|
The Vampire was another of the strange imaginings of our forefathers. It was thought that men and women sometimes returned, body and soul, from the other world after their death, and wandered about the earth doing all kinds of mischief to the living, one of their favourite pursuits being to suck the blood of those who were asleep, and these became Nampyres in turn. The superstition took deepest hold i z Eastern Europe, and is still an article of firm faith in Hungary and Servia. One reads ghastly stories of men unconsciously entertaining and sheltering vampires and perishing miserably, of lonely travellers pining suddenly away, of the bodies of the dead being disinterred and the corpse found with the tell-tale stains of blood around its mouth, and the
alike ; and we can easily see how such beliefs as this, or the wehr-wolf or loup-garou of the Germans and French, or the ghoul of the Arabs and Persians, would have a terrible effect on the minds of the superstitious. The vampire was a terror of the night, since the corpse then, after lying in the stillness of the grave throughout the day, awoke to a fearful vitality. The forms it assumed were not always human, but were believed to be at times those of the dog, frog, toad, cat, flea, spider, and many other innocent creatures. Hence the contemptuous expression one sometimes hears used to deride a needless anxiety, "a mere flea-bite," could have had no counter-part in medixval days, for the anxiety such a misadventure might create would be of the most alarming and harassing description. In old books one finds the most circumstantial details as to how to detect when one has been bitten, or to prevent further mischief. To this end the grave of the suspected vampire was opened during daylight when his powers of evil were quiescent, the corpse was decapitated and the head buried elsewhere, a stake was driven through the body, and many other elaborate and horrible precautions were taken to pre-vent a recurrence of the nightly resurrection. On the whole, we may well congratulate ourselves that we do not live in " the good old times." Even now in country districts and amongst the uneducated one comes across such striking instances of superstitious belief and thraldom as suffice to enable us to faintly realise what it must have been when all alike were enwrapped in a dreadful bondage to unseen powers of evil far more intense than is now possible even to the few.
The vampire bat, a native of South America, is so called from its blood-sucking propensities. It is the legend of the vampire that has given the name to the bat, not the habits of the bat that originated the fable of the vampire, for at the time that these legends of the destroyer were articles of faith in Europe, the American animal was quite unknown. The natural tendency towards exaggeration surrounded the vampire bat with a mysterious horror, and having once gained its name of ill-omen, it became easy to rear upon it a superstructure , of morbid fancy. The researches on the spot of Waterton, Darwin, and other reliable authorities show that the name is not altogether ill bestowed, as both Europeans and natives suffer severely from its attacks during the night, and the horses and cattle that are out in the pastures frequently return in the morning with their flanks covered with blood. |