Q & A with Thomas J. Garza

After a discussion with one of Thomas J. Garza's students (he teaches 'The vampire in Slavic cultures' at the University of Texas at Astin), I decided to contact the man, himself, for an interview.

I've briefly covered some of his writings found on the 'net and one of them, in particular (see the question on xenophobia), stood out to me. I've also been impressed by his devotion to the Slavic vampire, following in the footsteps of Jan L. Perkowski and Bruce A. McClelland.

Thomas J. Garza in 'an appropriately bizarre photo from a newspaper article a couple of years ago'*

I sent a request for an interview† and after he agreed‡, sent a long a bunch of questions.§ To his credit, he didn't shy away from the hard stuff, as his responses reveal.‖ Without further ado, heeeeeeeere's Garza!

Anthony Hogg: You have an impressive proficiency with Slavic languages, so how'd you go from that to teaching a course on vampires? Is your vampire course 'bait' for students to delve deeper into Slavic language and culture?

Thomas J. Garza: My interest in vampires certainly goes back to watching -- and loving -- the old Tod Browning's "Dracula" back in the '60s. But it was my work in Slavic languages that took me to the Foreign Service Institute in the late '80s after finishing my doctorate at Harvard. While working with the FSI, I was working in Hungary in the summer of 1988, retraining Hungarian teachers of Russian to teach English (anticipating the political changes there). As my birthday fell on a national holiday, St. Stephen's Day, some colleagues suggested that we drive up to the Romanian border and into Dracula country. Back then, the roads in Sighisoara were terrible, and the final leg of the trip -- up the ravine to the castle remains -- had to be be donkey. But the trip was worth it, and the affect of standing in the ruins was incredible, a kind of transformative experience of being in such a place, as with Stonehenge or Machu Pichu. I distinctly remember thinking then that when I returned to teaching, I would use this "hook" of the vampire story to get students interested in this part of the world. So, in 1997, a year after getting tenured at the university of Texas, I offered the vampire course for the first time. I certainly use the the theme of the vampire as "bait," as you say, to get them into the course that covers the history, geography, religion, literature, and film of the Slavic world, but significantly, it is that same hook that keeps them interested, I think, throughout the semester! I always have a sizable quotient of students who go on to take a Slavic language or culture course after the vampire class, and that's very rewarding.

AH: Speaking of Slavic roots - from a mythic/folkloric perspective - what's your take on the 'universal' vampire? Do you believe vampires are found across the globe, or are they a local, Slavic revenant with unique attributes?

TJG: Vampires, in my experience, are absolutely a global phenomenon, from Asia to Europe, across Africa, and throughout the Americas. The story may vary in details, modes, and/or substance, but there is a "universal" core of the story -- at least in the West: the vampire is creature that has returned from the dead (a revenant), and who takes sustenance from a host, who in the process is weakened or killed by it. Slavic vampires have their own characteristics, which vary from Slavic region to another. In the Balkans, for example, vampires and werewolves began in the lore as rather similar entities, and evolved historically into enemies. In Russian, the werewolf stories were very rare, and the vampire has always taken center stage. S/He is characterized not only as a blood drinker, but also since the nineteenth century as a "contagion," capable of spreading the vampire "disease" to an entire village or community.

AH: You've said, 'As long as we can tap into our xenophobia, then we get into the kind of vampires that make us squeal and jump.' Why is xenophobia essential for this process? Does this process still have a 'place' in our postmodern age?

TJG: It may not be essential, but xenophobia certainly insures that human beings are predisposed to being afraid of anything that's different from us: The Other. In spite of globalization and a seemingly ever-shrinking world, we are nonetheless terribly complacent in our own lives and tend to be very suspicious of non-conforminty -- especially when it's in the form of another culture. Postmodernism has actually given use a better and more effective lexicon to talk about Othering, especially in the context of the post-colonial breakup of empires. So, while a blood drinking creature will, indeed, always be inherently frightening, s/he takes on a special horror when we think don't understand it. That's why the vampires in, say, 30 Days of Night are particularly horrific; they are tribal, pack creatures, who speak a very different language, whereas some the new "integrated" vampires in Twilight, for example, might make some of squeal for very different reasons. I find the vampires and story in "True Blood" particularly interesting in this regard because, although they are also "modern" vampires in a "modern" setting, they have a "back story" -- a history -- that places them in the larger vampire mythos; and in a place like Bon Temps, which is inherently "créolité," difference is more likely to be accepted, and "coming out of the coffin" is possible.

AH: What other elements make vampires scary? Why should we revert to the 'scary' type at all?

TJG: Besides being creature that we don't understand, I think the best vampires in literature and film fall squarely into the age old "thing-that-go-bump-in-the-night" category. Here I mean the element of the unexpected or the uncanny that makes our blood run cold and the hair on the back of our necks stand up. In the original Murnau Nosferatu, it's the anticipation of the arrival of the monster, epitomized by mere shadow of his hand creeping along wall and the accompaniment of live music intensifying our horror; or in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, it might be the entrance of Dracula into Mina's room as mist, and then moving under her bedclothes while she sleeps, and waiting for her to notice that she is no longer alone; or the vampire Armand in Interview with the Vampire simply running his finger through the flame of a candle -- unaffected. Scary doesn't always (often?) involve blood and guts. I think the vampire in lit and film has historically presented us with a much more complex creature of horror than, say, Freddy, Pinhead, or Chucky, and thus can be much more subtle and effective in the delivery of horror.

AH: I've got your 2010 book, The vampire in Slavic culture on my to-get list, but could you tell us...why is it so expensive? Its publisher, Cognella, is selling it for $129.95 and Amazon, $169.95.

TJG: Aurgh! Yes, I would also like the book more accessible and I know the price is high. It is, though, a compilation and as such requires that the publishers acquire the rights and clearances to use all of the texts, the prints, and the lyrics that are included in the book. I had hoped that the price could be kept under $100, but after I added the Russian songs to the volume, it went over. I'm hoping that as more of the texts that I've included in the book become readily available digitally, the price will go down accordingly. Sorry.

