that winds itself around her, and as her myth developed, she became associated with the the figure of Satan. Some tellings have it that she returned to Eden to tempt Eve, whom she resented, with the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus we see again Lilith nesting in the tree in paradise, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Other versions focus on her insatiable sexual appetite and after her fall make of her more of a succubus demon who returns to Adam to have intercourse with him, and from her unholy unions with Adam as well as with other men, she conceives and gives birth to other demons, an entire race of succubi and incubi, called lilin, and so once again we return in a roundabout fashion to the notion that Lilith is not unique but rather one of an entire race of demons with similar attributes and behavior. But how did we get from the notion of Lilith as the later version of Lamashtu, a wild, animalistic demoness, part bird, who devours children, to the notion that she was one of God first creations, made in his image in Paradise? The answer is that it was invented, whole cloth, during the Middle Ages in an apocryphal work of Aramaic and Hebrew proverbs.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is believed to have been composed anonymously between 700 and 1000 CE. The work was clearly inspired by a Hebrew collection of ethical lessons written in Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE by one Ben Sira, but scholars believe the medieval work to be more of a satire. The author likes to address topics such as sexual intercourse, masturbation, urination, and flatulence. In fact, fair warning, any discussion of this composition, as well as certain aspects of Lilith, will get a bit bawdy and weird. It has been suggested that the Alphabet of Ben Sira may have actually been written by a Jew as a kind of burlesque comedy poking fun at his own traditions, or by a non-Jew as a kind of mockery of Judaism. One example of the parodic nature of the work is that its protagonist, Ben Sira, is said to be the grandson of the prophet Jeremiah, whom God had commanded not to marry or have children. Well, according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Jeremiah did have a partner, and had a daughter with her, but in an effort to obey God’s command, would apparently practice Onanism, or coitus interruptus—which, at the risk of being crude, is basically pulling out to spill one’s seed. According to the author, the prophet Jeremiah did this once in bathwater that his daughter afterward bathed in, resulting in his impregnating his own daughter, making Ben Sira both the grandson and son of the prophet Jeremiah. One can see why this work is apocryphal and rejected even back in the Middle Ages by Jewish philosophers and rabbis. The passage in which the author invents the modern legend of Lilith occurs when King Nebuchadnezzar asks Ben Sira to heal his son, and Ben Sira blames Lilith for the boy’s illness and makes an amulet for his protection. He then explains who Lilith is to Nebuchadnezzar, saying God created her for Adam so that Adam wouldn’t be alone and made her out of earth just as He had made Adam. However, they began to argue over sexual positions, with Lilith refusing to be on the bottom, and Adam insisting that he was superior and therefore must be on top. Lilith protests that they are, in fact, equal, being made from the same stuff, and when Adam denies it, she abandons him, sprouting wings and flying away to the sea. Adam, of course, complains to God that his woman has run off, so God sends angels to bring her back. Lilith, however, refuses to return and claims she “was created only to cause sickness to infants.” The story concludes with Ben Sira explaining that, because of the deal she struck with the angels sent after her, the amulet he had made would be effective at driving her off. The story further indicates that she is the mother of demons, many of whom are doomed to perish every day. The tale given in the Alphabet of Ben Sira is the first known suggestion of her creation in Eden as Adam’s wife, but the notion of her as a bringer of misfortune to children, which is also present, was likely inherited from her forerunner, Lamashtu. How she came to be known as the mother of demons is not especially clear, but it would come to define her persona.

Adam clutches a child in the presence of the child-snatcher Lilith.

The next development of the Lilith myth came in another medieval Jewish text, the Zohar. This work was said to have been composed actually long before the Alphabet of Ben Sira, in the 2nd century CE, supposedly by the famed sage Rashbi, or Shimon ben Yochai, but this claim appears to only have been made by the man who first promoted the text, Moshe ben Shemtov, or Moses de León, a Spanish rabbi and Kabbalist, a kind of traditional mystic. The problem is that Moses de León was known to compose pseudepigraphal Kabbalistic tracts, meaning he falsely attributed his writings to other, typically ancient and more authoritative sources, which increased their value. In other words, he was a forger. Indeed, de León’s widow, according to one report, explicitly revealed the Moses de León wrote the Zohar himself in the 13th century and attached Rashbi’s name to it in order to make it more valuable. Nevetheless, within fifty years, it was considered a core sacred text among many Spanish Kabbalists. Regardless of the authorship controversy, the book purports to be a collection of the teachings of the sage Rashbi, as well as commentaries on the Torah and allegorical narratives. In it, Lilith is discussed some sixty times, and in other Kabbalistic writings, her myth is further expanded. The notion that she was created of dust the same as Adam is reinforced, but in some Kabbalistic works, it is claimed that, for some unclear reason, when God made Lilith he formed her not of good, clean dust or soil, but rather of unclean filth. The idea that she fled Paradise after a quarrel with Adam remains. However, in the Zohar, we learn that Adam actually impregnated Lilith before she fled, and that when she bears his children, they are demons or spirits, thus clarifying Lilith’s role as a mother of demons. A further aspect clarified is her perpetual yearning for male companionship, such that when she fled from Paradise, at one point she found herself near God’s throne, which was surrounded by Cherubim, and since cherubs looked like little boys, she attached herself to them. But it was Adam she longed for, and Kabbalist tradition tells us she returned to the garden, but finding Eve with him, she schemed to be rid of her by tempting her, thereby contributing to Adam’s Fall as well. But Kabbalist tradition is far more intricate than this. Kabbalist mystics actually rewrote much of the origin story of Lilith, suggesting that rather than a creation of God she was a spontaneously generated divine creature, a kind of manifested aspect of God, an emanation from beneath his throne, which kind of sounds like a fart to me. By this alternative version, she was only part of an androgynous, dual entity, Lilith being the female half and Samael, a rebel angel and adversary to God identified with Satan, was her male counterpart. Thus, Lilith and the Devil were one and the same, so she was the Serpent in the Garden just as much as he was. Despite this development of Kabbalistic lore that has Lilith being more of a demoness from the start, she is always depicted as longing for Adam and for the company of all men. After the Fall, she copulates with Cain, bearing many demons. And Adam, upon finding out that their expulsion from Paradise and the murder of his son may have had to do with his connubial relationship to Lilith, decides to be celibate and not even lie with Eve for a whopping 130 years. However, during these many years, it’s said that Lilith comes to Adam in his sleep, stealing his seed, and begetting many demons, an entire demonic race, in fact: the Lilin, a plague upon mankind that are said to lurk in dark places, such as doorways and wells and in pits used as latrines. Thus, in the Middle ages, a tale that likely began as satire was expanded upon by forgers and mystics into the full-fledged myth of a separately created woman, a nymphomaniac spirit who caused the fall of man and became a succubus that mothered an army of demons.

A simple explanation for the popularity of this growing and changing myth is that, much like her folkloric precursor, Lamashtu, Lilith served as a useful scapegoat and superstitious explanation for a variety of misfortunes and embarrassing or baffling experiences. While the philosophers and mystics spoke of her origin and nature, the everyday people only feared her and blamed her for things. Her nature as a succubus who stole the seed of men to give birth to demons meant that Lilith was commonly believed to be the cause of nocturnal emissions. Whenever a male had a wet dream, it was said that Lilith had come to him in his dreams and succeeded in arousing him to the point of impregnating her. Perhaps the men or boys who had these nocturnal emissions and were embarrassed by them or confused were consoled by this superstition. Men also likely claimed to their wives that they had better engage in frequent intercourse with them or it would be their fault when Lilith came to them, and it was thought that when Lilith succeeded in seducing a man, she gained some rights of cohabitation in the household. Thus later artifacts that bear the name of Lilith, like incantation bowls and other charms, are inscribed as literal writs of divorce, declaring that Lilith had no rights there. The danger was even thought to exist when a man slept with his wife, whether he spilled his seed outside of her on purpose, if you’ll excuse the frankness of my remarks, or even if some of his semen was lost accidentally. Lilith was thought to lurk in the bedsheets, waiting to steal it, and rather comically, men would shout out at the moment of orgasm, “Release, release! Neither come nor go! The seed is not yours!” Nor were men alone the supposed victims of Lilith or her other succubi children, for some of her demon offspring were male incubi and were said to visit women in their sleep and impregnate them. Of course, one can easily imagine this scapegoat being quite handy if a woman needed to explain a seemingly inexplicable pregnancy. And it must also have been used as a defense by rapists, who could easily blame a woman’s violation on some incubus. But this idea of the incubus seducing or assaulting women in dreams returns us to the notion of sleep paralysis and the “incubus phenomenon,” the sleep disorder in which one feels pressure on them and even has a vision of a dark figure or night hag—the origin of the word nightmare. So Lilith and her brood can be seen as a superstitious explanation of those hypnopompic hallucinations, another parallel with revenants or vampires. And also like revenants, they were blamed for inexplicable deaths or illnesses. It was said that Lilith attacked pregnant women because of her resentment of Eve and her partnership with Adam. Thus when a woman died in childbirth or afterward, from the all too common childbed fever, it was said Lilith had taken her. Likewise, Lilith, like her antecedent Lamashtu, was said to prey upon children, blamed for stillbirths and miscarriage, and was also blamed when children died in infancy. She was sometimes said to drink their blood, which aspect had likely been carried down through the centuries from superstitions about Lamashtu, but mostly she was said to strangle babies in their cradles. As one might imagine, then, Lilith took the blame when the terrible and seemingly incomprehensible tragedy of crib death, or what we might today call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, occurred. Indeed, even adults who died in their sleep were said to have been taken by Lilith or her Lilin; it was said that after a succubus or incubus demon successfully seduced someone, they might change form and kill them. Thus, Lilith evolved to become a kind of catch-all superstition, a scapegoat for most mysterious phenomena related to sleep, maternity, and infancy.

Illustration of Lilith’s involvement in the temptation of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden.

As we have seen, through syncretism, dubious satirical texts, pseudepigraphal forgeries, and mystical apocrypha, the myth of Lilith grew through the ages. But how, some may rightly ask, could an orthodox believer, a modern Christian or Jew who credits only canonical scriptures, ever come to believe in the figure of Lilith when she is only explicitly mentioned in Isaiah and even then only in some versions? The answer comes in a unique interpretation of the Genesis Creation story. The book of Genesis actually appears to have two versions of the story of God’s creation of mankind, in chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 1 verse 26, it says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness…’” and concludes in the next verse, which states, “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” Then in chapter 2, it tells a slightly different version of the story, having God make man first, saying in verse 7 “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Only later, beginning in verse 18, is woman created: “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’… then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” This double telling of the story is easily explained if one views Genesis as a combination of traditional texts which vary in their particulars. After all, Chapters 1 and 2 have distinctly different styles, present the events of Creation in a different order, and even use different words for God. The orthodox view of the separate accounts is just that Chapter 1 represents a larger overview of the cosmological events of Creation and Chapter 2 zooms in for a more human focus. But if one is wanting to find evidence of Lilith in Genesis, one will certainly be inclined to view the first Creation story as being the Creation of Adam and Lilith, and the second as being an explanation of the reason for Eve’s later creation. When God says it’s not good for man to be alone, it must be because Lilith has fled from Adam, for God is omniscient and must have known such things even before Creation. It’s an interesting interpretation, but one can creatively interpret scripture in many such ways to find evidence of things that aren’t there. Consider the “Gap Theory” or gap creationism. To reconcile the Genesis story of Creation with the geological time scale, theologians have suggested that each day of creation actually represented an entire age, whereas others have said that some extended gap occurred between the creation of the heavens and earth in verse one and the rest of the creative acts that are listed starting in verse two. Such an interpretation allows believers to trust in a literal interpretation of the Bible without denying many of the findings of modern science, such as the age of the earth, and the fossil record, dinosaurs, etc. However, it has also led some to believe that, since there was a first creation, and later a second creation that included mankind, that there must have existed some first attempt at creating humans, a so-called “pre-Adamic” race. Unsurprisingly, in the 19th century, this notion was latched onto by racists looking for some religious support for their ideas that non-white people are inferior, suggesting they are the descendants of a separate Creation, a failed dry run at humanity. All of this from literally reading between the lines, a mythos of hatred born from the blank space between the first two verses in Genesis. We see how these ideas spread and evolve, and how they are used to justify superstition and false beliefs. The development of the apocryphal myth of Lilith is much the same, syncretistically adapted from ancient pagan folklore, fictionalized and expanded on through the inventions and interpretations of charlatans and mystics, until even modern theologians find arcane reasons to credit it because they want to. It seems like it should be enough to cause any honest critical thinker to lose faith in such claims and interpretations.

*

Until next time, remember, ancient texts are often a mish mash, a collage of pieced together traditions, compilations of copied manuscripts, a palimpsest through which can be discerned traces of previous writings and ideas, often falsely attributed to some famous figure when they were actually composed by some faceless scribe. Can’t we just appreciate them for what they are, a priceless cultural artifact that teaches us about our past, without insisting they’re actually some monolithic divine pronouncement?

Further Reading

Blasdell, Heather L. “‘...And There Shall The Lilith Repose.’” Mythlore, vol. 14, no. 4 (54), 1988, pp. 4–12. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26812954. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Kramer, Samuel N., and W. F. Albright. “Enki and Ninḫursag: A Sumerian ‘Paradise’ Myth.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Supplementary Studies, no. 1, 1945, pp. 1–40. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/20062705. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Patai, Raphael. “Lilith.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 77, no. 306, 1964, pp. 295–314. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/537379. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Soza, Joel R. Lucifer, Leviathan, Lilith, and Other Mysterious Creatures of the Bible. Hamilton Books, 2017.

