Porn in depth ... or maybe not

About ten years ago I was making a composite Photoshop graphic and wanted the naked torso of a woman to start. Lucky old me – Mr J is a sculptor with loads of photographic reference. “I need a picture of a woman’s breasts, this sort of shape, this sort of angle” I said to him, confused by his slackening jaw. “Deb” he replied, “you must be the only person I know with an internet connection who doesn’t know how to find tits.”

Fair enough … I’ve got better at it. I think we can agree the internet has boobs aplenty, although accurately measuring porn traffic and content is problematic. So all that bandwidth isn’t devoted to watching kittens after all.

The subject of Tyger Drew-Honey’s recent BBC3 Tyger Takes On … was porn – specifically, the effect it may be having upon his generation. Better known to most as the oldest kid from Outnumbered, Tyger is a contemporary teenager, so he has grown up with the kind of access to hardcore images that previous generations could only dream of. In addition, his parents were well-known workers in the industry: his porn-performer and producer father’s stage name is Ben Dover, and his mother Linzi Drew was an adult model, porn-performer and one-time editor of Penthouse.

Change in the industry in the last twenty years has been massive and technology-driven. The factors that have made porn so easily available have also dismantled entry barriers into the industry, and pushed prices considerably southwards. A female porn performer to whom Tyger spoke to at an award ceremony lamented the fact that anyone thinks they can be a porn “star”; Ben Dover mourned an abandoned studio: “The Marie Celeste of the porn world – a metaphor for the porn world today”.

Understandably, nobody in protected professions likes progress which strips them of their monopoly, but the reality is that just as anyone with a satnav is potentially a taxi-driver, anyone with genitals and a lack of inhibitions is now potentially a porn performer. But before we get the violins out, we should remember that this is not a decline in porn – quite the contrary - just decline of big money due to reduced exclusivity of distribution.

This is where the habitual use of the term ‘star’ for any person who commits their fornicating to film is palpably ridiculous: a ‘star’ is a person who has a brand. Stars have clout, control over their careers, merchandising and contracts. In fact, very few porn performers get to this point, and they don’t earn a huge amount on their way. I think I’d probably want more than eight hundred quid (minus my agent’s 15%) for filmed anal sex, especially since the internet does not have amnesia.

But enough of the effect on the industry’s participants: the intended thrust of the programme was the effect the output porn has on people who have grown up with it.

It is used, predictably, as an instructional manual: “Take that video and do it on a bird” inarticulated one young man … which is great in the event the porn he consumes reflects what his lover wants. In an industry whose majority output is consumed by men, is that likely?

Is it possible to become addicted to porn? I have my doubts, but I suppose addiction is compulsion in relation to a normal but condensed stimulus. If cocaine is a condensed stimulus to a dopamine hit, is porn condensed sex? One contributor commented upon the number of times “I’ve been with a girl and wished I was at home with porn”. “Yep – I’ve been out with women like that” piped up Mr J. A young man called Randeep took up boxing to keep occupied and away from porn: well, if you’re going to watch someone get battered around the ring …

But I can’t be as jocular about the coercion and violence. An anonymous contributor habitually watched rape-porn with her boyfriend and they found themselves replaying the scenes: sexual violence had become normalised. She’s clearly not happy with what happened but “I don’t feel like I’m his victim … I feel like I’m porn’s victim”.

Is this an excuse too far? Her euphemistic phrasing - “anal sex without permission” – suggested she has a vocabulary to displace the blame. The word she needed was ‘rape’. Correlation and causation are devilishly tough to disentangle, but women were being violated for a long time prior to rape-porn. It’s hard to believe that a man of his generation could be so oblivious to the issue of consent. In a reasonable world he’s culpable, whether he’s been watching porn or cartoons.

Tyger concluded that “maybe my own sex life has been informed by porn”. He felt “slightly robbed” by a three minute erotic dance which cost twenty quid. If you can have steak for free, sizzle at four hundred quid an hour probably is a bit steep. “The fantasy of porn is helping us to disconnect from the reality of sex” he concluded.

So … worth an hour of your time? Given that there are some extremely presentable people who inform authoritatively on sex issues this programme seemed to be less an incisive examination of real issues than a vehicle for someone who’s accrued ace meeja contacts and some great PR outreach virtue of The Daily Mail. If you’ve watched existing quality pieces such as Lisa Rogers The Perfect Vagina watching someone pick the low-hanging fruit of interviewing their own Mum and Dad may not satisfy.

Numinous Neuroses?

The British Journal of Psychiatry published an interesting paper on their website in November but, to judge by the recent coverage, the PR has only just hit the newsrooms.

Professor Michael King and his team looked at people with differing supernatural beliefs - no beliefs; conventional religious and ‘spiritual’ – to see whether there were any correlations between these states of belief and mental illness in Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households. They found that: “Spiritual people were more likely than those who were neither religious nor spiritual … to have abnormal eating attitudes … generalised anxiety disorder … any phobia … or any neurotic disorder … They were also more likely to be taking psychotropic medication”.

Not good for the ‘spiritual’ people then.

I liked the Telegraph’s reporting, but thought that The Daily Mail and The Huffington Post’s coverage were more open to misreading with: “Being spiritual may give life deeper meaning, but it can also make you more susceptible to mental illness“ and “Being spiritual may give life deeper meaning but it can also mess up your mind” respectively.

So does being ‘spiritual’ cause neurosis?

William James, often called one of the ‘Fathers of Psychology’, contributed the idea of ‘religious genius’ to the fledgling subject of religious psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, when he drew a distinction between what he termed ‘pattern-setters’ and those who follow ‘a second-hand religious life’. Several scales to measure different ways of being religious have followed and they reflect (in something of a development away from James) that there are simply different ways of being religious: ways that probably reflect underlying personality traits and biology as well as life-experience.

