Researching traditions about death can lead to some occluded avenues shunned by many Ancient Near East scholars (generally anything after about the rise of the Roman Empire is irrelevant). It has long been my contention that death and religion are intricately intertwined, well nigh incapable of being teased apart. I’m also very interested in the research of writers on popular culture. Findings, no matter how erudite, if they don’t reach the public will only fail to impress. Mary Roach, ever masterful, wrote a morbidly fascinating account of the afterlife, so to speak, of corpses. This work (Stiff) was followed shortly by Spook — her foray into the science of ghosts. Anyone who can have you mortified one minute and laughing out loud the next deserves to be read.
Can't have one without the other
I recently finished Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth (Reaktion, 2008). I was pleasantly surprised that Beresford ambled back to the Neolithic Period in his quest for vampire origins. A number of unexpected facts jumped out at me from his pages — vampires historically have very few traits that last through the folklore about them over the ages. Primarily all they share is being improperly dead. This horrific concept is among the most deeply rooted of human terrors. We prefer the properly dead who stay dead, thank you. Whether revenant or still alive, the vampire somehow threatens the lives of the living and must be dispatched by making him (or her) properly dead.
More rat than bat
Having been a youngster and woefully unaware of international news at the time, I had never heard of England’s Highgate Vampire of the 1970s. A disjointed and confusing account involving an actual vampire-hunting Catholic priest, a rival vampire-hunting occultist, and ending with the actual staking of a corpse (in 1970! CE!), the tale in Beresford’s book is almost incredible. A little web research demonstrated that the story still has a much wider following than this blog will ever have. Overall, however, it convinced me that my inklings of the danse macabre between religion and death were as accurate as a vampire hunter’s stake.
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