Omens, Charms, and Rituals: A History of Superstition

On many porches right now there rot pumpkins that were hollowed out for Halloween and transformed into lanterns with candles or electric lights, illuminating grimacing grins from within. Long is the history of this ritual, though it was not always pumpkins that were carved, but rather turnips and other vegetables, their glowing visages said to ward off the spirits that walked the earth that day. They are called Jack-o-lanterns, however, because of a Western European folktale about a particular spirit said to walk the earth. The story of Jack of the Lantern, or Stingy Jack in the Irish version, is the story of a wicked man who tricked the Devil. The specifics of the tale vary from region to region, but essentially, this man Jack, either a blacksmith or a common thief, convinced the Devil to transform himself into a coin, which Jack put into his pocket next to a cross, or that he lured the Devil into a tree and carved a cross onto its trunk, or by some tellings he did both, trapping the Devil more than once. The thrust of the story is that Jack promised to free the Devil if the Devil promised not to take his soul. When Jack eventually died, he was too wicked to go to heaven, but the Devil, because of their bargain, could not take him. Thus, he was doomed to forever wander the darkness. The Devil gave him a burning coal to light his way, which some say he placed into a hollowed out turnip. In fact, the legend of Jack o’ Lantern is merely one iteration of an older folktale, in which the man’s name is given as Will rather than Jack, and he is doomed to wander with a bundle of sticks used as a torch, called a “wisp.” You may have heard of the Will-o’-the-Wisp: they are reportedly magical lights seen in the night, said to lure travelers to their doom. They have been called many things through the ages, including fairy fire and fairy lights, hinkypunk, and Irrlicht, or deceiving light, in German, which was later Latinized as ignis fatuus, or foolish fire. The reason for these latter names is clear. The lights were most commonly seen in marshland and swamp, and if a traveler followed them, they became lost, thus making them portents of ill fortune and death. They were first written about early in the 14th century, in a Welsh work that gave another interesting name for the phenomenon: the corpse candle. This indicates that the lights were often seen floating around graveyards as well, which corresponds to the claims of modern ghost hunters who have reported sightings of ghost lights or orbs in cemeteries. As it turns out, there are some rather compelling scientific explanations for this phenomenon. Due to the decay that occurs both in marshes and graveyards, the presence of methane gas likely results in a chemical luminescence, or chemiluminescence. This is, essentially, the much maligned “swamp gas” explanation of UFO sightings, but it remains the most likely rational explanation of will-o’-the-wisp, fitting the features of reports better than other explanations, like bioluminescent insects, St. Elmo’s Fire, or ball lightning. While science provides a rational explanation today, though, it must be recognized that folklore did the same job in ages past, providing a rationalization of an otherwise unexplained phenomenon. And the fact that it was thought to be a harbinger of bad luck too makes sense, for certainly there must have been travelers who wandered into a swamp following the lights they saw there and got stuck, or lost their wagons and carts or even their lives. They saw the lights, and afterward, they met ill fortune or death. But of course, the real cause of it was leaving the road and forging into marshlands, not the luminescent phenomenon in the distance. Such is the nature of superstition. It attributes a false cause to both good and bad fortune, giving believers some agency in it, through ritual, as well as some sense that they understand a world that is full of mystery and misfortune.

To connect this topic to the recent series, the myth of vampires was, from its origin, a superstition. The word derives from a Latin word which means “to stand over in awe,” and it’s typically defined as an irrational belief borne out of ignorance and fear, but as I stated, many superstitions can be seen to have derived from fallacious reasoning, specifically the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, which means “after this; therefore, because of this” and describes the flawed logic of ascribing a cause to some phenomenon simply because the phenomenon occurred after it—your basic confusion of correlation or coincidence with causation. In the vampire superstition, we see villagers assuming that some rampant disease that occurred after a certain person’s death must be caused by that dead person. Thus, it seems, superstition can beget folklore, or vice versa. As a further example of the folklore of vampirism being related to superstition, we see the element of vampire lore that revenants have no reflection in a mirror, which, even if Bram Stoker was first to connect it to vampires, still reflects, if you will, the superstition that mirrors captured and showed the human soul, which Count Dracula did not have. Of course, we can see this explanation of reflection as an attempt to rationally explain, in the absence of a true understanding of the process, why one could see oneself in a looking glass. That wasn’t you in the glass; it was an embodiment of your eternal self. Thus we can easily understand the superstitious belief that breaking a mirror, or even looking at one’s reflection in a cracked mirror, can result in bad luck. In fact, it was sometimes believed to portend death. The very specific number of seven years’ bad luck may have evolved from an old Roman belief that the body and therefore the soul renewed itself in seven year cycles, a superstition that remains popular today, with many believing the erroneous myth that the human body undergoes a kind of cellular regeneration every seven years. This belief about mirrors was once so pronounced that if one broke a mirror, it was considered imperative to grind up its pieces in order to free the soul trapped within. The notion that mirrors separated the soul from the body in this way led many to believe that they made our souls vulnerable to being taken by the Devil or by other spirits. This appears to be the origin of the superstitious practice of covering mirrors after someone has died. If one wasn’t afraid of the ghost of the departed spiriting away one’s soul from the mirror, then one was typically afraid of looking into the mirror and seeing the reflection of the ghost behind them. Thus, mirrors have also long been used as a kind of spirit trap, placing mirrors in doorways to catch any ghosts that might step into them, thinking they were walking into another room. 

Accusing the anointers in the great plague of Milan in 1630. This image comes from Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom. Refer to Wellcome blog post (archive). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

As we see in vampire lore, disease breeds superstition, and nothing is so likely to generate such beliefs as an epidemic disease, like the Plague. The superstitious ritual of blessing someone who sneezes is sometimes claimed to have originated with the Plague, but this is not accurate. Medieval texts as far back as the 13th century describe people responding to a sneeze with the phrase “God helpe you” as a blessing against pestilence. It is true, however, that the Black Plague originated numerous false cause claims as the blighted communities sought to blame the disease on something or someone. These false cause superstitions typically resulted in scapegoating, which we have seen in the libels and persecutions against Jews, when they were said to have poisoned wells. I spoke about this in my episode In the Footsteps of the Wandering Jew. Churchmen also blamed the plague on sin, and on witchcraft. Indeed, in Italy, there was even a name for the scapegoats of the plague, whether Jewish or not. They were called “anointers,” and they were thought to spread the disease through poisonous oils that they sprinkled from vials. This led to many innocent people being hunted by mobs simply because someone, likely a personal enemy or rival, accused them of being an anointer. As an example, in one incident, an 80-year-old man seen brushing off a bench in church before sitting on it was said to be anointing the benches with poison and was set upon by an angry mob and dragged through the street, likely to his death. Other superstitions borne from casting about for a cause of the plague resulted more from ignorance about the nature of disease rather than from scapegoating. As I have discussed before, the miasma theory of disease reigned prior to our modern understanding of germ theory, and it was thought that vapors or emanations spread disease, providing a very basic understanding of airborne disease. The bubonic plague was not airborne, however. It was caused by the bite of infected fleas or by being exposed, through broken skin, to infected material. Nevertheless, as it was noticed that those near other infected or who were around the plague dead frequently became infected themselves, it was thought that they must be contracting the disease by inhaling the infectious vapors, those bad smells, which they reasoned could be countered by good smells, or even just different smells. Thus the line, “pocketful of posies,” is immortalized in the nursery rhyme Ring around the Rosie, inspired by the Black Death, as flowers were kept on one’s person to stave off the smell that slays. This miasma theory of disease also resulted in the superstition that one should hold one’s breath while passing a graveyard. Less logical were other supposed charms against the bubonic plague, such as wearing a toad around the neck or rubbing pigeons on one’s buboes. Nor were all flowers alike considered effective against the plague. Indeed, hawthorn blossoms were thought to actually bring the plague, since they apparently smelled of the plague dead. This has since been explained by science as the presence of Trimethylamine, a compound present in hawthorn as well as in decaying flesh.

Hawthorn trees and shrubs seem to have become connected to numerous superstitions, perhaps because of the smell of death surrounding them. In Vampire lore, it was often stakes of hawthorn, or hawthorn cuttings with thorns, that were used to “kill” vampires or to keep them away. So while they seemed bad luck as they related to the Plague, they were good luck when it came to dealing with revenants, and this mixed significance, as we will see, is rather common. Romans believed hawthorn sacred and used it for torches, or tied their leaves to cradles to ward off evil. Pliny the Elder wrote that destroying a hawthorn bush would get you struck by lightning. Yet when the Christian Church spread, it was claimed that the thorns placed on Christ’s brow were of hawthorn, giving it a negative connotation that was amplified when it was later claimed that witches commonly used the plant in their spell-making. Likewise, the belief that walking under a ladder is bad luck comes from the fact that a ladder, leaning against a building, forms a triangle. Triangles were symbolic of life to Egyptians, and of the Trinity to Christians, so pagan or not, passing through such a sacred symbol was considered blasphemous. Or at least, that’s one explanation. There is also the simpler explanation that ladders were used in medieval gallows, and one just wouldn’t want to pass under those, or the even simpler explanation that you wouldn’t want to pass under a ladder because objects or people were apt to fall on you. The true origins of bad luck superstitions are often hard to pinpoint like this. Was it bad luck to pass someone on a staircase because it was believed ghosts haunted staircases, or because one was more likely to have a bad fall if they ran into someone there? Was it bad luck to let milk boil over because it was believed to harm the cow and make it more likely to stop producing milk, or because milk was precious and only kept in small quantities, fresh, in an age before refrigeration? Is the number 13 considered so unlucky (such that it causes a fear complex known as Triskaidekaphobia) because in ancient astrology it was thought that during the 13th millennium chaos would reign? Or because in Norse mythology, Loki attended a feast of the gods as the thirteenth guest and initiated Ragnarök—the destruction of the gods—with a deadly prank? Or rather, is it because, at the last supper, the betrayer, Judas Iscariot, was the thirteenth person at the table? We may never know, but we do know that, to Jews, it is an auspicious number, the age at which a boy becomes a man, a number representing the word for love. Then again, it has also been suggested that fear of the number 13 actually derives from an anti-Semitic fear of the Jews.

a mummified hand of a hanged man, used for folk healing as well as folk magic. Image credit: www.badobadop.co.uk. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Many superstitions go further than just a fear of bad luck when, like the witnessing of the will-o’-the-wisp, objects or events are considered to be omens of imminent death. Much like one’s image in a mirror came to represent their soul or their self, and the destruction of that mirror was considered an ill portent, portraits too were thought to represent a person’s well-being or true self, and if they fell from the wall, it was thought an omen of death. Perhaps this notion is what inspired Oscar Wilde’s wonderfully creepy short story, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”—if one could safekeep their portrait for an eternity, perhaps it might render them immortal, and might the portrait itself change along with the quality of its owner’s soul? Likewise, as clocks became were used by more and more people, and as we began to measure our lives in minutes and hours rather than by the progress of the sun in the sky, by the 19th century, a stopped clock had come to represent the ceasing of life. Thus it is no great stretch to understand why a stopped clock that may suddenly and unexplainably chime could be seen as an omen of death. Many were the unsupported claims that a broken clock would inexplicably ring out just before an ill loved one’s passing. This may have been related to superstitions about not talking during the chiming of bells, since that sound had been associated with death all the way back to the Plague, when churches rang their bells to mark a death and were ringing almost constantly. Many such superstitions arose from those who dealt with death and attempted to understand the process by which death spreads, as we saw with the lore of revenants. The souls of the dead were thought to remain a while and to pose some mortal or spiritual threat to the living in other ways besides rising from the grave a vampire, as we saw with beliefs about mirrors. This idea explains why it was considered bad luck to encounter a funeral procession and not take off one’s hat or join the procession for the rest of its march, and it was thought that pointing at such a procession would mean certain death within a month’s time. Likewise, a superstitious individual would not walk over anyone’s grave nor remove flowers from a resting place, and if they felt a chill, they thought someone had walked over their grave—even if they had not yet chosen their burial place. Not all superstitions about the dead involved ill fortune, though. For example, it was thought that touching a dead person at their viewing could impart good luck, could heal certain illnesses or conditions like warts, which they believed were passed to the deceased, or would at least prevent the dead from haunting you. More specifically, it was believed that being stroked by a dead criminal’s hand could cure facial cysts and goiters. It was not so much their criminality but rather their untimely death at the gallows, for if you recall, there was a belief about people having an appointed 70 years of life. Thus, one who dies before their time, while one folk belief said they may rise as revenants, another had it that the additional life denied them acted as some kind of mystical palliative. As murder victims and suicides were not frequently stumbled upon, it was criminals, who were publicly hanged, that became the source of this strange medicine, and it was not uncommon so see people approach the freshly hanged to touch their hands, or for mothers to pass their afflicted infants to the executioner so that he would press the hands of the dead on their faces. The belief was so prevalent that doctors were known to keep withered hands in their kits to rub on their patients.