Allport and Ross’s 1967 ‘Religious Orientation Scale’ draws a distinction between people it considers ‘extrinsically’ religious who are broadly more likely to go through the outward observances and convention associated with religion, and the ‘intrinsically’ religious who are broadly more likely to have integrated religious/spiritual considerations into their daily lives and thought processes. It’s fair to say the intrinsic/extrinsic scale is disputed by some: it has been added to with other dimensions and different scales have been created. But the very existence of such discussion confirms our intuition that a loner, new-age, mysticism convert is probably getting something other from her beliefs that an habitual, from-birth, congregant. King’s paper uses ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ several times, so this is an issue that the authors are certainly aware of, if not the journalists who commented upon it.

In short, it’s thought that the personality correlates of people who go freelance for their metaphysical lives may be different. For example, studies have shown variations in such things as dogmatism, authoritarianism and locus of control (the expectation of being able to control the things that happen to you).

So it may well be that underlying personality characteristics give rise to both mental health outcomes and a person’s chosen form of religion or spirituality, rather than the spiritual beliefs themselves leading directly to bad mental health. As King’s paper put it: “Another possible explanation for our finding concerning people with a spiritual life view is that they are caught up in an existential search that is driven by their emotional distress.”

In any case, the differences the study found in OCD, phobia, depression, anxiety and so forth are small: around one or two percent in most cases.

I suppose my concern is that the coverage could be misused used by unethical institutional religions to suggest that religious enquiry in and of itself can lead to bad mental health, in rather the same way that the US Evangelic movement feared Satanism itself during the 70’s ‘Satanic Panic’.

Actually, there are two stories I would sooner have picked out from this paper.

The first is that are differences in findings between the UK and the US. The study “…fails to confirm North American evidence that holding a religious understanding of life provides protection against mental disorders”. It’s not clear whether this is a methodological or environmental issue – are the US and UK so different in their religious practices and outcomes?

The second is that there is a lot more boozing and drug use among the ungodly than the religious, but no significantly greater unhappiness. Now that’s a headline.

What's the Harm?

It is very hard not to feel the deepest sympathy for everybody involved in the Neon Roberts case. Neon’s story hit the headlines earlier this month when a judge took the highly unusual step of identifying him publicly to help him to be located after his mother had taken him to prevent radiotherapy following surgery.

Neon has medulloblastoma. I’m not a cancer-specialist but you can search for information on it easily enough. It’s a serious condition, which seems to have a serious chance of a cure … provided the help gets to you before the rapidly developing tumour does. It’s a metastasising cancer which means that it can spread easily, in this case, through the rest of the brain and spine, which is presumably why it is necessary to deliver radiotherapy to the whole brain rather than just the operation site.

I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like to discover that your child has cancer and may die. Sally Roberts and her estranged partner must be going through hell.

This week, a judge ordered the radiotherapy to go ahead. Sally Roberts had objected on the basis that there may be side-effects – which is undoubtedly the case – and that alternative treatments may help, which is far less certain. She appears to have cited several which may be promising for the future, but which are not sufficiently well-developed or standardised yet; or else therapies which are used for other cancers and don’t have a track-record with medulloblastoma. The list includes: immunotherapy and photodynamic therapy. Also cited were boron capture therapy about which Cancer Research UK says that “there are concerns that [it] causes severe side effects”.

Again, I’m no cancer specialist, so let’s leave that to them. The Guardian reported that: “Lawyers representing the doctors told the court the experts listed by Roberts appeared to have little or no expertise in treating medulloblastoma, with one having apparently based his description of it from the internet or newspaper cuttings.”

The possible side-effects of radiotherapy Neon may face include deafness, reduction of IQ and stunted growth. However, this is not predictable. He may be OK, or affected only mildly. As the judge pointed out, the only real choice right now is between radiotherapy and death.

This story has been picked up on various places, random examples here and here, on the ‘net as a parental rights versus heavy-handed government coercion issue. 

Sally Roberts’ comment along these lines, apparently made to the Daily Mail, (and assuming for a moment that this is faithfully and properly reported) was: “I feel backed into a corner. It is taking away my human rights as a mother. Neon is my son. How dare the state impose their treatments on my son? They are not allowing me as the mother to make these decisions.”

This is an unequivocally wrong way of looking at it.

Parenthood is a relationship involving responsibility for a child but not ownership of it. Neon Roberts is not his mother’s chattel; he is a unique human being with rights of his own. Even if parental rights trumped a child’s rights – and they don’t, for very good reason – Neon has two parents, one of whom has consented to the radiotherapy.

For examples of why parental rights don’t trump children’s rights, you can look at exorcism, medical neglect and genital mutilation.

Sally Roberts is just wrong about her rights over Neon, but she at least has the excuse of being in emotional turmoil right now; an excuse that the libertarian-strand alt-med bloggers do not. I can’t criticise her for her desire for the best for her son and her fear for his future after radiotherapy. At the same time, we must remember other parents – every bit as loving and courageous – have gone through this and decided it is right to go ahead with the radiotherapy. Ms. Roberts’ fervour does not make her right about medicine.

I previously reproduced some vintage US anti-vax leaflets and quoted a Mrs. Carolyne Burns from 1927 who refused to have her son vaccinated, despite it being a prerequisite for school attendance. Mrs Burns said:

“I demand the right of a public school education for my boy and I can’t see why he shouldn’t get it. I object to vaccination and I won’t submit my boy to such a dangerous practice. It is un-American and unconstitutional to force this pus into the system of a healthy child … the school won’t accept him and I won’t have him vaccinated. What can I do?”

So this is tragic, but it’s not new. Incidentally, the vaccine to which Mrs. Burns was so averse was the polio vaccine, surely one of the candidates for ‘most significant disease intervention in human history’ award (… when they decide to invent it!)

Perhaps the most tragic thing about the Roberts family situation is that life occasionally offers you a choice between something shit and something even shittier. When life gives you lemons, sometimes all you can make is grimaces.

The human desire to personify an amorphous, generalised threat is readily observable in supernatural folklore, and it serves to provide the satisfaction of something specific to focus upon and rail against – a scapegoat. Again from The Mail, Roberts apparently claims that she will sue if Neon does suffer side-effects as a result of radiotherapy: “I will be holding them all accountable — everyone who has been involved in his treatment. The judge, the doctors, my former husband — the lot of them”.

