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Vampire — Description

If Patient Zero had a name, history has ordained it forgotten. Umbria in Central Italy is wet, fertile, unapologetically alive, and by extension (in a world before modern medicine) unclean. The air buzzed with blood parasites, nasty vein-biters who are born writhing in stagnant water. By the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire was too caught up in the denial of its continued existence in the presence of overwhelming Gothic takeovers to pay any mind to public health infrastructure. People started getting sick, bitten, eaten alive by the brood. Just outside of the town of Lugnano, the old ruined villa of a man who had ceased to live long ago was rearranged into a cemetery. It was the only space to put the 47 children taken by the Bad Air, the only place to forget the tragedy. The oldest was barely 3, the youngest were dead months before they were even born, a truly godless cruelty beset upon them by vectors they didn't understand. Like a broken clock accurate twice a day though, they did diagnose one thing correctly: this plague came upon them in the form of a bite. Blame didn't fall on the bugs, however. They blamed the 10-year old who couldn't stop begging their mommy to release them from their screaming toothache.
Now, objectively, the only thing we know about this child, dug up by archeologists in 2018, was that they were scared, confused and in pain. I don't want that to get lost in my flowery language or the Halloween spirit fueling it. This was a real child in real pain caused by a real disease, and my heart goes out to their caretaker who wouldn't in a thousand years be able to comfort their baby with any measure of assurance. It'd be a Herculean task today to explain to a sick child that they're hurting because the microorganism Plasmodium has rotten their tooth from the inside out and left a pool of excruciating puss in its wake. These people had no modern miracles of medicine to inform them. They had no concept that something could happen with absolutely no cosmic reason whatsoever. The only way they had available to rationalize the need to bury 47 children was that someone had angered the powers that be, that it was someone's fault. I can only pray this child was spared the humiliation of being told to their face that their entire village was side-eying them specifically.
What exactly singled this kid out as “different” from the rest is lost to time. The ancients had a pretty tidy word for what the citizens of Lugnano probably thought this child was: “strix”. A strix, best translated into English as “screecher”, more specifically akin to the shrieking of an owl, is a supernatural affliction upon the living. The Greek author Antoninus Liberalis, writing his Metamorphoses, originally in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, considers the origin of this monster in a girl called Polyphonte. This granddaughter of Ares was punished by Aphrodite, for the girl had a bigger crush on Artemis, by being pumped full of pheromones, the sort of shit that gets you horny enough to fuck a bear in the woods. Artemis was… understandably disgusted by Polyphonte's sudden enacted urges of bestiality, and sicked her beasts on the girl. Polyphonte fled the ravages of wild animals, and created two bodyguards in the form of her hulking crossbreed bear-children, Agrius and Orius. These abominations cared for no god and would devour any living being dumb enough to wander alone in the woods at night. Zeus wanted Hermes to gank these nuisances, but Ares protested. These were… his descendants afterall. He convinced Hermes to turn the family into birds instead of lobbing their heads off. Agrius was turned into a vulture, while his mother and brother became owls, all of them avatars of war and omens of death for future generations. To top it off, these particular carrion birds were given a craving for human blood and flesh, because Ares is a very mentally unwell sculptor, and Hermes just gets off on being a dick. By the Roman days, this general bloodlust had evolved into a more targeted metaphor for child mortality, snatching infants for lunch and robbing them of their tiny lives. You can see where the people of Lugnano got this idea in their heads. That's why they buried Patient Zero sideways, and crammed into their mouth a discarded chunk of mortar from the old ruins, to make sure they wouldn't be able to rise from their grave and bite any further children.
The interesting thing about this word “strix” is that Antoninus seems to be introducing it to our surviving literature just before the point in history where it… well… “metamorphosizes” into a new class of monster. Its modern Italian descendant, “strega” refers not to some feral harpy-lamia hybrid thing but rather to human female practitioners of witchcraft. Figuring out where/how that transition happened has been a massive pain in my ass because the terms “strega” and the even more recent “stregheria” (meaning “witchcraft) have long since been co-opted by an Italian neopagan tradition founded in 1899, so the vast majority of my initial search results were middle-aged white moms on Facebook going through the phase of projectile vomiting the posts of their other similarly annoying AI friends. Thank Odin for Google Books though, it's the only way I could tease out an answer. Like most things in life, it seems to be the Romans’ fault.
