The Grave Mysteries

If you ever happen to stay at the Travelodge just outside the cathedral city of Ely, in the eastern English Fenlands, you might consider how much dark magic is sunk into the land there. I know the area well: It’s not far from my home in Cambridge, and in the mid-seventeenth century it was blighted by witchcraft accusations. But local fear of malign beings, and a willingness to act on it, predate these persecutions by at least a thousand years. In 2006, archeologists excavating farmland a stone’s throw from the motel discovered fifteen graves dating from the late seventh century, including one of an adolescent girl buried with an amulet bag containing a copper reliquary, a brooch, beads, rings, and iron nails. That her relatives and neighbors had attributed to her some unearthly power was confirmed by the fact that during decomposition someone had turned over her corpse, detaching the legs at the knee, and pulled off her head.

“Why go through the revolting business of uncovering and mutilating a half-rotten corpse?” asks John Blair, not unreasonably, in Killing the Dead, his wide-ranging, absorbing study of vampires. The answer suggested by contextual information drawn from many other cultures and eras is simple. People became afraid that after burial, the deceased were wandering by night, up to no good, or beaming maleficence from their graves. They were, it seems, not as dead as might have been hoped, and so they had to be “killed,” in the case of the girl in Ely by removing the cranium and twisting the torso to jumble the internal organs. These were not the bat-like vampires of Halloween and horror movies, but they were just as hazardously undead, draining the vital energies of the living and, like witches, attacking their crops and livestock.

The Ely grave was not an isolated discovery: Similar examples have been found in other English counties, mostly women buried around the same time. In fact, there were corpse-killing epidemics in southern England, Ireland, and northwestern Europe throughout the period spanning the fifth and eighth centuries. Whereas in the earlier phase the living soon-to-be-undead may have been revered as magicians, by the 660s they were feared and loathed. Parallels with witches are obvious: Both were what Blair calls “reservoirs of unholy, lethal power”; most of the undead were women; panics were triggered by political, religious, and economic upheavals, including mortality crises; and Christianity stressed the link between immortality and corruption, to the point where all goodness departed and demonic monstrosity flooded in. Missionary work made war on tradition, defining new ideals with detestable binary opposites. Medieval anathematization of magic to promote orthodox belief rounded off the stereotype of the witch as an enemy of God as well as man. No accident, then, that a second great wave of Christian proselytization, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would coincide with the rise of witch trials. “Other” in every conceivable way, witches could be usefully hated and hounded to restore a sense of orderly equilibrium.

By the late eighth century, it seems, the walking dead had drifted from lived experience into the realms of legend. And yet the propensity of Europeans in crisis to reify anxieties, to create bugbears that could be punished, was latent. The so-called “great European witch-hunt” proves this rule, as does a contagion of werewolf panics that followed a similar pattern. For the Isle of Ely to have malevolent revenants, then a millennium later witches, points to something hard-wired into human psychology and pre-modern culture. Blair believes that societies vilify either witches or corpses; but both are reactions to social strain, discord, and feelings of unease.

As professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Oxford, Blair published works on Anglo-Saxon politics, society, and culture. In retirement, he decided to have some fun with a stranger subject, the intellectual virtues of which one imagines him patiently explaining at the High Table of his college. “Scholars who shy away from topics that seem distasteful or irrational,” insists Blair, “are re-framing past world-views in the image of their own.” To make sense of the past, we need to take seriously the things our ancestors took seriously, not lord it over them with smug post-Enlightenment superiority. We need neither share their beliefs and values nor cosplay our way into their lives by dressing in jute and eating pottage. We need only to be imaginative and humble, remembering that history is about understanding, not judgement. After all, we were once them. To sleep and dream in a timber roundhouse, warmed by the embers of a fire, was not so different from sleeping and dreaming in a Travelodge, and may even have been marginally more comfortable.

This book delivers two big surprises: the logical foundations of corpse-killing and its reach and durability as an idea. Blair, who admits to having been surprised himself, has amassed heaps of evidence, some of which is startling. He tells the story of a Romanian farmer who after death was blamed for causing sickness in his niece, who, in a scene straight from a witch trial, cried from her bed: “Look, he’s on top of me, he’s killing me!” Fortified by plum brandy, the family crept to the cemetery by the gleam of a midnight moon, dug up the man’s body, ripped out his heart, and roasted it on a pitchfork. As if she hadn’t already suffered enough, the poor girl was made to drink tea brewed from the mashed-up ashes—a centuries-old custom that, depending on your point of view, either coincided with her recovery or caused it. This incident took place in 2004. Whenever the dead have refused to lie still, such drastic action has proved necessary. Performative corpse-killing is a cathartic way of sending the dead decisively into paradise or oblivion.

