Neslikts kopsavilkums - http://www.csicop.org/si/9603/staking.html No pavisam racionālā viedokļa.
Gan varbūt nedaudz pārāk centīgs mītu grāvējs, pierakstot 'tikai daiļliteratūrai' šo to, kas tomēr ir figurējis arī mītos...
Nekā būtiski jauna tur nav.
Un es nezinu, kāpēc google news nolēma man to izmest šodien, tas ziņu filtrs reizēm uzvedas ļoti amizanti

Staking Claims: The Vampires of Folklore and Fiction

Paul Barber

---

We know about Dracula and the would-be vampires in the news, but what were the
"real" vampires all about?

People who learn that I wrote a book on vampire lore often say, "Oh, you mean
like Vlad Drakul?"

"Not actually," I tell them. "Vlad Drakul was a figure in Romanian history
whose only association with the vampire lore is that Bram Stoker named the
character Dracula after him. Until Dracula came out, no one ever associated the
historical figure with the vampire lore." This has been pointed out many times,
and the Romanians have often expressed their dismay over the way we have
expropriated their national hero and made him into a vampire. But in the media
the sensational always has an edge on the prosaic, and by being associated with
vampires -- even if only via fiction -- Vlad Drakul has become the only figure
in Romanian history that Americans have ever heard about. If the Romanians
began to make movies portraying George Washington as a ghoul, we would know
what they feel like.

Here we see fiction becoming "historical fact," while the scholars who try to
correct the "facts" find that they have no hope of getting equal time with the
people who purvey mythologies. One of these is Stephan Kaplan, who I think --
but I'm never sure -- is a notoriety freak who is putting us on and having a
wonderful time doing it. For example, he was quoted recently as saying that
vampires can come out in the daytime, they just need to wear a sunblock of 15
or higher. As wit, this ranks among the best things I've heard recently, right
up there with the story that the Florida citrus industry is trying to get
O. J. Simpson to change his first name to Snapple. I suspect that Kaplan will
one day call a press conference, wearing a silly hat, and say, "I was just
fooling, and you fell for it!" I got a call from the BBC a while back asking me
for my reaction to Kaplan's announcement that Los Angeles is awash in
vampires. To me this is like an adult asking me what Santa Claus brought me
this year: The question had better be ironic, and the answer may as well be. So
I told the interviewer that it was true that vampires are everywhere in Los
Angeles, but because of the muggers they're afraid to go out at night.

The folklore of the vampire has only a slight connection with the fiction, much
the way the folklore of ghosts has little to do with the movie
Ghostbusters. Most people aren't aware that, throughout European history, there
have been extensive and detailed accounts of bodies in graveyards being dug up,
declared to be vampires, and killed. I took some years out of my life to study
these accounts and find out what in the world could have caused people to set
out to kill dead bodies. And here we encounter our first real/non-real
boundary: the digging up of the bodies was unquestionably real -- indeed,
beyond any doubt. We know this because we have a vast array of evidence to that
effect, both archaeological and documentary, including highly detailed accounts
written by literate outsiders, who gave information that they could not
possibly have made up. For example, unless you are a forensic pathologist, you
probably don't know that decomposing bodies may undergo a process called "skin
slippage," in which the epidermis flakes away from the dermis. The following
account, from the eighteenth century, tells of the exhumation of a man named
Peter Plogojowitz and remarks on this phenomenon: "The hair and beard -- even
the nails, of which the old ones had fallen away -- had grown on [the corpse];
the old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled away, and a new fresh one
had emerged under it. . . . Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in
his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the
people killed by him." When we see remarks about skin slippage, we know that
the author has either (a) read a text on forensic pathology or (b) looked at,
or heard about, a decomposing corpse.

Yet here we are confronted with a predicament: If our source is right about
skin slippage, what are we to make of his evidence that the dead body had been
drinking blood from the living? The answer, of course, is that we are not
obliged to believe our informant's interpretations, let alone those of his
informants, just because he is giving us an accurate description of a
corpse. Scholars have always thrown out the observations because they didn't
believe the interpretations. This is not as odd as it might seem, for often
description and interpretation are run together, as in such a statement as "the
body came to life and cried out when it was staked." But we'll get to that in a
moment.