But the fact is, Neon has cancer, and there may be no consequence-free outcome available. That isn’t his father’s fault, nor his doctors’, nor the judge’s.

You may have had an experience in your life which left you limp with impotence, your only choice being the acceptance of loss. I know I have.

I use Sally Roberts’ quotes from The Mail here as illustrations of the experiences and feelings of a person in a corner and in pain. I feel bad for her.

The people I don’t feel bad for are the people on alt-med sites who promote non evidence-based therapies as effective interventions. There’s more on the Quackometer. The next time someone asks you “where’s the harm in it”, perhaps think of the false hope that de facto medical neglect can bring.

Setting Own Goals?

An only half-serious memoir of flailing, derision, ostracism and black-eyes

At school I was OK at maths and English, so it didn’t bother me much that I turned into a prototype dodo during PE. My parents, friends and especially netball team-mates totally accepted that I just wasn’t a sporty type. Chief among the unbagsied, I was usually inflicted upon whichever team complained least loudly, and my impotent flailing confined to the back of the gym/pitch/court.

The good news about a confession of this type is that I can feel through the ether the many of you who are nodding and empathising. I don’t know if there are published goals for games lessons in school – you know, enjoyment of sport, desire to participate even without the threat of detention - but to judge by the Health Survey for England (cited here, p 31) they don’t work. Using a device called an accelerometer to measure physical activity the survey found that a miserable 6% of men and 4% of women achieve the government’s recommended weekly physical activity level. As a nation, we are melding with our office chairs and sofas. Evolution will soon provide us with stain-resistant upholstery.

The good news for me is that I was very, very lucky. My brother started Judo and I fancied giving it a go. I sat my O-level mocks with matching black-eyes from my first grading, and the real exams with a repeat pair from Aikido, taken up at a similar time. I was clearly enjoying myself too much to care that I looked like a racoon. Weight training to help with strength followed and, eventually, took over. I even spent a year being a health-instructor until I realised that the tedium of being asked how to make bums smaller was going to lead to madness or violence. At the age of twenty-seven I learned to swim, and now I run.

I must add that I do all of these things very badly indeed. Except the Aikido … I was alright at that. But everything else was, and is, done despite the miserable lack of attainment. I have learned to like exercise for its own sake: in other words, exactly the opposite way it was taught at school.

A quick breeze over a report from the University of East London (p56) about the expected legacy outcomes of London 2012 considers the Olympic Games’ effects in terms of employment, skills tourism, house prices and so on. And it also addresses what is, in my opinion, an oft-repeated canard – that the sight of sporting excellence may precipitate a nation to undock from its soft furnishings and head out to the nearest playing field. It says:

“The Olympic Charter aims to encourage and support the development of sport for all … There is an intention towards a virtuous circuit: sport for all feeds elite sport which, in turn, it is hoped, will inspire more people to participate. Trickle down and knock on effects are assumed with the affective charge of the Games, the role models of the athletes, the infrastructure and expertise mobilised in putting the Games on and extensive global broadcasting of Olympic sport all key ingredients in the process.”

So – plenty of good intentions. But the report’s conclusions are refreshingly unhyperbolous when it considers the real evidence: “ .. there has been a paucity of studies on post-Games participation in sport and whether an Olympic Games provides a short or longer term bounce for community participation in sport”. Where changes have been perceived in the past: “… the Olympic Games are likely to have been one factor amongst many …”

All of which makes me ponder on a strand of thought that unites both school games and the Olympics – the assumption that greatness and achievement motivate spectators to participate.

I think it probably does exactly the opposite.

There’s an apocryphal anecdote that George W. Bush was appalled that fifty percent of Americans were below average intelligence. The use of the tale is not to prove that Dubbya is as thick as the most afflicted of his countrymen – he probably didn’t say it – but it does encapsulate that sad truth that in order for some to excel, others can’t. In the case of elite sport, that’s most of us.

Yet we’re left with a durable bit of cultural software from nineteenth century public schools that runs in a seemingly uninterruptible loop: sport, pain, humiliation, virtue, sport, pain …

The psychology of motivation has been studied a great deal in the era between the brutality of Eton’s height-of-empire playing fields and our present obesity epidemic. I’m personally very fond of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on praise and motivation in which she encourages parents and teachers to give accolades for process rather than outcome. Dweck’s experiments suggested that those praised for their intelligence seemed to regard it as a fixed quality and to be more conservative in their future choices; in trying to retaining their ‘clever’ status, they did things that made them look clever all the time, sometimes missing out on trying harder tasks, disappointments, reversals and the opportunity for problem-solving that those things all bring. It seems that if you can instead get hooked on ‘process’ (and thereby tenacity), a decent level of attainment will follow anyway. It’s hard to focus on something over a long period of time and remain too bad at it.

In fact, when you get into process, you stand a chance of experiencing one of the most pleasurable things known to man that doesn’t involve chocolate – a condition labelled by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as ‘flow’.

Flow occurs when you are completely absorbed in a task: you can lose time and even your sense of self. It’s been called other things too, such as ‘in the zone’, and we were certainly aware of the notion in martial arts.

Flow didn’t really figure in our incongruously-named athletics sessions at school, during which we were each timed or measured performing explosive and aspirational feats for which there had been absolutely no preparation. As wilted and asthmatic teenagers collapsed with burning lungs and pulled hamstrings, the crimplene-tracksuited gym-teacher assiduously filled out the Amateur Athletics Association paperwork. It was only later, when I did my stint assisting others in gyms, that I wondered how many of my clients would have expired on the spot if I did the same thing with them.

But the data were there – the results. We hadn’t learned to enjoy, but we had been successfully measured.

That danger of applying labels, with the attendant tendency to indelibly mark, has been usefully explored in other contexts too. Everyone who has explored cognitive-behavioural therapy for depression has encountered the idea that “depressed right now” is a description, and “depressed” or “depressive” are potentially self-fulfilling prophecies. I know that I didn’t regard myself as “bad at netball this session”, but as “inept at any kind of physical activity whatsoever”.