AH: A student of yours and I have been discussion on The vampire in Slavic culture's edition statements and we're coming up with some contradictory results. There seems to be more than one. Are there other editions of the book?

TJG: There have been two: the original is through University Readers in 2009, and an updated, slightly expanded version by Cognella (a subsidiary of University) came out in 2010.

AH: Which works/authors have influenced your writings on the undead. Which would you recommend as essential reading?

TJG: Certainly my Slavic-centric focus on the vampire story has been greatly influenced by the works of Prof. Jan Perkowski, who teaches a vampire course at the University of Virginia, and originally taught that course here at the University of Texas back in the 1970s. From the nineteeth century, I'm particularly fond of the works of AK Tolstoy (a relative of Leo Tolstoy), including the stories "The Family of the Wurdalaks," and "The Vampire." Especially the latter embraces the specifics of the Slavic vampire wonderfully, and was made into a very slick, dark film in Russia in 1991 called Blood Drinkers. But my take on the contemporary vampire is very strongly influenced by the Russian/Ukrainian writer Sergei Lukyanenko, who authored the Watch series (Night Watch, Day Watch, Evening Watch, and Last Watch) in the late 1990s and 2000s. All of these are now available in English translations. I think this series is very good, indeed, in not only bringing vampires into the new millennium, but in giving them a role in the greater historical saga of the battle of Good and Evil on Earth.

AH: The vampire in Slavic cultures is, essentially, a university reader. Considering what I've read from you so far, you clearly have some interesting things to say on the subject, yourself. Do you plan on writing your own work on the subject?

TJG: If only there were more hours in the day! I have done a couple of articles that talk about the contemporary Russian vampire in terms of Othering of the Chechens, Caucasians (people of the Caucasus), and Central Asians in Russia, but I would love to do something longer and more substantial in the area of mapping the vampire in Russia. Stay tuned; I promise that there's more to come!

I'd like to thank Prof. Garza for his participation, and forthright, insightful responses. His book, The vampire in Slavic cultures (2010), is available through Cognella and Amazon.

* Garza's caption ('Re: A brief interview?‏', Thursday, 15 September 2011 11:51:44 PM).

† 'A brief interview?', Thursday, 1 September 2011 7:53:15 AM.

‡ 'Re: A brief interview?‏', Thursday, 1 September 2011 8:46:50 AM.

§ 'Re: A brief interview?‏', Wednesday, 7 September 2011 5:07:58 AM.

‖'Re: A brief interview?‏', Wednesday, 14 September 2011 8:34:59 AM.

Q & A with Bruce A. McClelland, Part 4

For the previous installment, click here.

AH: A few years before you wrote your book, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended its run on television. During its time, there was a resurgence of interest in the vampire hunter (like Blade and Van Helsing) but now we're back in the realm of vampires again with Meyer's Twilight series.

Do you see the vampire hunter coming back into fashion and are there any examples you can think of, which would provide the catalyst for its return?

BAM: As with my answer to question 5, above, the "fashions" or permutations of the main elements of the vampire myth may or may not involve "infinitely malleable signifiers." Among my current interests (see below, q. 8) is to determine what is so marketable about this genre, and what its possible transformations are. I once thought, as a kid (same time as I was watching Hammer films, I suppose) that rock-and-roll also was permanent, and since it lasted into the 90s, by some definitions, and since those vampires The Rolling Stones are still kicking around, it appears that it is possible to hold onto a category, so long as you are willing to extend its boundaries and make it malleable and permeable. But there comes a time when the essential components of the category, which constitute its essence or identity, are no longer visible, at which point it becomes useful to wonder whether you still have the same thing, or something, Monty Pythonesquely, completely different.

Abstractly, your question involves two intersecting dimensions: one has to do with the nature of the cycles of popular culture fashions, the other with the philosophical dynamics that are at the base of the vampire theme. Crudely, the latter is easily represented as a dualistic conflict between good and evil, life and death, light and dark, blah blah. That essential human social drama, like the vampire perhaps, is not going to die, at least in my lifetime. But the specifics of the myth, like those of the defunct mythologies of the Greeks or Egyptians or Hittites or Etruscans or whoever, with their attendant ritual verbiage and gestures, may indeed pass into other forms.

I think the better way to think about it, especially nowadays with global mass media, is that the world's societies are coming into contact more frequently and faster than ever before – much faster than in centuries past – and so the capacities of societies to rearrange their categories and boundaries, in order to update knowledge of who is one of us and who is one of them, are being outpaced by this increasing contact, with its concomitant conflicts of styles and modalities. In the final analysis, the vampire story is essentially about that: who is us (the living, the real, the valuable), and who is them (the dead, the unreal, the worthless or abject). The role of the slayer, as I point out throughout my book, is to validate the boundaries that a society creates in order to exclude (literally excommunicate) certain members. The slayer, the seer, the hunter of vampires is, like a superhero, by definition always on the side of the ostensible Good (Us). And where We may feel guilty about designating certain among us as Other, we need someone to validate our need for a scapegoat without holding Us responsible.

So I think of the dyad of vampire/slayer as a dynamic for expressing a certain range of social tensions, among a drifting palette of other, similar dynamics to represent other types of social tension. In the case of the vampire, as well as the witch, the issue has always been the Enemy Within: someone who is so much like us that he or she might be attractive to us, but is also a threat because he or she is also essentially alien (dead, Communist, what have you). In socioeconomic terms and with respect to the history of vampire cinema/TV, now that Eastern Europeans are starting to look so much like those of us in the NATO world (and I am in Sofia, Bulgaria as I write and attest to that), the image of the terrorist is now starting to absorb much of the semantics of the East European monster of the 1930s. That is, in America at any rate, we must now all take off our shoes to get on an airplane, even 93-year-old half-crippled WASPs like my father-in-law, because any one of us may be a terrorist (or Communist again, if the Republicans have their way in changing the predominant label back to something more familiar). The hunter has to re-emerge. To all extents and purposes, Jack Bauer (of "24") is a vampire hunter: he is outside the system, he is as violent and morally degraded as his enemy (i.e. he can "see" them), yet he is on the Right Side because he allows the rest of the system to wrap its citizens in ignorant comfort, blind to any sense of injustice or moral compromise.)