There are numerous superstitions about animals having premonitions about death as well, for example, dogs, which were invested with prophetic abilities in both the Egyptian and Roman cultures. Perhaps because of this ancient folklore, the howling of dogs became an omen of death in various European cultures. However, some may have had other reasons to be struck with terror at the sound of a howl in the night. If I were speaking of France, you might assume that I refer to the howling of wolves as striking terror into the hearts of those who hear it, but hearing howling at night was also a cause of great fear throughout the UK long after wolves were stamped out in the 14th century. You may suspect that I’m going to bring up werewolves now, but instead, I speak of the beasts on the moor, or folktales about fearsome black dogs. Many are the tales of these supposedly supernatural creatures: the Cú-sith of Scotland, the Gwyllgi of Wales, and the Gytrash of Northern England. But perhaps the most famous is the Black Shuck which is thought to range through countryside of East Anglia. Like werewolves, and like the will-o’-the-wisp, it was thought to haunt dark roads at night and prey upon travelers, recognizable by his blazing eye, which, of course, sounds like it could be mistaken for a will-o’-the-wisp. It was claimed that its terrifying howl could be heard, but not its footsteps as it galloped to set upon you, which of course causes one to doubt that anything was actually running toward those who claimed to have had close encounters with it. If one was not killed by the Black Shuck, it was still considered bad luck to encounter them, and travelers were advised to close their eyes if they heard the beast’s howling, even if it might just be the wind, a specification that certainly suggests many such supposed close calls were only encounters with the howling wind. One encounter describes a more corporeal beast, however. In Suffolk, in 1577, it is recorded that a black dog burst into Holy Trinity Church, leaving scorch marks on the door that today are called the “devil’s fingerprints,” and then killed two churchgoers where they knelt. Accounts like this one, and superstition surrounding the Black Shuck and other black dogs like it would go on to inspire the Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. If I were to act the Sherlock here, I’d point out that archaeologists have examined the teardrop shaped scorch marks and determined they were apparently purposely made with candle flames, and descriptions of the Black Shuck entering the church with the sound of a thunderclap, in conjunction with the fact that a violent thunderstorm occurred on the same night, leads one to believe that the imaginations of those present may have run away with them.

Account of the appearance of the ghostly black dog "Black Shuck" at the church in Suffolk in 1577.

Superstitions about black dogs now lead me back to the trailhead by which I embarked on this investigation, recommended to me by generous patron Jonathon: black cats. Jonathon suggested I devote an entire episode to black cat superstition, and I hope he’s not disappointed that instead it serves as just part of a longer episode about superstition generally. As we saw with other categories of superstition, whether something represents good or bad luck is not always clear and varies from culture to culture. The same is true of cats, and black cats specifically. As with dogs, cats have been domesticated since great antiquity, giving us plenty of time to develop folklore and superstitious beliefs about them. In various global traditions, they long served as symbols for protection, independence, and good fortune. Going all the way back to Egyptian and Norse mythology, cats are considered sacred, servants of the gods, vanquishers of evil spirits. Their positive reputation as protectors of the household grew with their role as mousers over the centuries. And while it is commonly thought in America and many other places that a black cat crossing one’s path is bad luck, in Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, exactly the opposite is true. Owning or even seeing a black cat is thought to be a sign of coming prosperity. Indeed, so strong is the belief that a black cat brings good luck there that it is thought their deaths can bring an end to good fortune. Charles I, the Stuart king, apparently believed as much and set his guards to protect his black cat as if they were protecting his very life, which he believed to be so. As legend has it, his cat died regardless, and the very next day, while he mourned the loss of his beloved pet and his good luck, Cromwell’s men showed up to arrest him, leading to his eventual execution. This story certainly smacks of embellishment, but it illustrates the extent of the belief that black cats are good luck. Another example is the presence of dried cats walled up in buildings as lucky charms. Not only in the UK but also in other European cities and even in the buildings of colonial America, cats that were desiccated through smoking and then placed within the walls of buildings and posed as though in the act of catching a mouse, have been discovered. It’s thought that they were placed there as a kind of scarecrow, to drive off potential ghosts or evil spirits, but in truth, we don’t know the purpose of the practice. One thing that modern science has shown us, though, is why the black cat’s coat is black, and it does indeed seem to indicate that the creatures are good luck. Their coats are black due to a certain mutant gene that also makes them more resistant to disease, and which scientists are studying for possible applications in medicine, specifically to treat HIV.

A depiction of Cathars worshipping a cat as if it were the Devil, and preparing to kiss its backside, an act called “osculum infame,” the kiss of shame. Image credit: cathar.info

Unsurprisingly, we have the Christian Church to thank for demonizing black cats. It seems to have begun with the odd belief that cats are somehow lewd. Well, certainly they do often present their anus to us with an upturned tail, but I rather think that such a belief says more about medieval Christians than it does about cats. I imagine they saw a cat’s exposed rear and then interpreted the cat’s backward glance as some kind of come hither look. Cut to them thumping their bibles and calling cats harlots. Eventually, it was thought that they were not just lewd creatures but also the very Devil in disguise. In the 12th-century tale of St. Bartholomew, the Devil takes the form of a cat. And in the Albigensian Crusade, a 13th-century military campaign against heretics in the south of France, it was claimed that the Cathar sect there did things like kiss the anus of the Devil, who had taken the form of a black cat. Indeed, it is suggested that this was the why they were called Cathars. From there it is no surprise that the same accusations were resurrected against accused witches by the Inquisition. Thus black cats were either the devil incarnate, or they were the familiars of witches. Some claim that the association of witchcraft with cats goes all the way back to Greek mythology, when a figure named Galinthias, servant of Hera, tried to interfere with Heracles’s birth and was punished by being transformed into a cat and cast into the underworld to serve Hecate, goddess of witchcraft. However, this is a stretch. Hecate was more of a goddess of magic, as without the Christian notion of a devil, the concept of witchcraft was not really the same in Greek myth. Also, some versions have it that Galinthias was transformed into a weasel, making this a tenuous basis for the origin of the witch and black cat relationship. Nevertheless, they were believed to be connected, and this is the very origin of persistent superstitions about them. If a black cat crosses your path, it is thought bad luck because it means the Devil has taken notice of you. And a cat is thought to have nine lives because it was thought that witches could take on the forms of their familiars, but could only do so nine times. It may even be related to the notion that cats steal your breath, though this has the pretty simple explanation that cats like to lie on sleeping persons for warmth and may have unwittingly been responsible for smothering some children. But of course, rather than come to terms with such an innocent tragedy, the superstitious want someone to blame, and so it is not a cat that smothered their child, but rather a witch or even the Devil himself.

The suspicion that someone has performed sorcery against someone else has created many a superstition. There is a long-held, widespread belief in a curse that can be placed on people called the Evil Eye. It is mentioned in many ancient texts around the world and is even acknowledged in the Bible and the Koran. Essentially, the Evil Eye is thought to be cast by those who are envious, so it is thought that young children and those who are fit and beautiful are the most at risk. Because of this, outsiders with miserable lives were often accused of casting the Evil Eye, just as they were also singled out as witches. Because the curse, which was blamed for a variety of illnesses, was thought to be cast with a hateful look, people with eye imperfections, like a squint or a lazy eye, were also accused of giving the Evil Eye, when of course they could not help how they looked at people. Belief in the Evil Eye curse brought about numerous other superstitions in the form of lucky charms. The most common were amulets with eyes on them, but another you have likely heard of is the horseshoe. The symbol of the horseshoe has evolved through the millennia, from something that wards off the Evil Eye to something that brings general good luck, and how it is used has also changed, from keeping the opening facing downward to keeping it facing up, but its origin as protection against sorcery is certain. Likewise, there are a variety of superstitions about brooms, such as not sweeping after dark or not taking brooms with you when you move into a new house, all of which originate from the supposed use of brooms by witches. Likewise, it was common practice in the 15th century to put a pinhole in eggshells because it was thought a witch might otherwise use the eggshells to cast a spell on whoever had eaten the egg. Parents avoided cutting their child’s hair or fingernails in the first year of their lives for fear witches might use the cuttings to cast spells against them. Some superstitions that had their origin in fears about witchcraft contradict each other. It was said that cutlery laid crosswise was a sign of witchcraft, and indeed an easy way to support witchcraft allegations against an enemy, and thus even long after witch persecutions it was considered unlucky to lay cutlery across each other. But while it was claimed that witches laid cutlery into the sign of a cross, it was also claimed that they could be made uncomfortable in a room by hiding open scissors somewhere, again because it made the sign of the cross. But problems of logical consistency aside, belief in witchcraft led to belief in numerous apotropaic superstitions like this, such as the hanging of hagstones, or river stones with natural holes in the middle of them that were thought to have been made of hardened snake saliva and were believed to be effective charms against witches, or like the carving hexafoils, designs like pentagrams and daisy wheels that appeared to have an infinite pattern, into the walls of buildings as protection against witches, who were thought to get lost in following the patterns.

As I have looked further into superstitions for this episode, I have happily come to find that they are perhaps one of the more perfect expressions of historical blindness in the sense that the reasons for these traditions are murky. Often, they are the result of ignorance, but also of syncretism, the synthesis of different beliefs that happens when cultures clash. Ancient pagan beliefs are adopted and adapted by Christianity, obscuring their origins in a kind of revision of history. We have seen this again and again in my holiday specials about Christmas folklore and traditions. Another example is the superstition about things moving widdershins, or counter-clockwise. This originated in traditions that worshipped the sun and held sacrosanct its trajectory through the sky, but with the advent of Christianity, it became associated with witchcraft and the Devil. Likewise, the belief that spilling salt was bad luck originated with the simple fact that salt used to be a precious commodity, but Christianity transformed this into an act of the Devil, saying that salt must be sacred because it is used in making Holy Water. This then led to the notion that salt could be used to drive away evil, perhaps in combination with the odd idea that, like the infinite patterns of hexfoils, a pile of salt might confuse and waylay witches and demons who felt compelled to count them all. Thus we have the further superstitions of throwing salt over one’s left shoulder, where the Devil was thought to lurk, or protecting one’s home with applications of salt. What we see here is ancient tradition, twisted through syncretism until we have little sense of its purpose, and strengthened by ignorance, to forge a false cause belief that flies in the face of logic. Now, I may sound a little salty, and you may take my conclusions with a grain of salt, if you’ll excuse the puns, but I think all these examples, and many others, all of which I read about in my principal sources, Black Cats & Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions by Chloe Rhodes and Superstition: White Rabbits & Black Cats—The History of Common Folk Beliefs by Sally Coulthard, bear out this final evaluation. We live in a world of nonsense that has been handed down to us as wisdom and truth.

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Until next time, remember, every time you tempt fate by boasting about your good fortune, and you knock on wood—or touch wood, as they say in other places—but you don’t know why, it all derives from Druidic belief in dryads, or benevolent tree sprites… or is it from the ancient Greek belief that touching an oak provided protection from Zeus? …or is it just from the 19th-century children’s game of Tig, from which we get the modern game tag, in which touching the wood of a tree made you safe? Jeez, I dunno what the point of researching this stuff is if I get three different answers.

Further Reading

Coulthard, Sally. Superstition: White Rabbits & Black Cats—The History of Common Folk Beliefs. Quadrille, 2019.

Davies, Owen, and Francesca Matteoni. “'A virtue beyond all medicine': The Hanged Man's Hand, Gallows Tradition and Healing in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century England.” Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine vol. 28,4 (2015): 686-705. doi:10.1093/shm/hkv044

“The Devil’s Fingerprints.”  Atlas Obscura, 25 June 2020, www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-devils-fingerprints.

Edwards, Howell G. M. “Will-o’-the-Wisp: An Ancient Mystery with Extremophile Origins?” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 372, no. 2030, 2014, pp. 1–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24505048. 

Merelli, Annalisa. “Hysteria Over Coronavirus in Italy Is Reminiscent of the Black Death,” QUARTZ, 24 Feb. 2020, qz.com/1807049/hysteria-over-coronavirus-in-italy-is-reminiscent-of-the-black-death. 

Rhodes, Chloe. Black Cats & Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions, Michael O’Mara Books, 2015.

The Revenants - Part Two: VAMPIRES in Fantasy

In 1897, the quintessential treatment of the vampire legend was published: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel that owed much to John Polidori’s and Lord Byron’s first vampire tale, in that again, the vampire is depicted as an aristocrat, living in a castle, who once more preys upon women with a dark charm and sensual allure. However, Stoker’s vampire is an entirely new creation, a bringing forth of the modern legend in its entirety, fully formed, while at the same time acknowledging much of the folklore from which it sprang. Four years after the publication of the novel, an Icelandic translation of the book appeared, entitled Makt Myrkranna, or Powers of Darkness. This edition was adapted from a Swedish version that had been anonymously translated, and whose publisher remains unknown. Interestingly, Powers of Darkness appears to have been translated from some early draft of the novel, with significant differences from the book as the rest of the world has come to know it. Nor was it unauthorized, as Stoker himself wrote a preface, in which, surprisingly, he appears to state that the story is true, or based on true events. He indicates that the characters are real people, stating that he “let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way,” but changed their names. According to Stoker, “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.” More recently, the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker, revealed that, according to his research, Bram Stoker had always intended his book to be read as a work of non-fiction, as a warning of a very real supernatural evil that he had discovered. He describes how his publisher refused to print the book as it was, saying that such claims of a blood-letting monster on the loose in London would only cause a panic of the kind they were still recovering from following the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper. He forced Stoker to excise the first hundred pages and reframe the book as a work of fiction. This is a truly intriguing story, which even a hundred years later has led some to believe that maybe, just maybe, there really is such a thing as vampires. However, the fact of the matter is that all of these claims appear to have been made to sell novels. Dacre Stoker has made a name for himself off of his great-granduncle’s work, writing a sequel called Dracula: The Undead, and later a prequel, Dracul. These claims were made by Dacre and his co-author as part of that prequel, suggesting that the completely fictional story that followed, about Bram Stoker himself struggling against vampires, was a believable filling in of the missing story. However, the novel he co-wrote is far longer than the supposed missing 100 pages he claims were censored, and if the Icelandic version were adapted from a complete draft, it too omits everything that Dacre Stoker and his co-author imagined. Furthermore, the claim that a publisher would refuse to print anything on the grounds that it might enflame public fear like Jack the Ripper, whose murders occurred a decade earlier, is somewhat preposterous. An entire cottage industry had sprung up for publishing books about Jack the Ripper, including The Whitechapel Murders Or, The Mysteries of the East End and The History of the Whitechapel Murders, both in 1888, then The Whitechapel Murders, Or, An American Detective in London and The Whitechapel Mystery, both in 1889, not to mention a bevy of journal articles in the intervening years. To suggest that writing about Jack the Ripper was not done, especially a decade later, is patently false. As for the Powers of Darkness, there is suspicion among scholars that, though it may have been adapted from an early draft of the novel, its translator took great liberties with the story that Stoker may not have even known about. And Bram Stoker’s own preface can easily be explained as another publicity stunt, an attempt to drum up interest among a new audience by falsely claiming that the story had some basis in reality, when in fact, it was entirely fictional. It must be remembered, after all, that Bram Stoker, who had long worked in the theater, as an actor’s assistant and as a critic, was nothing if not a showman.