From antiquity to the twenty-first century, the urge to kill the undead has been prevalent from Mesopotamia to the late Roman Empire; Western Europe to the Eurasian Steppe; Han Dynasty China to Vedic India; and Aztec Mexico to the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Japan. Death is universally unimaginable as anything other than a black full stop or an alteration of circumstance, an afterlife—Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” Even advocates of the black full stop find that when someone they know dies, the connection is not severed but changed, involving what Joseph Conrad called “the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead.” However, since the greater part of the human race has always derived comfort and strength from ancestral spirits, the appeal of the black full stop has been limited. And with that inevitably comes a blurring of the boundary between life and death.

In the Western world, Christianity may have forced distinctions between the secular and sacred—for instance, the destruction of false idols—but it did nothing to discourage the ambiguity between life and death. Jesus both raised the dead and came back Himself, in His own times and for the ages through the miracle of the Mass. Glowing apparitions of the Virgin Mary have long manifested to the faithful, and the best work of many saints began with martyrdom. Souls were waylaid in Purgatory; tears and blood dripped from icons. On Judgement Day, promises the Bible, sleepers in the dust shall awake and rise up (a scenario that terrified me as a child). In less sacred settings, felons cut from the gallows recovered, as did mariners dragged from the sea; wraiths drifted like mist, full of mournful recriminations; murder victims bled before culprits; mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, first recorded in the 1730s, made the dead breathe again; nineteenth-century mediums coaxed spirits back from beyond the veil, even in physical form, draped in ectoplasm; and in the twentieth century, stopped hearts were shocked back to vitality. Those who remember loved ones through an anecdote or a photograph, or especially in a dream, can sometimes feel as if they never fully left.

Although the concept of spiritual limbo underpins this book, it’s not about ghosts, which can be laid to rest, or evil spirits that can be exorcised. Blair refers to incriminating visions at the Salem witch trials and comforting visits from dead Finnish husbands—but all this is peripheral. His subject is the paradoxical corpse itself. The moment that the soul (or whatever you want to call it) departs, the person ceases to exist, yet everything else remains. “All dead bodies are at least slightly daunting and troubling,” writes Blair. “That is a human universal.” Corpses elicit strong feelings, from grief and reverence to revulsion and denial, encouraging the illusion that traces of life might linger in otherwise dead flesh.

Anthropologists consider this a liminal phase: a time of ambiguity when corpses were at risk of demonic infiltration. This is why post-mortem rituals needed to be performed correctly. According to Skolt tradition in the borderlands between Norway, Finland, and Russia, if a corpse was buried too soon it might mutate into a marauding, iron-toothed, man-eating specter. Mummification may seem like the opposite of cremation—the meticulous preservation of the corpse as opposed to its eradication—but it has a similar objective: immobilizing the body, preventing its re-entry into society. We still think of funeral services and wakes as “giving someone a good send-off,” where we gather to wish that they rest in peace—but the silent coda is and has always been “and don’t come back.”

Corpses that did not comply, either from devilment or because their journey into the afterlife had been interrupted, could only be disabled by skewering their bodies, squashing them with rocks, chopping them into bits, and atomizing them through incineration. Women bore the brunt of this treatment. Predictably, beliefs about the dead were gendered: Female bodies were more vulnerable to being hijacked by an unwholesome entity—the same queasy amalgam of eroticism and misogyny that runs through discourse relating to witchcraft. The trope of the “man-eating” virago stems from the idea that a woman who, in death or life, throws off the patriarchal bridle becomes ungovernable, threatening masculinity and the civil society masculinity protects. To indulge in fantasies of women calling the shots was a cheap thrill. In Taiwan, girls who die young appear in dreams to choose their suitors, who, from fear of retribution should they refuse, marry paper-and-cloth effigies of the spirits. Superficially, the bossy brides appear to be on top. And yet patriarchy has long been adept at dressing up the subordination of women as female empowerment.