My Judo club ran three squash courts too, so the squashies and the judos often met in the bar area. My PE teacher and I encountered each other one evening, mutually alarmed. “How amazing to see you here” she said to me. “I never had you down as a physical type”.

So the jock/nerd dichotomy wasn’t just me then.

If I’d had the speed or the wit, perhaps I’d have responded to her cheek by pointing out that disliking standing in the drizzle in very little more than your underwear while having a wet netball smack you in the face probably isn’t all that bizarre.

It strikes me that there are many dimensions to being active. Some people get excited by distance, some by time, some by scores. Some people like to be in teams of one and some like larger groups. If you’re not competitive, that’s fine. I used to volley on squash courts for hours with a friend. No scoring. Load of fun.

Indications are that key public bodies already know that the Olympic Games aren’t going to improve gross-national-fitness by itself. This report from NHS London says: “This research shows that just having the 2012 Games in London will not automatically create a health legacy. So NHS London is launching … the ‘Go London’ programme to realise our ambition of improving health through increasing levels of physical activity.”

Judo was my very short-lived gateway drug which enabled me to overcome the twice-weekly exercise aversion sessions at school. I was very fortunate.

Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony was stunning. And this week I’ll watch the gymnastics because I find it amazing and beautiful. Perhaps there are elements of the games you’ll be drawn to watch too.

But we shouldn’t believe any of the hogwash about the Olympics enciting us to become athletes. The simple human pleasure of enjoying and being in control of your body is far too important to be left to peddlers of mirages.

Psychics and Princes

My great-grandmother was psychic.

Everybody knew it. If a member of her extended family paid an impromptu visit from even a great distance, like London, they were greeted with a friendly smile and a dinner that was already virtually at the table. “I knew you were coming”, she’d say. She was known for having ‘a way’ with animals, to the extent that she could pick up and offer comfort to a dog who had been fatally injured in the street, without getting bitten.

She was never subject to rigorous testing for her gift, and that was a blessing really. To have had it revealed that meals cooked for large families inconspicuously subdivide to accommodate unexpected guests, or that simple kindness on the part of the human (or closeness to death of the animal) produces a mundane - if touching - pieta, would have compromised her identity in a very painful way.

Her family functioned around the notion of her powers and performed their roles to support and nourish it. Most of them had flickering encounters with the other-world themselves, but were naturally subordinate to their mother in their abilities during her lifetime.

My father tells me about a time he went to see a stage-spiritualist who sat with her assistant. These ladies’ status seemed to be directly proportionate to their size, and a psychic wearing what appeared to be a chintz tarpaulin was evidently a very powerful creature indeed. As the star-psychic inhaled prior to bestowing her first insight, her skinny assistant broke in with a baseless voice in a Lancashire accent: “I can see a black and white cat – has anybody lost a black and white cat?”

The formidable priestess shot her a daggered look, and she was right to, because the monkey was taking a shot at being the organ-grinder. This was not enthusiasm – it was a takeover bid.

In a world where there are no exterior ways of denoting your status – no qualifications, no protected professional titles, no career ladder and demarked skills and experience, no gold jewellery nor designer adornments, no foreign holidays to boast of nor flash cars to drive, a person must attain their rank with the sheer force of their personality. If the criteria for their assets and virtues are unmeasurable except by the support of their cohorts, that is all for the better. Being psychic was, and is, a recourse open to people who have few other ways of differentiating themselves.

A person like this can be instead of do.

Unfortunately for her very hard-up family, my great-grandmother never had the commercial nous to go the Helen Duncan, Doris Stokes or Psychic Sally route. There must have been thousands of Elizabeth Archers all over the UK, women whose social status derived in good part from their mystical powers. That family was poor, in a way we have difficulty imagining today. My grandmother and her brother had to go to the beach to collect sea-coal for the fire. They didn’t have enough to eat and neither did their younger siblings. They were given charity shoes in front of their classes at school, but not frequently enough to permit their growing feet to avoid being cramped into forming hideous bunions. It was the Great Depression, and life was largely shit. It has frequently been observed that religious-spectrum ideas can be potent comforters and compensators, which is why we see those in most need of comfort and compensation investing in them.

As arduous exams and professional paths are, surely it is better to live in a world where you can do instead of be?

A story in The Daily Mail this week caught my eye. Apparently, Prince William is considering whether he will sign up for another three-year tour of duty as a Sea-King helicopter pilot. But is the call of royal duties threatening to divert the Prince’s chosen path?

The feature writer suggests that the Prince’s personal yearnings lie with his career. Apart from the fact that it has cost a small fortune to train him, he seems to like his job – a job that is all about doing.

But the Royal Family exists by virtue of the being paradigm – we don’t vote for the Queen. Prince William’s dilemma* is a very modern illustrations one of the rarer modern examples of being versus doing.

This model must cause them a great deal of pain as individuals. Prince Philip was famously made to give up his career in the Navy, and Princess Margaret’s privileged and empty life showed on every line of her face at the end. The Duchess of Cambridge is noted for having never had a recognisable job. The reason for this is a mystery, but if it was on advice from the Palace, I think they were very, very wrong. She married just in time to lose the ‘Waity Katie’ label, a hallmark of her indeterminate identity. But in times to come it may count against her.

I very much hope that Prince William signs up for another tour. Contrast these pictures: on one side, the capable man at the controls of a Sea-King helicopter; on the other, a person dressed for an absurd pantomime, bearing more than a passing resemblance to a child playing dressing-up with a blanket and foil-covered chocolate money for medals.

Albeit that they represent different ends of the social scale, there is personal mystique in being a Prince or a psychic – and both are equally ridiculous. It seems that being a Prince may unfortunately also be painful.

* Assuming of course, that it exists in reality rather than in the imagination of a newspaper feature writer. Whether it is an issue now, however, it certainly will be at some point.