Whether the fashion of the vampire hunter per se will re-emerge is unclear. Certainly if the dangerous vampire is co-opted and ingested into human (read: European) society, so that he no longer seems so foreign or threatening, then we may be tacitly admitting that there are other stories in which real people (e.g. "terrorists") can be portrayed as much more dangerous than the vampire ever was. In any case, we still seem to need hunters and seers (e.g. Blackwater), people who know who the terrorists are and how to destroy them, so we can stay safe and keep on doing whatever it was we were doing before.

AH: Do you have any upcoming works in the vampire genre? Are there other avenues within it that you'd like to explore?

BAM: Well, as I mentioned above, I just finished a chapter for a new book on True Blood, in which I look at the co-optation of the vampire as the potentially eternal consumer. There are some people urging me now to look at what incentives (social, financial, …) are driving the current reconfiguration of the vampire story into something almost unrecognizable from the early horror and Orientalism of Dracula. I even have a tentative title: "What's Up with All These Vampires? The Truth about the Untruth about the Undead." The point of that subtitle is that, except for the emergence of blogs like yours, and Niels', and Rob Brautigam's Shroudeater and a few others, most people really don't want to understand the sociodynamics, true history, cultural anthropology or even the psychology of the vampire mytheme. There is a reason, going back to your second question above, that people really don't want to look too deeply at the Slavic or folkloric or religious roots of the vampire (a reason, that is, that goes beyond the general Enlightenment chauvinism behind Western European attitudes toward East European culture). The fact that there are so many TV pseudo-documentaries called something like "The Truth about/The Real Story of/behind {Dracula, The Undead, Vampires, Bloodsuckers, etc.}", each consulting the same talking heads with the same talking points (usually taking us all the way back to Vlad the Impaler[!], suggesting this may be a Romanian conspiracy), suggests a kind of cover-up. None of the stories on the History Channel, Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel or any of those pseudo-educational televenues (I don't know what you've got in Australia) really goes very far or very deep, and I suspect that's exactly the way people like it.

So I'm interested, vaguely, in that: what is it about vampires (or other phenomena similarly treated) that we don't really want to know? There's something there, some thrill or frisson or furtiveness –eroticism?-- behind our tendency to always prefer the sensational over the actual. This something is what allows the media industry to keep spinning stuff out of the very term 'vampire', even though the vampire's shape has shifted drastically.

Another avenue, if I get the time, is the relationship of the vampire to the early Enlightenment, that period of magia posthuma that Niels is rightfully so gung-ho about. I gave a talk at the University of Chicago in 2008, where I was invited by Bruce Lincoln, who was then teaching a course on vampires at the Divinity School, in which I looked closely at the imperative to explain away the folkloric vampire on the part of both the scientists and clergymen (esp. Dom Calmet) of the day. I'd like to expand on that theme, and look more closely at what I consider a concerted attack on the imagination when it is not in the service of technology, which leads to the death or incipient irrelevance of religion, folklore, etc. It's a critical time, in European intellectual history, and the vampire – once a networked member of an elaborate and confusing South Slavic demonology – plays a significant part.

Otherwise, I'm trying to get back into fiction. I defined myself as a poet for thirty-plus years, and while I don't think I can move back into that space for now, I would like to return to "creative writing." The only long fiction I've ever had published, by the way, was a novel I wrote in Russian (and published in a Petersburg literary journal), which was entitled "Hot War: Memoirs of an American Vampire in Moscow."

I'd like thank Bruce for his time, patience and excellent responses to my questions. I'd also recommend checking out his interview with Chris Detloff, for further discussion on his view of the undead and those who hunt 'em.

Q & A with Bruce A. McClelland, Part 3

For the previous installment, click here.

AH: In this light, what do you think the next phase of the vampire's etymological evolution holds? Or do you believe that the current incarnation is too firmly embedded in popular consciousness to fade away?

BAM: That's a great question, and one I am considering for a new book. Clearly, the vampire is no longer a consequence of an ecclesiastical belief system, but rather what an anthropologist friend of mine once referred to as an "infinitely malleable signifier." More cynically, the vampire is a theme that has become so deeply engrained in our [Western] consciousness, which is increasingly less ecclesiastical as official-political religion becomes desperately more fundamentalist and thereby makes itself less and less relevant, that its way of encoding the conflicting positions and desires of the powerful and the powerless continues to make for new stories. Which can, it seems, be sold to ever younger audiences for new dollars. I think the new phenomenon of Twilight and True Blood, which starts, probably, with Anne Rice's simplistic but clever inversion of the protagonist/antagonist dynamic in Interview with the Vampire, may represent a kind of death knell for the vampire as we know him/it. We are getting further and further away, with each new unbaptized generation, from having any awareness of the deeper religious and eschatological conflicts that underlie the vampire myth. Certainly, the scapegoat theme is still the profane essence of the story, so what we have now are movies and TV shows in which outsiders no longer seek autonomy or identity, but inclusion in the post-liberal manufacturing and consumption system. The blood-drinking aspect of the vampire represents a nice Freudian combination of eroticism with violence, but there are so many other dramas out there that deal with that subject more literally and directly.

Twilight, it seems to me, is aimed at neutralizing the fear of the male that has been generated by the proliferation of the pornographies of sex and violence, and by glorified popular culture images of sexual behavior as soulless and violent (leaving adolescent and pre-adolescent girls with no better models of the female/feminine than such degraded, manufactured images as Brittany Spears and her desperate retro-pubescent exhibitionism).

The popularity of the vampire waxes and wanes, historically, but let's not forget that his true popularity is only 80 years old, hardly eternal. Stoker did not die a rich man, and in the Slavic countries, the vampire is nothing special (at least in the folklore history). I have recently contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book entitled True Blood and Philosphy (Wiley/Blackwell, 2010), the very existence of which suggests that as soon as these media events (Buffy, True Blood, Twilight, etc.) are produced, they are analyzed to generate meta-products for another, ostensibly sympathetic audience. There is a new industry, in other words, of neo-scholarship trying to make itself relevant to an increasingly illiterate society, by paying almost serious attention to what would otherwise pass as mere entertainment. How long that can go on is anybody's guess, but currently, it doesn't feel as though the vampire has many places to go to get out of this trap.

