The Vampire in Europe: A Critical Edition

By John Edgar Browning

THE VAMPIRE, His Kith and Kin examined the reasons for the old belief in Vampirism, its growth and dissemination in many lands, and its crystallization into a permanent and determinate legend. This new volume, The Vampire in Europe, uniform with the other, deals with the subject from a historical point of view and presents the evidence which gave rise to the theories. This evidence, drawn from little-known authors, musty chronicles, and the obscurer occultists, is in many cases derived from official sources, civil and ecclesiastical. The first chapter treats of Vampirism in ancient Greece and Rome. Accounts of the extraordinary outbreaks of Vampirism in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been gathered from Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Newburgh. Particular attention is paid to the alleged irritation which gave rise to so much literature in the early eighteenth century, while the curious situation in modern Greece is fully discussed.Included in this critical edition are the authoritative text, rare contextual and source materials, illustrations, criticism, contemporary reviews, and Greek and Latin translations. A biographical note is also included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John R. Mabry
• Release date: Aug 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944769864

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The Vampire in Europe

— A Critical Edition —

Apocryphile Press

1700 Shattuck Ave #81

Berkeley, CA 94709

www.apocryphile.org

First published in 1929 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

Apocryphile Press Edition, 2014

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 9781940671451

eISBN 978-1-944769-85-7 (Kindle)

eISBN 978-1-944769-86-4 (ePub)

Ebook version 1

"Foreword" Copyright © 2014 by Katherine Ramsland

"New Introduction" Copyright © 2014 by Rosemary Ellen Guiley

"Prologue: Montague Summers and the Vampire Casebook" Copyright © 2014 by Gerard P. O’Sullivan

"Afterword" Copyright © 2014 by Carol A. Senf

"Appendix A. Greek and Latin Translations" Copyright © 2014 by Grace de Majewski

"Editor’s Preface, Appendix C. The Real Vampire Community: A Concise History, & Appendix E. Vampires of the Crescent City: A Case Study" © 2014 by John Edgar Browning

Other materials are the copyright of their respective owners.

All rights reserved. No part of the front or back matter may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Frontispiece: Montague Summers, portrait by Vaughan & Freeman. From Essays in Petto (London: Fortune Press, 1928) by Montague Summers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Katherine Ramsland

Editor’s Preface

New Introduction

Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Prologue: Montague Summers and the Vampire Casebook

Gerard P. O’Sullivan

THE VAMPIRE IN EUROPE (1929):

The Unabridged Text in Facsimile

Montague Summers

Author’s Introduction

I. The Vampire in Greece and Rome of Old.

II. The Vampire in England and Ireland, and Some Latin Lands.

III. Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia.

IV. Modern Greece.

V. Russia, Roumania, and Bulgaria.

Index

Afterword

Carol A. Senf

Appendix A. Greek and Latin Translations

Grace de Majewski

Appendix B. Reviews, Reactions, Ads, and Notices

Appendix C. The Real Vampire Community: A Concise History

Appendix D. On Vampirism and Energy Work

Appendix E. Vampires of the Crescent City: A Case Study

About the Contributors

FOREWORD

Katherine Ramsland

It starts with a quickening. In one form or another, you encounter the vampire, and it changes you. It compels. You can probably recall the first vampire story you read or film you saw. For me, it was Bela Lugosi’s sexy-creepy portrayal of Dracula, which sent me right to Bram Stoker’s complex nineteenth-century novel. Others have quickened on Lestat, Saint Germain, or even a figure from folklore. These days, it’s more likely to be a Twilight character. Once exposed to this charismatic creature, whether repulsed or attracted, you crave more. So you explore. You become a vampire hunter of sorts. You seek greater nuance, so you start digging around in the literature. If you dig deep, you’ll discover the murky but eye-opening work of Montague Summers.

A real life Van Helsing (sans the penchant for destroying vampires), Summers was a folklorist with an insatiable appetite for the occult, a driving curiosity, and enough energy to collect a profusion of dark tales from many cultures and historical periods. He published his groundbreaking book The Vampire in Europe in 1929 one year after publishing The Vampire, His Kith and Kin. I applaud Summers for traveling widely during an era of limited communication and difficult conditions. I’ve seen critics deride his credentials and gullibility, but, really, who cares? Summers’s accomplishment, for vampire lovers, is without equal. He tapped his education and considerable resources to pull together disparate records, stories, and belief systems that collectively provide an intimate, multi-faceted portrait of the vampire. In the process, he inspired many more forms of vampire stories.

I have to admit feeling a kinship with Summers, as I possess a similar pervestigative passion. A decade ago, I delved into the vampire subculture, seeking data about the various ways that people absorbed, experienced, and expressed the vampire. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know, especially as I discovered how culture itself influenced the manifestations. Like Summers, I heard tales about the real ones from insistent believers, and I quickly learned that one acquires more information with an open attitude than with a skeptical stance. There’s a lot to be said for just riding with the story. As an immersion researcher, I learned to blend into the field and let it be what it is rather than boxing it inside my personal preconditions. I suspect that Summers did, too. If we, as readers, similarly allow Summers to be what he is, the reading proves to be quite fascinating.

In this second rambling book on vampires, Summers describes numerous accounts of vampirism on the European continent. Most he draws from written records, but he also seems to have visited several places, including Eastern Europe, where people still feared a vampire’s visitation. Throughout the shadowy world of ghosts and demons, Summers wrote, there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with such fearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nor demon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both. We can imagine how delighted Summers felt whenever he met someone who was willing to show him evidence of supernatural realities. I envision him standing in some lumpy cemetery, rehearsing in his head an intense narrative only just related to him about a vampire exhumation or ritual, so he could later transcribe it.

