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125th Anniversary, Dracula By Bram Stoker Published (26th May 1897) - Ep 8
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The author of Dracula, Bram Stoker, like many of his peers and subsequent literary generations took significant inspiration from the more gruesome details of our histories, surprisingly this extends beyond folkloric influence to a core of archaeological examples, broadly referred to as 'deviant burials'. From actual exemplar of these 'victims' comes our tendency towards monster-making. This episode is inspired by the 125th Anniversary of the publishing of the standard vampire-literature text, the one everyone has heard of... Dracula, on 26th May 1897. How close is this text to a historical reality of the 'Vampire', reality I should clarify in regard to actual belief resulting in pre- and post- mortem persecutions of real people... people who were often othered and scapegoated to sooth the real everyday realities of fear... varying from disease, political control, war, famine, rebellion against societal normalcy. Joining me this episode is Dr. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn a senior lecturer in Film Studies and American Studies at the Manchester Metropolitan University, the puzzles presented by cultural media are endlessly fascinating and Dr. Ni Fhlainn is an expert at decoding them!
NOTE: Keep your eyes (...and ears) peeled for an October Bonus Episode on Vampire Studies, the rest of this episode and reading recommendations for Spooky Season!
Music
Intro/Outro Music - Creative Commons - "Fantasia Fantasia" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Introduction and Membership Benefits
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, podcast fans. This is Chris Webster, founder of the APN, and I just want to thank you for downloading this episode. Please consider becoming a member of the APN, if you're not already, and helping us make more great shows and get them out to the world. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash members, or click the link in the show notes. On to the show. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Historical Themes in The Flipside Podcast
00:00:36
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Flipside. This is the podcast that brings to you important, or we think important, discussions about the past. Prompted by specific historical events. This month I'm joined by Dr. Sorcha Nie Frein of Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a senior lecturer there in film studies and American studies.
00:01:02
Speaker
and particularly specialises in gothic studies, horror cinema, and focuses on vampires in fiction, culture and film, and in more general monster studies. If you have a particular interest in this subject as I do, I cannot recommend one of her latest books enough. It's called Postmodern Vampires, Film Fiction and Popular Culture.
00:01:27
Speaker
was published by Paul Grove Macmillan in 2019 and it is utterly brilliant. So, what inspired this month's episode? Or should I say, not this month's episode, but May's episode, as we are trying to catch up with our schedule here.
Dracula's Link to History and Archaeology
00:01:47
Speaker
125 years ago, on the 26th of May 1897, the premier piece of vampire associated literature, of course I'm talking about Dracula by Bram Stoker, was published.
00:02:07
Speaker
Now, how on earth am I going to link this one with archaeology? Well, it's quite simple really. You see, like many authors at the time, Bram Stoker was enthralled by archaeology and history. So there's a lot of stuff to do with those topics within his own writing and within Dracula itself. But beyond that, all these folkloric figures that we tell such horror stories about
00:02:37
Speaker
Well, they all have at least some precedence, at least some form of presence within the archaeological record itself. But beware, there are no real witches, vampires or werewolves here, only victims of communal fear.
00:02:59
Speaker
Without further ado, a brilliant place to start in this discussion would probably be where Dracula and vampires in general tend to fit into our cultural register.
Vampires: Symbols of Death and Perfection?
00:03:15
Speaker
as characters and as monstrous figures, vampires and many other creatures of a similar type with variant names, fit in and have developed in terms of storytelling devices across many, many different cultures.
00:03:35
Speaker
But why is that and why do these folkloric figures have an actual tangible existence within our archaeological records and within our textual record as well?
00:03:52
Speaker
Well, I suppose the vampire has been with us as long as we've had human culture. The idea of coming back from the dead is something quite powerful within human culture and the one thing that I suppose we cannot do. So there's no greater sort of
00:04:07
Speaker
barometer of the human psyche, I suppose, in this idea that we'll have creatures that can come back from the dead. And when they do, there must be a terrible price to be paid. So the fact that vampires across the world cultures essentially come back and usually drink or consume abject things. I mean, most vampires, certainly in popular culture, consume blood. Some consume tears. Others consume sort of the sickness that, you know, the kind of bile and disgusting fluids we have in terms of sickness.
00:04:36
Speaker
depending on where you are from in the world and what culture you find yourself in, you'll find that some sort of vampires will have a process of coming back, but they'll always be something rather disgusting attached to it. So what we have here is a very powerful barometer in terms of the things that we find difficult to deal with, whether it's the disgusting nature of bodies or the idea that death is something that is final and finite.
00:05:05
Speaker
and can be quite traumatic to the psyche. What I find interesting about vampires though is that they have amazing ability to be adaptable across culture. So again, we don't necessarily have to think of the one that we tend to see most often in popular culture, that's not necessarily a universal experience for all cultures. So we find this wonderful variation from the oral tradition all the way through to
00:05:29
Speaker
publications such as Stokes Dracula or indeed even more recent and contemporary literary pursuits of the vampire. So we find that they are always open and amenable to change and adaptable and that's where the exciting part of Vampire Studies comes into play, their wonderful their versatility as Nina Arobach had famously said.
00:05:47
Speaker
we find that there's so much that they can represent and do and articulate and chart across the human experience. So for that reason alone, I think they're so important in our contemporary popular culture.
00:06:01
Speaker
There's something really intriguing in that contrast as well, isn't there? That these beings are universally hated and disgusting in a way because they take in that aspect of humanity in terms of actual fluids like blood and bile and tears
00:06:26
Speaker
But also, I mean, these are all associated with aspects of humanity which aren't particularly liked, I suppose. But apart from that, that they also at some points come to exemplify
00:06:47
Speaker
good human traits in terms of something to aim for and often actually when you read of these characters, they are something which personifies perfection, which is also quite off-putting in a way because that's something that we as humans are distant from.
00:07:10
Speaker
The passage of time has really influenced this as well in terms of archaeologically we're looking at actual human individuals who were persecuted for something often which was not their fault, for an opinion which was formed of them in life perhaps because of how they acted.