As we discuss the possible basis for the foundational vampire novel, Dracula, many may object and say that of course Bram Stoker based his monster on a true story, at least to some degree, in that it is common knowledge that he based his Count Dracula on Vlad Drăculea, or Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, the Voivode, or leader, of Wallachia, the famously ruthless son of Vlad Dracul, the Dragon. Vlad the Impaler is said to have been so bloodthirsty that during his campaign to cement his control of Wallachia, when he captured dissident Transylvanian Saxons, he had them impaled, thus earning his name. However, besides Vlad Țepeș not being a Count or a Transylvanian, there is quite a bit wrong with this notion. First, rather than being a hermit in a castle feared by all the peasants for his evil or cruelty, he was widely celebrated as a just ruler and is remembered in Romania as something of a national hero who established peace. His reputation for cruelty was real, however, from his impalement of enemies to the burning of his own subjects for being lazy and poor, so the surviving view of him as some sort of just tyrant is dubious, at best. However, none of this is really relevant to vampirism. There was never any historical connection between Vlad Țepeș and blood-drinking or revenant folklore. The connection only exists in Bram Stoker’s novel, because he took the name Dracula. In the 1970s, it was argued by two researchers, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, that Stoker based his character on that historical figure, but since then, scholars have argued convincingly that he seems not to have known much about Vlad the Impaler at all. He appears to have found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachian and Moldavian history and decided that it sounded appropriately scary. Among all of his papers, no mention of or evidence of research into the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler has ever been discovered. The working name of the character before he changed it to Dracula had been Count Wampyr. But Vlad the Impaler is not the only real life figure that scholars have argued inspired the novel’s creature. Some suggest he may have been more inspired by Attila the Hun than by Vlad Țepeș, as in the novel, the character claims descent from him. Others suggest that Bram Stoker was inspired by the real-life vampire story of Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, which I spoke about in substantial detail in a recent patron exclusive. In fact, an 1896 newspaper clipping about the destruction of Mercy Brown’s corpse for fear she had turned revenant was found in Bram Stoker’s papers. He had been touring America with a theater company that year, and certainly seems to have heard of the story. Add to that the fact that Stoker makes mention of an English town called Exeter, from where his character Jonathan Harker leaves for Transylvania, and it makes for a convincing argument. However, whether it helped shape the novel at all, the story of Mercy Brown could not have inspired it, for by the time he acquired the clipping, he was already far along in composing it. In fact, the next year it would be published. More recently, one historian, Louis S. Warren, has even argued, rather convincingly, that Bram Stoker based the character of Count Dracula on Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West show had toured London in 1887, at which time Bram Stoker actually spent time with the American showman. Warren believes that, to Stoker, Dracula’s transformation and decay was a direct result of his living on the frontier among other races, and that the novel stands as a reflection on the American frontier and how the colonizer is changed and eventually was colonized himself by the racial other. Read this way, the novel has decidedly white supremacist themes, and the vampiric plague visited upon England in it comes to represent the fear of racial degeneracy. Is this what Stoker was writing about? Is this what he viewed as the true story behind his novel? God, I hope not. In the end, maybe it’s better that we only read the book as a terrifying yarn rather than as commentary on some real threat.

Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler, the usual suspect for the model of Dracula, though Bram Stoker appears to have studied him little during the composition of his novel.

If we are to compare the vampire of novels and films to reality at all, it must be to the original vision of vampires from European folklore, which I described in nauseous detail in part one of this series. So let us look at the vampire, meaning its appearance. How do the revenants of Central and Southeastern Europe, the vampir of Serbia, the Nachzehrer of Germany, the vrykolakas of Greece, compare with the bloodsuckers of modern horror fiction. As I joked about at the end of Part One, by simple appearance, they are very unlike one another. The modern vampire is thin, and pale, but according to folklore, “real” vampires are bloated, supposedly with the blood of their victims but actually with putrefying gasses, and rather than pale, it was a darkening of the skin, or more accurately, a reddening of the skin that typically indicated to real vampire hunters when a corpse had become undead. It is clear enough how this change came about. Pallor is closely associated with death; when one imagines a dead man, one thinks of the color leaving their cheeks, so that was obvious enough. As for the trim physique, from the very moment the folklore entered the realm of fiction, in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the creature had been reimagined as an attractive figure who might walk among us unnoticed. Stoker’s Count was simply walking in the footsteps of Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, himself a caricature of Byron. The vampire never really had a chance to be its true, shambling, distended self, though I think that might have been even more horrifying. The image of the vampire evolved further from the dashing debonair in the 1920s, with the silent film Nosferatu, in which the vampire was depicted more ratlike, or perhaps batlike, and some scholars have suggested this representation was an anti-Semitic trope, presenting the vampire as the feared foreign-born Jew who was seen as an invader of white society, leeching off of and tainting its populace. So the racist meaning behind vampire fiction can again be clearly seen. By the time of Nosferatu, the teeth of the vampire had become a prominent feature, but where did they come from? It is possible that the notion of fangs derived from the receding of gums from the teeth in corpses, just as the receding of skin made it appear that hair and nails were growing, but there is not clear mention of fangs in any folkloric accounts. Indeed, when blood drinking is mentioned at all in the folklore, the vampire is said to have drunk from the trunk of his victim or some other place on the body, not the neck. Polidori’s story makes early mention of teeth marks left by the vampire on the neck, but not of fangs. It seems that this little detail was invented by Bram Stoker, and it certainly sunk in, if you will. There is some evidence, however, which I will expand on momentarily, that Stoker was greatly influenced by the folklore writing of Sabine Baring-Gould, a priest from Exeter, curiously enough, whose description of werewolf folklore was well known at the time, and which I made heavy use of myself in my own series on werewolves. So it would seem that the fangs of the vampire were borrowed from the werewolf.

Also like the werewolf, and likely borrowed from Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves, are the vampire’s shapeshifting abilities in the novel Dracula, as the Count is depicted as transforming himself not only into a bat, as is commonly thought of when one thinks of vampiric transformations, but also into a large dog and a wolf. In fact, though this is pretty accurate to the folklore of revenants as well. “Real” vampires, or revenants, which were not always actually believed to physically leave their graves, appeared on their nightly perambulations as their old self but also were said to appear as dogs and as wolves, but also as cats, goats, horses, donkeys, frogs, chickens, owls, mice, and even butterflies. Strangely, bats are one of the rare animals not named as a form taken by the vampire. This wide variety of forms should cause one pause. If in many cases the dead person who was rumored to have returned from the grave to trouble the living was said to take so many different forms, then it casts even more doubt on eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen revenants. If one believed that a disease was being caused by a revenant, and one was on the lookout for a revenant, especially one that others in town had been claiming they had seen, one might see that revenant in every innocent creature that crossed their path. Or, they might not have seen anything at all, for it was even said that revenants might be invisible. Perhaps this is the folkloric origin of Dracula’s ability to travel by moonbeam or appear as a mist. In reality, though, we must consider that this means any tragedy or hardship or annoyance might have been blamed on a revenant, whether accusers really believed they had seen them or not. If an animal was within view, that was the tricky vampire, and if no animal was around to blame it on, one could just say that the revenant must have been invisible. According to the folklore, only twins who were born on a Saturday and had reversed their clothing could see an invisible revenant, so obviously that would make it hard to spot them. In this way, the vampire was quite similar not only to the werewolf, but also to the witch, who it was thought could appear as an animal and could even make herself invisible through her use of the Devil’s salve. And the similarities do not end there. As we know, witches were women, often outsiders, accused of dealing with the Devil, and so too were werewolves believed to have made deals with Satan. Well, as it turns out, vampires also were often said to have been reanimated through a diabolical power. Indeed, sharing the same pool of potential suspects with witches and werewolves, it was often outsiders or criminals or people believed to be practitioners of sorcery who were expected to turn into revenants after death.

Sabine Baring-Gould, the priest whose folklore writings about werewolves appear to have greatly inspired the novel Dracula.

In fiction, there is some disagreement about how one becomes a vampire. According to Stoker, one only has to be the victim of a vampire to become one, and this reflects some folkloric traditions well, when it was feared that any who died of the disease being blamed on a revenant would themselves become revenants. However, the strange customs behind the vampire myth do not always agree. In later fiction, it is said that a vampire must make a victim must drink the vampire’s blood to become a vampire, but in the original folklore, the vampire’s blood was something of a cure for vampirism. Just as we saw in the story of Mercy Brown with the ashes of the supposed revenant, the blood from the alleged vampire, as well as soil from its grave were often used to cure a victim or to ward off further attacks. And in many cultures and traditions, one did not need to be attacked at all to become a vampire. As previously stated, just as it was common for anyone considered an outsider or who was not well-liked to be accused of witchcraft, the same might easily be claimed to have been reanimated by the devil after their death. Take, for example, the vrykolakas of Mykonos discussed in Part One. De Tournefort specifically mentioned that he was unliked. Another category of person thought likely to turn revenant upon their passing was a person thought to have committed suicide, such as the shoemaker of Breslau. This supposed predisposition toward vampirism meant that there was probably always a handy scapegoat when a disease began to trouble a village, for any person who had killed themselves or who was suspected of sorcery or even who was not well-liked could be the culprit. Consider this list of the types of people most likely to be accused of becoming revenants, compiled by Dagmar Burkhart, expert on Slavic folklore: “the godless…evildoers, suicides, in addition sorcerors, witches, and werewolves; …robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes, deceitful and treacherous barmaids and other dishonorable people.” Indeed, it appears that alcoholics were often prime candidates, and they, like suicides, were sometimes exhumed and dealt with as revenants before anyone had reported their supposed return from the grave. The act of suicide itself was not always believed to have opened the deceased to the influence of the Devil, though. Rather, it was the fact that they had died before their time. We see this also among those taken suddenly by some disease or in some other way suffering an untimely demise. In Psalm 90, it is stated, “Our days may come to seventy years,/ or eighty, if our strength endures,” and this line of scripture led some to interpret that God had appointed at least that number of years to all of us. Therefore, if one is taken early, by accident, or disease, or by their own hand, or even by the hand of another, they may rise from the grave a revenant. Murder victims and those who meet untimely ends in the wilderness especially are at risk of vampirism because if their remains are left undiscovered, they do not have the benefit of a proper burial. But none of this may matter, according to some traditions. One may be well-liked, and god-fearing, and live out all their appointed days on earth, but if they were born a certain way, they may be damned from the start to become a vampire. Babies born with teeth, it was said would become a revenant, or those born with a red caul, or with a split lip, or a supernumerary nipple or vestigial tail or red birthmark. Again, the folklore of the vampire is reminiscent of that of the witch, who was said to have been marked by the Devil with some of the very same bodily signs.

One prominent feature of the fictional vampire is its sexual magnetism. From Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula to Anne Rice’s Lestat, vampires are depicted as darkly alluring or even rapacious. They enter the bed chambers of their victims and take them in an intimate embrace, pressing a their red mouths to their victim’s necks, and exchanging fluids. Whether one sees this as a metaphor for sex, or in a more horrifying sense, as a representation of violation, the subtext is there. Surprisingly, this too can be viewed as deriving from some aspects of vampire folklore. For example, the revenant was thought to be a sexual creature. This may be the result of the so-called “wild signs” observed in corpses exhumed on suspicion of being vampires, which is believed to be a euphemism for an erection. Such anatomical reactions are an apparent common thing in decomposing bodies, as a result of the bloating that I spoke about in great uncomfortable detail in Part One. These signs of what must have seemed to be arousal likely then led to further claims about the sexual activity of revenants. It has been claimed, for example, that the revenant was apt to visit his widow and wear her out with his lovemaking. Beyond these reports, though, many were the claims that the revenant entered the bedchambers of his victims and lay down on top of them. This was not necessarily said to be a sexual act, however, or a rape, but rather a physical assault in the sense that the revenant was trying to smother them. But, if we really think about these incidents, we come away with an entirely different explanation. If a person today were to describe seeing a shadowy figure enter their room, and said they were unable to do anything as this figure got on top of them and pressed down, smothering them, we might more likely attribute this to not only a nightmare but the terrifyingly real phenomenon of sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucination. Those who suffer from this well-known sleep disorder feel that they cannot move while in a state between sleeping and waking, and the hallucinations that accompany this sensation are often terrifying, involving shadowy figures and creatures entering their room, sitting on their thorax, creating the feeling of pressure there, and sometimes carrying out some sexual act on them. This has been called “the incubus phenomenon,” relating to folkloric demons like the incubus and succubus that were said to seduce and have intercourse with sleeping men and women. Statistical analysis has shown that this incubus phenomenon may be experienced by as much as 11% of the general population, and up to 41% of those who experience sleep paralysis. Rather than a demonic figure, this creature that sits atop a sleeping person is viewed as an old hag in many traditions, also called the Night Hag, and is more of a witch-like figure. In fact, this hallucinated entity is actually where we get our word for nightmare. A mare in Scandinavian folklore was a damned woman who visits villagers in their sleep to sit on their chests and bring them terrifying dreams. Clearly this known sleep disorder serves as a sound rational explanation for many reports of nightmarish revenant visitations.