Summers gained a perspective that arises from both breadth and depth of knowledge. Besides his vampire treatises, he also tackled ghosts, demons, witches, and werewolves. He even understood psychic sponges, who today are referred to as psi vampyres. Seemingly, he actually believed in the existence of supernatural creatures, an attitude that only enhanced the aura of awe and wonder that he injected into his writing. (Reportedly, he liked to encourage people to view him as sinister.) Yet at times, Summers erased the magic by exposing the diverse ways that different cultures had stretched the ever-elastic vampire into their own image. These narratives support a psycho-sociological interpretation over a reality of vampiric trespass. Nevertheless, Summers ably demonstrated what a human appeal the vampire has had. People everywhere, and from as far back as we can find, have been fascinated with this thing that thrives on fatal intimacy.

Summers lifted the veil of that haunted border we maintain between ourselves and our secrets, so we who love vampires are indebted to him. As he said himself, Consciously or unconsciously it is realized that the vampire tradition contains far more truth than the ordinary individual cares to appreciate and acknowledge. Summers showed that the vampire tale was not just a filler for ignorance; it was also about the imaginative expression of our inner depths. It still is.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Montague Summers advocates, in the introduction to his translation of Ludovico Maria Sinistrari’s Demoniality (Fortune Press, 1927), that it is far better to believe too much than too little.¹ Summers observes this sentiment quite literally in his two seminal treatises on vampirism published not two years after Sinistrari’s text. The unfortunate result, however, of Summers’s apparent belief in the supernatural vampire, together with the somewhat incohesive organizational schemata and extensive untranslated Greek and Latin passages he employs, has been for many reason enough to forget, and thereby render obsolete, Summers’s work on the iconographic vampire. A literary demise such as this would likely have seemed to Summers not only cruel but antithetical to his endeavor to chronicle the dark traditions of the vampire before it becomes lost amid the ages of a dateless antiquity. Before discounting all together Summers’s idiosyncratic and, at times, cryptic writings, I find it instructive to turn to a respected biographer of Summers’s, Joseph Jerome. Jerome notes in Montague Summers: A Memoir (1965) that a former pupil of Summers from his teaching days at Hertford in 1911 had remarked previously that Summers was a good teacher for anyone who wanted to be taught.² It follows then, given this insightful anecdote, that Summers likely patterned his writings on vampirism after his own lecturing style in the classroom. This is to say the usefulness of Summers’s works on vampirism comes only after no small amount of effort and diligence on the part of readers. Effort, then, for Summers, surely equaled gain.

In the end, an important question arises: What does Vampire Studies owe to Summers? Unfortunately, taking into account the availability of newer, more practical guides to vampire history hitting store shelves by the truckload these days, many readers and scholars of the subject who are less acquainted with Summers’s importance are more likely now than ever to question the necessity of Summers’s already increasingly ornamental status in the discipline of Vampire Studies. Thus, the issue I take up in this critical edition has become a pressing one. To better phrase the earlier question: Is there still a place for Summers in Vampire Studies? To help answer this, the present work underscores, in addition to the overall impact felt through Summers’s books, the scholarly contribution his books have made to the critical methodologies used for studying vampires. It is true that Summers was, in his day, an erudite bibliographer of Gothic works, but of equal importance to this and other fields of similar Gothic interest is the more globalized approach Summers lent to Vampire Studies. It is worth noting here that Summers, after conducting extensive searches throughout Europe, came to have at his disposal many rare volumes on the subject, from which he made detailed English translations. His so doing has helped to solidify over the course of almost a century our modern understanding of the vampire and its antecedents throughout the world.

Today, books and journals citing Summers’s writings on vampirism comprise innumerable volumes. Gregory A. Waller states that Summers’s work is preeminent among [general surveys] of the vampire and serves as a basis for superficial surveys that come after.³ Mary Y. Hallab concedes, if begrudgingly, that "after Dracula, Summers has probably had more influence on subsequent vampire lore than anyone else for the reason that he has been cited by so many who have accepted his accounts at face value.⁴ Jan Louis Perkowski cites Summers’s section on the Romanian vampire as worthy of mention,⁵ while Alan Dundes calls Summers’s work well worth reading," The Vampire in Europe, specifically, offer[ing] excellent coverage of Europe.⁶ To be sure, it may be said that without Summers and, more still, without his tenacity, the image of the vampire we know today might have had considerably less to do with comparative and converging cultural, social, and religious belief systems, and more to do with predominantly anglicized popular (literary and filmic) interpretations of the vampire. Simply put, we owe to Summers the modern serious study of the vampire figure.

Hallab calls Summers a kind of Van Helsing, a clergyman obsessed with impressing upon his readers the existence of these unspeakable supernatural horrors.⁷ Incredibly, Hallab may be more right than others realize. Van Helsing’s character in Dracula needed little proof before setting out to investigate the Count, yet, curiously, we as readers hardly question the conviction of Van Helsing’s faith in the undead. But why? After all, he was not privy to the episode witnessed by Jonathan back in Transylvania. So, then, who is this Van Helsing? What remarkable things had he seen or done...in life? These and similar questions guided the previous volume of Summers’s I edited, The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition. What was needed in it, I felt, was not an OCR conversion of Summers’s canonical text, but a critical, authoritative reproduction of the original publication, inclusive not only of Summers’s unabridged text but bookended with biographical and bibliographical notes written on Summers by celebrated scholars in the field, translations of Summers’s extensive Latin and Greek passages (effectively opening up, for the first time, a good third of the book), transcriptions of the few contemporary book reviews I could locate at the time, as well as newly discovered contextual documents and photographs, the majority of which had never before been seen in print.