High Stakes

The more observant of you will have noticed that vampires have been in the news. No, not bankers. Although the droll current-affairs metaphor does apply, Voltaire got there first: describing the vampires he had seen in London and Paris in his Dictionaire Philosophique, he wrote "there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable places."

Archeologists in Sozopol, Bulgaria have excavated a couple of graves whose inhabitants had been pinned to the ground through their hearts with iron rods. Better safe than sorry, I suppose. Staking is such perfect horror-film fare that it’s hard to believe that it happened in real life too, but it truly did.

Vampires erupted onto Western European consciousness in the early 1700s, but that is not to say they were invented then. The Ottoman Turk and Austrian Empires had been slogging it out for centuries, and when the Austrian Empire finally prevailed over the Balkans, they found themselves administrating over local peoples who had quaint local customs, like mutilating corpses.

A rash of alarmed reports came back, asking how to deal with the phenomenon. To Roman Catholic Austria, desecration of the dead was not just unhygienic – it was sacrilege.

But where there’s repulsion there’s usually titillation too. The response to the new tales of the undead varied, from learned shock and outrage, to ardent and morbid curiosity. Incidentally, this is worth noting for those today who believe "horror" to be a modern and corrupting - pardon the pun - interest.

As early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Sorbonne¹ in Paris had passed two resolutions prohibiting the decapitation of accused vampires. And Eighteenth century western Europe avidly consumed the vampire stories that streamed in from the east. The case of the vampire Arnod Paole and his numerous victims was one of the first to be seized upon; it was enthusiastically retold, and was the subject of a best selling leaflet at the Leipzig book fair of 1732.

Arnod Paole had died when he had fallen from a hay wagon and broken his neck. His case was recounted in Visum et Repertum, a report which had been commissioned by the authorities of the Austrian Empire and written by regimental medical officers Fluckinger, Sigel and Baumgarten.

Paole had been born and died in the village of Medvegia, north of Belgrade in Serbia, but he had spent part of his life away as a soldier serving in what was then called ‘Turkish Serbia’. After his service, he had returned home, married and bought a farm. Although he was remembered as a pleasant man he was said to have had a sombre air, which was attributed to an incident that he mentioned during his travels; he had claimed to have been troubled by a vampire, and had used the folk remedy of eating earth from its grave and smearing himself in its blood to be free of it.

After his death, some of the villagers said they had been bothered by Paole, and four were reported to have died by his actions. Forty days after his burial, he was disinterred. Reported in Visum et Repertum, his body was found not to be corrupt:

"They found that he was quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, mouth and ears; that the shirt, the covering of the coffin were completely bloody; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin had fallen off, and that new ones had grown; and since they saw from this that he was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, according to their custom, whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously. Thereupon they burned the body the same day to ashes and threw these into the grave."

Paole's four ‘victims’ had also been disinterred and treated the same way since they would be tainted and could turn into vampires themselves. Clearly we have the notion of contagion here.

But the deaths did not stop there. In the three months leading up to the arrival of the medical officers, (five years after Paole’s death) another seventeen people died after short illnesses of two or three days, and one had claimed to have been bothered by the spirit of one of the recently dead before she expired. It was reasoned that the curse of vampirism had managed to persist via the meat of the local cattle and sheep, whose blood Paole must therefore have sucked. The officers were thus able to witness the disinterment of more bodies, as the latest rash of vampires were dealt with.

A woman named Stana had died at the age of twenty after a three day illness following childbirth. Her baby had not survived for long, and had been buried but then pulled out of its grave by dogs and partially eaten. Stana had been sufficiently worried about the vampire (and had perhaps suspected it for the death of her baby) to smear herself with its blood as a protection against it. But to judge by her pristine condition in the grave three months after her death, this measure had not been effective. Liquid, rather than coagulated, blood was found in her vessels, her viscera were fresh and her nails on one hand were new. The only part of her which had succumbed to the grave was her uterus, inflamed and malodorous with the placenta still in place (giving an indication what why she actually died).

Another woman named Ruscha had been buried with her child soon after parturition. Six weeks and five weeks later respectively, the mother and the baby both had fresh blood in their thoracic cavities and hearts.

An old woman named Miliza had died at the age of sixty, around three months previously. Having spent her whole life looking lean and spare, she now conversely appeared to be plump and healthy in death. Like the others, her blood was liquid and her viscera were fresh.

A twenty year old woman who had been dead for over two weeks was found to be fresh with a flushed and ruddy complexion. When she was moved, fresh blood flowed from her nose.

In total, all the people above plus two teenage boys, one pre-pubescent girl, a woman, a man, a baby and an old man were found in a vampiric state.

All the vampires' heads were severed from their bodies, the carcasses were burnt and the ashes were thrown into the river Morava. Two mothers and their babies, and a man in his twenties were also exhumed but had decomposed sufficiently to allay suspicion. They were replaced back in the ground without further desecration.

Paole’s case illustrates perfectly that vampires were a phenomenon associated principally with two things: epidemics, and failure to decompose in the predicted manner.

The 17^th century Greek Roman Catholic Priest Leone Allaci wrote:

"If at any time an unwonted mortality occurs and persons begin to die when there is no epidemic of sickness to account for it, the citizens shrewdly suspecting what the cause may be, proceed to open the graves of those who have been recently interred."

Ernest Jones² provided a list of some of the most alarming outbreaks of vampirism: in Chios 1708; Hungary 1726; Medyuega and Belgrade 1725; Serbia 1825; Hungary 1832. These coincided with fatal epidemics - plagues.

A recently as 1898, people on the Island of Kynthos believed that vrykolakas – Greek vampires - brought consumption. Regional variants, such as the Bosnian lampir, were associated with plagues and the Greek word ‘Nosopheros’ (from where the Balkan word Nosferatu derives) means plague carrier.

In a very peculiar twist, Balkan/Greek type folkoric practice in response to consumption also occurred in late nineteenth century Rhode Island, USA. Go here for my vodcast on The Vampires of Rhode Island.

