Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

Résumé fourni par la source

John Blair’s Killing the Dead is an impressive catalog of historical and archaeological evidence detailing belief in and cultural practices surrounding restless corpses that plague the living. Many cultures have complex beliefs around the threats presented by the undead, be they ghouls, vampires, or other kinds of revenant. Blair’s work presents extensive evidence for these beliefs from the earliest periods of human history to the modern era. Killing the Dead focuses primarily on European sources but also includes examples from neighboring Eurasian cultures and the European colonial diaspora. The sheer breadth of data presented in this book is an impressive feat of scholarship, yet Blair struggles to find a narrative beyond the central thesis that belief in the dangerous dead is widespread among, if not endemic to, human cultures.Killing the Dead is divided into six parts, each composed of a series of short chapters. Part I, “Approaches,” lays out the author’s conceptual framework for studying the “dangerous dead” in a cross-cultural and intertemporal setting. Part II, “Dynamics,” focuses primarily on Eurasian ethnographic and folkloric sources that describe encounters with the undead. In parts III–V, Blair adopts a chronological structure where each part and chapter presents historical and/or archaeological evidence for unquiet corpses, primarily in the Middle East and Europe from antiquity through the early modern period. The final section, Part VI, “The Modern World,” presents a series of more recent examples from colonized regions of North America, Africa, and Australia along with the author’s concluding thoughts on the topic of the dangerous dead. Overall, the book is well structured making it easy to return to and find specific examples.The book’s historic and folkloric examples of encounters with the dangerous dead are engrossing, to say the least. The litany of examples clearly represents beliefs that the dead could rise from the grave and threaten the living. In addition, Blair gives clear examples of culturally sanctioned practices to tame or neutralize the dead. One of the earliest examples comes from a curse tablet found in the tomb of the Assyrian Queen Yabâ from the site of Nimrud, Iraq, dating to the eighth century BCE, which threatens that anyone who violates the tomb will be cursed such that their corpse will never know rest (159). Fears of undead mobs are seen in an 1666 CE account from the Ottoman Traveler Evliya Çelebi, which describes a battle between opposed obur (i.e., “vampire”) factions: The dangerous dead were “riding dead horses, oxen, and camels, they fought for six hours amid thunder, lightning, and screams, leaving debris strewn over the hills” (292). Çelebi then notes that the graves of obur can be identified by disturbed soil and a lack of bodily decomposition. People can neutralize the threat if “they immediately remove the filthy carcass of the accursed obur from the grave and drive a hawthorn stake through the stomach, nailing him/her to the ground” (293). Another seventeenth-century example comes from Poland where, after a man died, the locals believed that his corpse was harming his relatives: “The tomb was opened, and they found him like a sack filled with blood. They turned him face-down, but the same night he went to his son and struck him, so that yesterday it was said the head had died. The parishioners went to behead him with a spade” (352).The strength of Blair’s work comes from not only collecting literary accounts but pairing them with archaeologically documented examples of restrained or “killed” corpses. Digs of Roman-period sites have unearthed numerous examples of interments where nails were driven through the body or large stones placed in a corpse’s mouth. For example, six burials documented at the excavation of Debelt along the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria included nails driven through the skulls, as well as in some cases, through the palms, pelvic-bones, and leg-bones of adult male skeletons (172). Later, new practices emerged to “kill” or restrain corpses. A tenth-century CE grave from the site of Birka, Sweden, includes an adult female skeleton whose body appears to have been modified postmortem: Her skull had been removed from her spine and was found cradled in her right arm—but with the mandible missing. A pig’s mandible, however, had been lain across the woman’s neck (224). In a seventeenth-century cemetery at the site of Pień, Poland, a female burial was found with “a sickle placed upright across her throat and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot” (348). This particular burial echoes a story collected in a twentieth-century German folklore survey where a respondent noted “that a sickle should be placed around the neck of an unquiet corpse” (348).The book abounds with both textual and archaeological evidence, resulting in an extensive reference work that demonstrates a pervasive concern with the dangerous dead lasting over millennia of European cultural history. It is understandably difficult for Blair to determine exactly how people of the past defined or understood animated corpses and the threats they presented. His creation of the theoretical category of the “dangerous dead” in Part I is truly a strength of this work as it recognizes the cross-cultural importance of the topic while avoiding a lengthy argument over nuanced and competing definitions of particular categories of undead entities. As an archaeologist myself, I found Blair’s detailed and well-illustrated inclusions of archaeological case studies particularly compelling. Archaeology excels at documenting the practices of human cultures, which often differ in nuanced ways from stated beliefs, particularly when revolving around taboo topics like “killing” corpses.While an overall impressive work, Killing the Dead struggles to find a consistent narrative. Blair frequently attempts to trace the origins and transmission of particular beliefs, such as the undead consuming their own burial shrouds or making lip-smacking sounds, across different regions of Europe. However, his examples are often separated by centuries and divided by national or cultural boundaries, which obscures any discernible pattern of dissemination. The book clearly demonstrates the pervasiveness of belief in the dangerous dead, but the frequency of events surrounding those beliefs is hard to assess. For example, while Blair describes numerous burials that include “killed” corpses, he offers little indication of the frequency of such burials in comparison to undisturbed burials within those regions or time periods. Finally, Blair also perhaps overstates the extent to which archaeological evidence of restrained corpses should be definitively associated with fears of the undead. Criminals and other social outcasts were often subjected to abnormal burial treatments intended to mark their exclusion from the community, but such practices do not necessarily imply that people feared their bodies would rise from the grave. Blair mentions this possibility but clearly leans toward interpretations of corpse-modifying practices as indicating fears of the dangerous dead.For scholars interested in cultural beliefs and practices surrounding the undead, Blair’s Killing the Dead is a strongly recommended resource. It brings together an impressive array of case studies that paint a picture of pervasive cultural beliefs in the dangerous dead across European cultural history. The lack of a strong narrative, despite the clear writing and effective organization of the material, unfortunately makes the work less accessible to a broader audience. Considering the wide appeal of the topic of vampires and the undead, this is a notable disappointment. Regardless, Killing the Dead represents an impressive work of scholarship that lingers in the reader’s mind, leaving one to imagine that a sickle may need to be lain across this unquiet tome to allow us all to rest easier.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.