The editorial decision to approach a critical edition in this fashion did not, however, go uncriticized. Some astute readers desired for us to take quite literally the word critical by re-evaluating Summers’s work entirely, correcting errors, disputing research, and dwelling more heavily on its purported shortcomings. But this was not our mission. If for anything else, these shortcomings can, for some, be quite instructive, bibliographically as well as biographically; in error, sometimes, there is truth. Our approach, as literary critic Maurice Hindle noted after the fact, was instead a disinterested appraisal, one aimed at re-visiting a familiar yet widely unexplored work with renewed perspective and interest in order that we may situate the book and its author in their historical context. We hope the present volume, like our critical edition of Summers’s The Vampire, will succeed in doing the same thing by equipping the general and scholarly communities with an authoritative edition of Summers’s canonical work on vampirism that facilitates examination, comparison, and synthesis, while contributing to broader historical and cultural research on the vampire figure.

Acknowledgments

The present volume was made entirely possible by the kind and generous support of many dedicated friends and scholars, among which are the fine scholars who contributed to the front and back matter. In order of appearance: Katherine Ramsland, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Gerard P. O’Sullivan, Carol A. Senf, and Grace de Majewski. Their combined efforts, as well as their infinite patience with me as editor, helped to bring this book to completion. Yet, none of this would even have been possible without the kind, generous support and leadership of our dedicated publisher, John Mabry of Apocryphile Press, who took a chance when others dared not.

The inclusion of much of the material and images in this book was made possible through the kind permission of several people, institutions, and organizations. Grateful acknowledgment is made especially to: Betty Forbes; Gerard P. O’Sullivan, and Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis, Booksellers (http://www.luxmentis.com/); Merticus of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (AVA); Chris Cotton, ProQuest, and ProQuest’s British Periodicals collection, for which inquiries may be made to the following: ProQuest, The Quorum, Barnwell Road, Cambridge CB5 8SW, UK, Tel: [phone] (http://www.proquest.co.uk/); Paul Fanlund of The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin); Marjorie Brill of Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers, whose content, while used here with permission, may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without the written approval of Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers (http://www.tcpalm.com); Loreen Brown, and Hodder & Stroughton/Hachette UK (http://www.hachettelivre.co.uk/); Heidi Koch, the American Journal of Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association; Andrew Branch, the Romanic Review, and the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York; Trevor Lipscombe and The Catholic University of America Press; Carrie Swetonic, Adina Weintraub, Anna Pitoniak, and Penguin/Dutton (http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/publishers/adult/dutton. html/); and Rosemary Bavister, and Taylor & Francis Books (UK)/Routledge (http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/).

The images reproduced in this book are from private collections, institutions, and online databases and are used solely for educational purposes. The copyright for these images is most likely owned by either the individual party whose permission we obtained to reproduce the image, or the publisher or distributor of the image. It is believed that the limited, academic, and informational use of smaller, lower-resolution versions of the images (for which no free or public domain version could be located, and whose use is not believed to detract from the original work in which it appeared in any way) that were obtained to help illustrate both the present work as well as the original works in which they appeared, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other use of these images, in print or digital form elsewhere, may be considered copyright infringement. Grateful acknowledgment has therefore been given to these generous parties for the use of their material. While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all copyright holders, we apologize for any errors or omissions and welcome information to help us make corrections in subsequent editions.

Finally, I would like to thank three men, without whom the present volume would never have been possible: the unconquerable Montague Summers, who has my deepest and continued admiration; Hector Stuart-Forbes, for his courage and dedication to Monty; and Michael David Agan, for his own courage and dedication to me.

John Edgar Browning

Buffalo, NY

NEW INTRODUCTION

Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Montague Summers was a man of contradictions, a combination of light and dark aptly expressed in The Vampire in Europe. He purported to be a man of the church and had literary ambitions, yet he was fascinated by the netherworld of the occult, and he delighted in swirling a sinister mystery around himself that made others wonder if they were dealing with a godly man or with the devil himself.

His two works on vampires—first The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, followed by The Vampire in Europe—reveal an obsession with blood, gore, mutilation, death and the demonic. For vampire enthusiasts and researchers, this obsession is fortunate, for Summers’s volumes of lore and stories remain, almost a century on, among the best resources of what people once said, thought and experienced in relation to the molesting undead, from ancient times to the early twentieth century.

Both books are not without their flaws and criticisms. Scholars over the years have pointed to Summers’s errors in translations of texts, and to his unquestioning acceptance of evidence and descriptions of the most lurid sort. In The Vampire in Europe, Summers acknowledges the hazards of anecdotal material. Stories are undoubtedly embellished in details, he says, but he has no doubt that the essential facts and core of the accounts are true. Thus, he has no reservations about retelling stories of vampire corpses yelling like a madman and storming about committing a wide range of foul acts. The corpses lie fetid, bloated and bloody in their graves and coffins, rise up and shriek, race about towns molesting humans and animals, and fight their final destruction with fury. He adds huge dollops of his own florid prose, such as great gory gobbets of raw flesh and, regarding a freshly staked vampire, a description of how hot blood poured forth and swilled the grave.

