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The rise of the vampire: How diseases may have led to Dracula

It has its roots in a surprising place.


The vampire is a familiar image in today’s pop culture, and one that takes many forms: from Alucard, the dashing spawn of Dracula in the PlayStation game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; to Edward, the romantic, idealistic lover in the Twilight series.

In many respects, the vampire of today is far removed from its roots in Eastern European folklore. As a professor of Slavic studies who has taught a course on vampires called “Dracula” for more than a decade, I’m always fascinated by the vampire’s popularity, considering its origins — as a demonic creature strongly associated with the disease.

Explaining the unknown — The first known reference to vampires appeared in written form in Old Russian in A.D. 1047, soon after Orthodox Christianity moved into Eastern Europe. The term for a vampire was “upper,” which has uncertain origins.

Still, its possible literal meaning was “the thing at the feast of sacrifice,” referring to a potentially dangerous spiritual entity that people believed could appear at rituals for the dead. It was a euphemism used to avoid speaking the creature’s name — and unfortunately, historians may never learn its real name, or even when beliefs about it surfaced.

The vampire served a function similar to that of many other demonic creatures in folklore around the world: They were blamed for a variety of problems, but particularly disease, at a time when knowledge of bacteria and viruses did not exist.

Vampires have become a common feature of modern pop culture.GoodLifeStudio/E+/Getty Images

Scholars have put forth several theories about various diseases’ connections to vampires. No one condition likely provides a simple, “pure” origin for vampire myths, since beliefs about vampires have changed over time.

But two, in particular, show solid links. One is rabies, whose name comes from a Latin term for “madness.” It’s one of the oldest recognized diseases globally, transmissible from animals to humans, and primarily spread through biting — an apparent reference to a classic vampire trait.

There are other curious connections. One main symptom of the disease is hydrophobia, a fear of water. Painful muscle contractions in the esophagus lead rabies victims to avoid eating and drinking or even swallowing their saliva, which eventually causes “foaming at the mouth.”

In some folklore, vampires cannot cross running water without being carried or assisted somehow, as an extension of this symptom. Furthermore, rabies can lead to a fear of light, altered sleep patterns, and increased aggression, elements of how vampires are described in various folktales.

The second disease is pellagra, caused by a dietary deficiency of niacin (vitamin B3) or the amino acid tryptophan. Often, pellagra is brought on by diets high in corn products and alcohol. After Europeans landed in the Americas, they transported corn back to Europe. But they ignored a crucial step in preparing corn: washing it, often using lime – a process called “nixtamalization” that can reduce the risk of pellagra.

Pellagra causes the classic “4 D’s”: dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death. Some sufferers also experience high sensitivity to sunlight — described in some depictions of vampires — which leads to corpselike skin.

Social scare — Multiple diseases show connections to folklore about vampires, but they can’t necessarily explain how the myths began. Pellagra, for example, did not exist in Eastern Europe until the 18th century, centuries after vampire beliefs had initially emerged.

However, pellagra and rabies are essential because they were epidemics during a critical period in vampire history. During the so-called Great Vampire Epidemic, from roughly 1725 to 1755, vampire myths “went viral” across the continent.

As the disease spread in Eastern Europe, supernatural causes were often blamed, and vampire hysteria spread. Many people believed that vampires were the “undead” — people who lived on somehow after death — and that the vampire could be stopped by attacking its corpse. They carried out “vampire burials,” which could involve putting a stake through the corpse, covering the body in garlic, and a variety of other traditions that had been present in Slavic folklore for centuries.

Meanwhile, Austrian and German soldiers fighting the Ottomans in the region witnessed this mass desecration of graves and returned home to Western Europe with stories of the vampire.

But why did so much vampire hysteria spring up in the first place? The disease was a primary culprit, but a sort of “perfect storm” existed in Eastern Europe. The era of the Great Vampire Epidemic was not just a period of disease but one of political and religious upheaval.

During the 18th century, Eastern Europe faced pressure from within and without as domestic and foreign powers exercised control over the region, with local cultures often suppressed. Serbia, for example, was struggling between the Hapsburg Monarchy in Central Europe and the Ottomans. Poland was increasingly under foreign powers, Bulgaria was under Ottoman rule, and Russia was undergoing dramatic cultural change due to the policies of Czar Peter the Great.

This is somewhat analogous to today, as the world contends with the Covid-19 pandemic amid political change and uncertainty. Perceived societal breakdown, whether real or imagined, can lead to dramatic responses in society.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Stanley Stepanic at the University of Virginia. Read the original article here.