00:07:32
Speaker
or just a genuine human fear of disease, which we'll discuss more later. But then this early vampire, you're talking late, early to late medieval, and then some instances in the Renaissance, perhaps arguably. But then that develops into this literature, which is really Gothic in a way, but also sort of
00:08:01
Speaker
exaltifies the vampire as something cool. I just wondered what you thought about that transition and that change.
Social Class Reflections in Vampire Portrayals
00:08:16
Speaker
That's really interesting because obviously from an archaeological perspective and the burial practice perspective, you can see that there's this idea of keeping contagion away, this idea of keeping contagion buried, whether it's putting rocks in the mouth or burying them under large boulders or making sure that that threat is contained and it cannot rise again. And it's so interesting that it changes again across all cultures, whether it's this idea that you have to scatter rice around a burial ground in order for the vampire to be condemned to
00:08:44
Speaker
to count every grain or every grain of sand so that they're they're forced back into the ground. What I find interesting about it from sort of the more my limited knowledge of it in terms of burial practice in Europe is that this idea of staking the body to the ground as well I think that's fascinating because obviously that then transcends into the literature the practice of keeping bodies in the ground by any means necessary definitely comes through in the literature when we think about how we destroy vampires.
00:09:14
Speaker
In terms of the bodies of vampires though, I think it's quite interesting that certainly the earlier literary encapsulation of vampirism, it tended to be an impoverished body, was the body that became a vampire. It was something that was diseased or was subjected from the community in some capacity.
00:09:33
Speaker
So it was not an aristocratic pursuit, that is something that definitely comes across much later. I think we've got John Polidori really to thank for that with the vampire, because prior to that, vampirism was something that was, you were condemned with by virtue of the fact that you were poor and you probably were in some way disaffected or disenfranchised within your community. You may have had a child with red hair, you may have had
00:09:57
Speaker
a child born with teeth, that child itself could be brought up and be considered a vampire within the community, they were an anomaly in some respect, or you may develop a physical disease, which is something that deformed the body in some way. So the fact that we now think of it as something aristocratic, that we can have a lot of money, we can live forever, we can indulge any tastes and pursuits we wish,
00:10:20
Speaker
this is a very contemporary, pretty much the last 200 or so years, this is a very contemporary idea about vampirism, so it has gone from something terrifying to something in some respects I would argue almost aspirational.
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, the archaeological examples really highlight the idea of the impoverished vampire, whereas the literature really begins to support, I'm talking about the later literature here, the idea of vampires having this status within societies, this rich status.
00:10:55
Speaker
I'm wondering to what extent that could be an influence in terms of the archaeological examples of religion with obviously higher status individuals almost being able to hold off death or the aspects of death which are less appealing let's say because they have this higher influence with God they are in their minds more
00:11:25
Speaker
worthy of redemption. I wonder what kind of aspect that has, particularly with the belief in some societies that disease was a sign of religious degradation, particularly within the Christian world, that is.
Urban vs Rural: Justice in Vampire Myths
00:11:45
Speaker
But quite apart from that, there's also a really clear distinct difference geographically. A lot of these examples of archaeological so-called vampire burials are from distinctly rural communities, whereas the literature, the later literature tends to hold these vampires as within a setting of
00:12:13
Speaker
urban enlightenment almost, which is quite the change. What's particularly intriguing is that urban areas tend to have more established systems of justice and you then have this character who is against what human justice stands for in the value of life.
00:12:43
Speaker
One, I hypothesise almost that archaeological vampire or deviant burials are more common in rural areas because of this distance from justice centres. But I also wonder at the contrast that in literature that happens where the vampire myth is shifted to an urban centre.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yes, I agree. I mean, I think that you see that a lot in, again, Polidori's text is actually quite a good transition there because the traveling, the idea that, you know, these aristocratic men would travel, this would be part of their sort of schooling, their development into adulthood, the fact that they would travel then to these kind of cast out places or places that were not known to them, such as in Italy, Greece, places like this, you find always in the Gothic novel.
00:13:40
Speaker
um this is where they come across vampirism or they understand um the full effects of vampirism are discovered there so you do get that bridging from the folkloric the the outer parts of the world beyond maybe the influence of the empire for instance and then you get that kind of skirmish with the fantastic so it comes together quite beautifully in that text because by the time we get to later novels certainly by the time we hit Dracula in 1997 it is a novel of the city and it's about
00:14:06
Speaker
the encroachment of that outer folkloric world beyond the empire's reach and how that penetrates back into the city.
Deviant Burials and Religious Influences
00:14:17
Speaker
Archaeologically we often call vampire burials or burials associated in some sort of folkloric influence a deviant burial because it goes against the usual traditions of
00:14:31
Speaker
honouring the dead that communities of various cultures went through. The usual procedure is disrupted by this folkloric influence.
00:14:44
Speaker
So in terms of archaeological examples, the deviant burial itself, the vampire, that individual is a victim in our considering. But also there's often this connection with and this targeting by the vampire or this fear of targeting by the vampire within the community
00:15:09
Speaker
specifically on family members, and I wondered what your thoughts and your association was in terms of that, why it's often those that are closest to the deceased individual, the vampire, who are targeted for the continuation of this disease, this curse.
00:15:34
Speaker
That's interesting. It brings to mind Montague Summers, who wrote a document about a man who died and walked back from his own funeral. I remember that one being quite interesting. I think it was one of the few documented in Ireland, actually. And I thought that was quite interesting because it was something sort of desperately polite about it and at the exact same time, something quite horrific about walking back from your own funeral to visit your parent who has just buried you.