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781), a classic depiction of sleep paralysis and the incubus phenomenon.

All that remains to consider when it comes to the vampire myth are the odds and ends, things like the origin of driving a wooden stake through their hearts, their lack of reflection in a mirror, their aversion to silver and garlic, and their reaction to crosses and to sunlight. The staking of a vampire is clear enough; we have observed that because of the folklore of the revenant, many original vampire hunters drove stakes of wood through supposed vampires. The truth of the matter, however, is that this may have originated not as a means of destroying the vampire. For that, beheading and burning served their purposes far better. The stake, it seems, was actually a means of keeping them immobile, driving the stake through their bodies and into the earth beneath so that they could no longer rise to trouble the living. Among the Finns, for example, the staking of a vampire was only to pin it in place. Other folklore indicates that the stake may have been a kind of apotropaic, or charm to ward off the vampire, as it was believed that revenants could be driven away by the mere presence of sharp things generally, not only stakes, but even thorns and knives, which were placed under pillows to ward off vampires. This may have been the origin of the belief that silver could kill a vampire, since the knives kept under mattresses and pillows were often silver. The folklore says little about the effect of crosses on vampires, though we may presume that this Christian element of the myth was incorporated later, with the spread of Christianity, in conjunction with the notion that the Devil was responsible for raising the revenant. Indeed, early accounts indicate the opposite effect of crosses, though. My principal source, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber, describes an incident in which a sword is driven into a suspected vampire, and then it is worried that, because the cross guard of the sword made a cross shape, it would prevent the Devil from leaving the corpse. Garlic, though, it seems, was indeed a recognized apotropaic against vampires, for the sole reason that it was stinky, and it was believed that revenants would be repelled by the stink. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that it was claimed the revenant did not stink as it should have, but the fact is that garlic was not unique. Any stinky thing was thought to repel the vampire, and villagers were known to spread feces on cloth as revenant repellant. As for the absence of a vampire’s reflection, there is speculation that this relates to the notion that vampires had no soul, and mirrors were thought to show or capture the soul. In fact, according to some folklore, it was actually believed that vampires had two souls, and even two hearts, thereby allowing them to survive death. It was thought that vampires talked to themselves because of their dual souls, and I would imagine this led to numerous mentally ill persons being posthumously accused of vampirism. Others have thought that the vampire’s issue with mirrors is that most used to be backed with silver, but the truth of the matter is that the element of vampire lore having to do with mirror images never appeared until Bram Stoker invented it. Likewise, the vampire’s inflammable reaction to sunlight is nowhere to be found in the folklore or early vampire fiction and appears to have been invented in 1922 by F. W. Murnau in his Dracula ripoff, Nosferatu.

There is an explanation given from ancient mythology for many of the elements I just spoke about, however. They originate in the Scriptures of Delphi, the so-called “Vampire Bible.” Said to be passed down from the word of the Oracles at Delphi themselves, it tells the story of Ambrogio in ancient Greece, who was cursed by Apollo, the sun god, to have his skin burned by sunlight, and who thereafter lost his soul to Hades, god of the underworld. The goddess of the moon and the hunt, Artemis, further cursed Ambrogio to be burned at the touch of silver, and grants him immortality but only if he drinks blood to sustain himself. If such a Greek myth were real, it would indeed appear to be the origin of the vampire story. The problem is, the earliest mention of the “Scriptures of Delphi” and the story of Ambrogio that I can find is 2015, and though some vampire enthusiasts claim it was unearthed by archaeologists in Delphi, I’ve seen no evidence of this. It appears to me that this is likely a modern hoax. Thus vampire mythmaking continues today. And fiction writers are not alone in expanding the vampire mythos. Well-meaning scientists and medical professionals too have added misinformation to our understanding of the subject. In 1851, British anatomist Herbert Mayo hypothesized that revenants were merely people in a coma or suffering from catalepsy who had been buried alive and who woke up only when dug up and impaled. This doesn’t account for all the reports of revenants who had no reaction at all when cut open or staked or those who had been in the grave for months and clearly would have been dead regardless of whether they’d been alive when interred. It would also require us to believe that some villages had a habit of burying a great many people alive. Also clearly false is the more recent hypothesis that vampires were actually people suffering from porphyria. This blood disorder, which has also been tried as an explanation of werewolves because of excessive hair growth being one side effect, is raised as an explanation mainly because of the porphyria victim’s sensitivity to sunlight, an aspect of vampires that we know was invented for cinema. However, other aspects lend themselves to this explanation, such as a supposed aversion to garlic because of its sulfur content, which could worsen their condition, and the receding of gums supposedly making fangs (though as we’ve seen, fangs were also never part of vampire folklore). Proponents of this theory claim that the lack of a reflection in mirrors, which we have seen did not originate from folklore, really refers to a porphyria sufferer avoiding mirrors because of how the disorder ravages their faces. And they even go so far as to claim that since the urine of a porphyria sufferer is red, it would have been presumed that they had been drinking blood (which is rather absurd considering blood in the urine is common of many ailments and not some strange condition that would encourage such speculation). The further claim that, since blood infusions would later be used as a treatment, perhaps porphyria sufferers used to try to treat the disorder by drinking blood, is also completely unsupported conjecture. The fact is that as a theory it seems believable, but since the symptoms it attempts to account for were largely fictional, it makes no sense, and furthermore, it makes no effort to account for the fact that those who were accused of vampirism were already dead and buried, and there is not always mention of them having been diseased in life or drinking blood when they supposedly rose from the grave. SO at the end of our examination of vampires, what it boils down to is a superstition, borne from a lack of understanding of disease and death, which has since been embellished by fiction writers and earnest men of science into a wide-ranging legend of an abominable and fiendish monster…who wants to suck your blood!!

Until next time, remember, if there is anything that my Halloween series have shown--from “The Specter of Devil Worship,” to the “Shadow of the Werewolf,” to “A Rediscovery of Witches,” to “The Demoniacs” and “The Revenants”—it’s that monsters, as such, may not be real, but those who claim to hunt, cast out, prosecute, and destroy them certainly have proven themselves monstrous. 

Further Reading

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988. 

Molendijk, Marc L et al. “Prevalence Rates of the Incubus Phenomenon: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in psychiatry vol. 8 253. 24 Nov. 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00253

Stoker, Dacre, and J.D. Barker. “Bram Stoker Claimed That Parts of Dracula Were Real. Here's What We Know About the Story Behind the Novel.” TIME, 3 Oct. 2018, time.com/5411826/bram-stoker-dracula-history/.

The Revenants - Part One: VAMPIRES in Reality

It was a dark and stormy night when in late spring of 1816 the travelers arrived in Geneva, but more than that, it was a dark and stormy season all around, for that was the “Year Without a Summer,” when the volcanic ash clouds spewed out by Indonesian volcano Mount Tamboro resulted in darkness and unseasonable rainfall. The poet Percy Shelley, his lover and the mother of his son, Mary Godwin, their boy William, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont were in the midst of a tour of France and Switzerland that May, having just traveled through an unseasonably bleak and wintry country to reach Lake Geneva, where they stayed in a small chalet. During a particularly dark and stormy time of their stay, they abandoned their lodgings to stay in the far more lavish Villa Diodati that had been leased by Percy’s poet friend, the famous playboy, Lord Byron. Sexual tension abounded in the Villa during their stay, as Claire Clairmont, whom Lord Byron had previously taken as a lover, sought once again to draw the poet’s attentions, and Byron’s personal physician and companion, John Polidori, tried to draw the eye of Mary Godwin, but she remained devoted to the father of her child, whom she soon would wed, becoming Mary Shelley, though she already referred to herself as Mrs. Shelley. With some among them frustrated in their romantic interests, and all of them frustrated in their recreations, unable to go sailing on the lake because of the foul weather, they stayed indoors, read German ghost stories, and with thunder rumbling and lightning flashing outside, they spoke about the life-giving power of electricity, the then-popular notion of galvanism. This spooky atmosphere eventually led to a friendly contest among the writers, to compose the most frightening story. Lord Byron struggled, starting a story about a man who promised to return from the grave to visit his friend, but in the end abandoning it and working instead on his poem, The Darkness, which reads, in part, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” Meanwhile, Mary Shelley too was troubled by a dark dream or nightmare, inspired by all their talk of galvanism. The result was her masterpiece, Frankenstein, the story of a monster raised from the dead. Her tale easily won the day, and today remains a classic of gothic horror literature. But it is Byron’s fragment of a story, which would later be taken up by his physician, John Polidori, and completed as a story called The Vampyre, which would eventually inspire an entire genre of horror storytelling and reinvent an ancient legend as a modern nightmare. Both were stories of things that came back from the dead, but Byron’s fragment was more clearly a representation of the old European notion of a revenant, a person that becomes resurrected and calls on people he knew in life. Polidori used the old Slavic word for a revenant, vampir, but the similarity ends there. In his story, the vampire is a nocturnal aristocrat named Lord Ruthven who preys on women. Clearly, Polidori rewrote the story as a parody of his friend, Lord Byron, but in the process, he single-handedly invented the vampire archetype, a well-dressed and mysterious gentleman with a dark, sexual charisma. In ensuing years, after his story was adapted into plays and an opera, his version of the vampire stood as the model for many imitators, and it reached an even wider audience later that century when a penny dreadful rip-off called Varney the Vampire serialized a similar tale on the cheap for a far broader readership. But today we easily forget that the basis of this fictional trope is a creature from European folklore that many cultures believed was utterly real.

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I often try to create some throughline in episode topics. For example, I had a solid run this summer, from my episode about the Tartaria urban myth to my series on giants, and my examination of the Book of Enoch, and my study of the Flood myth and Noah’s Ark. Often there is no clear transition between my topics, though, like from JFK’s assassination to Tartaria, or from Noah’s Ark to gun violence, or gun violence to MK-Ultra, or Montauk to demagogues. However, if I were to attempt some tenuous connection here, I suppose that demagogues could be seen as a kind of vampire on a democratic society. Vampires are commonly used as metaphors or symbols, signifying greed and misuse. In fact, Merriam-Webster lists these metaphorical uses of the term as valid definitions, including “one who lives by preying on others” as one meaning, and even the disarmingly misogynist definition that a vampire might refer to “a woman who exploits and ruins her lover.” To suggest that the vampire is only present today in fiction or metaphor, however, disregards the continued belief among some that vampires are real. Such modern belief can be traced back to Christian apologism, or more specifically, the work of Montague Summers, the colorful clergyman and popular writer who styled himself as a kind of modern witch-hunter and demonologist in the early 20th century. I have spoken at some length about Montague Summers in my 2-part series Shadow of the Werewolf, as well as in my 2-part series A Rediscovery of Witches, both of which, if you haven’t listened, would make for a great podcast binge this Halloween season. Suffice to say that Montague Summer, who was undeniably erudite and whose work cannot be faulted for lack of scholarship, differentiated himself from any contemporary academic writers on the occult with his apparent absolute belief in his subject matter. He argued that witches really had made pacts with the devil, and that werewolves were real, having also made pacts with the devil. He made similar arguments that vampirism was and remained a real phenomenon. His claim can be clearly discerned in his second volume on the subject, The Vampire in Europe, when he writes of “the fundamental truth, which, however exaggerated in expression and communication, essentially informs the vampire-tradition.” Likewise, he states in no uncertain terms, “That a large number of cases of vampirism must be accounted certain only the most prejudiced will deny. Even in many other relations which cannot be pressed in detail it seems beyond doubt that the main facts are true.” Nor is this an obsolete view that cannot be entertained even by the bright light of modern science, as there exist today various subcultures that believe in vampirism, members of which even consume blood and believe it sustains them. So, in examining the folkloric origins of the vampire, we are not only examining the source material for a literary invention. Rather ridiculously, it seems we are obliged to refute the notion that vampires, as such, ever really existed.

Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where one dark and stormy night, much of modern horror was born.