It seems the original confusion derives from striges getting characterized as familiars to witches and enchantresses (“venefica” in Latin). The 1st century BCE author Horace devotes a whole section of his Epodes to decrying witches, who wear strix feathers and plot to dismember a boy to use his biomaterial for spell components. In the century after, Petronius, in his Satyricon, tells of a shapeshifting witch who consults her pet striges on making love potions from either human blood or the blood of a mare in heat, as you do. Finally, we get to the 2nd century CE, when the grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus defines “strix” as an “evil-doing woman” who can fly, seemingly understanding the shapeshifting aspect of previous literature to mean that a venefica could shapeshift into a strix and collect her own damn spell components, thus very jankily combining the two monsters into one synonymous being who prayed on the living and drank their blood for kicks.
Of course, Italian isn't the only Romance language trying to pretend it's still Latin. Adorning Notre-Dame in France, for example, is a gargoyle called “Le Styrge”, from the same root, preserving the more monstrous-owliness interpretation of the creature. There's another distinct descendant of Latin still breathing air today though, the family resemblance obvious in its name but heavily obscured by centuries of Slavic influence in the Balkans: Romanian. The word they inherited from “strix” became “strigoi” in their tongue, and it's here that it becomes much more… inquisitorial. To understand what I mean, let's seamlessly move the story forwards to well over a millennium after the grizzly fate of the Lugnano child and discuss the case of the first man in recorded history to be himself accused of becoming a strigoi (well okay, “štrigon” on the books, slight regional variation) and by extension a general nuisance to the Croatian village of Kringa, a man named Jure “Grando” Alilović.
Alilović was a stonemason born in 1578, but no one cares about his boring peasant life. History only remembers his death in 1656, or more accurately, what's said to have happened after he was put in the dirt. According to legend, Alilović was sighted just days after his burial, wandering the streets, snacking on a dead sheep he had slung over one shoulder, and sharing the kill with a black cat riding on the other. His skin was deathly pale and his smile twisted into a sickening, unnatural, evil grin. His widow Ivana awoke terrified as she saw her dead husband standing at their bed, smile dripping with blood as his stalled lungs gasped for the memory of oxygen. He had his way with her, there was nothing she could do. Next he appeared at a neighbor's door, knocking ominously in the middle of the night. Before the week was out, that neighbor unexpectedly dropped dead. Local priest Father Grigorio, and County Prefect Miho Radetić figured there was only one way to keep this rancid fucker in his grave: by digging up the body during the daylight hours of peace, and staking it through the heart.
This is a fairly common tactic to exorcize the supposed undead in Eastern Europe. The logic is simple: it's not actually a werewolf thing where the stake in the heart itself slays the creature, it's the metaphorical act of literally nailing a stubborn bastard into their coffin so they can't get back up. That's why you'll see some variants including putting giant crushing stones over the body which would then be impossible for the corpse to get out from under, or some form of blade placed over the body. In Poland, for example, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a 17th century woman remembered only by the villagers of Pien as “Zosia”. She was buried with an agricultural scythe curved squarely over her neck, the idea being that if Zosia ever tried to get back up, the action would slice her head clean off. That is pretty metal, I can't deny. Maybe they should've tried that with Aliloviç, because both Grigorio and Radetić had some pussy ass strength and were unable to pierce Alilović's chest. This allowed the strigoi to wander amok and cause general terror in Kringa for sixteen years, which I will argue requires even more suspension of disbelief than the fucking undead walking around, because I know damn well if I discovered that there was a blood-sucking chaos gremlin in my neighborhood, we'd all be grabbing our pitchforks and torches long before 1672. That's when nine angry mobsters eventually decided to take matters into their own hands and dig the stank ass corpse up themselves. They too were unable to gank him with a shiv, but luckily they had a hard-headed chungus of a man amongst them who understood the immortal wisdom “if brute force isn't working, you're not using enough of it”. Stipan Milašić took a big fuckoff barbarian axe and just guillotined Alilović's head clean off. His legendary feat of badassery was then rewarded with a dreadful supernatural howl that echoed across the cemetery while the body of Alilović thrashed about like a slain facehugger. The grave was sealed, Alilović was purportedly never a menace again, and the credits rolled on this particular slasher.