00:15:59
Speaker
so there was something quite both humorous and awful at the same time reading that but it does it does make you think that i suppose we see that all the time though in relation to contemporary popular culture where when you think of the person who's transformed what are they trying to do they're usually trying to reconnect with someone who is
00:16:17
Speaker
who has been left behind, someone who's no longer, you know, sort of affected by Vampirism. So they return back to those family members who have been left behind and they try and almost reconnect or reinstate themselves within a life that's now lost to them as a vampire. So they're trying to bridge that connection but they can't do it. So I imagine it comes from that. I suppose as well it's your connection to your former life and that's why you're going to try and
00:16:45
Speaker
reconnect to it. We see a lot that with vampire fiction though we do see people spying on their form of family members but maybe not connecting with them because they realize that the idea of them transcending death is too difficult or too abject or too horrifying. So I can imagine why they do it but at the same time a lot of the reconnection is often a point of contention or indeed narrative development within more recent vampire fiction and film.
00:17:13
Speaker
That concept of disconnection you mentioned from that family unit and from that community aspect that it seems perhaps contributed to the whole
00:17:28
Speaker
horrific concept of the vampire. But apart from that perhaps also that disruption, that example you gave, the disruption of the grieving process that that individual has been buried and then has returned and disrupted the natural process of grieving which was probably happening within that family unit.
Vampires and the Grieving Process
00:17:53
Speaker
That is also something which is twisted and horrific in its own way. And I think whether that was included or became a trope, so to speak, because of the emergence of
00:18:11
Speaker
a more open or emphasised and more communal grieving structure where this industry was built around the process of grieving. Maybe that had an influence.
00:18:28
Speaker
aspect of it is just incredibly disturbing and the hope that is then crushed because this individual returns but then this individual hasn't returned because they're still dead is soul crushing in a way and I can think of
00:18:44
Speaker
one example of a folkloric tale, which supposedly has some basis in fact, there was an individual supposedly called Petar Blagoฤeviฤ during the early 1700s in Serbia, and he died at age 62 of some form of disease.
00:19:07
Speaker
After his funeral, he purportedly returned to his home and asked his son for some food. His son refused this, obviously quite unnerved by the appearance of his dead father. And then that son was found dead the next day.
00:19:27
Speaker
I suppose from my own perspective, I would immediately think of two things said, and one thing is the son defying the father's request. And that is therefore, you know, there's punishment to be had for that anyway. And then the other part of it is that, again, it's replicating the idea of returning to the family's homestead and to be nourished by the family homestead, but not rather being nourished by food, he's nourished by ice and blood or something like that. So it's a sort of a darker twist on what we would expect from a sort of father and son sort of
00:19:57
Speaker
emotional relationship, I guess. So I can see why that happens. I also think as well that with those kinds of stories, they're often functioning as sort of parables in their own right. They're functioning as some sort of cultural truth within them. Whether the practice is real, it's more to do with the idea that there are punishments beyond heaven and earth that can come back and get you if you do not necessarily conform to what's expected of you. So that's what I would imagine with it myself.
00:20:26
Speaker
So this is a large part of many vampire mythologies, so I really feel I need to ask this. But what place does religion, particularly in terms of the European sphere and the American sphere, to an extent, the Christian religion have within vampire mythologies? I know that from an archaeological perspective,
00:20:53
Speaker
A lot of the early medieval deviant burials are direct retaliations against incursions by Christian ideologies on pagan practices. I think that's particularly the case with quite a few Polish examples, or at least that has been argued quite consistently in the literature.
00:21:17
Speaker
Where do you think the roots of this connection are? Is it in early medieval retaliation against Christianisation? Or is it more later in its detail?
00:21:34
Speaker
suppose it would in the sense that I can see it having one of those unifying factors as in like any kind of ideological movement it would have a unifying factor that therefore has to make enemies of those without outside of that cultural space so therefore you can imagine that things that cannot be explained as the will of God or as some sort of function of the church or its practices you can see that therefore then it is disregarded as pagan or as having some sort of I don't see satanic but you know some sort of
00:22:04
Speaker
malignant force.
Christianity's Impact on Vampire Myths
00:22:05
Speaker
So you can see that that would be one of the reasons why it would be a division of that. I mean, there are lots of sort of religious turmoil within that period, so you can imagine that within the Christian shorthand would actually prove to be quite valuable, because usually in Christian burial certainly that period anyway.
00:22:24
Speaker
the idea of the putrification of the body would also have been quite a difficult concept I suspect. So this idea of the body coming back but then coming back from death is again very problematic and again the idea around what happens to the body and how the body is treated in death, anything that deviates from those sort of practices as I suppose by any religious community that would then be seen as something very troubling and very
00:22:49
Speaker
in terms of the vampire it depends I mean there's so many sort of oral ancient traditions around burial practice that then come into play with vampirism obviously the idea of burying a body across at the crossroads so it wouldn't know which way to go back to the town again burying them underneath rocks or being staked or or yew trees things like that you would find these practices because it is this idea of it being somehow
00:23:17
Speaker
sacrilegious or somehow being able to kind of keep the good people, good practicing right honourable Christians away from this malevolent influence. Again the idea of not having a Christian burial again which comes with its own huge kind of history within the church and within sort of the Enlightenment period, you do find that there's this idea about vampires not being able to stand in consecrated ground or certainly not being buried in consecrated ground.
00:23:42
Speaker
So you do find that in the popular culture it tends to get simplified and it's simplified down with
00:23:49
Speaker
again numerous sort of texts do this but I mean the one that kind of really starts with the religious kind of I suppose influence coming through in terms of containing the vampire and understanding the vampire would of course be Dracula simply because Van Helsing who is not only very fluent on folklore and you know lots and lots of different cultural practices but he's also again knows his religion as well. He is both the scholar and the theologian of sorts you know and he certainly understands the idea of
00:24:18
Speaker
the vampire being able to violate laws that are considered far too serious to simply overlook. So there is something interesting about that because it combines that idea of reason and folklore, it brings together
00:24:35
Speaker
religious doctrine and the idea of understanding earlier practices or things that may not have been previously understood by science. So we have these wonderful ideas coming into play and since then we do find that the vampire tends to bring with him the idea of updates of modernity and updates of technology but a lot of the vampire hunters tend to stay within the realm of religion
00:25:01
Speaker
and the religious rules that they all know. And that's been parodied and played with all across the 20th century. But religion tends to still keep a foothold in the vampire world simply because it's an easy way of containing them. Now, as we get into the 21st century, that has bifurcated a bit. It has shifted
00:25:22
Speaker
Some vampires represent religious continuity and present religious ideas around morality and being able to control oneself and that kind of signification of very particular Protestant ethics, I would argue. Whereas other vampires completely ignore religion. Religion kind of dissipates or falls away. It does kind of depend on the text itself, though.