Hollywood could deliver no better.

Summers relates such stories without analyzing or filtering them. Some may see that as a drawback, but the unvarnished accounts enable readers in subsequent generations to arrive at their own conclusions in sorting fact from fictional embellishment, and from reinterpreting what people in centuries past really experienced. Clearly people were terrified of the powers of the dead, and were convinced that under certain circumstances the dead rose up against the living to wreak havoc and destruction. Even their embellishments in the records are telling evidence of their fear, as well as their views on death, the afterlife, and spirit interference.

The Vampire in Europe is a roaming work that does not stick to vampires, but draws in lore and superstitions about blood, burial, familiars, witchcraft, ghosts and demons. Summers had already laid his foundation for the existence of real vampires in his previous work, examining theology, mythology and science, and he assumes the reader is on board with him as having proved his case. In The Vampire in Europe, he sets himself more to storytelling, covering accounts of vampires from ancient Greece and Rome to parts of Europe, England, Ireland and Russia, mixing folktales with the real accounts. He even ventures to America to mention the vampire cases of New England.

The stories do not come from Summers’s own investigative research, but are compiled from previous literature and reports. There are places where his interpretations might have benefited this material. His accounts from England center on the twelfth-century reports of pestering ghosts written by William Newburgh and Walter Map. Vampire was not in their lexicon, but Summers points out that the molesting medieval ghosts behaved in similar ways to the European vampire. He observes that vampires then dropped out of awareness in England until the occult revival of the nineteenth century—but offers no explanation why.

Summers himself was convinced that vampires existed, but believed them to be reanimated corpses, not ghosts, specters or demons. He notes that the ancient Greeks and Romans, and even the early Christians, believed in the corporeality of the dead and their hunger for blood. Still, he gives the spectral and demonic vampires their due in his collection of accounts, as well as the living sorcerer vampires who cast destructive spells and control the elements. He gathers in bits of lore that have associations with vampirism, such as burial customs and beliefs for holding the dead in their graves, the appeasement of spirits of all kinds with offerings of blood, and the ability of demons to enter and reanimate corpses.

Some of his associations are tenuous: for example, the poltergeist activities of familiars, the phenomena that plagued various saints, the blood-letting of the sadistic Gilles de Rais, and the satanic black masses described in J.K. Huysman’s La-Bas. He mentions the hysteria of the afflicted girls of the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of 1692-93, who complained that the accused witches were assaulting them in invisible form and leaving bite marks on their bodies. Nowhere in the trial records was there mention of blood-drinking or walking corpses, but the bite marks suffice to link witchcraft and vampirism, according to Summers. He also cites other accounts of witchcraft in which spells were cast to waste away victims, a legitimate form of vampirism, though not the classic blood-drinking preferred by Summers.

The digressions from vampirism are sometimes long, wandering to the point where the reader wonders where Summers is headed. Yet he always loops everything back to the vampire. Despite the thinness of some of the connections, the digressions are engrossing and illuminating in their own right. The reader learns a great deal of other occult lore in addition to that concerning vampires.

The Vampire in Europe is at its best in the chapters related to Greece, Eastern Europe and Russia, all places where the vampire lore is lush and rich in detail. Here the witchy live vampires mingle with the screaming dead vampires in great description.

Summers repeatedly emphasizes that vampire beliefs originate with ignorant peasants and barbarous, uncivilized people. Yet, in writing his books on vampires, he plays to educated Western audiences whose morbid fascination and desire for shock effect rivet them to his pages. Summers himself is both author and audience, satisfying his own dark obsession with the unholy from the lofty position of researcher. Who is more barbarous—the peasant who strives to keep the shadow of death away from life, or the distant observer who seeks a vicarious thrill in the ghastly experiences of others?

In the end, Summers takes refuge in Christianity, assuring us that the vampire will be baffled and destroyed by it. This is not surprising, given his religious views and his questionable status as an ordained priest. He goes on to state that unhappy people who are beyond the pale of Christianity are not so fortunate, for they become the sport and the prey of fiends and cacodemons who so far from being exorcized and banished are rather attracted by the cantrips and abracadabra of their warlocks and voodoo professors of darkest necromancy.¹ It is an odd statement for a man who befriended Aleister Crowley, one of the most fearsome magicians of modern times, and the occultist Dennis Wheatley—and who was alleged to participate in dark rituals himself. Perhaps Summers came face to face with the demonic and the vampiric, and his literary products were part of an effort to banish what he himself feared. The real Summers remains shrouded in mystery, and the answers to such questions probably will never be known.

Meanwhile, we have his works on vampires, as well as on werewolves and witchcraft. We can debate their strengths and weaknesses, but the bottom line is that Summers pulled together an amazing variety of details, accounts and lore, raw and visceral.We may accept, reject or reinterpret as our own views and beliefs change over the course of time. Summers froze the vampire in amber better than any other researcher leading up to his day, and possibly beyond.

Summers once opined that people would read his books well into the future, and he was right. Death and the dark side hook us, and always will.

PROLOGUE:

MONTAGUE SUMMERS AND THE VAMPIRE CASEBOOK

Gerard P. O’Sullivan

As John Edgar Browning notes in his preface, The Vampire in Europe is a companion volume to The Vampire, His Kith and Kin. The book you now hold in your hand is a casebook, of a kind; the other is a theological treatise on vampirism. Summers’s model for the vampire casebook is the work of his friend and intellectual mentor, the Edwardian sexologist Havelock Ellis.

