Killing the Dead
Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World
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- 29,99 €
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- 29,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living
Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.
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In this expansive volume, archaeologist Blair (Building Anglo-Saxon England) surveys stories of corpses rising from the dead, from classical Greece to the "corpse killing" epidemics of the 17th century. Premodern people, he writes, viewed death as a process that began with the "cessation of breath" and ended with "physical decay." It followed, therefore, that if this liminal stage was somehow interrupted, then the deceased was not fully dead. In ancient Mesopotamia, Blair finds, "ghosts were taken entirely for granted," but there was no belief in the corpse physically returning; that changed in late Antiquity, with the rise of Christianity and the concept of resurrection. Blair points to archaeological evidence of grotesque burials, almost all of women, their bodies contorted and their heads placed on their chests or side, signifying a "corpse-killing" had taken place. Blair attributes these "corpse killing" epidemics to the stress of society moving from a pagan world, where women were powerful, to a Christian one, where women's power was much diminished. Such shocking violence on female corpses increased even further, Blair notes, when the bubonic plague hit in 664. Waves of corpse-killing continued to crest until the Enlightenment. This meticulous account sheds horrifying light on the constancy with which women have been made to pay, even in death, for society's larger anxieties.