AH: The ninth and tenth chapters of your book present your case for Bram Stoker's characterisation of Abraham Van Helsing being inspired by Dutch physician, Gerard van Swieten. Would you care to explain the link between the two and why you believe Stoker was influenced by him?

BAM: Because Stoker played so close to the vest regarding his model for Van Helsing, the subject is of course liable to much speculation, and my opinion on the subject is far from being widely accepted. I should say at the outset that there was one brief moment, several years ago, when I came across an article on the Internet by a scholar, a physician I think, whose name I don't remember and whose article I can no longer find, who had absolutely independently come to the same conclusion on the basis of some of Stoker's notes he had read at the Rosenbach Foundation Museum in Philadelphia. Elizabeth Miller patently rejects the idea, claiming, not without justification, deep familiarity with the Stoker collection at the Rosenbach. Still, I was encouraged by the same conclusion being put forth independently by someone who mentioned the link between Vans Swieten and Helsing, almost in passing. How I wish I could find his paper! [Dear Sir: if you are reading this, please contact me with the reference that led you to the conclusion that Stoker had drawn upon the character of Van Swieten for his character Van Helsing.]

First of all, while I'm willing to admit that Van Helsing is a fictional character and thus a composite of possibly multiple acquaintances and prototypes, I can't buy the common argument that Arminius Vambery was the model for VH (see Arminius Vambery). They have virtually nothing in common. Stoker's reference to his "friend Arminius" in Dracula is homage, of course, but I think more a matter of gratitude and indeed, respect or friendship, not a winking hint that Vambery=Van Helsing.

At the famous 1890 meeting between Stoker and Vambery at the Beefsteak Club, this Hungarian adventurer and agent provocateur supposedly regaled his British audience with his knowledge of not only Transylvania, but also Central Asia, where he had traveled widely, sometimes as a spy speaking a Turkic language and dressed as a dervish or what-not. Recall that Vambery's personal and somewhat covert mission in London was to garner support for his brand of Pan-Turkism, which in theory the British might have supported because of its anti-Russian position. Vambery gave lectures in London about his ideas, and it is possible, perhaps likely, that Stoker attended one or two. Pure speculation so far.

But although Elizabeth denies the significance of the connection between Stoker and Vambery, being, in my opinion, unnecessarily cautious but nevertheless scholarly, she ignores the fact that two years before the publication of Dracula, Vambery had published, in English, with Allen and Unwin, The History of Hungary. In that book, which I have a copy of, he mentions both Dracula (Vlad III) and Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria and Hungary, albeit in different chapters, of course. (So far as I recall, he does not mention Van Swieten.) As an historian of Hungary, including Transylvania, he certainly knew more about Vlad's exploits than he brings into his book, since these were widely known from the fifteenth century on. Considering that Vambery was a Pan-Turkist, and that Vlad's father, Vlad II Dracul, was a member of a paramilitary band sworn to fight the Turks, this might explain both the short shrift that Vambery gives to Dracula in his history, and a reason to associate Dracula's widely known bloodthirstiness and anti-Turkish rage with evil. (Though without the Romanian fighters against the Turks, Hungary may have remained under Ottoman domination longer than it did.)

Furthermore, Vambery must have known a good deal about Van Swieten, since he was the principal and most trusted advisor to Maria Theresa in a number of matters. If he knew about Van Swieten, he also knew about his Consideration, Swieten's treatise on magia posthuma, since among the first significant duties of Van Swieten was to investigate the goings-on with vampires in Silesia in 1755.

Following the above logic, we so far have a link between Stoker→Vambery→Vlad III/ →Maria Theresa→Van Swieten. Interesting, but not yet convincing. But if we now look at the common characteristics of Van Helsing and Van Swieten, in this context they seem to be more than purely accidental. Both are, for example:

(a) Dutch (Vambery was Hungarian);
(b) knowledgeable about vampires (Van Swieten was one of the first Western authors on the subject);
(c) physicians;
(d) holders of professional credentials in other areas (Van Swieten was Chief Censor and Head Librarian for the court of Maria Theresa); and
(e) perhaps most importantly, Catholic (see "Envisioning an indulgence: Dracula (1897) & Van Helsing (2004)").

Vambery, meanwhile, possesses virtually none of those features in common with Van Helsing (or Van Swieten), but he would have known all those things about Van Swieten. Or, if Vambery did not mention them specifically, Stoker could have easily learned more about Van Swieten, as a result of interest piqued by Vambery's stories, at the British Museum (speculation).

Between the demonstrable pathways from Stoker to knowledge about vampires (Transylvanian folklore, which of course he also learned about later from Land Across the Forest), Vlad Dracula, and Gerard van Swieten, on the one hand, and the more-than-coincidental morphological similarity between the fictional Abraham Van Helsing and the real Van Swieten on the other, I am hard pressed to accept any other model for Van Helsing proposed to date. This is especially true because no other hypotheses ever offer evidence that even comes close to refuting that put forth above. But, to be honest, although I think this connection is close to being demonstrated, it's not a subject I'm going to pursue any further, at least actively.

To be continued...

Q & A with Bruce A. McClelland, Part 2

For the previous installment, click here.

AH: Your book puts particular emphasis on a Bulgarian etymology for the origins of vampires. Do you think their contribution has been more historically important, than, say, the Serbian influence? If so, why?