00:25:50
Speaker
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00:26:26
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:27:12
Speaker
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00:27:43
Speaker
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Mislabeling and Historical Contexts
00:27:47
Speaker
There are many problematic aspects when we're discussing deviant burials, in particular the fact that when as archaeologists we uncover these unusual burials there is a tendency in some
00:28:06
Speaker
sectors to immediately label these as associated with some folkloric aspect, whether that is vampire belief, witch belief, werewolf belief, all of these folkloric figures had their own fear crazes within Europe throughout the medieval and even into the Renaissance period.
00:28:30
Speaker
In reality however, some of these unusual aspects which happen in deviant burials can be easily explained away by societal norms or societal
00:28:45
Speaker
conditions. So even the justice system has this influence. I'm thinking about the association of decapitation burials with the deviant profile. Now, decapitation was actually a used justified punishment, which was included in law documents in the medieval period throughout the medieval period.
00:29:13
Speaker
to punish someone who directly went against societal norms. I can think of one example off the top of my head here now, which is Bishop John, who was a Christian who went to convert the pagan Slavs
00:29:32
Speaker
Now, his punishment for doing this, for going against accepted societal norms, was a decapitation burial. Even this practice of selective burial placement outside of consecrated ground, so for example at a crossroads, that's also a punishment within justice records, in this case sometimes for
00:30:03
Speaker
Thieves, sometimes for murderers, in general for people who by their own acts have removed themselves from acceptable society. Yeah, I mean the idea of the decapitation again, I mean you can see
00:30:26
Speaker
I mean it's such a barbaric practice obviously but this idea that it has to have been something really really contentious that has had to have taken place in order to deem this person must be buried without their skull intact. There is something quite
00:30:42
Speaker
quite violent about that and something that tells me that there's some real fear behind that practice, that there was something quite terrifying that they had done or were associated with or were accused of that makes them not only potent to potentially come back or have some sort of sway in the future, but also that they need to be permanently put down. So there's something, as I say, very powerful about that, but also very indicative of something indicative of a very frightened community.
00:31:11
Speaker
or indeed a community that is in some way under a very strong influence, whether it's religious practice or community leadership or something like that. It just tells me that you really want to keep them down if you're taking their head off.
Fear and Religious Influences in Burial Practices
00:31:25
Speaker
In terms of vampires,
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah, again, because I tend to work on it more from this more contemporary narrative analysis, you don't always see vampires losing their heads. It tends to be more sort of the symbolic staking. Occasionally you do get decapitation. That could be more to do with the popularity of its representation on screen, though.
00:31:45
Speaker
and special effects and all that. So it's interesting that we still return to ideas of decapitation because I'm thinking of the period in which you were talking about, you were also thinking about, you know, you're not too far away, a couple of hundred years away from things like the French Revolution, and then when you start to think about decapitation there, it becomes a completely political act as well.
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that quite often, certainly this is the case I think with deviant burials, there is this aspect of sacrifice to the community. This is them causing the final death of this
00:32:30
Speaker
person this aspect of their community which I mean certainly when you come to sort of more Christian times and communities who believe in resurrection on Judgment Day
00:32:47
Speaker
they're causing the final death of this individual by disrupting the body post-mortem. So there is this disruption to grieving processes and I wondered what your take on that was, whether that is still something which comes through in literature and such.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah and the idea of desecrating the body as well, I mean there is a desecration at work there and that is telling you something about you know the idea of the body post-death, it is something that is not seen in these instances as something that's representative of a religious whole but rather something that is corrupted and needs to be
00:33:35
Speaker
dealt with. So there is something definitely to that. Historically I've read around other vampires and vampire burial practices and it is always about the idea of it being somehow a dark shadow, not a religious view of completion of the body. The body is something whole or something religious or something sacred but rather something profane and must be contained and dangerous.
00:33:58
Speaker
And in its way, that fear, that trauma of having to deal with the body of a loved one post-mortem in this strange form, that does still exist in the literature. I'm thinking of Dracula because that's the clearest example that I know. But within that,
00:34:24
Speaker
It is almost made easier because although that trauma, that fear is there, this is clearly through personality changes and even through changes in the way these individuals act quite polar opposite wise in terms of how they were. They are very distinct and distant from who they were when they were human.
00:34:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of Lucy Westerner in particular. I mean, when she is killed, she is decapitated in the film anyway, quite spectacularly. She is killed and she is staked because once dead, sort of those appetites and those drives that come out of the person. So the things that keep us in check, if we're thinking of our Freud, and even though it's pre-Freud, with this idea that you're keeping ourselves in check, that we can resist certain urges and desires.
00:35:26
Speaker
Um, those things, those, those, those impediments are lifted. And I think once they're lifted, the vampire can be pure appetite or it can function on that idea of pure desire or desire without any kind of qualm. So we see this with, with Lucy when she's abducting children and she's described as the bloofer lady. Uh, and this is very powerful because it's, it's again, an image of maternity made monstrous in so far as she
00:35:53
Speaker
she's buried in her wedding gown so this idea of the dress becoming a shroud, the idea she'll never be a mother but so she kidnaps and steals other people's children. So again we see this sort of parable of you know not being righteous or not being performing within what one would expect of a woman of her stature. She is then punished twice over, she's punished not only by dying but also then by coming back and being sort of a horrific caricature of what she wanted in her life.