But this curiously scientific approach to the life of the undead deserves to be contextualized—both in Summers’s own works and in those of the contemporary psychologists, psychoanalysts and sexologists with and against whom Summers wrote his treatises on vampires, werewolves and witchcraft. Let us consider Summers’s work within the milieu of the psychological and criminological case history, notably as it attempted to discuss and explain the behaviors of sexual inverts, sadomasochists, and members of the criminal underworld to its Victorian and Edwardian audiences.

The Hampstead home of Montague Summers at No. 15 Eton Road served as a salon for at least two noteworthy groups. The Phoenix Society for the Production of Old Plays, dedicated to the staging of Restoration dramas, held its charter meeting there. Summers was fascinated as much by the paraphernalia and stage edifices of the Restoration theater as he was by its obsessions with the supernatural, which were manifested onstage by an intricate machinery of trapdoors (one known as a vampire trap, appropriately enough), pulleys and levers.

No. 15 was also a regular gathering place for the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, which, according to H.Montgomery Hyde and others, appears to have grown out of remnants of the Order of Chaeronea, a secretive and initiatory group committed to promulgating a male homosexual ethos and organizing a homosexual resistance.¹ The innermost circle of The Phoenix Society and the BSSP shared several members, in addition to Montague Summers.²

Henry Havelock Ellis was one of the prime progenitors of the BSSP. Ellis was a radical secularist and a believer in the liberatory power of human sexual expression—hardly the kind of person with whom Summers, often considered an ultra-orthodox Catholic, was likely to keep company. But sexual politics, like politics generally, often makes strange bedfellows.

At first glance Summers’s books are written from the viewpoint of a highly orthodox Catholic churchman. His positions on witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy and the occult appear to be wholly in keeping with the teachings of the Magisterium of the Church. Upon closer inspection, however, one finds a strange syncretism at work.

Those who praise or blame Summers for his putative ultra-orthodoxy are missing an essential point: Summers believed in Summers-ism, and even long after his covert ordination to the Catholic priesthood. Dig deeply enough into the footnotes of Summers’s studies and you will find Tertullian and St. Thomas Aquinas rubbing elbows with the sexologist Havelock Ellis, the German physician and occultist Franz Hartmann, practitioners of Victorian parlor mysticism, and trance mediums and spiritualists of all kinds. If reading Summers appears to stretch a reader’s credulity, it is because the writer himself believed so many contradictory notions simultaneously. He accepted as established fact many things which any skeptic, rationalist or even conventional Catholic would dismiss out of hand.

Ellis was a rationalist of sorts and he was doubtless uncomfortable keeping company with occultists, but Summers repeatedly invites him into the heterodox conversation that makes up The Vampire in Europe. Ellis, while still a medical student, resolved to make the study of human sexuality his lifetime intellectual pursuit. In his youth he served as the Progressive Association’s secretary and assisted Percival Chubb in drafting the constitution for the Fellowship of the New Life, dedicated to the principles of vegetarianism, pacifism and simple living. These were the principles to which Ellis adhered throughout his life. (The Fellowship’s most memorable splinter group was the Fabian Society, which counted George Bernard Shaw among its members.)

Ellis believed that the sexual drive was paramount and took multivariate forms of expression. He was deeply distrustful of the discourse of perversion and identified homosexual desire as inversion—an innate reversal of sexual gender traits. This characterization (really normalization) of homosexuality appealed to Summers in his early adulthood, when his own personal struggles with sexual identity and alterity appear to have reached their zenith.³

It would be a gross anachronism to say that Summers was a champion of homosexual rights in his youth, because he was not. He did take a sort of wicked delight in shocking the British bourgeoisie, and most especially his father, who was scandalized by his son’s peculiarities and irked by Monty’s habit of affecting an excessively fey lisp in his presence. By the time Summers was invited to join the BSSP in 1917, he was a minor celebrity in circles which celebrated homoerotic love. But when Summers resigned from the BSSP five years later, he had grown weary of the Society’s ceaseless public campaigning for the acceptance of same-sex relationships and its constant internecine bickering.

Still, Summers left his mark on the Society and made a small but significant contribution to its canon of literature. This was in the form of one in a series of pamphlets restricted for sale to adult students of Social Questions. In autumn of 1919 Summers was invited to make a presentation to the BSSP on the Marquis de Sade and published the first full-length essay in English on the writer’s work the following year. The resulting essay, titled The Marquis de Sade: A Study in Algolania, was printed as Publication No. 6 for the Society by Battley Brothers of Battersea. Summers argues that it was de Sade who prefigured the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfield and Havelock Ellis on homosexuality and the first thinker to treat the question of sexual inversion in an intelligent and impartial manner.⁴

Summers is an astute reader of de Sade and his times. Quoting Ellis, Summers notes that the imprisoned de Sade "solaced his imagination with the perverted visions—to a very large extent, however, founded on knowledge of the real facts of perverted life in his time—which he has recorded in Justine, Juliette and the rest of his many romances."⁵ Summers also goes to great lengths to defend de Sade against the charges which led to his imprisonment by citing the most reliable records of fact surrounding the incidents which led to the Marquis’s arrests and convictions.