BAM: If by Serbian vampires you are referring to the vrakolaka (with variant spellings) described by Perkowski, the etymology for that term is both clearer than and entirely different from that of the word vampir, from which, of course, the English vampire/vampyre derives. My dissertation focused on the Bulgarian vampire because, I believe, that is where the term comes into existence (recalling that present-day Macedonia was part of the Bulgarian empire, yet is only a stone's throw from present-day Serbia). My hypothesis concerns the religious and social conflict between the Christianizing forces coming into Bulgaria from Byzantium and the indigenous groups (Slavs and leftover Thracians, mostly) that in some cases resisted the attempts to make them give up their lifestyle, rituals and beliefs, which consisted of animal sacrifice and (possibly) belief in reincarnation, or at least a cyclical view of nature (where Christianity is teleological). I would contend that in much Bulgarian folklore, the frequently encountered hostility between vampires and wolves might in fact reflect some friction in the contact between the Serbian vrkolaka (literally, "wolf pelt") and the Bulgaro-Macedonian vampir. The "demon contamination" problem in the Balkans that Perkowski alludes to is very real, but is in fact just an example of semantic shift due to cultural contact. The more interesting question to me is when and how both of those vampires acquire some of the features of the western witch.

AH: Another angle explored in your book, is the transition from the etymological origins of the vampire as a type of heretic to a bloodsucking corpse. How did this transition take place and why?

BAM: The answer to that question, I'm afraid, took me an entire dissertation to provide (and even there, we don't really have enough data to be completely confident in the analysis). But, quickly, my claim is that the word vampir originally designated a small group (for if it were a larger group, we'd expect to find more evidence of the term) of people, probably agrarian Slavs, who had drawn the enmity of the Byzantine Christianizers because of their participation in pagan rituals, in particular, animal sacrifice. (The frequent polemics, although superficially directed against sacrifice, upon closer inspection turn out to have been directed at the revelry and abandonment (e.g. drinking, licentiousness) that accompanied such sacrificial rituals, as these were offensive to the Christian requirement for self-restraint and denial, or at least sublimation.) Eventually, the "pagans" were absorbed into the mainstream Orthodox Christian society, having no longer any official apologist for their beliefs. But, I surmise, the word vampir persisted, now with a general connotation of "someone who participates in anti- or un-Christian behavior." I suppose the term may have smacked of political resistance, since the Byzantines were indeed a political as much as a religious force in the late medieval Balkans. When the dualist sect known as Bogomils gained a foothold in the Balkans, their dualist and clearly anti-ecclesiastical beliefs represented a clear threat to the project of Christianizing Bulgaria, and they were the first "heretics" in the Balkans. I believe that the term vampir was then once again extended to refer not to the defunct pagans, but now the heretics (who, unlike their pagan predecessors, did not perform sacrifices, and in fact believed that the entire liturgical system of Orthodox ritual and symbolism (including the crucifix) was nonsense). Now the term took on an even broader meaning, suggesting apostasy and anathema. When the Bogomils went underground (to reemerge in southern Europe as Cathars, etc., where Dan Brown and Michael Baigent pick up the story), the word vampir, which no longer had any specific referents, came to be synonymous with "excommunicate." In late XVI or early XVII Macedonia, if I recall, the word is definitely associated with excommunication. Excommunication was a serious adverse status in an Orthodox Christian state, and among its eschatological implications was that the excommunicate could not undergo proper funerary procedures, and that his (or rarely, her) soul would not be able to rest, and the body would be rejected by the earth (admittedly, a later folk explanation). It is not a far leap from the soul being in a state of unrest (merging with the broader, proto-Slavic category of the "unquiet dead") to the image of a deceased body that is somehow still animated but soulless. Blood-sucking is a much later attribute, perhaps derived from desacralization/desymbolization of the Christian Eucharist, and most likely connected to ideas about witchcraft. I don't see much evidence for blood-sucking until the early 18th century, though there may have been some reflexes of Dionysian ritual involved (where the wine=blood symbolic connection seems to have preceded the Christian myth).

To be continued...

Q & A with Bruce A. McClelland, Part 1

As promised, here's is my interview with Bruce A. McClelland, author of Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead (2006).

He's the third subject of "Q & A", after Niels K. Petersen (part 1; part 2) and Martin V. Riccardo (part 1; part 2).

As per usual, I sent the questions by e-mail ("RE: Possible Interview", Monday, 15 February 2010 11:29:31 AM), but revised the last question ("RE: Possible Interview", Wednesday, 17 February 2010 2:10:14 PM). His answers arrived soon after ("RE: Possible Interview", Tuesday, 30 March 2010 10:26:14 AM), only held up by his general busyness and trip to Bulgaria.

I do warn you though, his responses are quite lengthy. So, I've decided to break the interview up into four parts, with two questions/answers per part. Rest assured, they're worth it.

I even considered sending the thing off to Folklore or the Journal of Folklore Research, before realising they'd probably edit the hell out of it. I didn't want to rob you guys of the fullness of the interview, so I decided to stick to the original plan and post it here. Not such a bad thing, considering that Bruce also provided a few weblinks within his responses. The ones he's typed out, I've integrated into the relevant piece o' text.

Bruce A. McClelland (Photo: Jen Fariello)

So, dear reader, I now present the first part of "Q & A" with Bruce A. McClelland.

Anthony Hogg: You've published "four books of poetry, a book of translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam", among others, so what exactly drew you to the vampire? When did they first start capturing your attention?

Bruce A. McClelland: The first horror movies I went to as a kid were those great Hammer Studios/Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee updates of the Universal Pictures monster movies of the Thirties (particularly Horror of Dracula (1958), as it was called in the US, and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The Technicolor dimension made the bloody scenes more vivid than blood really is (I don't know whether it was the film color or the way they made stage blood, but in my memory, Hammer blood was bright, scarlet red, without the blue component that characterizes real human blood). A few years later, as an early adolescent, I was further attracted to such horror films by the bustiness of the faux Central European milkmaids, vampire wives and girlfriends, etc. Mario Bava and Barbara Steele didn't hurt. So: to answer your question, I was generally interested in monster/horror at the ripe old age of 7, and vampires were just members of the monster club: in fact, I was a charter subscriber to a magazine called "Famous Monsters of Filmland", which I think I subscribed to until it went belly-up.

I should add that as I grew more, um, serious, my passion for horror movies waned. But my interest in Dracula returned in the mid-70s with the publication of McNally and Florescu's In Search of Dracula, which led me to investigate the historical aspects of the Dracula story. Out of that came other investigations, including reading Perkowski's Vampires of the Slavs, which first united my interest in Slavic language and my interest in vampires, and my thinking coalesced into my first book of poetry, The Dracula Poems (1976).