00:36:20
Speaker
So on the form of allegory now that we see this straight away, but in terms of thinking about vampirism and the proximity to vampirism, it is this idea of that corruption. Again, that idea of that corruption not only of the body, but of the soul. The idea that the personality is gone because the soul has gone. All that's left is this reanimated shell. So we see that quite explicitly, I think, in that novel.
00:36:47
Speaker
That's really interesting. On the scale of things, does this rest as a form of dehumanisation, or is it almost a hyperhumanisation where our worst traits are almost exaggerated in this process of making monsters?
00:37:07
Speaker
So I think that it's easier to kill something and to object it from a community or to get rid of it in any way if you dehumanise it. If you take away those things that identify as human or as having a soul or as being an emotional person or creature, I think that it's easier to destroy those things that we no longer recognise as being equal to ourselves.
00:37:30
Speaker
So there is definitely an element of dehumanisation at work because that's the only way that Van Helsing and the crew of Light can stake her. It's the, you know, I mean, they can't, they say, you know, oh my God, it was Lucy and it's like, it's no longer Lucy, it's now a monster, it's an it, essentially, in her place. So that helps in terms of doing the unspeakable. But also in terms of being proximate to vampires or the idea of why we would do this is that we need to think of the fact that
00:38:00
Speaker
Vampires, there is a frightening element too. I mean, can you imagine the idea of what we have currently with zombies, which is the idea that death is not the end in terms of work, in terms of being enslaved, in terms of having to feed into some consumerist appetite or serve some sort of consumerist end. There's something really awful about the idea of there being no relief beyond death as well. If death is supposed to
00:38:26
Speaker
reunite us with loved ones or bring ourselves to peace or whatever it might be, depending on the religion. The idea behind these kind of Gothic revenants, vampires and zombies in particular, is the idea that there is no rest, there is only unease, there is only a sense of internal longing and eternal suffering. And that, of course, comes back to ideas around religion and the ideas around controlling, I suppose, this idea of control within society that we have to have certain
00:38:52
Speaker
shared norms and rules in order for things to be safe and in order for us to be compliant as a community. So you can see a lot of these kind of beliefs come out of, in some cases, very practical things like you shouldn't be around dead bodies because they're putrefying and will make you ill and they're disease ridden.
Folklore and Societal Norms
00:39:10
Speaker
But at the same time, you can also see there's other sort of social norms around the idea of we need to believe in
00:39:15
Speaker
unified practices as a society or else we'll all go around murdering each other. So there is a sense and reason and order to a chaos, but how to reinforce that on an allegorical level is to tell scary stories about it. So this is why we tend to get these parables. And they're so potent, they still are adapted today. We still see it in film and television today.
00:39:38
Speaker
Honestly, that might be the scariest part of this, that sense of otherness has carried on and has been present right from the archaeological examples of deviant burials into folkloric practices and belief right into modern strands of literature.
00:40:01
Speaker
The fact that we as humans haven't changed all that much in the sense that we need almost a function, it would seem, that sense of otherness, that belief in someone else being different enough that persecution is justified
00:40:25
Speaker
almost. The fact that that has been extant throughout all of these examples is probably one of the most terrifying aspects of something like vampire belief, in my opinion.
00:40:42
Speaker
Absolutely. And again, it has a presence all the way back to our, again, religious communities, the idea of around the world, this idea that they are not of our tribe, they are another tribe, whichever tribe that may be. So this is how we function, this is how we function, this is how we survive. But as people, as humans, we like the idea of being involved in the community. We have that sense of we need to band together because our evolutionary survival depends on that.
00:41:09
Speaker
in terms of making sure that we have diversification within our community in terms of bloodlines and things like that, but also in terms of being able to bring something to the community, that we have value, that we have some sort of inherent value beyond
00:41:28
Speaker
the immediate sense of ourselves so we can see why this will happen on an evolutionary scale but in terms of being able to tell those stories but the other the other will they can't be part of us because then we won't be able to conquer or be in hard parts of the community if it's too large.
00:41:42
Speaker
So we have to have this idea that there are people out there who are contrary to us or are different from us. And in the Gothic, that works through the classic sort of things of deviant sexuality, deviant practices in terms of power, in terms of corruption or authority or beholden to a different religious community or a different religious idea. So we can see how as certain religious thinking has dominated certain geographical parts of the world,
00:42:09
Speaker
they will have very different practices that they are very staunchly protecting because it's their group identifier that keeps out the other and we could very well be the other in that construct. So you can see why anyone who's a stranger, anyone who's coming to town who is not known to you or has a different surname or has a different coloured hair or different coloured skin or different religion, whatever it might be, they are often cast as one to be suspicious of because you know straight away they are not part of the tribe.
00:42:36
Speaker
So it's going back to that real base primary thinking and then from there we build a lot of these Gothic stories and then Gothic stories it is always about the idea of someone who pushes it just that bit too far. You might think of them as normal or as part of your social set and then
00:42:52
Speaker
they push it too far and that's when you realise they've gone into a sort of degrading or terrible place which inevitably marks them as Gothic and as corrupted. So obviously we have all of these various types of other characters and all of them that I can think of off the top of my head are associated with folklore
00:43:14
Speaker
Further to that, all of them have got their own periods of being their golden age in terms of literature. Beyond that, all of them have their own distinct persecution crazes as they've been branded in medieval Renaissance Europe.
00:43:35
Speaker
So I'm thinking of why is there this different otherness? Why is there this distinct cast of characters that have been used to represent the other? So I'm thinking of everything from the witch persecution craze to obviously vampire belief
00:43:57
Speaker
But even within Germany, for example, and Poland as well, there was this craze in terms of the shape shifter, this werewolf character, which is more animalistic in most of its descriptions than human.