Alilović, however, was far from the final undead outbreak in Eastern Europe. The hysteria really kicked off in 1725, with the resurrection of yet another otherwise total nobody, Petar Blagojević of the town of Kisiljevo in what is today Serbia. Legend has it that within eight days of Petar's death and burial, nine other villagers dropped dead of some mysterious illness. Now, peasants dying of the disease of the week is about as newsworthy as me crying myself to sleep into my pile of stuffies, making a miserable substitution for resting my head against the warm heartthrob beating politely between the delicate breaths cushioning a real human woman's pillowy bosom, but these nine each shared something that stood them apart from the rest of the undertaker's wheelbarrow. The night before they died, they each reported having a horrendous nightmare of Petar violently jerking them o- I mean uhhh strangling them to death. Petar's wife even came forth claiming her husband showed up at their house asking for his goddamn loafers woman, and when his good-for-nothing son declined to just make the man a fucking sandwich, Petar brutally murdered the twerp with his bear teeth and drained him for all had like a Capri-Sun. The good people of Kisiljevo had infinitely more sense than those in Kringa, because staking the bastard through the heart is the first thing they did.
The official who got dragged along to make the exhumation of Petar even remotely legal, a man named Frombald, was shocked in his report by the discovery that Petar had not decayed normally… or at least, normally by the understanding of 18th century Slavic peasants. They claimed Petar's hair and nails had continued to grow after his death, which is not actually uncommon. Your meat doesn't just like Thanos Snap off the skeleton when you die, it desiccates and shrivels as tiny microorganisms slowly and without coordination pick your raw materials clean for someone else to use. It wasn't actually Petar's hair and nails themselves getting longer, but rather his skin… shrinking off of them. Gross, and one of several reasons I know my goth girl arch is just gonna be an aesthetic phase, but not supernatural or even unexplainable. Similarly, Blagojević was reported to have a pool of fresh blood pouring out of his mouth. The peasants’ first reaction (and be honest, yours too) was oh well obviously he's been up and about satiating his thirst, but that blood could've easily been his own. As he rotted away over the course of a week, something was… bound to burst. Regardless, the only thing to do from here was kabob the ornery bloodsucker and cremate his remains for good measure. The peasants lived happily ever after until the next crusty aristocrat rolled in to completely dick over their human rights, and we close out yet another cheap flick you had on in the background while you gave your girlfriend the best sex she's had in the past five minutes. Blagojević was neither a trend-setter nor was he a season finale, but he is remarkable to the greater scheme of things in one notable way. Blagojević was not reported as a “strigoi”. The Slavic Serbs had their own tidy word for an uncannily preserved corpse which has risen from the grave to indiscriminately engorge itself on the blood of the living. The cursed word on their lips was “vampir”.
Now, if you ask 10 different linguists what the origin of our modern English derivation “vampire” is, you're gonna get 10 different answers. Trust me, it's even more frustrating than it sounds. Welcome to linguistics, the subject I actually majored in. There's a plausible argument to be made that the word is actually Turkic in origin, of all things. There's a critter amidst the scattered folklore of Tatar steppe peoples called an “ubyr”. This word literally means “glutton”, but in practice is more so used to mean “witch” or “evil spirit”, usually with a monstrous insinuation, breathing fire and capable of flight. It's not unlike “strega” in that regard. In a D&D context we might use the word “hag” if that clears up the mental image in any way. This hypothesis would suggest that this word got ported over to the Slavic world via the Bulgars to the South, as early as the 7th century CE, or through the more northerly Kipchaks in the 11th century. While the etymology is smooth, there seems to be something of a literacy issue keeping this from being a perfect theory. For example, we don't have any Kipchak words written down until the Codex Cumanicus, whose oldest manuscript was penned in 1303. If there's an older document containing a Turkic cognate to “ubyr”, I couldn't find a single academic reference to it, so please feel free to slide evidence to the contrary my way, because nothing gets under my skin quite like a rabbit hole with a dead-end. Basically, the math works but we have no actual paper trail to check the thought process against.
