Where Did Vampires Come From?
Did ancient collaborative storytelling techniques give us vampires?
From my own background of the itinerant tribes of Jewish and Turkish descent, their nomadic lifestyle facilitated storytelling as a means of connection and survival. While roaming through the Middle East and Eastern Europe, these tribes relied on storytelling to earn the trust of locals and navigate unfamiliar territories. Stories were shared through various mediums, from one-on-one fortune-telling to communal gatherings around fires, blending tribal narratives with local customs and legends.
While the traveling storytellers knew the framework of their stories, they would NOT have every word memorized. In fact, it was quite common for storytellers to modify and update their stories for each local village they passed through, and would often determine these modifications based on feedback from the local audiences in the form of gasps, laughter, and tears. One of the ways they accomplished this was by having set archetypes and structures for stories, with specific segments cut out for local flavor to be added. For example, one of the folkloric creatures they would tell stories about were the Mullo, an undead revenant described as having white clothes, hair that reaches to their feet, and one physical oddity (a trait which varies from geographic region to region). Anyone who had a horrible appearance, was missing a finger, or had appendages similar to those of an animal, was believed to be a mullo.
A mullo’s purpose was to seek out people it disliked in life, and harass that person, which included family members, returning to the Earthly realm to commit malicious acts, like attacking by strangling and sucking the blood of a person. To ward off mullos, Romani people drove steel or iron needles into a corpse’s heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears, and between the fingers at the time of burial.
In India, where the Romani people originated, similar tales of Vetalas, ghoul-like beings that inhabit corpses, are found in old Sanskrit folklore. The vetalas are described as creatures who, like the bat, hang upside down on trees found on cremation grounds and cemeteries.
In ancient Hebrew cultures in the Middle East, there was the Alukah (the literal translation of ‘leech’) which is synonymous with the term Motetz Dam (literally, ‘bloodsucker’). The creature is understood to be a living human being, but can shape-shift into a wolf, and would eventually die if prevented from feeding on blood for a long enough time. The Alukah can also fly by releasing its long hair, an allusion to kabbalistic teachings that Jews should allow their hair to grow long in Payot or Payos, stretching back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and continuing to Orthodox Jewish communities today. I want to make clear, this was not a creature meant to slander the Jews, but was a creature believed by Middle Eastern Jews to exist.
In Turkic Europe, two of the earliest historical recordings of similar creatures can be found in Neplach’s Chronicle, probably written in 1360 which directly correlates to when Sinti and Roma people began moving into Europe. For the year 1336, Neplach (the historian) mentions a shepherd named Myslata from Blov. He died and was buried but he didn’t stay in the grave. Each evening, Myslata walked around, spoke to people as if alive and scared them. Soon, he started killing people, and if he stopped by someone’s home and called their name, said person would die in 8 days. So the people of several villages decided to exhume him and burn his body. During the process, Myslata let out a loud scream.
The second case happened in 1344. Neplach writes about a woman from LevÃn, who after being buried, came back, killed several people, and danced on them. Once she was exhumed and a stake was put through her, blood started pouring out of her as if she were alive. She also ate her clothes, and when the clothes were removed from her mouth, the clothes were bloody as well.
In the Dalmatian region of Croatia, there is a female creature called a Mora, or Morana, who drinks the blood of men and also the kuzlac/kozlak, the recent-dead “who have not lived piously.” They can be men or women who show themselves at crossroads, bridges, caves, and graveyards and frighten the locals by terrorizing their homes and drinking their blood. To be killed, a wooden stake must be thrust through them.
In Romania, these creatures were first called “Moroi” (from the Romanian word mort meaning ‘dead’ or the Slavic word meaning ‘nightmare’) and then later renamed to “Strigoi”. Similarly, dead Strigoi were described as reanimated corpses that also sucked blood and attacked their living family. Live Strigoi became revenants after their death. A person born with a caul, an extra (oddity) nipple, a tail, or extra hair was doomed to become a Strigoi. The same fate applied to the seventh child in any family if all of their previous siblings were of the same sex. Finally, a person with red hair and blue eyes was seen as a potential Strigoi, a unique and odd physical appearance for the region.
In Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, a creature called Pijavica, which literally translates to ‘leech’, is used to describe a creature who has led an evil and sinful life as a human and, in turn, becomes a powerfully strong, cold-blooded killer. Its former family can only protect their homes by placing mashed garlic and wine at their windows and thresholds to keep it from entering. It can only be killed by fire while awake and by using the Rite of Exorcism if found in its grave during the day.
By now, you can recognize this creature as the prototype of a Vampire. While many speculate that these proto-vampires arose simultaneously, I would argue that the archetypes for these creatures existed in India circa 700 CE, and through the itinerant communities’ use of collaborative storytelling, perpetuated and adapted to local cultures, thus giving us the modern-day vampire. Basically, without the itinerant storytellers, you don’t get Dracula.
Today, itinerant tribes continue to face persecution, underscoring the ongoing relevance of storytelling as a tool for resilience and resistance. Their stories remind us of the enduring power of storyteller-audience relationships in shaping our understanding of the world and connecting us across diverse communities and experiences. As storytellers, we inherit a rich tapestry of narratives, woven together by the threads of history, culture, and human connection.
For more exciting details on the art of storytelling, check out Threads of Imagination, published by DSTL Arts! Purchase today at https://www.dstlarts.org/s/shop
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