00:44:20
Speaker
Well, that's a big question. So with the otherness element, I suppose the idea is that, you know, as much as we think of vampires or or werewolves or zombies or whatever, I mean, some are more fixed than others, but they do all evolve, they do all change. They have to stay relevant to the culture in which they're produced, otherwise they fall away. And this is why we have
00:44:38
Speaker
certain tropes and conventions that have stayed with us through human culture and others that we have lost to history or time because they no longer had purchase. So we find that with vampires in particular, they do evolve and change depending on who's telling the story, what point of view is being put forward, and with that comes a set of ideas about who is the other, who is cast off as the other in that particular situation.
00:45:01
Speaker
And that, of course, evolves too, because we as human culture, we find something to resolve or have a problem with or upend or debate or reject from our earlier generations, the previous generations that come before us. There were norms that were constantly turning.
00:45:18
Speaker
turning over and changing.
Dracula's Evolution and Modern Issues
00:45:20
Speaker
So as a result, not only what is gothic can change in terms of the evolution of it, but also what is the other? What is the actual person who may be trying to control the situation? What are they all about as well? That is equally relevant. A really good example of this.
00:45:36
Speaker
is if you look at the trajectory of a character like Dracula who never speaks in the original novel, whose point of view is only ever really represented through what other people say about him. And then when we get to the end of the 20th century we see that Dracula and other vampires, because there's a kind of a huge cast of vampires by the end of the 20th century, they all get to tell their own stories.
00:46:00
Speaker
But the people who you have to really worry about in those stories in the late 20th century are the people who hunt vampires. Why do they hunt them? What's their deal? Because they usually tend to be more conservative, more traditional. Vampires tend to be cast as people who actually just want to live their lives differently.
00:46:16
Speaker
And whether you want to read that as an LGBTQI inflected story, whether you want to read that as the idea of multiculturalism or the end of sort of fervent religious dogmatism, whatever way you want to read it, it's the idea of the vampire being something different and functioning and very, very
00:46:34
Speaker
beautiful capacity, I would argue, outside of traditional religious spheres or traditional social mores. So we have the vampire evolution going from something that needs to be killed because we're so worried about it in culture to something that we want to emulate because we're so stifled by the conservative culture in which we live. So they do this kind of amazing sort of 180 in the process. And this this is, I think, a really interesting thing because, again, with zombies, the evolution of the zombie story from Haiti and how that changes
00:47:04
Speaker
We see that going from being obviously an incredibly strong metaphor for slavery and looking at plantation life in the Haitian plantations, the sugar plantations. But we also see then that gets transformed in the American imaginary into something about consumerism and consumption without end. And that this idea that the planet and we
00:47:24
Speaker
are just going to die in service to a hunger that we can never fully satiate. So there's something horrifying in that, but it just updates the story. So these potent metaphors that stay with us, they're beautiful in their simplicity because we can latch them on to any particular period and they will still be legible, will still understand what they're saying.
00:47:48
Speaker
So in a really simplified sense then, the way that we create these characters is just as in, I'm not belittling the process because it's quite fascinating really, but it's a mechanism for our own understanding of the world that surrounds us.
00:48:12
Speaker
Yes, and also the understanding of the horror of our place in the world, depending on how we identify or with whom we find ourselves aligned. Yeah. When you really think about it, what better figure is there to use than a so-called monster that we ourselves have created from folkloric aspects? Exactly.
00:48:41
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And again, what is monstrous in one generation is profoundly moving or powerful or empowering in the next. So that's the wonder of it. It always changes and flexes and adapts around us. So that's what makes teratology, the idea of studying monstrous, just so profoundly important because it always tells you it's like the best thing in the world in terms of
00:49:06
Speaker
understanding where you are in this particular moment, who is being vilified and why and what they say about each other. It decodes everything from social history to politics to ancient burial practice. It gives us everything.
00:49:20
Speaker
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00:49:50
Speaker
Another interesting facet of the archaeological deviant burial side of things in terms of vampire belief is that it has this incredible association with the understanding or lack of understanding within these communities of the decomposition process.
00:50:15
Speaker
So that what you end up with is this sort of fear of an entirely natural process and a fear of almost the natural environments associated with mortuary culture and death itself.
Decomposition and Historical Misinterpretations
00:50:30
Speaker
An incredibly literal but also slightly terrifying example of this is that it is a natural process
00:50:39
Speaker
for blood to appear around the mouth during the decomposition process. This is just something which happens in some cases, but that was taken by some as evidence of vampirism in medieval cases and cases in the Renaissance as well, even into a case in America in the late 1800s.
00:51:10
Speaker
This is an aspect which is entirely natural but was taken by some as confirmation of folkloric belief and practice. The general lack of observation and intentional distance from the process of dying and the state of death meant that there was little to no knowledge of these natural processes and reactions.
00:51:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I think this idea as well that, you know, scientific advancement and understanding disease, understanding blood, understanding circulation and all of that, and how that then leads us to the understanding we have of something like the human body today, where we can map the genome and things like that. You just realize that, you know, the last
00:52:03
Speaker
300 years has advanced us in millennia in terms of our understanding of the human body and what we know of it, whether we believe in anything or not, it's a different principle of exploration, of life. So I think that's profound, because when I think of prior to that, burial practice was largely, I imagine,
00:52:25
Speaker
conceived of in terms of whether you were within certain religious group or community or tribe or not and if you were not then there was a huge risk for them to have you amongst them so therefore you had to kind of consider casting them out. Whereas nowadays we know that things like that now are based on preference of religion or indeed belonging to certain groups but just as equally people don't have to. It's much much more plural in that sense.
00:52:52
Speaker
Yeah, so interestingly, some of the earlier accounts of vampire-like creatures seem to represent these folkloric characters as being vectors almost for disease. Which in a way, weirdly gets this correct as corpses.