As a work of intellectual history Summers’s essay is convincing in the lineage it draws from de Sade to Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Féré, Iwan Bloch and Havelock Ellis, arguing that the Marquis was the pre-scientific forerunner of all modern thinking and case histories on Algolagnia, the relationship between sexual desire and the impulse to inflict pain. Summers maintains that a certain degree of sadism is normal in all sexual relations, prefiguring Ellis’s later observation—quite apropos of his student’s work on the vampire—that the impulse to bite is also part of the tactile element which lies at the origin of kissing.⁶

Summers provides in his essay a veritable catalogue of historical figures who derived enjoyment from the infliction of pain and the manufacture of mayhem: Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Heliogabalus, Sigismondo Malatesta, Gilles de Rais, and Ibrahim ibn Ahmed among them. Summers’s descriptions of the bloody acts of violence wrought by these despots and criminals bear striking resemblance to his later discussions of the vampire—not only in his accounts of their alleged predations, but also in his often gruesome and detailed reports of their destruction.

Summers, as a teller of frightening stories, is well aware of the element of sadism at work in his own scintillating prose: It is probable that something of this masochistic feeling lies (perhaps quite unconsciously) at the root of the fascination so universally exercised by uncanny tales of ghosts and specters, which send hearers of readers to bed shuddering and glancing over their shoulders with delicious apprehension of a supernatural visitant.⁷

Ellis appears to be a far more prominent figure in The Vampire, His Kith and Kin than he is in The Vampire in Europe. Take, for example, this aside by Summers from The Vampire, His Kith and Kin:

Dr. T. Claye Shaw in his study, A Prominent Motive in Murder has given us a most valuable and suggestive paper upon the natural fascination of blood which may be repelling or attractant, and since Dr. Havelock Ellis has acutely remarked that there is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood, it is easy to understand how nearly blood is connected with the sexual manifestations, and how distinctly erotic and provocative the sight or even the thought of blood almost inevitably proves. It would appear to be Plumröder, who in 1830 was the first to draw definite attention to the connexion between sexual passions and blood. The voluptuous sensations excited by blood give rise to that lust for blood which Dr. Shaw terms hemothymia. A vast number of cases have been recorded in which persons who are normal, find intense pleasure in the thought of blood during their sexual relations, although perhaps if blood were actually flowing they might feel repulsion. Yet normally the fascination of blood, if present at all during sexual excitement, remains more or less latent, either because it is weak or because the checks that inhibit it are inevitably very powerful.⁸

While Ellis appears in only a single footnote in The Vampire in Europe (a reference to prostitutes and foot fetishism), he casts a long shadow over the structure of the entire work, which takes as its model the casebook made most famous in England by Ellis and his disciples. The casebook, as a genre of scientific and medical writing, evolved through the nineteenth-century and rendered its subjects statistically regular and understandable, reducing patients to the most salient characteristics of their symptoms and recording the observations of physicians and scientists in a dispassionate, passive and therefore objective voice. This, as Ivan Crozier and others have argued, was what distinguished the medical and especially sexological casebook from mere musings about human behavior. It is also at the level of the case that theory and practice knot together because it is the point at which what the physician knows intersects with the symptoms which a patient exhibits—or at least what the patient says about them.

In the history of the psychological and psychoanalytic literature surrounding vampirism, there is a good deal of cross-fertilization between discussions of the vampire and those of the sadist. The origins of the clinical casebook dealing with sadomasochism lie in the field of criminal forensics, criminology and alienism as it was once known. Some of the most groundbreaking work on the relationship between sexual desire and the compulsion to inflict pain, called alternately algolagnia and algophilia, was written by James G. Kiernan, M.D. Kiernan, a psychiatrist heavily influenced by the writings of Shobal Vail (S. V.) Clevenger (1843-1920), was the first theorist of criminal behavior to suggest that there might be a sexual element to the Whitechapel murders wrought by the infamous Jack the Ripper.

Kiernan reviewed the cases of Jack the Ripper, the serial child murderer Gilles de Rais, and the writings of the Marquis de Sade and concluded that the impulse to inflict pain for the derivation of sexual pleasure was not caused by insanity. Kiernan believed that a sadist could be quite rational. Therefore, the rational sadist was culpable and should be held responsible for his or her criminal actions. Kiernan claimed that cases of extreme sexual violence could not be excused by reason of insanity and that The Ripper should be caught, tried and punished accordingly.

Kiernan’s oblique normalization of sadomasochism exercised a profound influence on the writings of Havelock Ellis. Ellis was very much a product of his intellectual and cultural milieu, as Ivan Crozier notes in his essays Pillow Talk: Credibility, Trust and the Sexological Case History (2008) and "Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourses on Algophilia" (2004).⁹ Ellis’s casebooks are not only the byproducts of his clinical observations; they are a densely-layered dialogue with his theoretical forebears.

In Summers’s hands the casebook becomes a curious instrument indeed. Ellis had the good fortune to interview hundreds of patients throughout his career and to collaborate with writers like John Addington Symonds, who could speak and write about sexual inversion from firsthand experience. Summers, on the other hand, is a dilatory clinician. His subjects, vampires, have already been exhumed, staked, beheaded, hacked to pieces, and burned by the time he arrives upon the scene—too late to conduct an interview with the bloodthirsty revenants who so consume his imagination. Summers deploys the form of the casebook in discussing stories related to him by natives of Greek and Italian towns, but also in handling ethnographic materials, which lends a sense of immediacy and veracity to the text which it might otherwise lack.

