Vampires, Burial and Death

Folklore and Reality

By: Paul Barber

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Hardcover | 1 December 1988

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Describes a scientific explanation for the start of the vampire legend, looks at the folklore in various cultures, and discusses burial customs

Industry Reviews

An armchair Dr. Van Helsing tracks down the real origins of the vampire legend. According to Barber - who skips right over the Vlad the Impaler hypothesis - stories of vampires rising from the dead are "an elaborate folk hypothesis" evolved to explain mysterious phenomena associated with death, especially the grisly facts of bodily decomposition. He begins by recounting vampiric folk tales from Serbia, Greece, and other haunted regions, and extracting their recurrent motifs. Vampirism can result, he finds, from suicide, sorcery, inauspicious birth, having a sleep-walking brother, and other rips in the social fabric. Unlike screen Draculas, folklore vampires are usually ruddy, bloated, lightly bearded peasants. To keep a vampire from leaving his grave, try mutilating the corpse, filling the burial site with food or knots (vampires can spend centuries happily untying knots), burying the corpse face-down (the vampire will chew his way to the center of the earth), etc. If the vampire escapes, recommended steps include staking, cutting out the heart, or cremation. After delivering this fascinating Baedeker of the living dead, Barber turns to an examination of human decomposition, explaining how each stage contributes to the vampire legend (bloating of the corpse, for instance, leading to reports of disturbances of the earth over a vampire's grave). In short, a "series of cognitive filters" turns a natural event into a tale of blood-seeking monsters. Learned, energetic, creepily absorbing study - definitely not for children. (Kirkus Reviews)

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