As for the ‘undecomposed’ element of Paole and his victims, we can fruitfully turn to the science of decomposition – a science to which most people throughout history have not had access. It's worth starting with an account by a travelling French Botanist, Pitton de Tournefort from his Relation d'un Voyage du Levant of 1717, who had the opportunity of seeing a vampire examined on the Island of Mykonos in 1700.

A quarrelsome and unpleasant man had been found dead in a field, and buried as normal. Two days after his burial, he was seen striding around the town at night. He entered houses and made a great nuisance of himself, upsetting furniture and extinguishing lights. Like many other ‘vrykolalas’ – Greek vampires - he did not suck blood directly, but he terrified the wits out of the living.

Masses were said, but since the disturbances did not stop and were so widespread, that it was decided to exhume his corpse on the ninth day after burial. De Tournefort witnessed the examination which was carried out by the town's butcher whom he described as "old and ham-fisted". The butcher's aim was to find the heart of the vrykolakas, for which he began a search in its abdomen. After a time spent sorting through the corpse's entrails, it was suggested that he needed to breach the diaphragm to enter the thorax, after which the corpse's heart was successfully extracted.

Unfortunately by now the stench was overwhelming. Incense was burnt, but the pungent fumes mingled with those of the corpse and the onlookers became so excited that they swore the palls of smoke emanated from the corpse itself. The terror mounted until all de Tournefort could hear was the word ‘vrykolakas’, repeated many times by the people in the Church and in the square outside it. The group who had initially found the man's corpse in the field added to the hysteria by recounting that when they had found him, he was not as stiff as a corpse should have been, but supple instead.

"I am certain that if we had not ourselves been actually present, these folk would have maintained that there was no stench of corruption" wrote de Tournefort, a stench that meant, having secured a place quite close to the body, "we were retching and well 'nigh overcome". The butcher claimed that the innards were warm and that the blood on his hands was fresh; De Tournefort and his associate countered that the warmth was no more than the warmth of putrefaction like that of a dung heap, and that the blood was nothing more than a stinking mess. But despite this reasoning, the people still took the heart to the seashore and burnt it.

Far from being subdued, the spirit became more restless than ever, terrifying everyone except, de Tournefort sardonically adds, "the consul in whose house we lodged".

De Tournefort believed the whole thing to have been "an epidemical disorder of the brain, as dangerous as mania or sheer lunacy". Clearly, no amount of reasoning would have convinced the people of Mykenos that there was not a vrykolakas in their midst, but with two parallel interpretations of the same event – the locals’ and De Tournefort’s -  we can perceive a cognitive bias which directed people to see putrefying warmth as life, decomposing sludge as blood, and incense as a spirit emanation from a vampire body.

Paul Barber’s excellent Vampires, Burial and Death has a chapter devoted to normal post-mortem changes that can be mistaken for vampirism. I recommend the book. After you’ve eaten.

Stana, Ruscha and her baby, Miliza, the twenty year old woman and Paole himself all had ‘liquid blood’ which in some cases flowed from their noses (and in all likelihood, all other of their bodily orifices).

Barber reminds us that blood coagulates in corpses, but liquefies again. Then, quoting Mant, he writes:

“The gases in the abdomen increase in pressure as the putrefactive processes advance and the lungs are forced upwards and decomposing blood escapes from the mouth and nostrils”

Stana was round and healthy-looking in the grave, but bloating from post-mortem bacterial gases would account for that, as it would account for the Paole’s “audible groan” as he was staked.

Paole’s twenty year old female victim’s “flushed and ruddy complexion” was quite common in vampirism too. Lividity in corpses occurs where the blood vessels break down, emptying now decaying blood cells into tissue where they can cause dark staining. If a person was suspected of being a candidate for vampirism, they were often buried face-down, which produces significant facial ‘flushing’.

The suppleness of De Tournefort’s vrykolakas was remarked upon by the people who found him. But rigor-mortis passes, usually after thirty six hours or so although the process gets delayed by the cold.

In fact, temperature has a massive part to play in general. As I pointed out with Mercy Brown in The Vampires of Rhode Island, if a person dies and the winter and is buried in freezing soil, buried in a shallow grave because the ground is too hard to dig a deep one, or kept them above-ground in a freezing mortuary, the corpse is not likely to decay particularly rapidly.

Death during epidemics provided another variable which contributed to the revenant myth – the idea that, as French Monk Augustin Calmet put it, "certain persons after death chew in their graves and demolish anything that is near them, and that they can be heard munching like pigs". This munching occurred especially at times of plague.

I covered this in a previous blogpost. To summarise: the bodily parts that were eaten by ‘vampires’ in their graves were those parts which would decompose first, such as entrails and finger ends. And the phenomenon was most likely to occur in late summer and autumn, the peak season for plague deaths.

While we can look this stuff up on the internet, most people throughout history have not observed the decomposition of corpses for the very good reason that they are sources of contagion. It’s unhygienic. They were left with nothing but hearsay and folklore to combat epidemic death.

I wonder what happened to the corpses in Sozopol? We can infer that the people were likely to have died during a time of plague. Perhaps the village had employed the folk diagnosis used across Southern Slav areas of walking a completely white or black virginal horse that had never stumbled, ridden by a virginal man around the graveyard. The horse would have refused to cross the vampire graves, leading to the corpses being exhumed.

Staking is an extremely prosaic way of simply keeping a corpse in its grave. It’s a rather large pin. While many traditions emphasise the importance of the material – hawthorn for some, iron for others – piercing the corpse would have let the gases out and stopped post-mortem shifting and popping. Bear in mind that these people did not have coffins.

Vampires, like all other unnatural predators, serve as scapegoats. They provide a way of communities feeling powerful in the face of insurmountable events: there is knowledge, there are rituals. It means that people can do something, where there is otherwise nothing that can be done.

Vampires were officially-designated 'outsiders', and it’s observable that such discreet populations within the main one are useful to the human psyche, and oft-created. Given that people have hanged witches, burned heretics and tortured foreigners, perhaps we should applaud the vampire-believers for their humanity in only multilating their scapegoats after they were dead.

