Vampires Through the Ages by Brian Righi Page A

defeating evil and was how it often “rehabilitated” those accused of witchcraft or sorcery. Yet even before the church adopted the practice, fire was a magical element used during pagan times as a central theme in rituals of cleansing, warmth, and protection. However, early man learned quickly that cremation was a difficult process, given the density of muscle and bone and the high water content of the body. Today’s crematories use ovens that reach temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and they still require up to a half-hour, depending on the weight and mass of the corpse, to reduce a corpse to ashes. Even then, a quantity of bone remains, which must be ground into dust until all that is left of the human body consists of between four to eight pounds of nondescript material.
    To alleviate the problems inherent in such a process, including the vast quantities of wood and manpower necessary to feed the flames for what could amount to days on end, some cultures turned to forms of symbolic cremation instead. In Bulgaria, for instance, a corpse thought to possess the spirit of a vampire was surrounded by a ring of flammable material. Villagers then lined up to take a hot coal, which they cast behind them in a gesture meant to drive the evil spirit away. In Serbia a similar practice existed whereby only the hair of the corpse was singed with a candle.
    Sunlight
    According to modern moviemakers, sunlight was a powerful weapon used to reduce vampires to a pile of ash, but as we learn so very often, Hollywood rarely gets it right. The truth of the matter is that nowhere in the folklore or the historical texts does this theory actually appear. Instead, the prevailing belief among the Serbians and others was that vampires became helpless when exposed to the rays of the sun, falling into a type of catatonic slumber or quasi-death trance. This helped explain why vampires appeared as simple inanimate corpses when villagers dug them up and ripped them from their coffins.
    To help account for the condition, it was surmised that since vampires were primarily night stalkers that derived their infernal powers from the darkness, it only made sense that daylight would prove their weakness. There is no precedent that they turned to dust or exploded into flames, however, and perhaps the first suggestion of this belief didn’t appear until F. W. Murnau’s 1922 German film Nosferatu . On the contrary, in some traditions, like those found among the Russians, vampires could move about on sunny afternoons just like the rest of us.
    The Vampire of Breslaw
    There were, of course, many other ways in which to slay a vampire, including excision of the heart, dismemberment of the body, burial under a gallows, piercing by sword, and immersion in water—and often more than one method was used in conjunction with others. The exact methodology again depended on the region, religious practices, and resources of the people, and each province or ethnic group seemed to enjoy putting their own little spin on the act. A classic example of just how these methods were used “in the field” can be found in English philosopher Henry More’s 1653 edition of An Antidote against Atheism—or—An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man . In this work appears the tale of a wealthy shoemaker in the town of Breslaw (today known as Wroclaw, a major city, in what is now southwestern Poland), who on September 20, 1591, committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a knife in the garden behind his house.
    Given the religious prohibitions against such an act, his family conspired to hide the suicide by covering up his wounds with the burial shroud in order to fool the examining priest into thinking that he had suffered a stroke instead. Perhaps the family’s wealth played a part in making a few heads turn the other way also, but regardless of how the deception was carried off the shoemaker was buried in the