00:53:19
Speaker
are vectors for disease if not disposed of in the correct way. Now the disconnection happens in terms of what is the correct way to dispose of a corpse. There's a bit of a difference in terms of proper disposal of like burial or cremation away from a settlement
00:53:44
Speaker
and decapitating a corpse there's a bit of a difference there but that is an interesting aspect of this belief that in a way they did get this correct, corpses are a vector for disease but not because they are vampiric but because that is an environment in which bacteria and
00:54:14
Speaker
reproduce exponentially. Yeah. Yeah, like we were saying before, when they come back, they come back to the loved ones who are left behind or whatever, when they come back, they bring within the disease of the grave, you know, that sense of it being coming back to claim more people, you know, it's not just about the person who's passed on, but the person they're going to take with them the second time around. So there is something quite
00:54:39
Speaker
Again, I'm quite profound that you can understand why that will come from this belief in the sense that, you know, if you have a mysterious illness that kills someone in a family and then the concept of the corpse coming back, that spreads the disease further, whatever that might be, whether it's cholera or whatever else, or black death. So you can understand that there's a hygiene process, not just of the spirit, but of the body.
00:55:03
Speaker
that is about removing the body from the kind of places that we share in our community. Not to not revere the dead but rather just to keep the dead completely separate because they are, you know, we don't understand it. And this is, I mean, we've just come out of quarantine so we understand this all quite well at this point.
00:55:27
Speaker
Right, so this is a big question that we could feasibly do an entire series on, but I just wondered what your insight would be in regard to why there are specific persecution crazes for specific folkloric figures
00:55:44
Speaker
in specific places at specific times, so whether it is just societal reactions to socio-political changes or religious changes or whether there's some other psychological reason maybe that we have to focus our efforts in terms of our hatred and othering on specific
00:56:14
Speaker
folkloric aspects at specific contexts in time? Well I'm thinking of it more in relation to witchcraft if I'm perfectly honest but I mean I do understand what you mean about vampires and people being accused of that but in in witchcraft it can't usually
00:56:38
Speaker
is around this idea of, again, a very basic idea, but a very effective one, which is reclaiming authority over people who no longer wish to be ruled, whether it's women not being wished to be ruled by
00:56:51
Speaker
the church or by various sort of institutions, whether those are local or larger than that. This idea that, you know, suspicion falling on them because it's very convenient then to find scapegoats on that way that can spread. I mean, I'm thinking in particular of the witchcraft trials up in Scotland where there were thousands of women murdered.
00:57:14
Speaker
And we see a much, much larger than anything we saw in Salem or anything like that. And again, it is about this idea of there's something within the community that needs to be contained. That could be immorality, it could be questioning an authority, it could be reasserting authority if it's
Folkloric Persecutions and Marginalization
00:57:30
Speaker
going under a particular sort of
00:57:33
Speaker
renewal a fervor, whether it's again religion or having to be ruled by a particular person and reasserting that you tend to find, you got to find a scapegoat really quickly and in doing that it's much easier historically to pinpoint women as people who need to be made examples of and it's very very easy, how do you disprove someone's a witch? It's incredibly difficult, especially when
00:57:57
Speaker
know, especially in the case of, you know, drowning and things like that, where you prove you're not a witch by dying. So it's kind of the worst possible outcome, no matter which way it's proved. So I think that that's why we have that level of persecution. It can often be around sociopolitical changes and termwiles, people wanting to reassert their cultural influence or their importance, or indeed just to kind of bring
00:58:22
Speaker
a new fervor or a new sense of authority to a group of people who they may deem to be undisciplined or in need of control or indeed wanting something like their land or their money, something like that. It usually tends to come down to incredibly base urges like greed or indeed control power, that kind of thing, and deemed to be easier to do to women because there'd be less consequences.
00:58:54
Speaker
That narrative does fit in terms of witchcraft belief and I think to some extent does fit in terms of vampire deviant burials as well. Although in terms of victim profiles in deviant burials there are more instances of men being associated with a vampire belief than women and there is some association potentially with ritual killing, sometimes of
00:59:24
Speaker
slaves or individuals or groups who are clearly subjugated, individuals or groups or collectives who are othered because of aspects like religion or even physical flaws. Also maybe because these aspects of society are more often
00:59:48
Speaker
associated with poverty and therefore are more likely to encounter disease. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't surprise me that it's more male in the sense that there's more
01:00:06
Speaker
I would imagine if you had some sort of crimes in which people were accused of committing terrible crimes, I would imagine that it would more likely be considered if it was considered a male crime with some kind of more associated with vampirism simply because there's more agency considered attached to vampirism, or indeed this idea of the power, the struggle beyond the grave, the physicality of that.
01:00:29
Speaker
The few examples that I know of women in so-called deviant burials, they are certainly more passively amended, their burials are more passively amended in terms of being different from your average mortuary practice. So they are buried prone, so facing down or with a brick in their mouth, whereas the
01:00:58
Speaker
acts against males in this deviant burial contacts are often more extreme so they are decapitated or they have a large stone laid on top of them to stop them rising from the grave.
01:01:18
Speaker
It's interesting. It makes me think of things like, you know, again, going back to the kind of virility or the idea of, you know, taking the head off. Is this something, is something symbolic in that for sure? Where in terms of the women, again, putting them prone, it does again give you this idea of a, certainly a suggestion of sociopolitical dominance, you know, over women. It does, it does certainly give that suggestion even in death, you know.
01:01:46
Speaker
You know people have been trying to define a spectrum of deviant burial identifiers for quite a while. Personally I'm not sure if that's even a possibility in terms of trying to develop one of those because you end up
01:02:08
Speaker
when you research this with some very strange outliers and examples. I mean I'm thinking of one example in particular which would be good to get your insight on in terms of what you think this reflects in potentially in vampire mythologies. But there is a deviant burial of a male in his late 40s. It's an early medieval example and he's been decapitated
01:02:38
Speaker
his skull has been placed on his feet and the area in which his skull would normally be has been filled in almost with a small pile of stones. Now even for deviant burials this example is quite strange so any insight you have would be incredibly interesting.
01:03:07
Speaker
There is something, obviously, there is something deeply disrespectful going on here. There's something disrespectful in terms of the desecration of the body, but also at the same time the idea of the feet and the head. I think there's something symbolic going on there.