It is clear, too, that Summers is attempting to rescue the form of the casebook from psychoanalysis, a discipline he abhorred. Ernest Jones, Freud’s leading British disciple, completed an inventive study of vampirism, which was published in final form in 1912 by The Hogarth Press as On the Nightmare.¹⁰ One year later Freud himself wrote on the figure of the vampire in his much-maligned work, Totem and Taboo.

Both Jones and Freud wondered how it could be that the beloved dead were believed to return to life in order to attack their closest relatives and feed upon their blood. The psychoanalytic response was this: ambivalent feelings of love and hate, buried death wishes and feelings of abandonment by the living toward the deceased, are projected onto the departed and emerge as dreams and fantasies of vampires feeding upon the living. Those who believe themselves to be the victims of attack are psychically drained by the mechanism of complex mourning and not by nocturnal visitations to suck their blood.

Jones takes this analysis one step further. He argues that the belief complex peculiar to vampirism involves a psychic regression to an infantile sadistic-masochistic phase of development.¹¹ Infants express anger by biting the body of the mother. Psychoanalytically speaking, the vampire projection fantasy recapitulates this infantile phase and imagines the deceased parent or loved one returning to exact vengeance through biting. Therefore, the psychoanalytic response to belief in vampirism, repeated time and again in the literature of psychoanalysis and object-relation theory, is this: The vampire is a projection of oral sadism left over from the early infant-mother relationship.

Interestingly, many of the same folkloric and ethnographic sources drawn upon by Jones in On the Nightmare are referenced by Summers in The Vampire in Europe. But Summers, unlike Jones, treats these tales as true. The Devil, writes Summers, energizes these dead bodies, he preserves them for a long time without corruption, he is seen under their appearance and with the face of the deceased, sometimes he goes to and fro about the streets, and at other times he wanders in the fields and open country.¹² The vampire is not a projection, a phantasm or a specter, according to Summers; it is a thing of flesh and blood, reanimated demonically.

Summers has spoken with those who have been affrighted, struck dumb, pummeled, bitten and maimed by vampires, and he has interviewed survivors who have seen their living family members slain by them. Summers even travels to a Greek Orthodox church with Catholic Brother Charles Louger on the island of Santorini where priests are engaged in the exorcism of a corpse believed to have become a vrykolakas. Summers leaves the scene not entirely convinced that he has seen the body of a vampire, but he is assured by one of the priests that if but the heart were whole and entire that sufficed to afford the devil lodgement.¹³

As the author of a casebook, however, Summers always arrives late. He repeatedly misses his opportunity to interview a vampire. His materials are collected after the fact and based largely upon anecdotes shared by victims and witnesses. More often than not, he draws upon a contemporary case in order to illustrate a salient and recurring fact about vampire behavior drawn from folklore, history or theology. Writing in his introduction to The Vampire in Europe, Summers remarks of its relationship to The Vampire, His Kith and Kin that "although very certainly in tracing the tradition of the vampire it was necessary to the theme that various examples and cases of vampirism should be related. These were largely illustrative of some particular point and so in a sense accidental. The present volume, which may be considered as complementary, collects a number of histories of vampirism in European countries. Naturally these relations have not all the same evidential value. Anecdotes told by peasants and occasionally folklore could not be omitted. Again we are confronted with the fact that an instance of vampirism does not lose but very swiftly and surely gains by report."¹⁴

By repurposing the form of the case study, Summers lends his stories and sources dimensions of immediacy and verisimilitude which they might otherwise lack. Writing within a disciplinary milieu which was dominated increasingly by psychoanalysts like Ernest Jones, Summers attempted to reclaim this genre for his own curious ends, and in support of his own belief in the power of the undead to hold sway over the living.

INTRODUCTION

IN a previous study, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, it was my endeavour to trace back the dark tradition of the vampire to its earliest beginnings, until indeed it becomes lost amid the ages of a dateless antiquity, for this remarkable and world-wide belief was very present with primitive man, and is notably significant in the daily customs and practice, both tribal and domestic—more especially in the funeral rites and sepulchral houses—of furtherest aboriginal and most savage indigene. Nor, owing (as I believe) to the fundamental truth, which, however exaggerated in expression and communication, essentially informs the vampire-tradition did the legend die. As man marched towards civilization it persisted, losing much that was monstrous but none of the horror, for the horror was part of the truth.

I also essayed to find some explanation of the traits and activity of the vampire, to formulate some sort of hypothesis which may account for these terrible phenomena. In a matter of such difficulty and intricacy it were hazardous indeed to venture to claim that my suggestions cover more than a few cases of the well-known and credibly reported instances of vampirism. None the less I have had the great satisfaction of learning that many earnest scholars and profounder students of occultism are very largely in agreement with what I posit, and I am emboldened to think that perhaps I have at least pointed towards some clearer and more detailed explication.

To the feather-fool and lobcock, the pseudo-scientist and materialist, these deeper and obscurer things must, of course, appear a grandam’s tale. Inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllae.

Although very certainly in tracing the tradition of the vampire it was necessary to the theme that various examples and cases of vampirism should be related these were largely illustrative of some particular point and so in a sense accidental. The present volume, which may be considered as complementary, collects a number of histories of vampirism in European countries. Naturally these relations have not all the same evidential value. Anecdotes told by peasants and occasionally folk-lore could not be omitted. Again we are confronted with the fact that an instance of vampirism does not lose but very swiftly and surely gains by report. It is needful then to distinguish and discount, and, although I have neither tampered with nor tinkered at any text, I have taken as my rule the standard of that keenly critical and severely judicious chronicler Bom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B., that we shall write down certainties as certain, falsehoods as false, and uncertainties as doubtful.

