a complicated symbol, Vampires

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all,Welcome to our newcomers and their fresh blood. Yummy.Wikipedia:Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person.In folkloric tales, vampires often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited when they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance. This is markedly different from modern fictional portrayals of gaunt, pale vampires beginning in the early 19th century. Although vampiric entities have been recorded in many cultures and according to speculation by literary historian Frost that the " belief in vampires and bloodsucking demons is as old as man himself " , and may go back to " prehistoric times " , the term vampire was not popularized until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, although local variants were also known by different names, such as vampir (вампир) in Serbia and Bulgaria, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. This increased level of vampire superstition in Europe led to mass hysteria and in some cases resulted in corpses actually being staked and people being accused of vampirism.

The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of The Vampyre by Polidori. The story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century. However, it is Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula that is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and which provided the basis of modern vampire fiction. Dracula drew on earlier mythologies of werewolves and similar imaginary demons and " was to voice the anxieties of an age " , and the " fears of late n patriarchy " .

***Medieval 'Vampire' Skull FoundPlague Vampire Exorcism " Uncanny Archaeology " by Samir S. Patel Matteo Borrini (Courtesy Matteo Borrini)

Picture a 16th-century plague victim, wrapped in a cloth shroud and buried. Now picture a gravedigger, assigned to the terrible work of opening a mass grave to put more bodies in. He scrapes the dirt away from the face and finds, to his horror, that the corpse is trying to eat its way out. Where the shroud covers the mouth there is a dark, bilious stain and the cloth has been worn through. As if it wasn't already difficult enough to dig graves for plague victims, he now has to deal with the undead--a malicious, pestilent vampire. The solution, a sort of vampire exorcism, would have been to cram a brick in the corpse's mouth to prevent it from eating its way out of the grave and spreading the plague. It is the stuff of legend, but there's something to it--a good scientific reason why it would appear a corpse was trying to eat its way out of the grave, and clear archaeological evidence for exorcism by brick. Senior Editor Samir S. Patel spoke with University of Florence forensic anthropologist and archaeologist Matteo Borrini after the meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science in Denver, where he presented an " exorcised " skull from a plague grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo.

Where and how was this skull discovered? From 2006 to 2007, the Veneto Department of National Heritage and Cultural Activities supported research on Lazzaretto Nuovo, where the corpses of plague victims were buried in the 16th and 17th centuries. As a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist, I was the director of the excavation when we found the skull of a mature female with a brick placed in her mouth. We conducted the excavation using the latest forensic archaeology and anthropology techniques, including methods used by modern police for crime scenes.

Why would they have done that to the corpse? This was an ancient folkloric tradition. We have determined that this superstition resulted from a misinterpretation of thanatological (death-related) data. In the 16th and 17th centuries, little was known about what happens to the body after death. They knew about immediate postmortem changes, such as cooling of the body (algor mortis) and temporary stiffening of the muscles (rigor mortis), but these changes don't really alter the appearance of the deceased. The ensuing decay and decay and putrefaction--which reduce a corpse to a skeleton--were poorly understood because they happen in the grave. When graves were reopened, it was usually after years, when the body had completely turned into a skeleton. So they associated death with a cold and stiff corpse or blanched skeleton, and allegorical paintings from the time confirm this. 

full articlehttp://www.archaeology.org/online/features/halloween/plague.html***

I'll be following this up.regards, in Clepheland