First, we will examine some of the most widely cited reports of supposed real vampirism, looking at the primary source material to determine the real basis for the legend. One of the earliest firm accounts of such a revenant is preserved in a book of Prussian folklore. In this report, we are told of an affluent shoemaker of Breslau, in what was then Silesia, who committed suicide in 1591, cutting his own throat with a knife. The remains of people who had committed suicide were traditionally buried using alternative funerary rites and were not buried in the churchyard. It was, therefore, not uncommon for the bereaved loved ones to hide the true cause of death. Such was the case of the Silesian shoemaker, whose widow claimed he had died from a stroke and went to great lengths to hide the truth of the matter, not accepting visitors to view the corpse, and having it wrapped tightly so that its wound would not be perceived. Her efforts paid off, and the shoemaker was buried with traditional ceremony. However, rumors soon surfaced about his suicide and became such a scandalous gossip that the town council confronted the widow, who continually changed her story, saying first that he had actually fallen on a rock, then that he had fallen on his own awl and she had thrown it away to prevent others from injuring themselves. However, her neighbors continued to distrust her because they said they had begun to receive visits by the shoemaker. In the tradition of the revenant, the dead man was seen walking the city and visiting people he knew after his death. The text does not call him a revenant, or a vampire, or even a Nachzehrer, a northern German word for the same sort of creature, but rather a Gespenst, or ghost. As is common in revenant folklore, the shoemaker frightened those it visited, waking some up from slumber and in some cases entering their houses and assaulting them in their beds. People left their homes and spent the night in the company of others, keeping their lanterns burning the whole night through, but still they reported seeing the shoemaker making his nightly visit to oppress them. The troubles were so great, that the council determined to open the shoemaker’s grave and see for themselves that he truly was dead. What they found was a great swollen corpse, but they found him complete and undamaged by decay, and the fact that he was not stiff as they expected him to be caused them to believe that his was no normal corpse. Moreover, his skin had peeled away, revealing fresh skin beneath, and it was said not to stink as other corpses stank. They set a guard on the corpse and allowed the townspeople to come and view it for themselves, but regardless, the revenant continued to visit and trouble the people. Finally, the shoemaker’s widow admitted that he had killed himself and urged the council to end the troubles by killing him a second time. In order to utterly destroy the revenant, they cut off his head, hands and feet, removed his heart, and cremated the remains.

Of course we see the bare bones of a vampire story here: a creature that has risen from the dead to attack the living who is finally dealt with by attacking his heart, beheading him, and setting him on fire. As we look closely at the story, however, we see already how different the traditional stories of revenants are from the later vampire tradition. First and foremost, there is no drinking of blood. Instead there is only some noisy bothering of neighbors and perhaps some mild throttling. This is essentially a ghost story, complete with unfinished business. It is not the body itself which rises from the grave to vex his neighbors; the grave appears to have been undisturbed and the visits continued even when the body was watched. Rather, the story seems to indicate that the spirit of the shoemaker set about bothering and even physically attacking people until the truth about his death came out. As we shall see later, there is ample reason to doubt the reports of the revenant’s victims, as many may have imagined the visits, encouraged by the mass panic, or made false reports in an effort to further encourage the widow to come clean about the rumored true nature of the shoemaker’s death, or someone may even have been disguising himself as the shoemaker and going around bothering the people for any number of reasons. But the story of the shoemaker from Breslau does clearly introduce some elements of European folklore surrounding revenants: that when they are exhumed, they appear not to have properly decomposed. Indeed, it is claimed that the corpse of the shoemaker does not even smell bad, although, it should be noted that immediately after stating that there was no stench, the text concedes that “the cloths in which he was wrapped had a repulsive smell.” It seems unrealistic to believe that those who dug up the shoemaker, upon smelling a repulsive stench, then went about sniffing things more closely to determine whether it was the cloth or the corpse itself that stank. So the reliability of the report is called into question. Likewise, we read that the body was “undamaged by decay” but in the same breath it’s stated that it was “blown up like a drum,” as if those who examined it did not recognize swelling as a part of the decomposition process. Thus we must consider that they may not have been the best judges of whether or not the corpse should have been stiff at this stage in its decomposition, or whether the fresh skin they saw beneath the peeling skin was or was not an aspect of normal decay. To these strange features of the revenant in his grave we will add a few more before essaying to provide some rational explanation other than that they represent signs of the undead.

A depiction of a revenant visitation

The next historical account of a supposedly real revenant, and one who can more accurately be called a vampire since he was Serbian, and that is the Serbian word for the phenomenon, comes to us from the 18th century, when Serbia and Walachia were occupied by Austria, and it was noticed that the locals had the strange practice of digging up corpses to “kill” them. In a village called Kisilova, after a man named Peter Plogojowitz died and had been buried, nine different people took ill and died swiftly, after only a day of symptoms. These people, as they lay dying, supposedly claimed that Plogojowitz had visited them in their sleep and attacked them. The villagers knew just what this meant—they had a vampire on their hands. So they opened Plogojowitz’s grave, in which they noticed that his hair and beard and even his fingernails had continued to grow after death, that his dead skin had peeled away to show healthy looking skin beneath, that his body did not stink, and that it was entirely intact after more than three months. More than this, fresh blood could be seen on his mouth, which the villagers believed he had sucked from his victims. To destroy the fiend, they drove a sharp wooden stake through his heart, whereupon great quantities of fresh blood erupted from the wound as well as from his eyes and mouth. Afterward, they burned his remains. This report adds features of the revenant in his grave that we will address in due course: the fresh blood seen in his mouth and flowing after being staked and the growth of hair and nails. Notable is the mention of blood sucking, and the staking of the heart. Here we find the vampire tale more complete but still not fully formed. Some vampire tales make claims about a disturbance of the grave, but more often, as in this tale, there is no indication that the corpse has left the grave or even that the villagers believe he had physically done so and then somehow reburied himself. Rather, again, it appears the revenant is seen as a kind of spirit, whose nocturnal attacks seem to create some effect on the corpse lying still undisturbed back in its grave. It is interesting that the report indicates the corpse is perfectly intact and “fresh,” yet admits an exception, saying, “except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away.” Once again the reliability of the report is questionable based on its own claims and logic. But perhaps most interesting here is the indication that the vampire is being blamed for an illness that is spreading through the village. Vampirism in folklore and fiction has since been portrayed as a kind of plague in its own right. It spreads like a disease when one vampire turns two victims into vampires, who in short order then each turn victims of their own, and so on. We don’t see vampirism spreading like an infection here, but it does appear to be a vector of some other infection in this tale, as we see his victims dying after a brief illness. But these sick villagers only essentially said that they had had nightmares about Plogojowitz. Again, if they even really made these claims, this could very well have been the result of some rumors that Plogojowitz had turned into a vampire. One wonders how many others who weren’t sick might have had similar nightmares with such rumors going around. Viewing the scenario in this more rationalist light, it becomes a case of scapegoating. We know nothing about Plogojowitz’s character in life or how he was viewed by villagers, but for whatever reason, when three months after his death a disease began spreading among the villagers, some chose to explain the mysterious illness by blaming it on the dead man, and the claim took on a life of its own, as it were. Who knows how many cases of vampires can be similarly explained as an attempt to find some comforting explanation for a frightening danger. The village of Kisilova knew of nothing they could do to defeat this communicable disease, but they knew just what to do about a vampire.

The explanation that vampirism was simply a way to cast blame for a plague when there was no one really to blame does much to explain every instance when a village chose to dig up and desecrate a corpse in this way. It was an established belief, which would of course encourage further claims of visitation by a recently deceased revenant whenever an illness was sweeping through a village. According to the account of the vampire Peter Plogojowitz, the people of Kisilova had heard of entire villages being wiped out by such a vampire. Of course, by this explanation, they were actually wiped out by diseases they did not understand, which they only explained by claiming a vampire was attacking them. As the notion that vampires cause disease transformed into the notion that vampirism spread like a disease, the act of digging up and destroying corpses itself sometimes became epidemic. According to a report published in Nuremberg in 1732, it sometimes resulted in villagers digging up entire cemeteries in the belief that they were full of vampires. In the village of Medvegia, a belief that vampires were visiting people and sucking their blood had arisen. The villagers claimed that their troubles could all be traced back to a soldier named Arnod Paole, who had died falling off a haywagon. While still alive, Paole had told people that a vampire used to attack him. He claimed to have finally rid himself of the vampire by eating soil from its grave and smearing its blood on himself. When Paole died, there were further claims that he had turned into a vampire and begun to bother villagers, and that he had even posthumously killed four people. One assumes they probably died from some illness, but regardless, the village dug him up, claimed he was not decayed, and that fresh blood flowed from him and that new skin and fingernails had grown on him. As was their custom with vampires, they staked him, whereupon he groaned and bled profusely, and thereafter they burned his remains. However, in Medvegia we see that whatever plague had been troubling them did not fade, so they needed further scapegoats and therefore claimed that all of Paole’s victims must likewise have been transformed into vampires. Thus they began digging up every corpse that had supposedly been killed by a vampire, which had probably actually expired from some disease, and each of these they decided had also not properly decomposed and showed the signs of vampirism, perhaps because they seem to have exhumed them in the winter, when cold weather slowed their decay. And when they ran out of dead people to blame for the disease and the disease continued to rage, they claimed that vampires had attacked their cattle too, and therefore anyone who had eaten of their meat must also have been transformed into a vampire upon dying. And when they dug these up—these people who hadn’t claimed to have been troubled by vampires but had likely died from the same illness nonetheless—they found that they too showed the signs of vampirism. It makes you wonder how many corpses they would have to observe before they started to suspect that the features they were so certain indicated vampirism might actually have been typical of a corpse in certain stages of decomposition.

An image depicting the rising of the dead from their graves.

Perhaps the best and most revealing report on such peasant superstitions comes to us from a French botanist named Pitton de Tournefort in early 18th century Mykonos, where the Greeks called such revenants vrykolakas. De Tournefort viewed the peasant superstitions more critically, and his skeptical account offers a rarer look at what was actually going on. He described a certain man on Mykonos who was unliked because of his quarrelsome nature, who had been murdered, with the culprit never having been discovered. Afterward, he was said to have been seen walking the island at night, or even entering homes and playing pranks like snuffing out lanterns, overturning furniture, or seizing people from behind and scaring them half to death. After ten days of this, they said a mass, exhumed his corpse, and cut out his heart. De Tournefort observed the practice, remarking on how inexpertly the butcher who completed the task performed it. Rather than observing a lack of stench, de Tournefort describes how the men who examined the corpse burned incense to cover the smell, which causes one to wonder whether that might be the case in other reported instances as well, but that the practice went unrecorded. Nevertheless, de Tournefort asserted that it did not decrease the stench at all, but rather magnified it. In fact, de Tournefort states that he suspects the men would have claimed the body did not stink at all if he had not been present to contradict their claims, giving the sense that a skeptic’s presence was all that prevented them from exaggerating their claims such that they would better match those of other accounts. Instead, some of the men began to cry out that smoke was coming from the body of the supposed vampire after it had been opened, proving it was a vrykolakas, though the botanist was certain that the smoke was obviously just from the incense. Likewise, he described the crowd of people proclaiming that the corpse was not stiff and that its blood was still red and warm, although de Tournefort seemed to express skepticism on the matter. He suggested that some warmth was to be expected when “rummaging about in entrails, which were putrefying,” and he further states, “as for the pretended red blood, …this was nothing but a stinking mess.” After the people thought they had rid themselves of this supposed vampire, the pranks continued, such that townsfolk left their homes and congregated together at night, finding their houses further ransacked and rummaged through upon their return. The believers argued over the proper way to dispense with the vrykolakas, suggesting they should have said mass after cutting out the heart rather than before, etc. Meanwhile de Tournefort had a different idea, suggesting that a number of vagabonds had run wild in the town, vandalizing homes and eating and drinking their fill at night when the villagers left their houses vacant and unguarded. Here we see a further explanation, other than scapegoating for a disease. We see that the supposed vrykolakas or vampire was hated for his behavior and character, and even killed for it. So perhaps others, like Peter Plogojowitz, were likewise disliked, making them a more likely target of blame when a disease came around, or in this case, on Mykonos, a crime wave. In the dark of night, as unknown figures are seen striding outside the home, or when some brute bursts into your house and knocks over your lamp, making it impossible to properly identify him, and goes on to break your things and assault you, who can you blame? Well if the folklore of revenants is common in your culture, you may be more likely to blame the ghost, or the corpse, of that one guy who was always such a dick.

So we have some notion of why a village might decide that a certain dead person was responsible for their woes, and we understand how social contagions work, that such claims might only grow with each retelling, becoming a mass delusion. But what of the claims about the vampire’s body not rotting as is to be expected. We might presume that the claims of there being no smell are exaggerated, but what of the consistent claims that the bodies are still fresh, with new growth of skin, hair, and nails, fresh, uncoagulated blood, with no stiffness as we might expect from rigor mortis, and even that they groan, or sometimes even cry out, when pierced by a stake? First it must be pointed out that, while accounts of vampire killing often claim that there are no signs of decomposition, they almost always belie an ignorance of what decomposition looks like. The falling away of the nose is a clear sign of decomposition, or the bloating that is described in almost every report. Vampire killers often believed the revenant was bloated because it had been drinking blood, but the bloating of corpses is common, due to the release of methane during putrefaction. The lack of stiffness was also a common sign of vampirism, but the fact is that rigor mortis is a temporary phenomenon. During the course of regular decomposition, the body again becomes flexible. Likewise, what they saw as the sloughing off of old skin and the growth of new skin is also a natural phenomenon, something called skin slippage, in which the outer layers of skin peel away, revealing not fresh skin beneath, but raw layers of the epidermis. What they saw as the hair and fingernails growing was actually the flesh having retracted from them, the beginning of a process of shedding the hair and nails. Much is made of the uncoagulated blood, but this too is common. Blood may coagulate but then liquify again, depending on the conditions of the body during decomposition, and the pressure of the gasses bloating the corpse commonly force the pooling blood past the larynx, explaining the supposedly fresh blood on the vampire’s lips. This liquid blood pools in the torso and especially in the heart, further explaining the copious bleeding when the vampire-killers stake revenants, and the very act of violently piercing the trunk of a corpse that has filled with gasses explains the sounds of groaning or even crying out that were frequently reported. Why would some bodies look different from others, though, as so many of these reports claim? The answer is simple. There are many factors that might hasten or retard decomposition, including moisture, temperature, microorganisms, and the presence of air or insects. Indeed, some bodies may actually be unusually preserved through accidental mummification and other processes. Some cultures in which vampires were believed to be common actually buried their dead in lime, which they believed hastened decay but could actually preserve the corpse. Another process is saponification, when fat is transformed into adipocere, causing a pinkish red discoloration in the muscles which may be mistaken for a robust complexion. But a better question is why European peasants would presume that such seemingly unnatural preservation of the dead was a sign of evil when otherwise, as in the preservation of saints, it would be viewed as a miracle of God denoting sanctity. Simply put, the fears these people faced were not fears of a fiendish monster. It was, instead, a quite natural fear of death, something they could not fully comprehend. For this reason, because of that deep-seated dreadful terror at the heart of vampire lore, I would argue that vampires remain the most horrifying of all monsters.

