Bruce A. McClelland (Independent scholar, US)
Killing the Irrational: The Enlightenment’s Misappropriation of Balkan Demonology
Topic: In the early decades of the eighteenth century, primarily in Slavic lands near the borders of the Habsburg empire, there were several well-known episodes – epidemics, they have been called – of local hysteria surrounding reports of revenant corpses known as vampires. This sudden encounter with living folklore from a previously unexplored cultural system prompted a disproportionate response on the part of the nearby non-Slavic European societies: learned men in both science and religion, primarily from France, Germany and Austria and Hungary were either dispatched or felt compelled to travel into Servia, Silesia and elsewhere to describe and, if possible, explicate the strange goings-on. The events in question, it seemed, were all too reminiscent of those involving witch accusations during the Inquisition. Indeed, the relationship between vampire epidemics in the 1720s and 1730s, and witch trials in Hungary, which passed away several decades later than in Catholic countries further west, has been well discussed by Klaniczay and others.
Until quite recently, non-Slavistic scholarship has tended to look at this period of European folklore history as the de facto starting point for the significant history of the vampire. The features of the vampire that eventually coalesced, in 1897, into the fictional Count Dracula were thus drawn entirely from the claims made in a small number of village centers that were located along a boundary or fault line where residual post-Inquisition witch beliefs had mixed with boundary vampire beliefs. The vampire was thus incorporated as an isolated demonological entity sui generis into literate and symbolic European discourse without further regard for the extended (South) Slavic folkloric network of which he constituted but one node. If there was hysteria to the south of the Danube, there was equal hysteria on the part of the Enlightenment rationalists hastening to ensure that violent religious persecution, especially that based upon conceptions of the anti-divine, did not rise again..
Approach: It is certainly inadvisable at this point to make too much of the historical accidents that allow us, especially in the so-called West, to rely upon the notion that there is some actual, traceable historical or cultural boundary between Eastern and Western Europe. One does not wish to again reify the idea of “Eastern Europe” after it has been so competently discharged by Maria Todorova. Yet I would propose that the reconfiguration, indeed the Hermetic theft, of the vampire mytheme, which ultimately contributes to the larger urbanizing process by which oral folklore is eventually supplanted by literature and then cinema, constitutes a kind of political action. The assumptions that lie behind such negligent semantic acquisition are responsible for the fact that almost a century must pass after the publication of Dracula before it ceases to be commonly accepted that the vampire is of Romanian (Transylvanian) provenance.
Conclusions: I propose, therefore, to examine more closely the reasons for this miscarriage of scholarly justice: though it is evident that non-Slavic interest in the vampire was a pretext for promoting a medical materialist agenda over the irrationalism and supernaturalism of the previous centuries, the question remains, why was there such a willingness (a) to give credence to the reports of waking dead among village townspeople on the part of van Swieten or Flückinger or Dom Calmet that they took such pains to explain away the fabulates rather than observe the folkloric activity itself, and (b) to ignore from that time forward the vampire’s kinship to other notions within the fairly extensive system South Slavic folklore? To answer these questions, a closer investigation of the motives and texts of the reports sent back into non-Slavic Europe will be a starting point: what question did these intrepid researchers think they were answering (whose purpose were they serving)? We must also look at how the researchers and investigators borrowed their versions of the mysterious events, as well as their interpretations, from each other and those that had gone before. An interesting consequence of such an impacted and incestuous mode of reportage, which indeed seems to be a longlasting characteristic of “Western” journalism about the Balkans, is that the scapegoat function of the Balkan village vampire came into literary Europe undetected, which allowed the ambiguous nature of this folkloric character to be disguised as evil. The symbolic use of the vampire hastened the demise of the folkloric one.