AH: In 2006, you published what has been called the "first book to explore the origins of the vampire slayer", Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. Why do you think this trope of the vampire mythos has been largely neglected in academia?

BAM: Academia, as you call it, until recently was never really aware of any aspect of the vampire outside the literary and cinematic (especially the former). The vampire was received, or as I usually claim, stolen from the Balkans in a kind of Orientalistic frenzy, without any regard for the accompanying religious and folk context. The Slavic vampire was only one type of folkloric being among several in Balkan lower mythology, even up to the 1980s, and nomenclature for only one member of a class of entities across the entire peninsula that had similar and historically related nocturnal and demonic attributes. If you look at the history of English language vampire research, you'll note that most articles and books don't cite even one primary Slavic source, and the usually erroneous statements about the pre-history of the vampire always rely on secondary or tertiary sources. Until Perkowski's work in the mid-Seventies, with few exceptions Anglo-American and continental European research on the vampire confined itself to the research available in Germanic and Romance languages. It was the English novel Dracula, after all, that made the vampire a hit (with a tip o' the hat to Varney, of course), at least in the US and UK. And in Dracula, as in most subsequent films, the image of the slayer is much less important than the character of the protagonist, Count Dracula.

The usual struggle between a hero/superhero and some dragon/demon/devil/evildoer that is the basis of countless popular movies isn't really present in the Dracula story in quite the same way: there are four or five rather bumbling heroes in Stoker's novel (which Polanski satirizes brilliantly), and Dracula's incredible (if putative and only circumstantially discovered) powers are only equaled by the combination of two psychic forces among the human antagonists (viz. Mina and Van Helsing, a point I elaborate in my book). Furthermore, in virtually all cases, the focus is on the method of vanquishing Dracula, but not so much on the character of the destroyer. (Going back to Peter Cushing in The Horror of Dracula, his Van Helsing is more heroic (and flawed) in nature than most other versions, he has more personality or stage presence, so there certainly is a precedent for making the vampire's antagonist a protagonist, but the identity and character of the hero are still less at issue than what kinds of powers are required to meet those of the vampire.)

I'm sorry to be so longwinded about this, but your question has lots of implications. It's really not until Buffy that academics writing about American popular culture actually began to make an industry of discussing an interesting, but hardly incredible television series. I might add that Buffy talks a good game about vampires, but in fact most of the demons in the show are anonymous and draw their physical attributes more from the same pool of visual characteristics and effects as are applied in those films that derive from latter-day neo-Catholic misappropriation of Inquisition demonology (e.g. The Exorcist, The Omen, and the Dan Brown stuff).

To be continued...

Q & A with Martin V. Riccardo, Part 2

Continued from here:

AH: You wrote the first multimedia vampire bibliography in 1983, Vampires Unearthed. Considering the dearth of works that have appeared since then, would you consider publishing an updated edition?

MVR: Since the Internet now offers an overabundance of information on any subject, I have not felt any need to put out an updated version. My friend J. Gordon Melton has also done a magnificent job in providing vampire bibliographies and filmographies in the body of his books and their appendicies.

AH: In light of your bibliographic background, what works do you recommend as essential for anyone with an interest in vampire studies and why?

MVR: The one book I have found most useful in my study of vampires is The Vampire in Europe by Montague Summers. First published in 1929, it has been reprinted in recent decades sometimes with a different title.

From his extensive research in the library of the British Museum, Summers assembled every recorded account of vampires he could find in old European stories and folklore. This book provides a good overview of how the vampire was originally perceived by those who actually believed that this creature existed.

AH: Your most recent book-length work was 1996's Liquid Dreams of Vampires. Why are there such large gaps between your books? As to its topic, what was it about vampire dreams that you hoped to find out? What is the significance of dreaming about vampires?

MVR: When I write and article or book, it is simply because I have something to say or an opportunity to share something. There may be periods when there is nothing I want to get across.

In some ways, Liquid Dreams of Vampires was my magnum opus. It gave me the opportunity to explore the many dimensions of the vampire that people are attracted to. Using the dreams and fantasies that people sent me, it became quite easy to connect the dots.

In many ways the appeal of the vampire is on a subconscious level, and dreams afford an opportunity to access these inner subconscious drives and motivations. As I say in the book, "Vampires are the stuff that dreams are made of."

AH: Why do you think Meyer's Twilight series has enjoyed such an unprecedented level of popularity? Many other vampire-teen-romance novels were published previously, so why did hers take off? Do you think its success will push vampire scholarship into the mainstream?

MVR: I doubt if anyone knows why one author is able to touch a chord in millions of readers. One aspect is characters that people relate to, another is good writing and interesting stories.

When Bela Lugosi played Dracula in the 1930 Universal film, that created a wave of interest in vampires that continues to this day.

The vampire novels of Anne Rice also had massive popularity. In future years something else will surpass the Twilight craze. The dark archetype of the vampire will always find new expressions that tap into repressed human longing and desire.

College level courses on vampires have been around for decades, and will continue to grow. I believe that vampire scholarship has been in the mainstream for some time. Vampires are out of the coffin, and there is no way to push them back in.

I'd like to take the time to thank Martin for his generous contribution to this blog. You can read some more about his background in vampire and paranormal studies here.

There's also a MySpace group (non-affiliated) dedicated to him, which you can join.

Q & A with Martin V. Riccardo, Part 1

Welcome to the second installment of "Q & A". My first guest was Danish vampirologist, Niels K. Petersen (Part 1 and Part 2).

This time around, we have Martin V. Riccardo, founder of Vampire Studies and author of Lure of the Vampire, Vampires Unearthed: The Complete Multi-Media Vampire and Dracula Bibliography (both 1983) and Liquid Dreams of Vampires (1996).

I presented my questions to him by e-mail ("Possible Interview", Friday, 22 January 2010 2:39:04 AM) and his response ("Re: Possible Interview", Sunday, 24 January 2010 8:25:52 PM) forms the basis of this interview.