For now, let's slow down and look carefully at the observations in the account
we have quoted:

1. "The hair and beard have grown on the corpse." Sorry, this just doesn't
   happen, even though many people believe it even today. It can appear to
   happen, however, because the skin may shrink back after death and make hair
   and beard more visible.

   
   
   

2. "The nails have fallen off and new ones have grown." The nails do in
   fact fall off as a body decomposes. The Egyptians were aware of this and
   dealt with it either by tying the nails to the fingers and toes or by
   putting metal thimbles over the tip of each finger or toe. The "new nails,"
   according to Thomas Noguchi, former medical examiner for Los Angeles, were
   probably an interpretation of the nail bed.

   
   
   

3. "The old skin has peeled away and new skin has emerged under it." This
   is skin slippage: epidermis and dermis. Many accounts remark also on the
   "ruddy" or "dark" color of the corpse, a phenomenon that may be caused by
   decomposition and a variety of other things as well. Contrary to popular
   belief, the face of a corpse is not necessarily pale at all, since pallor
   results from the blood draining from the tissues. If the person was supine
   when he or she died, the face of the corpse may be pale; if prone, the face
   may be dark. Those parts of the corpse that are lower than the rest may be
   gorged with blood that, having lost its oxygen, is dark and causes the skin
   to appear dark as well. And the parts that are under pressure -- where the
   weight of the body is distributed -- may be light in color because the (now
   dark) blood has been forced away from the tissues. The dark coloration
   resulting from the saturation of the tissues with blood is called "livor
   mortis" or "lividity." It is this phenomenon that allows medical examiners
   to determine whether a body has been moved after death: If lividity is
   present where it shouldn't be, or not present where it should, then the
   body has been moved.

   
   
   

4. "There is fresh blood at the mouth." The adjective "fresh" is
   less puzzling if we suppose that the author hasn't actually tested the
   blood for freshness. What he was surely observing, and confused by, was the
   fact that the blood was liquid. This was remarked on many times by people
   who observed such exhumations. It is simply not unusual. In fact, blood
   normally coagulates at death, then either remains coagulated or becomes
   liquid again.¹ The reason the
   blood migrates to the mouth is that the body, as it decomposes, bloats from
   the gases produced by decomposition, and this bloating puts pressure on the
   lungs, which are rich in blood and deteriorate early on, so that blood is
   forced to the mouth and nose.
   
   

And did you notice that we were just told why people believed that the dead
sucked blood from the living? The standard theory about death was that it came
from the dead, and when people dug up the first victim of an epidemic and found
that he had blood at his mouth, they concluded that he had sucked the blood
from the other people who had died. "Not without astonishment," says our
author, "I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common
observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him." Moreover, the
bloating of the body was taken for evidence that it was full to bursting with
the blood of its victims.

So we have cleared up an old mystery merely by paying attention to the people
who, centuries ago, tried to tell us about it. From here on things will be
easier: If our informants tell us that the vampire "came to life and cried out"
when they drove a stake through him, we shall accept the observation and reject
the conclusion: Yes, a body would "cry out" if you drove a stake into it,
because doing so forces air past the glottis -- but this is not because the
body is still alive. Among modern medical examiners, there is remarkable
agreement on both points.

The vampire lore did not die when people worked out forensic pathology: by that
time it had become part of literature. The folkloric vampires had been
peasants, but in the eighteenth century, authors were still reluctant to make
peasants into major characters in stories, so the fictional vampire was moved
into the upper classes. By the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), he had
became a pallid count, rather than the ruddy peasant of the folklore. Along the
way, Linnaeus named a Central American bat after the European vampire, since
the bat lived on blood, and the fiction writers, noting this, added the bat to
the store of their motifs. This is why, in modern movies, vampires are apt to
turn into bats in the night, when they need to go somewhere quickly.

Oddly, when this material became fiction, it once again became "fact," for
nowadays the media keep digging up not just scholars and pseudoscholars who
talk about the folklore but also people who actually claim to be vampires. The
scholars and the vampires are brought together by their common fate: The media
trot them out every year around Halloween. The modern "vampires" derive their
inspiration not from the perfectly good material from folklore, which in fact
has been sadly neglected, but from the fiction, perhaps because it is more
dramatic and coherent. The folklore is about cantankerous peasants who come
back as spirits to torment their nearest and dearest, and this simply doesn't
translate into a glamorous lifestyle. So our modern "vampires" drive hearses,
cap their canine teeth, and wear cloaks when they go out at night. None of
these things has anything whatever to do with the folklore of the vampire --
even the canines are an artifact of the fictional tradition. Some modern
"vampires" claim a taste for blood and tell stories of raids on bloodbanks and
of obliging friends who let them open a vein.