It also doesn't explain why seemingly every modern Slavic language shares a common cognate from this singular root: Czech “úpir”, Polish “upiór”, and Russian “upýŕ” just to name a few. This heavily implies, whether obtained from the Turks or home-grown, this root was acquired by the Proto-Slavic common ancestor of all of these tongues. This could push the origin of the word back as far as the 5th century CE, slightly too early for any permanent presence of Turkic peoples in Eastern Europe to have a detectable influence on native speakers… and coincidentally the same time frame Patient Zero would've lived. Hmm… Alright alright, before I convince myself that vampires are in fact real and caused the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, if it is an indigenous Slavic root, then what is that root? Oh fuck if I know, man. I read a 2017 paper about the Turkic debate by Kamil Stachowski of Jagiellonian University, and he supplies a nonexhaustive list of over fifteen different etymologies that have been proposed over the decades. Maybe its “*ǫpir-” meaning “bloated”, i.e. with blood. Maybe it's “*vъ-pirati-” meaning “piercer”, or to be more lore-accurate in this case, “biter”. We got another option, “*ǫper-”, which means “unrotten”, which I can't deny is pretty metal. Hell, I even saw *ǫpyrь” thrown in there, with the meaning of “non-bird”, which while one of the weaker etymologies, would give us a tantalizing connection to the original strix, so… there's that?
Ironically, we actually have the exact same problem with surmising a Slavic origin as we do with the Turkic hypothesis. The oldest use of one of these cognates appears in 1047, when a monk named Upir’ Likhoj signed off his copy of the Book of Prophets made for the library of the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Novgorod. Yes bafflingly the first use of the word “vampire” in history is… a dude’s name? There was a dude, a real dude, in real history, who experienced existence as a dude whose parents named him “Sinful Vampire”. That sucks brother, although that probably wasn't the intention of your folks. Scholar Anders Sjöberg suggested that this Upir’ fellow is actually the same person as prolific runecarver Öpir Ofeigr, whose name is Swedish for “screamer” and would not in that case be related to the word vampire at all. That “Likhoj” element meanwhile does mean “sinful” but apparently it's not an uncommon epithet for monks to take, not because they did something wrong (which we all know they did tho), but more in the “Oh Lord Vader, I am your unworthy servant!” sort of connotation. So… I guess we're just left holding a bag of circumstantial evidence and obnoxious coincidences.
Alright well now that you're confused and I'm confused and you've agreed to take me to dinner, let's pick up where we left off back in the 18th century. The year after Blagojević got ganked, another vampire rose from his grave to terrorize Serbia. Arnold Paole, an infantryman from the village of Medveđa, fell off his wagon and cracked his neck like a glowstick. No one was… that upset. He'd come stumbling back home from some place called Gossowa, twitchy and paranoid about the vampire he claimed to have slain in Greece, just like how I became single-handedly responsible for all Six Great Mass Extinctions last Tuesday. It was so cool, I guess you just had to be there. I however am far too badass to allow myself to get bitten in a scuffle with an original batman, unlike Paole. Oh but don't worry, Paole had a solution to his haunting! He went back to the vampire's grave, dug up the Resident Evil reject, and extracted a vial of vampire blood. He then drank the vampire blood. I… brother, I realize this won't explicitly be part of the lore for another century or two, but you gotta understand, from a modern perspective, that's a 100% surefire way to get yourself turned into a vampire! This is as dumbfoundingly painful to read about as the Qin Emperor guzzling mercury to obtain eternal life. Oh and well look at that, four people dropped dead within a month of his internment, each stating they had nightmares about the vampiric Paole before biting the dust. Come on history, Supernatural has better writing than that, and Sleepy Hollow has even better writing because that show is a lost gem which everyone should watch this Halloween.
