Dark Banquet Read Online Free PDF Page B

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in…well, never mind). It should also be noted that stories of vampyrelike creatures have a worldwide distribution. Bloodsuckers inhabit the folklore and literature of ancient China, Babylonia, and Greece, as well as the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica (most notably as the Mayan bat god Zotz or Camazotz).

    Vampyre hysteria ebbed and flowed throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reaching its peak in the 1730s. At this time it became quite popular to dig up dead bodies, accuse them of crimes, and then smash a stake through their decaying hearts. According to legend, those corpses hoping to avoid skewering often chose to transform themselves into something not quite so corpselike. Although Slavic vampyres never actually took the form of bats, popular transformation destinations included animals or inanimate objects such as fire and smoke. Fear was an important component of most vampyre legends, but some of these creatures would have had a hard time striking terror into your average toddler. For example, Muslim gypsies in the Balkans won’t keep pumpkins or watermelons for more than ten days (or after Christmas) for fear that they’ll transform into vampyres. Thankfully, these vampyre veggies have no teeth—so they’re reduced to pestering people by rolling around the ground, growling, and dripping blood.
    Descriptions of how vampyres attacked their prey are almost completely absent from the early folklore, but there is some general agreement that previously healthy victims began wasting away before ultimately succumbing to the vampyre’s supernatural powers.
    Some scholars have attempted to explain the multicultural obsession with vampyrism from a criminal standpoint—as gruesome acts committed by individuals exhibiting actual medical conditions ranging from schizophrenia to rabies. On rare but memorable occasions, criminals turned up who were actually obsessed with blood. These “vampyrists” were psychotic rather than supernatural, obtaining gratification by consuming or otherwise coming into physical contact with the blood of others. The most infamous vampyrist may have been the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory. Apparently the countess was quite fond of brutalizing her servants, and after slapping one young woman in the face, she found herself splattered with the girl’s blood. Soon after, Báthory became convinced that the liquid had cosmetic and restorative powers. Ultimately, she may have participated in the torture and murder of over six hundred maidens—all of this mayhem so that she might drink or bathe in their blood. *16 After her trial in 1611, the countess was walled up inside a small chamber within her own castle where she lived out the last three years of life in darkness and solitude. In what might have been an early attempt at a plea bargain, several of Báthory’s assistants avoided similar confinement by having their extremities hacked off and then getting burned at the stake.
    Some researchers seeking to explain our fascination with the vampyre phenomenon looked to the deaths themselves rather than the crimes surrounding them. They related fatalities that resulted from supposed vampyre attacks to diseases like anemia, tuberculosis, or the various plagues (such as the Black Death) that spread in wavelike fashion across Europe and much of the globe. †17 Additionally, given the general population’s ignorance about medical conditions like comas, it’s no shock that there were numerous reports of what may have been premature burials and encounters with “dead” people who had suddenly and inexplicably come back to life. *18
    Clearly, though, once word of the existence of real vampire bats began to circulate, a new supernatural emphasis on these mysterious (and as yet unidentified) creatures began to take shape. Bats living in Europe, where blood-feeding species had
never
existed, were gradually