It’s intriguing that secular-minded believers in the finality of death find meaning in the supernatural when framed as entertainment. Readers drawn to the word “vampire” in Blair’s title may be interested in the genesis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the thirsty count’s many outings, from Nosferatu to Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee in the golden age of screen horror, to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and the Twilight movie saga, and, along the way, a slew of lurid lesbian erotica, beginning in 1872 with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla. The vampire of the Western imagination first came (back) to life in a seventeenth-century fable about a debauched Moravian citizen, fatally kicked in the testicles by a horse, who embarks on a frantic rampage of rape, pillage, and destruction before townsfolk torch his remains. It was, according to Blair, “the first modern vampire novel aimed at a popular audience.” Then, in 1732, reports that Serbian villagers, plagued by misfortune, had burned exhumed corpses swollen with blood were seized upon by the London newspapers. And so, around the Georgian breakfast table, a genre was born. Blair does not elaborate, however, claiming that, like Dracula’s all-enveloping cloak, the folklore and fiction of vampirism has smothered an understanding of why this belief has been so widespread.

Historians are vocationally obliged to annoy people by setting limits on generalization and resisting simplification. Freud and Jung both reduced the vampire archetype to a psychoanalytic nugget lurking inside us all. Blair has no time for this. First of all, corpse-killing was geographically variegated and sporadic. The outbreak in later seventh-century England mentioned earlier was followed four centuries later by another, which ended soon after 1200. This pattern—or lack of it—was confirmed by eruptions of the phenomenon on other continents, for example, in Saxony and Silesia in the 1540s, later seventeenth-century Moravia, and New England in the 1780s. In these and other cases, specific environmental factors came into play: the Black Death and its long-term repercussions; persecution, rebellion, and war during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; and, in colonial America, a T.B. epidemic. As with witch hunting, these were not direct causes but catalysts that interacted in myriad complex ways with other factors, chiefly an innate propensity to violently fear bodies that were unable to settle in their graves.

The undead were a diverse bunch. They might be blood-sucking vampires of the modern European stamp, but elsewhere they showed up as demented zombies, spiteful witches, or invasive spooks, or some vile combination of these things. The making of a vampire began not with death but during the dead person’s lifetime, with some awkward relationship, lingering guilt, or unrighted wrong. Satisfaction at the death of an oppressor—a cruel landlord, say, or an overbearing matriarch—could be attenuated by the haunting feeling that his or her influence persisted. Cessation of life may or may not have been the end for the deceased; but it certainly wasn’t for those they left behind. Emotions hold the key here. Vampires, like ghosts and witches, are passionate psychic projections, illusory yet animated by memory.

Beyond contemporary theology and literary confection, the archaeological record is of paramount importance for understanding corpse-killing as a custom. But scattered bones and grave goods are more suggestive than conclusive, inviting speculation and leaving questions hanging in the air. Take, for example, the grave of a woman from the fifth or sixth century found in a Hebridean burial chamber facing the Atlantic. One hand rested over her heart, and the other was clenched. A pebble had been placed on the genital area. Some time after interment, the body was twisted, as with the Ely girl, and the ribcage opened, presumably to remove the heart. Was this a savage mutilation, an outburst of fury by an anxious community? Or were they honoring her? Or both? In due course, an elaborate Pictish cairn was built there. Did this serve as a nautical landmark or talisman? Was this the tomb, Blair wonders, of “an itinerant but charismatic wise-woman, both feared and revered after her death?” Did the dead walk among northern European peoples in this period? It’s not Blair’s fault that the only honest answer is “That question is clouded rather than clarified by an abundance of ambiguous evidence.” The archaeology bears all the signs of corpse-killing, but perhaps there were other reasons for opening and, to modern eyes, defiling a grave. At one Alsatian burial site, the legs of one in six skeletons have been hacked about, perhaps to hobble their mischievous corpses—or perhaps not. According to Blair, archaeothanatologists have a tendency to avoid the subject, mention of which is almost as mysterious as the grave mysteries themselves.

There comes a point where we might just admit defeat as detectives and stand back to enjoy the weirdness and wonder of it all. Mid-sixth-century English graves as far apart as Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and Durham contain skeletons that are variously prone or supine, limbs decorously arranged or contorted, knees up and knees down, heads on or off. In some, arms are raised as if in supplication, reaching for the light or attempting to embrace the living. Perhaps it was a cry of anguish in the wake of global cooling in the 540s, followed by a bubonic plague epidemic. The historical imagination runs wild, as it should, employing a little of what the writer Saidiya Hartman has called “critical fabulation” in order to recover the stories of people whose voices, through the obscurity of time or their oppression, were never recorded.