Footnotes:

1 The Sorbonne was founded as a theological college - and was not given to University of Paris until 1808

2 Ernest Jones (1949) On the Nightmare The Hogarth Press Ltd, London p. 122.

3 Mant ed. Taylor's Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence p. 147, quoted in Barber Vampires, Burial and Death p. 115.

Profanity and Nuptials, or, Get Your Hands Off My Language

Mr J has been researching World War I this week. One of the things which has given him most grief is trying to ascertain authentic swear-words from the trenches. We have such a pleasing range today meaning you can take your pick from the blasphemous (“Jesus Christ”) to the whimsically old-fashioned, and thus relatively unimpactful (“bloody thing”). Confusion really arises when you consider our best swearwords (those Anglo-Saxons must have hammered their thumbs a lot). Words like “fuck” and “cunt” can be either deeply offensive or even incredibly amiable, depending entirely upon context.

Paterfamlias J came partially to the rescue with a recording from Old Uncle Harry, made in the ‘70s. On this recording, Uncle Harry had rather quaintly caught himself saying “bloody” and asked if swearing was OK. We took that to mean that, to an essentially Edwardian man like Uncle Harry, “bloody” was quite a rude word.

As an aside, poor Uncle Harry had been frustrated in his chief ambition of shooting his superior officer in the head by a fellow soldier who had jumped in and threatened to do it first. His verbal self-censorship was the only blip in a fully-flowing narrative involving plentiful accounts of gassing, carnage and death, so it wasn’t that he lacked the stomach for grim reality.

Some suggest the origin of the adjective “bloody”, used in an expletive context, is a corruption of ‘By Our Lady” which would make it blasphemous. It certainly seems that at religious times, invocations of God and his cohorts were the most serious variety of verbal outburst.

Conversely, Mr J. says it seems that the word “fuck” was used so casually in the trenches that it was only its omission which panicked people. If you were told to pick up your gun, you knew that someone was short of the time to get the intensifier “fucking” in there, and that the situation was formal and serious.

So we can see that words have changed over the years, and that this trend is intimately connected with the zeitgeist – the ‘concept-soup’ in which we mentally swim; our intellectual, emotional, cultural agar.

Blasphemous swears have become less serious for many of us, because religion does not have the same influence over our lives.

English is a pervasive language in the world. This is, no doubt, because of the country’s ardour for empire at a certain critical point in history. I’m sure there are good and bad things to be said for this spread of the language (and I can take neither blame nor credit, having sprouted from the gene pool, but not having been actually there).

But I’d propose that having English as your first or second language is a cool thing because it’s so avowedly and proudly evolving. We do not have the equivalent of L'Académie Française (whose pronouncements are not, and cannot be, binding in any case), standing like an etymological Cnut against a tide of reality. If you don’t know that “wicked” can mean cool, awesome or impressive, you’re just either old or you don’t get out enough.

In short, if enough people use it in a certain way, it gets into the dictionary. The rules are dictated by the useage, and the useage changes. This is a good thing.

Take the word “marriage” as another example. In medieval times, Canon law accepted that people could be married by their declaration towards each other. In practice, the landed and wealthy needed firmer contracts than that because of the money and power at stake. But no doubt, many simpler folk simply took up with each other, sans clergy or witnesses to bless their arrangement. ‘Common Law Marriage’ a.k.a. staying together ‘til you’re too exhausted to escape, was common throughout Europe.

This changed during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation where both sides seemed to want things formalised. The Catholic Church required that a priest and witnesses be present for a legal marriage, This was during one of the meetings of the interminable Council of Trent (nearly two decades, in case you were wondering – I think they let people out for sandwiches and the loo). In England, we had Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act which did a similar thing about a century later.

Today, marriage also doesn’t have to be a religious ceremony. In the UK, the marriage must be conducted by a person, or in the presence of a person, authorised to register marriages.

In practice, this means that if you go to the local Anglican Church, the vicar may have the relevant certificate; if you go the registry office, you’ve definitely got a one-stop-shop; if you go the local Wiccan group you’ll need a space blanket for later (those people keep taking their kits off in the moonlight) and a visit to the registry office to make it all official. At my brother’s wedding they had the Catholic priest to do the religious bit and the registrar to do the official paperwork bit.

The practice of marriage, as well as the formalities validating its creation, has changed a great deal. In medieval times, people married very young, no doubt so they could produce children before they expired of pillage, plague or starvation (or childbirth, paradoxically). One of my favourite historical characters, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was first married at the ago of 13 or 15 – both under-age by current reckoning. Plenty married younger.

A cursory look at the dynastic marriages of the nobility also shows that a woman’s consent was not particularly necessary. Aristocrats and social climbers would throw their daughters at men higher above them in the social hierarchy. Girls weren’t encouraged to think that they had a say in the matter. Because they didn’t.

This is another reason I like Eleanor of Aquitaine. She managed to get an annulment from her first (and unhappy) marriage to the King of France and arrange a new one with a bloke she fancied – the man who would become Henry II. The physical journey after her divorce and before her new marriage, incidentally, speaks of a woman flying like the wind to avoid dynastic rapists, men who would have grabbed her and violated her in order to be the new master of her lands, possession being nine-tenths of the law and all that.

Which leads on to another massively changed nuance of marriage: in most places, marriage meant that a man could force his spouse to have sex with him. Rape within marriage was a contradiction-in-terms. The phrase “irrevocable consent” was often used in this context (it has other legal applications too).

Famously, Sir Matthew Hale pronounced in 1736 that a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract”.

So we can see that words change over time and that that is a useful thing. We can also see, with even a cursory look (and this is just stuff I can think of off the top of my head – perhaps you can tell), that the concept of marriage itself has changed considerably. I haven’t even gone into all the historical invocations not to marry for love or lust, the increasing romanticism during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

So, we’re happy with words that evolve. We’re also happy with the many, many changes that history has brought to our meaning of marriage (anyone for the legal rape of a 12 year old, given by her father to a thirty-year old? – thought not).