I should point out that the questions were originally numbered, but I have changed them to names, i.e., "1." becomes "Anthony Hogg", etc. That's a format I'll continue to use for future interviews.

Also, due to formatting issues with the e-mail, I've had to insert paragraph breaks myself.

Lastly, he provided a correction ("Interview correction", Monday, 25 January 2010 4:51:29 AM) to one of his responses concerning the publication date of Sumners' The Vampire in Europe (1929), which I've edited into the interview.

Due to length, this interview will also be split into two parts.

Martin V. Riccardo
(Photo: "Bitten!: Chicago-Area Vampire Enthusiasts", Chicago Magazine)

Anthony Hogg: How did your interest in vampires start? What's their appeal to you?

Martin V. Riccardo: I loved monster movies when I was a kid, but vampires did not really appeal to me then. In the old Universal films they often just seemed to be standing around posing rather than actually doing anything.

When I was in college I heard a lecture on vampires by Leonard Wolf, author of the book A Dream of Dracula. He discussed the strange appeal of the vampire that manifested itself in popular media. Around the same time I saw the Christopher Lee film Dracula Has Risen from the Grave in which the Count is much more dynamic and physically powerful than the older films I was used to.

From these influences, I became intrigued with the vampire image. Over time I have learned that there are many aspects of the vampire that appeal to people, but the element that attracted me most at the time was that this creature was an outcast and outsider who was shunned by the world of the living.

AH: In 1977, you founded the Vampire Studies Society. What was its intent and purpose? How did it differ from existing fan clubs, like the Count Dracula Fan Club?

MVR: I have always had a strong interest in the paranormal. As a result, the Vampire Studies Society had a special interest in collecting true stories of vampire encounters and other otherworldly attacks. However, there was also an interest in everything related to vampires, including fiction, film, and television. In that regard it was quite similar to the Count Dracula Fan Club.

AH: The Society produced the Journal of Vampirism, which ran from 1977-1979. Why did it have such a limited run?

MVR: I believe the Journal of Vampirism was the first periodical that focused on the subject of vampires. The Journal came out during one of the major surges of popular interest in vampires, when Frank Langella was getting attention in his portrayal of Dracula on Broadway and in his new Universal film version of Dracula.

When that particular surge died down, there was no longer enough popular support for me to keep up the publication.

AH: In 1990, "Society" was dropped from the organisation's title. Why was that move made? Is Vampire Studies still operational today, and if so, in what capacity?

MVR: I decided that it no longer served a purpose as a membership organization. Vampire Studies now functions as an information clearing house in which individuals can contact me with questions on the subject.

It is not intended to compete with all the instant information on the Internet. People can email me if they choose to, but most inquiries are still sent to my mailing address: Martin Riccardo, Vampire Studies, P.O. Box 151, Berwyn, IL 60402 U.S.A.

To be continued...

Q & A with Niels K. Petersen, Part 2

For the previous installment, click here.

AH: Part of the reason for your blog's existence, was to relay your attempts at finding a copy of de Schertz's famous Magia Posthuma, a work very few authors have read. Where did you find your copy and why do you think other writers have struggled to find a copy of this work?

NKP: If I wasn't seriously searching for that book, I may never have started my blog, and probably would not have attempted to launch the term "magia posthuma" as a kind of brand for the topic. Magia Posthuma is famous because of Dom Calmet who wrote about it in his Dissertation, but apparently it wasn’t widely read or even known in the 18th century, and probably never has been. Because of Calmet and those who have cribbed from him it has become a well-known title, even becoming the name of a Belgian metal band for a short period.

I was finally able to read a copy thanks to the Royal Library in Copenhagen, but I had to help them by pointing in the direction of a copy. As far as I know now, there are two copies in the Czech Republic and one in France, the latter one probably the copy that Calmet himself read.

Magia Posthuma originates in Catholic considerations on how to deal with beliefs in posthumous magic and probably was only known in certain Catholic circles. It isn’t mentioned by Giuseppe Davanzati in his dissertation on vampires, so those circles may have been pretty limited. That would also explain the scarcity and the current location of copies of the book.

AH: Most sources cite the book's publication date as 1706, yet you're fairly confident that it was actually published in 1704. What gives you the grounds for this claim?

NKP: I am not that confident as to the actual publication, but from the contents I can see that a censor read the book in 1704 and recommended its publication. So it must have been written in 1704 or before. I hope that future research in those parts of Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, will shed further light on the actual background for von Schertz’s book. One would expect that archives and libraries could contain more information, or just information that is not currently easily available, but I honestly don’t know what to expect. As the magia posthuma cases and posthumous cremations of corpses in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia are closely related to witch and sorcery cases, hopefully someone will augment the work of Karen Lambrecht and Gabor Klaniczay, filling in some of the gaps in our knowledge about the posthumous magic of that region.

AH: Apart from finding a copy of de Schertz's book, what would you say is your proudest achievement, so far, in your vampirological studies and aims?

NKP: I am happy to have inspired people in Vienna to arrange a conference on vampirism and to have participated. That certainly has been one of the highlights of my active interest in the subject. I also want to mention my delight in inspiring and helping various people in their studies and research. It seems that I have inspired a couple of students in their choice of thesis. I am frequently surprised at the kind of response I get from my blog. Some of the feedback I have received can be seen on the blog, but a lot of it is only communicated by e-mail.

AH: To my knowledge, you haven't published any book-length works on vampires. Why is this? Do you plan on publishing anything in the immediate future?

NKP: I am frequently asked that question. But like I said, I started out working on a book in my native language, Danish, before even considering blogging about the subject. I must admit that my search for further material, blogging, and in particular all those other things that I am involved in outside of the field of magia posthuma has taken up a lot of time. But I have lately put more time into getting on with my book. So I am actually working on it, but my time is pretty limited, so I dare not put a date on when it will be finished.

AH: Lastly, what is the ultimate aim of your blog? What do you hope your readers will get from it?

NKP: I hope that people will find out that vampires and other revenants are rooted in "historical reality", that they differ a lot from the vampires of Buffy and Twilight, and that we can learn something about human history and concepts by following the history of the vampire. I hope that more people will be inspired to explore the reality behind the myth by not just accepting what some author, say Montague Summers, writes, but by reading the original texts.