By the eleventh century, we have a clearer picture of Europe and Scandinavia gripped by millennial panic: apocalyptic visions, political discord, economic pressures. Corpse-killing seems like a reasonable expression of the emotional turmoil. After all, the living were threatening enough without the dead pitching in. Even corpses were anxious, it has been suggested, “neurotically biting and tearing at the constraining shroud in their malevolent frustration, their outrageous lusts pent up by restrictions on their movement.” It wasn’t much of a stretch to suppose that given half a chance these madly snapping jaws might sink into flesh to drink blood.

In this era, we can at last draw on written records. The stories told by twelfth-century chroniclers such as William of Newburgh and William of Malmesbury shift the focus from the refined, numinous power of the moribund person to his or her base wickedness. As revenants spreading misery and sickness, an evil magistrate, a venal abbot, a jealous steward, and criminals and sinners of all kinds meet gruesome second and, this time, permanent deaths. Sewn into a calfskin, the magistrate is thrown into a lake; the abbot is similarly consigned to a bog; and the steward, identified by his bloated corpse as a bloodsucker, is relieved of his heart and burned to cinders. The lesson of these monitory tales seems to be that you may evade justice in life, but you will be caught in death and rubbed out with no trace. Well, almost no trace. Every now and then, William of Malmesbury records, from the abbot’s swampy resting place came “a foul smell that breathes a noisome miasma over the locals.”

After 1500 came the commercial mass production of print, which looped dynamically between prescription and practice and tellingly coincided with the age of confessional strife and the witch trials. Along with the demonologies pouring off the presses between 1580 and 1610 were philosophical works on vampires. As with treatises about witches, even when these were skeptical, the effect was to make vampirism a subject worthy of study and the attention of the courts. This was followed by another productive period in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A lawyer named Karl Ferdinand von Schertz published a book entitled Magia Posthuma in 1706, inspired by an epidemic of corpse-burnings in Moravia. Eminently even-handed, von Schertz both acknowledged the danger of predatory corpses and encouraged circumspection in officials. Then, in 1746, Antoine Augustin Calmet, a French abbot and “the father of vampire studies,” published a lucid treatise on supernatural beings that was translated into English. As with learned demonologists and inquisitors, Calmet fused academic musings with the authenticity of experience. Consequently, his book was full of bloodcurdling stories, destined in 1820 to be repackaged in a pocket-sized edition, the Histoire des vampires et des spectres malfaisans. This became a foundational text for nineteenth-century Romantics, to whom vampires were bankable avatars of repressed passion and gothic terror. To this extent, educated people took vampires seriously; otherwise, they were an emblem of rustic superstition, to be mocked in the dawning age of reason and science.

Elite condescension disdained the fact that peasants understood themselves and their bonds to each other, the land, and the universe in viscerally embodied ways. Private feelings were also shared and deployed as strategies for collective security and survival. Supernatural legends effectively purged emotions and channeled them into action. A Polish custom recorded in the 1690s is a case in point. People plagued by nightmares about dead people were cured when the corpses were disinterred and decapitated and their hearts sliced open. The blood, which flowed freely, was added to bread dough and eaten by the afflicted. As with counter-magic deployed against witches, these peasants met supernatural enemies on common ground, neutralizing a curse with a holy spell involving blood and fire, ingestion, and transmutation. It made sense. What reads like a scene from a horror film was in fact a rational interpretation of mental distress and remedial prescription, in tune with a mystical connectedness between mind, body, and community that has passed out of modern lives.

The study of vampires, as with all supernatural beings, should lead us to one critical question: Even if an idea like the resurrection of the dead was useful, does that necessarily mean people believed it implicitly? The ontology is subtle and shifting. Anthropologies of witchcraft suggest that it was possible to endorse the reality of witches and yet have no personal experience of them, even to be skeptical of most reported instances. The ambivalence of this position reduces credulity to a type of symbolism: the vampire as metaphor, akin to its tyrannical power in fiction. And yet the boundary between fact and fiction, the figurative and the literal, like the line separating life from death, moves over time within cultures and varies between them. What mattered most was a wider context of mysterious wonders sustained by emotional energy, not empirical proof, and the fact that vampires, like witches, gave meaning to people’s daily lives. As the historian of witchcraft Stuart Clark once observed, demons infested every branch of Renaissance philosophical, theological, medical, and legal debate not because Europe’s finest minds were credulously obsessed with occult monsters but because demons were good to think with.