Vampires are one of the most popular monsters invented by man. Let's try to understand what role the diseases from which our ancestors suffered in creating their image played.
In the old days, sickness was something terrifying for people. Mass outbreaks of various infectious diseases occurred suddenly and brought death and suffering.
And it wasn't just the epidemics. Other diseases, which could have originated from animal carriers or latent genetic factors, were capable of causing ailments that could not be explained.
And then people turned to the realm of the supernatural. Several of these illnesses have contributed to the emergence of one of the most enduring and widespread myths in the history of our civilization - the myth of the vampire.
The image of a vampire, a restless dead man who rises from the grave at night to drink human blood, first appeared in Ancient Greece.
If the old wise philosophers, whom we still admire, sometimes lived to be 70 years or more, then the average life expectancy in ancient Greece is assumed to be about 28 years.
In that era, centuries before the advent of sanitation, refrigeration, and antibiotics, disease-causing organisms were ubiquitous and far more likely to drive people to their graves at a very young age.
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Without a microscope at hand to study these tiny invaders, ancient people mistook many diseases for the tricks of otherworldly forces.
Take porphyria, for example. This disease affects the synthesis of heme, a chemical compound involved in the production of hemoglobin in the human body.
Symptoms include itching, skin rashes, and sores that appear when exposed to sunlight. In the worst (fortunately, very rare) cases, the gums are greatly reduced in size, exposing the teeth almost to the roots.
Feces take on the brownish tinge of undigested blood, and the effects of photosensitivity can be so severe that you can lose your ears and nose - these are the physical features of vampires such as Nosferatu, for example.
It was the eastern regions of Europe that became the breeding ground for the myths about Count Dracula, which later spread to the west.
Most of the porphyria patients had symptoms that were not nearly as dire as those described above. Desiree Lyon Howe of the Porphyria Foundation of America says there can be no more than a few hundred of these severe cases at a time worldwide.
Nevertheless, in the Middle Ages, in remote settlements that had little contact with the outside world and did not differ in the wealth of the gene pool, their number could have been much larger.
Farms and villages in Transylvania, now part of Romania, fit this description perfectly. It was the eastern regions of Europe that became the breeding ground for the myths about Count Dracula, which later spread to the west.
Writer Roger Luckhurst, who edited Bram Stoker's Dracula for the Oxford World's Classics series, investigated the conditions that helped spread the belief in vampires.
He managed to find out that this myth began to gain popularity at the beginning of the 18th century.
“For the first time in English the word 'vampire' was mentioned in the 1730s in newspapers that reported that bloated bodies with traces of fresh blood around their mouths were dug up in one of the far corners of Europe. The authors noted that the stories were told by peasants, but there is no reason not to trust them,”he says.
When disasters such as plague or mass deaths of cattle came to this rural area, local people believed that the walking dead, hunting for the living, were to blame for everything.
In this case, the first thing they did was to dig up the last person who died in the village. This brings us to another problem: medical science was still in its infancy, and it was not so easy to determine exactly whether a person died.
Patients with catalepsy, who could fall into such a deep catatonic state that their pulse became almost indistinguishable, were sometimes buried alive.
If they woke up in the grave, they went crazy with fear and hunger and began to bite themselves. Perhaps that is why bodies were found with traces of blood near the mouth.
Many people in such settlements kept pets, and the villages themselves, as a rule, were located near forests where wild animals were found.
Nowadays, rabies is practically not found even in the wild nature of Europe, and before the invention of the vaccine, it was quite common.
As soon as symptoms begin to appear (phobia and hydration, aggression, bites and delirium), death becomes inevitable. There is no cure for rabies.
“The legend of the werewolves is obviously connected with rabies,” says Luckhurst. "After contact with an infected animal, it was as if a person turned into an animal."
“There is a grain of folk wisdom in the myth of werewolves, advice not to associate yourself too much with the natural world. We must remember that first of all we are people,”he says.
“In these places [in Transylvania], primarily in the mountainous regions, the diet was very monotonous, and people often suffered from diseases such as goiter [caused by iodine deficiency],” Luckhurst says.
The lack of nutrients not only made people more prone to diseases, but in some cases could provoke the development of diseases to which they were genetically predisposed.
“The popularity of newspaper stories about vampires among eighteenth-century Londoners and Parisians showed that they enjoyed feeling civilized and intelligent compared to the superstitious Catholic peasants living on the outskirts of Europe,” he says.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that the myth of the blood-sucking walking dead arose in many world cultures - on different continents and at different times.
The Philippines has mananangal, Chile has peuchen, Scotland has Baavan Shi, and one of the indigenous Australian tribes has yara-ma-ya-hu.
Luckhurst believes that the vampire myth is not just due to disease. Vampires always come to our cozy homes - be it a rural cottage in Transylvania, an English estate or a house in ancient Athens - from somewhere outside.
“They are always strangers; in ancient Greece, barbarians who did not belong to the Greek world and were supposedly familiar with all types of black magic were considered cannibals and bloodsuckers. Elsewhere they were pagan tribes,”emphasizes Roger Luckhurst.
Even in South America, he said, the vampire-like creatures that the Incas believed in came to their cities from somewhere in the wilderness.
So a vampire is not only a convenient explanation of the symptoms of diseases that we were not yet able to understand, but also a metaphor for everything alien and incomprehensible - unknown and strange places and people living there.