Everyone knows the drill by now. They dug up Paole's supposedly undecayed body, ganked him with a wooden stake, chopped off his head, and then lit him on fire, I guess just to be thorough. The four victims also got the same treatment just in case they too arose as vampires, because the villagers of Medveđa had clearly seen more movies than Paole did. Unfortunately for them, this movie had an end credits scene. In 1731, seventeen people began complaining of pain, spasms, and horrendous illness, before promptly planking backwards into the open arms of an overworked Grim Reaper. The local medical officer chalked this up to malnutrition because… you know peasants, but the locals insisted he look more into the vampire angle. Alright fine, he conceded, and lo and behold, when he called in his higher ups to conduct the exhumations, they found all the victims in the same state as Paole. The primitive hypothesis that got thrown around was that Paole had initially sustained himself on livestock like a mangy dog before moving on to hominin prey, thus passing the vampiric disease onto the farmers who consumed said animals. I'd make a witty remark about how you'd never be able to get me to eat vampire cow meat, but as a starving peasant myself I know that'd be objectively false. Just incinerate my beautiful corpse like the government decided they had to do for the seventeen victims, unless of course you want me kissing all up on your neck. Which I mean hey baby~
Speaking of hot vampire foreplay, “Good heavens!” thought the first Englishmen to read of the Austrian government's official report on the Medveđa epidemic in the May 1732 edition of the London Journal, “these vampires those barbarous Slavs speak of most certainly make for quite the thrilling heartthrob! Tea and crumpets!” Yes of course this is how the word “vampire” first enters the English lexicon, misappropriation and Twilight fan girls have been a thing for three centuries. I meanwhile refuse to stoop so low, even for the sake of research, to subject my lesbian ass to the straightest media ever released. Having to read the original Dracula was bad enough but we'll slog through that next week. Before Dracula, the English public was engrossed in this romantic foreign idea of the vampire, the earliest precursor to Bram Stoker's crystallization of the lore being John William Polidori's 1819 short story The Vampyre.
Polidori's Gothic tale was actually the other side of the same writing contest which put to paper Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the friends trapped inside their homely Swiss cottage during the volcanic gloom of the Year Without a Summer. It spins a yarn of a wealthy orphan named Aubrey who is so unburdened with parents or real problems that he fucks off to Rome with some creepy stranger whose only two interesting character hooks are that he's tall, dark, and mysterious, and being named Lord Ruthven. Suave as fuck Ruthven, however is, gasp, not all that nice a guy, because he's very obviously a vampire and sucks dry any rich girl he bangs, just like I do. Aubrey divorces his boy toy, fucks off to Greece, meets a pretty girl named Ianthe, who warns Aubrey about vampire lore just in time to herself get hickeyed to death. Totally by complete and nonsuspicious coincidence, Aubrey then bumps into Ruthven in the area and decides well guess I got nothing better to do than rebound. They go adventuring once more, only to be attacked by bandits who mortally wound Ruthven. Oh noooooo, us readers think as Ruthven dies and makes Aubrey swear on the Bro Code that he won't mention his unaliving to anyone for a year and a day. Ruthven dies laughing deviously like a cartoon supervillain, and it's only after Aubrey loots his shit that he finds in his possessions the sheath for the dagger left behind at Ianthe's murder scene. He big oops his way back to jolly old England only to find his own sister has gotten shacked up with a very much still alive Ruthven. This son of a bitch cucks Aubrey with his own sister and taunts him with reminders of the oath he's now magically bound to keep. By the time Aubrey goes so completely batshit insane over this pickle that he dies and is thus free to reveal Ruthven's nature with his last confession, Ruthven has already vamped the sister and shuffled off to find a new bitch to penetrate. Oh trust me, it only gets gayer with Dracula.
Design notes, so interesting thing about the chiropteran nature of vampires. There actually was no documented association between these critters and the undead until the first scientific description of vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) in 1810. It was the bats and their blood blóts who were named after vampires, not the other way around. I still wanted this generic vampire to exude that classic battiness, but I think I found a good sweet spot between that and the more owl-y associations of the earlier strix. My thought process rests on a hypothetical virology I drafted for vampires as studied in the Drake Hero Universe. “Vampirism” is essentially super-malaria, designed by Hermes to metamorphosize people into bloodthirsty bird monsters, but since Ares’ commission was more adamant about the “bloodthirsty” part, the bird features started getting lost to vestigiality once run amok in the wild. Molting became permanent and even mutated into a peeling of the epidermis, making them hypersensitive to sunlight. I also envision the “beak” of a strix is actually the victim's teeth enamel lengthened, fused, and sharpened into one big dental trowel. In later vampires, natural selection settles for a “good enough” approach to the transformation, rendering the enamel fusion incomplete, resulting in that classic “snaggletooth” refined so famously by Dracula's incisors. Really I just wanted to pack the teeth of real vampire bats into a human mouth and figure out what that would look like. Maybe one day I'll publish my full dissertation on the metamorphic parasite I dub Plasmodium ulucus.