In Part Two we will further explore how this lore evolved into modern myth.

Further Reading

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988.

Buzwell, Greg. “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati.” British Library, 15 May 2014, www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati.

Summers, Montague. The Vampire in Europe. Taylor & Francis, 2013.

The Enigmatic Kingfish, Huey Long

Huey Pierce Long was a controversial figure on the national stage during the Great Depression. The former governor of Louisiana turned senator made few alliances in Washington. In fact, he had even moved to oppose the New Deal plan of the very popular president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1935, he announced his candidacy for U.S. president, a campaign Democrats feared could divide support for Roosevelt, for while he was not popular among his congressional colleagues, he had grown more and more popular among the public, many of whom listened to him on the radio, where he expounded like a preacher on his Share Our Wealth program as an alternative to the New Deal, promising to make “Every Man a King.” And back in his home state, where he had done much to help the common man, he was truly revered by his constituency. “I’m a small fish here in Washington,” he was fond of saying, “But I’m the Kingfish to the folks down in Louisiana.” And it was not just the voting public he held sway over in Louisiana. He still dominated the political scene there. He had handpicked his gubernatorial successor, Oscar K. Allen, and the system of patronage he had established back when he had been governor remained in place, such that, even away in Washington, he could get state legislation passed or struck down seemingly as he pleased. In fact, he was in Baton Rouge on September 8th, 1935, just a month after declaring his candidacy for president, on just such state business. On that day, there was a special session of the state legislature. The business of the day was the ouster of an avowed political enemy of Long’s, Judge Benjamin Pavy. Long had arrived, accompanied by his armed guards, to personally see to it that certain bills would be passed that would allow the legislature to gerrymander Pavy’s district and ensure his political downfall. Huey Long stood tall and proud, secure on his home turf, as he walked between the marble pillars of the Louisiana capitol. Two times that evening, a man in a white suit, Carl Weiss, Judge Pavy’s son-in-law, tried to approach Long and engage him in some sort of conversation, but Long brushed him off. At 9:20pm, Weiss came at Long one more time, eliciting some angry retort from Long that appeared to trigger Weiss into assaulting him. The result was a shootout, as Long’s security, trying to prevent Long’s assassination by Weiss, gunned the judge’s son-in-law down. However, they were too late, for it appeared Weiss had already gotten a shot off. They rushed Huey Long to the nearest hospital, and surgeons immediately went to work trying to save his life. However, they could not stop the internal bleeding from his wound. For two days, Long clung to life, but in the end, he died. His final words were reported as “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” When his passing was announced to the public, many mourned the death of a great reformer, feeling a loss of hope comparable to what the country would feel 30 years later after the murder of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. Meanwhile, many others sighed with relief to be rid of a dangerous demagogue, an authoritarian whom many believed to be a homegrown fascist akin to Hitler.

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In the previous post, when I revisited my first topic about Trump’s demagoguery, I suggested the current perils U.S. democracy faces are similar to those in the 1930s, and I specifically cited the demagoguery of Father Coughlin. But Huey Long is often mentioned in the very same breath as Father Coughlin. It would have been quite easy to lump him in among the threats to democracy of that period, but Long deserves further analysis, which in turn requires some further clear-eyed analysis of demagoguery. Some scholars reject the term altogether, suggesting it is too difficult to define and is a label too easily flung at those whom we oppose as a means of discrediting them. The word originally only meant “a leader of the people” in ancient Greece, but even so, it has always carried with it a negative connotation, indicative of manipulation or deception. Today, however, we might recognize the validity and even the importance of certain radical political agitation that may not have been condoned in the past. So where is the line between radical leader and dangerous demagogue? Perhaps the ultimate example of a dangerous demagogue is Adolph Hitler. The way Hitler cultivated his public image as a leader of the masses, his spellbinding oratory, his appeal to prejudices and his reliance on scapegoats are all perfect examples of the stereotypical demagogue. In fact, it has been argued that demagoguery is the definite first stage of a fascist movement. It is certainly important, even vital, to remember the rise of Hitler and be vigilant against the rise of another like him. However, comparisons to Hitler are not always the historical parallel we should use. First of all, you run the risk of offending Holocaust survivors with such analogies. Second, you may be too easily dismissed as alarmist or hyperbolic. Perhaps the better example to use when evaluating whether Huey Long was a demagogue would be the stereotype of the Southern demagogue. We can take as our exemplar “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, another Southern governor and senator. A leader of the Red Shirts whom I described in my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, Tillman engaged in wholesale race massacres during Reconstruction in his efforts to ensure continued white supremacy. Like others who fall into the Southern demagogue category, Tillman rose to power by whipping up the emotions and prejudices of voters. He exploited the hot-button issues, manipulating the discontent of a white, agrarian culture and blaming all of their woes on the black citizens that he painted as their enemies. The demagogue cultivates his image as a champion of the downtrodden, when often he has never been one himself, as was the case with Tillman, who came from a wealthy slave-owning family. The demagogue is charismatic in their speechmaking, but it is the emptiness of their rhetoric that is more important, since great oratory is not a fault. The demagogue is no resolver of social problems. Rather, he distracts from problems with his scapegoating, and more often than not, race-baiting, as the demagogue’s currency is prejudice and resentment. And finally, revealing that the demagogue cares more for his own elevation than serving those who raise him up, he is no keeper of promises, and he usually reveals himself to be corrupt, engaging in fraud, and betraying the principles of democracy to further his own empowerment. These attributes can be seen very clearly in Hitler, and quite clearly in “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and other Southern Demagogues. But the question of this episode is did the Kingfish meet these criteria?

Southern Demagogue “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman

Huey Long grew up in a district of Louisiana that thrived on populist politics, and he appears to have learned much about the whipping up of crowds from politicians in the so-called People’s Party, which appealed to farmers and rural laborers. Long always presented himself as being one of the working class, from a poor background, but in truth, he was from an affluent family, most of whom were Democrats, the party of Jim Crow segregation and black disenfranchisement until the party realignment that was underway during Long’s lifetime. Here we seem to be checking a box in favor of demagogue, as Long cultivated his image as one of the common man, when in fact members of his own family, upset by his later politics, publicly contradicted his tales of growing up poor. However, self-presentation is an artform practiced by all politicians, especially today with their teams of public relations experts and publicists and media messaging strategists. Adopting a rustic persona and reinventing oneself to appeal to the public is almost a requirement of the job. Yes, it’s disingenuous, but it’s also, maybe, a commonplace evil in a world where all politicians show up to disaster areas with their shirtsleeves rolled up as if they really intend to physically do anything beyond giving some prepared remarks. This alone we might dismiss as a matter of optics, a politician doing what politicians do. So let us search for further signs of demagoguery. He started his career as a lawyer, and even back then we can see his tendency to fight for the little guy, winning compensation for his clients from the enemy he would focus on throughout his political career: big corporations. His political career commenced with a position as Public Utilities Commissioner, in which role he again championed the less advantaged, supporting independent oil companies and taking on the behemoth Standard Oil. His critics will point out that he had a conflict of interest here, as he actually owned stock in the independent oil companies that he was helping. This assertion certainly paints Long as a corrupt and deceitful leader whose supposed principles only served his own ends. However, recent legal scholarship casts doubt on the long-held assumptions that Huey Long improperly profited from independent oil company profits. As it turns out, the stock shares in question, in the independent Win or Lose oil company, came into his possession years after he first began fighting for companies like them, even after he had left the governor’s office. And regardless, in his work for the Utilities commission, he not only fought for smaller companies, but also for the consumer, pushing for affordable rates. It may be difficult to argue that Huey Long was not corrupt, but to characterize all the genuinely beneficial reforms he pushed for as cynically self-serving is unfair.

During his governorship, Huey Long did undeniable good for the state of Louisiana. It is somewhat absurd to read his critics argue that he only exploited the poor and disadvantaged to achieve power, but then concede that he did actually keep his promises and enact reforms that benefitted them, but also claim that he only did so to hang on to his power. It’s a bit like arguing that a certain saint does not deserve to be sainted because they only did all that charity work and performed all those miracles in an effort to become a saint. It’s rather hard to discern the purity of one’s motives, since we judge by their actions. In office, Huey Long enacted so many reforms they became known as the Long Revolution, and the reforms would be considered progressive even by today’s standards. He pulled the state out of its Depression nosedive with broad infrastructure projects that vastly improved employment. Yes, some projects may have been vanity projects, like a new governor’s mansion and a new capitol, but they put laborers to work all the same, and most projects were not, including the construction of a new seawall and spillway to shield New Orleans from flooding, improvements to that city’s port and warehouses, a new airport, numerous bridges and railroads, and almost 4,000 miles of newly paved roads, a record at the time for a state in the Deep South. Beyond these projects, he built new health care facilities and fought for more sanitary and compassionate mental health facilities. In education, he allocated funding to improve school facilities and provide free textbooks, and as a result increased enrollment in public schools. He also established night schools and managed to significantly reduce adult illiteracy in Louisiana. Those who call him a demagogue argue that he only helped all these people in order to serve himself, but he actually did much to empower local government over big government, which would seemingly reduce his own power. If demagogues don’t keep their promises and are in the business of distracting from real world social issues by blaming scapegoats, Huey Long doesn’t fit the bill. He drew attention to real social ills and enacted concrete programs to alleviate them. The enemies he vilified were the extremely wealthy and large corporations, validly pointing out a concern that we must recognize has only gotten more concerning: that many of society’s ills derive from the distribution of wealth. It causes one to ponder, can it really be called scapegoating if you are accurately casting blame?

A Huey Long for Governor campaign flyer

While he won the enthusiastic support of Louisianians, especially poor and rural citizens, Long made many enemies as governor, and later, in Washington. Perhaps this accounts for the divisive nature of his legacy. The first time he ran, in 1924, he lost, but in 1928, through his innovative campaigning and captivating speeches, he succeeded with the slogan “Every Man a King but No One Wears a Crown.” Early in his tenure as governor, having made enemies of industrialists with his proposal of an oil tax, he was nearly removed from office under an impeachment resolution that listed accusations ranging from bribery through patronage and controlling the courts through his appointments, to carrying concealed weapons and suborning murder. The last was hearsay, a rumor that Long had suggested, while drunk, that someone kill a rival’s son and leave him in a ditch. The accusations resulted in an all-out brawl in the legislature, remembered as Bloody Monday. Long insisted the whole impeachment campaign was a conspiracy by Standard Oil to prevent his reforms, and in the end, after a battle of bribes and counter-bribes on both sides, Long was victorious. Afterward, he came to dominate state politics, such that one critic rewrote his slogan as “Every Man a King but Only One Wore the Crown.” His mechanism of influence was machine politics. He cultivated allies in the legislature through patronage. He would appoint legislators to positions in state agencies, providing them additional income, and then expect them to play ball when it came to passing laws for his reform programs, and as we saw on the day he was shot, he attended legislative sessions in person, ready to bowl over opponents of his agenda with his folksy and charming rhetoric, as well as his scathing personal attacks. His opponents he thereafter dealt with harshly, supporting those who ran against them in elections and even using his power to take petty revenge, like firing anyone in their family who happened to work for the state. It’s no wonder he was disliked by those who stood in his way, and absolutely his system of patronage was ethically dubious, but those who admire his reform programs, and especially those who benefitted from them, like the poor, tended to view him as playing the game the way it had to be played in order to keep his promises and make his changes. One argument is that he may have started out an idealist and only resorted to the corrupt means that his enemies employed because his ends justified them. Moving beyond his time as governor, though, after his election to the Senate, when he remained in firm control of Louisiana through his machine and the puppet governor he’d chosen to replace him, it may very well be that he succumbed to his ambitions, not wanting to give up his influence, and seeking greater power in Washington, whether because he lusted after it or because he really believed that only he would use it for the good of the country.