The baffling part of this is that the modern "vampires" are claiming kinship
not with the vampire that our ancestors actually believed in but with the
fictional vampire derived from that one. This is like somebody claiming to be
related to Rhett Butler in the movie Gone with the Wind. "You mean Clark
Gable," you say. "No, no: Rhett Butler. You know, the character in the
movie. He's my cousin." And, lacking anything further to say, you ask, "Do you
and Rhett talk a lot?" But in its way, theirs is a successful lifestyle, for
those of us who study the folklore have long since become accustomed to getting
two minutes on television programs that then give ten minutes to a ditsy lady
who sleeps in a coffin. And anyone can get media attention who will bring up
Vlad Drakul or even the moribund porphyria theory, which supposes that people
really were drinking blood to cure their rare disease, even though we have no
evidence either that drinking blood would alleviate the symptoms of porphyria
or that any live people were accused of drinking blood -- it was always
corpses. This theory never got beyond the wild hypothesis stage but has
historical interest for following the trend that confuses folklore with
fiction. I describe it as "moribund," but such theories seemingly never die in
the media, no matter how often they are demolished by evidence and argument. By
now you couldn't kill the porphyria theory with a stake.

The peculiarities of this subject have a way of compounding themselves with
time. We have seen how confusing it is to have data in which accurate
observation and inaccurate interpretation are all balled up together. As the
discipline of anthropology formed and took shape, it looked back on its earlier
indiscretions and made a firm resolution not to view other cultures as inferior
to that of the anthropologist. Indeed, it took us many decades to figure out
that "primitive" cultures aren't any younger than "advanced" ones. But their
attempt at dispassion discouraged anthropologists from making distinctions: Now
you're not supposed to notice when someone from another culture is simply wrong
about something. Indeed, it's no longer politically correct to make
distinctions at all between right and wrong ideas, unless of course they are
the ideas of our own culture. So it doesn't bother us to say that Copernicus
corrected Ptolemy, but it does bother us if I point out that nonliterate
cultures typically misunderstand the events of decomposition. What is odd about
our modern view is that it appears to be the very kind of patronizing that we
are trying to get rid of.

One review of my book complained about my applying scientific discourse to my
subject. The reviewer did not suggest an alternative mode of interpretation --
intuition, perhaps? But the reason I studied this particular aspect of the
folklore is that it is replete with evidence, and evidence lends itself to
analysis better than hunches or intuition. One objective of the serious
scholar, it seems to me, is to find likely subjects, ones where there is enough
evidence to base an argument on. I have had several fruitless discussions with
television directors who wanted me to tell them not just more about the vampire
lore than I know, but more than can even be known. "What about the really early
stuff?" one woman kept asking. "What about the Paleolithic?"

But we simply don't have any clear evidence from the Paleolithic. The literary
evidence, going from present to past, continues to change subtly until finally
you would be hard put to identify the "vampire" phenomenon at all. Early Greek
views of the dead have much in common with the later vampire lore, but no one
would identify Patroclus as a "vampire" simply because he appears to Achilles
after his own death. And the early archaeological evidence is often ambiguous:
People may put slabs of stone over graves either to keep the dead from
returning or to keep animals from digging into a grave.

The fact is, no one leaves documents around explaining the things that everyone
knows. It is only much later that it occurs to anyone to wonder about those
things -- when it is too late, and they are no longer known. So we will almost
surely never know anything about the origins of the vampire lore. The most we
can know is that by the eighteenth century the vampire was a certifiably dead
body that was believed to retain a kind of life and had to be "killed" in order
to prevent it from killing other people. And, of course, we now know that the
misconceptions about the folklore have proved to be more viable than the
folklore itself.

Note

1. There are other correlations here that I've dealt with in detail in a
   book: Vampires, Burial, and
   Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press,
   1988. [RETURN]
   
   

About the Author

Paul Barber is a research associate with the Fowler Museum of
Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles 90024-1549, and author
of Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and
Reality