Vampires Through the Ages Read Online Free PDF

among scholars and folklorists alike. The first was proposed by German scholars in the 1700s who believed the word vampire came from the Greek verb pivnw , meaning “to drink.” Later, in the 1800s, a linguist named Franz Miklosich suggested that the Slavic word upir and its synonyms upior , uper , and upyr came from the Northern Turkish word uber , which meant “witch.” In direct opposition to Miklosich, other linguists such as André Vaillant claimed that the Turkish word uber was in fact derived from the Slavic word upir .
    As if all that weren’t confusing enough, the final and most recent theory is that the word vampire existed no further back than the German-Hungarian word vampir , and its origin is relatively new in the scheme of things.
    There were, of course, many other names for these creatures, spoken in many other tongues not directly tied to the English vampire . For instance, the words wukodalak , vurkulaka , and vrykolaka were found among the Russians, Albanians, and Greeks, all of which translated roughly to mean “wolf-fairy,” demonstrating an early comingling of the archetypes for the vampire and the werewolf. Beyond this, the further one digs back through the pages of history, the more obscure and clouded the names become—until they are lost entirely.
    Categories of Vampirism
    Just as the names for vampires changed to suit the tongue they were spoken in, so too did the nature and habits of the creatures change to fit the cultures that believed in them. Despite the many variations on the theme, for the purposes of our investigation vampires can be broken down into three distinct categories. The first and most common form of vampire was as feared as it was dreadful to behold. These ghastly night stalkers, which we will call revenants , were traditionally the corpses of the living dead, who roamed the night in search of tasty victims, much as George Romero’s zombies did in Night of the Living Dead . In some cultures the dead bodies were controlled by the spirit of the deceased, who after death could find no rest and so was cursed to rise again, while in others the corpse was merely a rotting vessel inhabited and spurred on by a demon or other evil spirit. In most cases, revenants were pictured as if they had just clawed their way out of the grave still wearing the death shrouds they were buried in. Reports describe them as shambling monsters with bloated bodies and ruddy or blackened colored flesh, long scraggly hair, and ragged claws with fresh blood seeping from their mouths and nostrils.
    In some areas, the revenant took on other physical traits that departed somewhat from the usual corpse-like appearance—but were equally horrifying. For instance, in the Saronic Isles of the Mediterranean, revenants had hunchbacks and attacked with viscous dagger-like claws. In Bulgaria they had only one nostril, while high on Mount Pelion in central Greece they glowed in the dark. Among some of the Slavic and Germanic Gypsies it was even thought that revenants had no bones, a belief based on the observation that vampires often left their bones in the grave when they went hunting. What may surprise many is that the tradition of vampires sporting sharpened canine fangs was a literary invention that surfaced much later.
    In most cases, what seemed to motivate the revenant was an insatiable hunger for blood, which it was believed allowed the creature to continue in its undead state. Upon first awaking in its coffin, the revenant began to devour its own body, including the funeral shroud it was buried in. The more of itself the revenant consumed, the more its living family members mysteriously began to grow ill and waste away, causing their deaths. At some point in the meal, the revenant either rises from the grave as an invisible spirit through holes in the ground or physically claws its way through the dirt. Once free from its tomb, it wanders through the night in search of family