I don’t think I have an ultimate aim with the Magia Posthuma blog, but its existence and aim is of course related to my own activities in the field. Curiously, even in periods when I only post a few times a month, I keep getting e-mails and commentaries from people who have just found it, so I suppose it works well as a resource of information and ideas.

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Niels for his co-operation with this interview and should point out that his blog served as a key inspiration for this one.

Q & A with Niels K. Petersen, Part 1

Welcome to a new segment for my blog; "Q & A".

I'll be interviewing people associated with vampire scholarship in order to give an insight into what draws them to the field and what they hope to achieve by their contributions.

Our very first guest is Niels K. Petersen, a Danish vampirologist and the man behind Magia Posthuma.

I e-mailed Niels some questions ("RE: Possible Interview?", Friday, 15 January 2010 5:26:18 PM) about his involvement with vampire studies, and he sent his response ("RE: Possible Interview?", Sunday, 17 January 2010 10:06:47 AM).

I should point out that the questions were originally numbered. I've introduced paragraph breaks not found in his original reply and split the interview into two parts, due to length.

Niels K. Petersen (Photo: Nicolas Barbano)

Anthony Hogg: What first inspired your interest in vampires?

Niels K. Petersen: It was reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a teenager that got me started. I had seen the documentary In Search of Dracula on Swedish TV, and I had read various vampire comic books like the Danish translation of Tomb of Dracula, so I knew about both the fictional and the so-called ‘historical’ Dracula, Vlad Tepes. Having read the novel, I began investigating and collecting everything about Dracula and vampires. I tried to compile facts about vampires and even had a box of index-cards with descriptions of vampires mentioned in various books. I must have been 13 or 14 years old when I started doing that.

Later on I got pretty disillusioned with the books I could lay my hand on. You should remember that this was way before the web, so books were often extremely hard to come by, and many books were out of print and almost impossible to buy. But the more books I found, the more I realized that most authors more or less just copied what others had written, perhaps adding some extra facts and the omnipresent Freudian analysis.

The chain of copyists led me back to Montague Summers, Stefan Hock and Dom Calmet, who were hard to come by then. I had to go the Royal Library in Copenhagen to find them, but that also meant that I could investigate a number of the original books on the subject from the 17th and 18th centuries. I also found a copy of Georg Tallar’s medical examination of victims of purported vampires or moroi, which wasn’t mentioned in any book I had seen before.

AH: You started your blog in 2007, but your readers probably aren't aware that you've been writing about vampires for a lot longer. Could you give us a background?

NKP: Well, I edited a fanzine on vampires and horror fiction when I was pretty young, so I wrote some articles on vampires that were based on books like Anthony Masters’ The Natural History of the Vampire. Later on, I was asked to write a couple of articles on similar matters, including a history of vampire cinema for a Danish magazine on horror movies to coincide with Coppola’s movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

But for many years I wasn’t actively doing anything related to the subject apart from perhaps watching the occasional vampire movie. I had become a father and was busy with other things. And I was still pretty disillusioned with most of the books that were published at the time. I suppose I had more or less dropped the subject.

But in 2006 I decided to compile the material I had for a book in my native language, Danish. However, when I began working on it, I started looking for extra information and for some of the books I didn’t have. I also discovered papers and a few books published in recent years, mostly in German, and thanks to the internet I was able to finally get hold of some of the books that had been almost impossible to find earlier on.

Initially I had no intention to go online with my interest. OK, I intended to make a companion web site to the book I was working on, but that would probably have been in Danish only.

AH: Your blog's primary focus are 18th century vampire reports and respective folklore associated with vampires. Why does this area interest you more than fictional literary contributions to the field, like, say Dracula?

NKP: So much has been written on Dracula, and I think that Elizabeth Miller in particular has done a great job in excavating Stoker and his count from the number of misconceptions and myths that he has been shrouded in for decades.

In general, a lot has been written on fictional vampires, but the historical origin of the vampire is quite another matter. Just take a look at a recent book like David J. Skal’s Romancing the Vampire, it thoroughly documents the fictional vampire, but when it comes to history and folklore it is very thin, and that is unfortunately symptomatic of the English-language literature on the subject.

But overall, one can say that most people who have seriously been investigating vampires have done so from an initial interest in the fictional vampire. When Aribert Schroeder travelled to a number of archives and libraries to look for source material on vampires, he wanted to trace the historical background of vampire fiction.

In later years, however, people, and mostly European researchers, have begun to investigate that history from other points of view. A growing interest over the past decades in the history of funerary practices and concepts of the dead with Philippe Ariès as one exponent, and the modern historical research into sorcery and witchcraft cases have, I suppose, led the way for an increasing interest in vampires and revenants from a similarly historical point of view. An example is the German book Gespenster und Politik, Ghosts and Politics, published in 2007 which compiles papers on e.g. Dom Calmet’s interest in vampires as related to his defense of the Church’s position in contemporary society against both those who questioned the Devil from the point of view of rational scepticism and those who superstitiously would believe all sorts of tales of revenants.

So, I simply aim at finding out “what really happened” by going ad fontes and trying to understand the events and concepts in terms of their context. By doing so, I hope to understand how the interest in and conception of vampires and other revenants have developed and how they are related to other aspects of society, religion, science etc. However, it is not only important to understand how vampire beliefs were interpreted and received by those more “enlightened” and educated people, who have communicated their experiences and thoughts on the matter in books and letters, but one should also try to grasp what kind of “belief system” that have made people genuinely fear the return and haunting of revenants.

In short, you may say that I am interested in the vampire as part of history, as a concept of "historical reality", rather than as a concept of some author’s or filmmaker’s imagination. Still, I am fascinated by the way vampires caught the 18th century imagination and transformed into something quite as different as the vampires of Dracula, Interview with the Vampire and Twilight. Within very few days of the incidents in the Serbian village Medvedja, people were writing about vampires in a way that carried the seed of modern vampire fiction.

To be continued...