Such ideas as these are represented in Europe in some varieties of
the Kobold and the Goblin (Gk. kobalos). Though the goblin must,
according to folk-philosophy, be fed with nice food, it is not
a deadly being; on the contrary, it is said the Gobelin tapestry
derives its name because the secret of its colours was gained from
these ghosts. Though St. Taurin expelled one from Evreux, he found
it so polite that he would not send it to hell, and it still haunts
the credulous there and at Caen, without being thought very formidable.
The demon that 'lurks in graveyards' is universal, and may have
suggested cremation. In the East it is represented mainly by such forms
as the repulsive ghoul, which preys on dead bodies; but it has been
developed in some strange way to the Slavonic phantom called Vampyre,
whose peculiar fearfulness is that it represents the form in which
any deceased person may reappear, not ghoul-like to batten on the
dead, but to suck the blood of the living. This is perhaps the most
formidable survival of demonic superstition now existing in the world.
A people who still have in their dictionary such a word as 'miscreant'
(misbeliever) can hardly wonder that the priests of the Eastern
Church fostered the popular belief that heretics at death changed
into drinkers of the blood of the living. The Slavonic vampyres have
declined in England and America to be the 'Ogres,' who 'smell the blood
of an Englishman,' but are rarely supposed to enjoy it; but it exposes
the real ugliness of the pious superstitions sometimes deemed pretty,
that, in proportion to the intensity of belief in supernaturalism,
the people live in terror of the demons that go about seeking whom
they may devour. In Russia the watcher beside a corpse is armed with
holy charms against attack from it at midnight. A vampyre may be the
soul of any outcast from the Church, or one over whose corpse, before
burial, a cat has leaped or a bird flown. It may be discovered in a
graveyard by leading a black colt through; the animal will refuse to
tread on the vampyre's grave, and the body is taken out and a stake
driven through it, always by a single blow. A related class of demons
are the 'heart-devourers.' They touch their victim with an aspen or
other magical twig; the heart falls out, and is, perhaps, replaced
by some baser one. Mr. Ralston mentions a Mazovian story in which a
hero awakes with the heart of a hare, and remains a coward ever after;
[27] and in another case a quiet peasant received a cock's heart and
was always crowing. The Werewolf, in some respects closely related
to the vampyre, also pursues his ravages among the priest-ridden
peasantry of the South and East.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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