01:03:27
Speaker
Oh, maybe, again, maybe, maybe this is a question of, as you were saying with, with decapitation, taking the head off and just dumping it in and good enough for him, we'll put it on his feet, you know, and there's no more thought than that going on with it. But if it is really unusual, I can appreciate why people will be looking at it. You know, if he's isolated, I assume he, if the body is isolated from everyone else, is in the community or indeed there's nobody around there, then tells me that he, this person was someone to be afraid of.
01:03:53
Speaker
in the community's view, keep them away. Whether this was someone who was hoping to join the community and was not permitted to, or was someone who was feared as a stranger, or someone who had passed a lens, but it was definitely someone who was kept away. So clearly, these individuals in deviant burials are victims in their own right. They're victims of post-mortem distress almost.
Monsters as Symbols of Othering
01:04:21
Speaker
and of disrespect and otherness. So in literature, is that ever the case? Are the monsters we create ever or so portrayed as victims? Victims of our own imagination and our own almost sadism, I suppose, in that we often, in these
01:04:50
Speaker
when we create a villain, almost go too far to other them from humanity, to make them seem as distinct from who we have the potential of becoming as possible. When we as authors, as thinkers, create our monsters, are we also creating
01:05:18
Speaker
our own victims. Oh yeah, absolutely. It depends on the monster. I mean, I need to say this just because the variety is so enormous.
01:05:30
Speaker
you know, typically, and especially in postmodernism, when we kind of look back to find the sort of human remains or the human trace of that person, or we discovered their, their own ability to tell their own story, we often find they aren't innocent, who have been wronged, transformed against their will usually, have been treated appallingly or have come back or in a hell bent for revenge.
01:05:55
Speaker
this is why we tend to I mean again those witchcraft stories are usually because these women were persecuted and murdered for various sort of reasons that were all abhorrent so we do find that you know therefore we find that there are innocents who are victimized and then
01:06:13
Speaker
they are either transformed beyond any kind of meaningful recovery or they are hell-bent on revenge of some kind. There's some terrible transgression that they must have their revenge for. So yeah, we usually find that. It's more unusual to find someone who's just evil for the sake of it because even in narrative terms that's not terribly interesting.
01:06:36
Speaker
you know, if you're just evil because then, you know, we did this very little room for you to develop as a character. There are examples but they usually tend to be fleshed out in sequels and things like that and be made sort of more sympathetic or indeed empathic. But I think that we want to understand why. This is such a human compulsion to understand why do they turn out the way they did and this is where those monsters and those evolutions of those stories really take flight because
01:07:05
Speaker
we want to know why are modern versions of Dracula, why are they obsessed with telling this story before he becomes Dracula? I would argue it's more interesting after he becomes Dracula, but it is something that is all about his war with God or his war with communities or zealotry or religion or dogma. This is the interesting thing about Dracula. He is unstable and so powerful in that instability, which terrifies
01:07:33
Speaker
the people who hunt them down with women is the idea of not having to obey any kind of societal rules or indeed this idea that the rule of men is not the absolute rule, that there is a different way forward. All of these monsters are humanised because that way we can understand that
01:07:52
Speaker
not one of us represents the ideal of our community. We're all different. We have all got flaws. We have all got, you know, bigotries and prejudices and beliefs that, you know, are contrary to other people's. So therefore we need to think of monstrosity as something that is diverse and varied and profound. The more and more we communicate with each other, the more we are interlinked in the 21st century, though, the more our monsties are also becoming
01:08:21
Speaker
increasingly sort of legible or knowable to us and we are now bringing in new monsters or new understandings of monstrosity in order to deal with the contemporary means we feel. So there are ways that we read these classic stories and then they will be updated accordingly. They update every 20-30 years at least because the world moves very quickly now.
01:08:43
Speaker
Humans have an extensive capacity to fear. That has been a fact throughout the ages, no matter what period you're interested in or study or research. A major aspect of this capacity to fear has always been our creation of coping mechanisms.
Reclaiming Monsters in Literature
01:09:07
Speaker
This often has resulted in the othering of whole entire groups of people or sometimes just individuals within our communities. When something goes wrong, we look for someone to blame. When disease comes to our towns, we used to look to minority groups and those who were just a bit too different.
01:09:35
Speaker
This resulted in the creation within our minds of monsters, but in reality as we recognise today, these so-called deviant burials are burials of victims of the human capacity to fear. Beyond this, in recent times, within literature we have reclaimed those monsters that we used to create.
01:09:58
Speaker
We've made them understandable. We've made them heroes of the different in a way. Because now it's something to be celebrated, our differences, not something that we allow, hopefully, to set each other apart. Now our vampires are so often our heroes.
01:10:27
Speaker
they're enlightened individuals that we actively employ sometimes to deny tradition, to fight the barriers placed on us politically, socially, culturally,
01:10:42
Speaker
At some point there was a switch and now our monsters aren't scary anymore. Instead there's been a recognition that perhaps we have always been the monsters and that the scariest things to be found are the things that we can find within ourselves. This episode was a wonder to record and we cannot thank our guest enough
01:11:08
Speaker
In an attempt to keep to a more timely schedule, I have had to cut some content out, but that will be available as a bonus episode in October, because I think you'll find that this topic is uniquely fitting for spooky season.
01:11:28
Speaker
In that bonus content, there'll be more discussion about vampire studies and deviant burials, but there'll also be some recommendations from our guests and others as to where to start if you feel like you'd quite like to study vampires and deviant burials and all that good stuff. Recommended spooky season listening if you will. You can find this podcast every month on APN.
01:11:56
Speaker
and wherever else you may listen we're pretty much everywhere now but sadly that's it for this month so stay safe have fun and i'll see you on the flip side guys
01:12:40
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:13:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this podcast. Please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcasting app. You can also consider becoming a member so we can keep content like this free and available to all. Check out pricing and info at arcpodnet.com slash members. Thanks again and have a great day.