At first, Huey Long allied himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt and campaigned for him, but eventually he turned on the president, opposing his New Deal programs as not doing enough to resolve the hardships of the Depression. It has been claimed by his critics that Long only moved against Roosevelt because the president had blocked his further political ambitions, but again, this is a matter of presuming Long’s motivation. It is certainly true that he had his eye on the presidency. He even wrote an imaginative account of what his presidency would be like. He anticipated dividing Roosevelt’s support, resulting in a Republican presidency, after which Long believed he would be swept into office. His critics further claim that his alternative program, the Share Our Wealth Society, was little more than a ploy to get him into office by bribing the poor for their support. And it is true that his alternative program was rather light on details and perhaps overpromised what could be accomplished at the time, but looking at it in a modern light, Huey Long was advocating for many reforms that were ahead of his time. He spoke about the richest 2% owning far too much of the wealth, and he proposed capping wealth and redistributing it to the poverty-stricken. He wanted to enact a temporary moratorium on debt during the economic crisis, a policy that was recently enacted under the Trump administration and furthered under Biden to provide relief during the pandemic. But more than that, Long pushed for universal healthcare, free college education, and a universal basic income. All of these proposals are still advocated for by progressive reformers today. So perhaps Long’s program was not the transparent ploy that some historians have claimed. Certainly Roosevelt recognized the appeal of it, as he came to view Long as “one of the two most dangerous men in America,” the other being General Douglas MacArthur. To address this threat, Roosevelt sicced his IRS on Long, putting his finances under the microscope in an effort to bring him down, and played Long’s own patronage game against him, declaring, “Anybody working for Huey Long is not working for us.” Roosevelt recognized not only Long’s threat to his presidency and to his New Deal programs. Almost certainly, Roosevelt’s assessment of Long as a danger reflected the belief common among Long’s critics that he was a fascist. Indeed, many were the comparisons of Long to Hitler. One New Dealer called him “the Hitler of one of our sovereign states,” and one journalist suggested Long could possibly “Hitlerize America.” American Communists called him “Louisiana’s Hitler,” and described him as “the personification of the fascist menace in the United States.” Domestic sympathizers of fascism said he was “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader.” Even Huey’s own brother said he was “trying to be a Hitler,” and some historians and biographers have immortalized this view of him. But was it accurate?

Long delivering a speech with his signature awkward gesticulation, which was sometimes compared to Hitler’s oratorical style.

There are indeed undeniable parallels between the Kingfish and fascist dictators like the Führer and Il Duce. They all rose to power in the wake of the Great Depression, taking advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction with an ineffective government. They were all mesmerizing orators and master propagandists. Huey Long pretty much invented the modern campaign media blitz. He was the first to outfit a truck with speakers and have it driven through the streets to encourage people to attend his rallies, and he was the first politician to use radio for national addresses, a practice that both FDR and Hitler later took up. However, in several key regards, Longism does not match up with fascism. A key element of fascism was race hate and racial scapegoating, obviously with the anti-Semitism of Nazism but also the Italian fascist racism against Slavic ethnic groups. However, Huey Long, while known to make remarks that betrayed a typically Southern view on race, was said by one who knew him to have “far less racial prejudice in him than any other Southerner in the Senate.” In his reform programs, he helped the poor black community the same as the poor white, securing jobs for black workers, improving conditions for black students, and reducing illiteracy among black Louisianians from 38% to 23%. He even insisted that black citizens too must receive an equal share in his plan to redistribute wealth. “Black and white, they all gotta have a chance,” Long said. “They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children.” As for anti-Semitism, despite working with some rabid anti-Semites, like Gerald L. K. Smith, Long himself was not anti-Semitic, having close Jewish friends and allies, one of whom, Abe Shushan, he honored by naming the new airport in New Orleans after him. Beyond these differentiations, there is the fact that Long’s politics were simply too far left to be considered fascist. You’ll hear some ill-informed people claim that fascism and Nazism were leftist movements, for the simple reason that Nazism was short for National Socialism, but Hitler was never a leftist or socialist. He used the term to gather broad support, but he explicitly said that he was redefining the word. In 1923, he said, “I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.” Very quickly his party revealed itself as a far-right movement, and that is how fascism is always and has always been characterized, despite what some who fear the far left might claim today. Nazism and Italian fascism both rose in clear opposition to Communism. Now Huey Long presented himself and his Share the Wealth proposals as an alternative to Communism, but his proposals were certainly far too socialist to be considered fascist today, especially since, when he had power, he did not forget about the people to whom he had made promises, as Hitler did, but rather delivered reforms to improve their condition. And Long himself certainly resented the comparisons, responding, “Don’t liken me to that sonofabitch.”

While Huey Long was no fascist, the further argument is that he at least had authoritarian tendencies. And of course, while fascism is undoubtedly a phenomenon of the far right, leaders on the far left of the political spectrum may indeed be autocrats heading a totalitarian state. One need look no further than Stalinism for an example of this. Examining Huey Long for evidence of authoritarianism, we find definite cause for concern. Even T. Harry Williams, one of Long’s most admiring biographers, concedes that Long, while seeking the power to overcome his opposition so that he could do good, may have ended up grasping too much after power and doing inadvertent harm. In wielding his unprecedented influence over the state legislature, he betrayed some rather anti-democratic sentiments, such as when one lawmaker reminded him that Louisiana had a constitution they were bound to follow, and Long replied, “I’m the constitution around here now.” As a senator and presidential hopeful, when he was pushing for wealth redistribution and was asked how he might respond as president if the Supreme Court blocked his program, he said he would get Congress to pass a law that extended the Supreme Court bench to include all congressmen and would have the case considered again. While I acknowledge and even distrust and denounce the counter-majoritarian nature of the Supreme Court, especially today as an openly partisan and extreme right bench rolls back civil rights, what Long was proposing, effectively merging the judicial and legislative branches of government, was not just unrealistic but extremely dangerous. While these remarks and Long’s unprecedented influence over every aspect of the government in Louisiana may be indicative of some anti-democratic tendencies, when we hold up Louisiana under his auspices to scholarly criteria for a totalitarian regime, we find that it doesn’t quite fit. A totalitarian system is characterized not only by a leader who holds extraordinary power as Long held. It is further characterized by the existence of only a single party and an official ideology, which just wasn’t the case with Longism. It is further characterized by an iron-fisted control over media and education and the economy, none of which Long ever held. Indeed, Long struggled with opposition newspapers and rival parties, and he once said to a newsman who suggested he was a dictator, “You and I both know that if the people want to throw me out they’re going to do it.” Besides the broad power Long wielded in Louisiana because of his political machine, the one other criteria he could be argued to meet was his commanding of a “secret police” capable of terrorism. Long’s use of the state police as his personal security was widely criticized, with comparisons unsurprisingly made to Hitler’s Brownshirt private army. And in 1928, he pushed the infamous Act 99 through the legislature, establishing the Bureau of Criminal Identification, a law enforcement agency independent of the police, which Long controlled by appointing its head officers, and which was capable of making arrests without a warrant. Long’s critics declared it his own Gestapo… but it didn’t engage in official campaigns of terror as predicted. In fact, today, it is just the wing of the state police in charge of fingerprinting.

Huey Long surrounded by his armed guards.

When Long first established this bureau, the BCI, it was specifically to investigate a number of armed militia groups that had formed in opposition to him and which had engaged in criminal violence and armed insurrection. These groups were, like so many others then and today, openly racist, overtly likening themselves to white supremacist movements like those that enacted reigns of terror all over the South during Reconstruction, much like those I described in my series The Coup on Cape Fear. These groups were responsible for death threats, not only to Huey Long but also to the Long-supportive administration, headed by Long’s successor as governor, Oscar K. Allen. They attempted arson on more than one occasion, and once even took a pot shot at Long’s home in New Orleans. At one point, when during a recount for a voter referendum on some constitutional amendments, Governor Allen declared martial law, necessitating that the recount occur under armed guard, many cried fraud, but the clear reason that Allen had to call in the National Guard that day was that these militia agitators had staged an armed rebellion in the district where the recount was occurring. Hundreds of armed members of the opposition militia group calling itself the Square Deal Association had stormed the East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse. And rather than some draconian crackdown, Allen’s declaration of martial law resulted in the Square Dealers dispersing without violence. These Square Dealers were the central focus of the BCI, who had infiltrated them with informants. It was because of these spies that the BCI was able to arrest many in this group the very next day, when the BCI surprised fifty armed Square Dealers at the Baton Rouge Airport. A shootout ensued, but no one was killed. Several were arrested, and the group’s leader fled across state lines. The informants that the BCI had among these opposition groups also provided information on meeting locations, at some of which Long stated they had recorded evidence of murder plots. Ever the purveyor of political spectacle, Huey Long dramatically read the minutes of these meetings on the Senate floor. Indeed, if they can be trusted, it does seem that the men at the meetings were talking about killing Long, specifically shooting him and sinking his corpse into the Gulf of Mexico weighted with chains and speculating that Roosevelt would pardon them for doing it. Whether this was idle talk or earnest plotting remains unclear, but all this seems enough to warrant Long’s security details and the establishment of the special investigative force, even if it does not excuse the unconstitutional granting of unlawful search and seizure powers. When later that year Long was killed in the Louisiana capitol, his armed guards failing to protect him, unsurprisingly, the event spawned a number of conspiracy theories, which I intend to discuss in a patron exclusive Blind Spot.

The figure of the Kingfish, Huey Long, is hotly contested by biographers and historians who variously call him a hero or a despot, a champion of the people or a demagogue. I have endeavored to judge him fairly in this episode, and to indicate where I thought he may have been unjustly criticized or unfairly characterized, but I must be clear that I don’t approve of his machine politics or his lack of regard for the separation of powers and for constitutional rights. I think that his plan for the redistribution of wealth, while admirable in many regards, was simplistic and unrealistic as outlined and likely a calculated attempt to steal the New Deal thunder and help him realize his designs on the presidency. I think Long actually showed his lack of support for the working classes in numerous ways, such as his lack of support for labor unions, his failure to push for a minimum wage law in Louisiana, and his opposition to the ratification of the Federal Child Labor Amendment. Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder what concrete beneficial reforms he might have managed to achieve as president. On the other hand, while Long may not fit many of the criteria of a demagogue or a fascist, when we apply the same criteria to Donald Trump, an unsettling conclusion must be drawn. Huey Long kept his promises to the people who supported him, whereas Trump, who made concrete promises such as investing $550 billion in infrastructure, bringing back U.S. manufacturing jobs, guaranteeing 6 weeks paid maternity leave, and generally improving the economy, healthcare, and education, did not keep the promises he campaigned on. He was carried into office largely by poor, rural whites, convincing them that he was fighting for them, but inequality only deepened when Trump was in power. Huey Long did not distract from real issues by race baiting, is common of demagogues and fascists, but Donald Trump ran on hate for immigrants, specifically Latin American migrants and Muslims, and since that time, he has made his political opponents and the media into his constant scapegoats, blaming the left and fake news whenever his corruption is revealed. Huey Long was regularly accused of corruption and graft, and after his death, those who inherited his political machine were definitively caught using it in corrupt ways to enrich themselves, but try as his critics might to posthumously link their crimes to him, Long has remained unimplicated in their crimes. Conversely, Trump ran on draining the swamp or ridding Washington of corruption while acting as corruptly as any President before him, or worse, conning donors to his campaign and his defense fund out of hundreds of millions and flagrantly enriching himself through the powers of his office. He is a compelling, if buffoonish and overdramatic speaker, as was Long and as was Hitler, and he certainly benefits from propaganda in conservative news media and through online disinformation campaigns. While Long was a progressive populist and used his control of law enforcement to combat lawless militia groups, Trump has proven himself a far-right extremist, far closer on the political spectrum to textbook fascism, and his apparent personal command of white supremacist anti-government paramilitary goon squads like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys serves as a far more apt comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and they have proven themselves more prepared to engage in terror campaigns. As I acknowledged at the beginning of this episode, comparisons to Hitler and fascism can often be viewed as offensive or alarmist or hyperbolic, and I do not make the comparison lightly. I’ve laid out the criteria and considered it thoughtfully, as you’ve seen. At a certain point, after comparing how something looks and how it swims and how it quacks, you’ve just got to admit when it passes the duck test.

Further Reading

Amenta, Edwin, et al. “Stolen Thunder? Huey Long’s ‘Share Our Wealth,’ Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal.” American Sociological Review, vol. 59, no. 5, 1994, pp. 678–702, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096443.

Haas, Edward F. “Huey Long and the Dictators.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 47, no. 2, 2006, pp. 133–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4234177.

Hogan, J. Michael, and L. Glen Williams. “The Rusticity and Religiosity of Huey P. Long.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004, pp. 149–71, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2004.0040.

Leuchtenburg, William E. “FDR and the Kingfish.” American Heritage, vol. 36, no. 6, Oct./Nov. 1985, www.americanheritage.com/fdr-and-kingfish#1.
Jeansonne, Glen. “Challenge to the New Deal: Huey P. Long and the Redistribution of National Wealth.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 21, no. 4, 1980, pp. 331–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4232034.

Schafer, Elizabeth D., and Anthony Connors. "Huey Long: Was Huey Long a Progressive Reformer or a Dangerous Demagogue?" History in Dispute, edited by Robert J. Allison, vol. 3: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of Progress, St. James Press, 2000, pp. 86-94. Gale In Context: Global Issues, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2876300019/GIC?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=6decfee2.

Seidemann, Ryan M., et al. “The Kingfish’s Mineral Legacy: An Analysis of the Legality of State Mineral Leases Granted to W.T. Burton and James A. Noe During the Years 1934–1936 and Their Relevance to Former United States Senator and Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long.” LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources, vol. 5, no, 1, 2017, pp. 71-152. LSU Law Digital Commons, digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/jelr/vol5/iss1/8/.