That a large number of cases of vampirism must be accounted certain only the most prejudiced will deny.

Even in many other relations which cannot be pressed in detail it seems beyond a doubt that the main facts are true whilst the accessories have been embellished for the sake of the narrative. Such a history is that of the vampire of Croglin Grange. Mr Charles G. Harper, who investigated the exact locality, assures me that Mr Augustus Hare was undoubtedly lavish in his colouring. Actually there is no place styled Croglin Grange. There are Croglin High Hall and Low Hall, the latter of which is probably the house indicated. Mr Harper adds: But it is at least a mile distant from the church, which has been rebuilt. The churchyard contains no tomb which by any stretch of the imagination could be identified with that described by Mr. Hare. These discrepancies do not, of course, militate against the essential truth of the tale, but it should be borne in mind that a narrator who thus mingles imagination for effect’s sake with fact incurs a serious responsibility. He gives a fine opening to the sceptic and of this every advantage fair and unfair will be taken. If a yarn is to be told for the shudder and the thrill, well and good; let the ruddle be thick and slab. But write the rubric without ambiguity that this is high romance to follow.

Cases of vampirism may be said to be in our time a rare occult phenomenon. Yet whether we are justified in supposing that they are less frequent to-day than in past centuries I am far from certain. One thing is plain:—not that they do not occur but that they are carefully hushed up and stifled. More

than one such instance has come to my own notice. In The Occult Review for January, 1929, Captain G. A. Hope relates under the title The Impassable Barrier a very terrible story of a vampire. There are even vampire animals. The vampire bat all know, and not long since the papers published a brief account of a vampire wolf (as it is supposed) which at night drained the life blood of flocks and even cattle.

Mrs Hayes informs me of a vampiric experience which befell her only some ten years ago, but happily in this case no actual harm was done, perhaps because the evil force (although none the less dangerous in intent) was something old and waning and had not at the time collected a sufficient reserve of that new strength for which it was so eagerly athirst in order that it might manifest itself more potently and with intensely active malice.

In June, 1918, it chanced that Mrs Hayes took a small house at Penlee, South Devon, not far from Dartmouth. She writes: I had a friend staying with me, but otherwise we were quite alone in the place. One morning we came down to find in the middle of the parquet floor of the sitting-room the mark of a single cloven hoof in mud. The house and windows were very small, so it was quite impossible for an animal to have got in, nor indeed were such the case could it have managed so as to leave one single footprint. We hunted everywhere for a second trace but without success. For several nights I had most unpleasant and frightening experiences with an invisible but perfectly tangible being. I had no peace until I had hung the place with garlic, which acted like a charm. I tried it as a last resource.

In a recent book, Oddities, Commander Gould has spoken of the Devil’s Footsteps that have from time to time appeared in South Devon, and it might very well be thought that the haunting at Penlee was the evocation of demonism whose energies persist, that formerly Satanists dwelt or assembled on the spot and diabolic rites were celebrated, but the purgation of the house by garlic unmistakably betrays that the horror was due to a definite vampiric origin. I have no doubt that there are many localities similarly infested, and that from time to time the vampire manifests in a greater or less degree, but the exact nature of these molestations is unrecognized and the happenings unrecorded.

It only remains for me to thank for several pregnant suggestions and the encouragement of their warmest interest those friends whom I have more particularly mentioned in my Introduction to The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. I am sincerely grateful to many students of the occult and generous correspondents whose compliments I highly appreciate and who have, moreover, been at the pains to give me from their own experiences material that is both valuable and original.

M. Fernand Hertenberger’s La Joyeuse Messe Noire is included by the kind consent of M. Georges Briffaut. It was drawn for the edition of Là-Bas published in the collection Le Livre du Bibliophile, Paris, 1926.

I am especially indebted to Mr Charles G. Harper for permission to reproduce as an illustration his sketch of Croglin Low Hall, which first appeared in his well-known work Haunted Houses.

IN FESTO MANIFESTATIONS IMAGINIS B.M.V.

UULGO Del Conforto.

1929

THE VAMPIRE IN EUROPE

CHAPTER I

THE VAMPIRE IN GREECE AND ROME OF OLD

ALTHOUGH perhaps, in Greek and Roman authors, it may be said that, strictly speaking there are—with one possible exception—no references to, or legends of vampires according to the exactest definition of the term as given in such standard works as Webster’s International Dictionary and Whitney’s Century Dictionary, yet there do occur frequent, if obscure, notices of cognate superstitions, esoteric rituals, and ceremonial practice, which certainly prove that vampirism was not unknown in Italy and in Greece of ancient times. Webster thus explains the word vampire: A blood-sucking ghost or re-animated body of a dead person; a soul or re-animated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep, causing their death. Whitney interprets a vampire: A kind of spectral body which, according to a superstition existing among the Slavic and other races on the Lower Danube, leaves the grave during the night and maintains a semblance of life by sucking the warm blood of living men and women while they are asleep. Dead wizards, werewolves, heretics, and other outcasts become vampires, as do also the illegitimate offspring of parents themselves illegitimate, and anyone killed by a vampire.

There were certain demons and blood-sucking ghosts of the most hideous malignancy in Greek and Roman lore, but the peculiar quality of the vampire, especially in Slavic tradition, is the re-animation of a dead body, which is