So why are so many people distressed that the term may now come to encompass the union of gay couples? The government’s plans to legalise gay marriage has met with howls of protest from religious groups, religious groups who are trying to both determine useage of a word that belongs to us all, and to claim that “marriage” has meant one thing since its inception.

Religious bodies will not be required to provide gay marriages. They are not the legal authorities over marriage except in countries like Saudi Arabia. Neither do they have provenance over the way we use our words.

It is inhumane to deny gay couples equality. I never want to hear another religous apologist tell me that their beliefs are primarily about ethics ever again.

Sleep Paralysis: Leave Your Comments Here

Following on from the article on Sleep Paralysis at Jourdemayne, here is the section for comments and recollections.

Time to Move ...

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The Heart of Darkness

I grew up in Southall.

It was OK: not much wrong, not much right. I remember listening to a chocolate advert’s jangling soundtrack which proposed we were in the ‘sophisticated 70s’. I wondered how we would remember it in retrospect, and came up with the perfect word: “grey”. I know that seems strange of an era characterised by Marc Bolan, Bowie and Slade.

But the decade went out with a bang. In 1979 the far-right organisation The National Front exercised their democratic right to hold a St George’s Day meeting … in Southall. With the area housing one of the largest Asian populations on the country it was clear and deliberate provocation. The special needs teacher Blair Peach was murdered a short distance from the town centre where police, white racists and young Asian men clashed.

As a thirteen year-old, I was very intimidated by the sight of shops barricading themselves in anticipation. There was an eerie silence, completely out of place during the day. No people, no dogs, no cars, no life at all, except that behind twitching curtains.

Of course, it was hardly the last riot of the era. There was Handsworth, Brixton … Toxteth happened half a block from my cowering grandparents.

I started to pick up how serious things were getting last Monday via Twitter. We switched on the TV and were astonished. And at around midnight, the news started to come in that people were rioting in Ealing. Ealing!

By then, it had been an hour or so since our neighbour’s car had been turned on its side and left in the road. Our neighbours called the police and were in favour of leaving the car in situ, for evidence. But Mr J is a great believer in the ‘broken window theory’ and has plenty of experience turning cars back the right way up again to boot. So with our other neighbour and two groups of young Asian men who appear to have been patrolling the area and who stopped to help us, the car was returned to its normal orientation.

I directed the traffic around the obstruction but, frankly, anyone who can’t see a medium-sized group of men turning a red car over in a well-lit street should probably have their driving licence suspended pending a trip to Specsavers.

The damaged car was put onto our driveway to discourage further mischief and was picked up within the hour by a tow truck arranged by next-door’s insurance – good service! The driver had come via Ealing Common and had had to run a red light to avoid becoming mired in a group of what he estimated at around two hundred fractious people who he felt would have over-run him had he slowed down and stopped.

The Ealing bit was where it all started to go a bit strange for me. While it’s not quite the Elysian suburb with free-running Ambrosia that the media sometimes implied, it does have high property values and not much social housing in the centre. The disaffected underclass would have to bus in, unlike with parts of Islington, Westminster and Stoke Newington (where I have also lived).

The next day, I saw people I recognised being interviewed on the TV. The indignant and traumatised licensee of a bar I used to frequent described how she hid in the kitchen with her sons while people looted her alcohol and till. I think the moment her bar was hit may be caught here. And here is a parallel street where looters tried to break into a Bang & Olufsen shop.

Mr J and I stayed up ‘til about 3, by which time it had been reported that an electrical appliance shop in West Ealing had been targeted too. When we thought it unlikely that anybody else would turn over any more cars outside the house, we went to sleep.

The next day, the streets were heavy with police. Friendly police. But anyone under the impression that they may get another night of free licence would have been emphatically disabused.

Although an officer I spoke to said he was worried that looters may target businesses in Southall, I thought it one of the areas least likely to be surrendered. As somebody put it on Twitter: “Turkish and Asian groups have stood up to & chased off rioters. Bloody immigrants. Coming over here, defending our boroughs & communities.” This referred to Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers who protected their property in parts of north London. This is what looters would have faced in Southall. Plus, as I’ve mentioned, we were assisted by what I’m sure were groups of young Asian men out on patrol.

It’s not that I haven’t seen riots in my lifetime, it’s not that they haven’t been very close by, it’s not that I haven’t been on demonstrations that got scary, and it’s definitely not that I don’t recognise the very serious issues that our poorest neighbours face. I’ve written about it here.

In addition to that, I think we all recognise that the young are being hit disproportionately in this recession. The uneducated young have very few unskilled jobs beckoning and the educated young can look forward to a few more certificates and a lot more debt before a similar (though probably ultimately, less precarious) fate. Basically, there aren’t very many young people who occupy the intersections in the Venn diagram of wages, affordability of debt and affordability of housing.

But while I will talk ‘til I’m blue on the face about those three things: housing expense (due to rarity); less purchasing power of salary for the young; increased starter debt to even get a stake in the game – these riots still seem different.

In the days that have followed, we have seen some of the perpetrators have their five minutes – but in a magistrates dock. Like a demented child’s song, a postman, a Para and a ballerina paraded before us to face the music. No matter how hard my deju vu kicked in the other night, there is something different about his one.

All riots at all times have involved looting. It’s too much to ask that there will be no opportunism at a time of even the most principle-driven protest. But here, the thieving and violence was higher in the mix. All the other riots I can recall had a political heart with a penumbra of criminality. To look at the targets of summer 2011, it seems the other way around.

Is it the stuperous ennui of materialism? Is it hi-tech poverty, where people are philosophical about food inflation running at 4.9% but aspire to a gadget with seventy ring-tones and an app for rating your farts? Did a phalanx of Yahoos, bored in the commercial breaks between ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘X-Factor’ go out to look for pretty stones and come back with a laptop and enough iPhones to draw attention to themselves on eBay? It seems that many eyes were bigger than many bellies on that night, as numbers of large-screen TVs were found the next morning, abandoned at wheezing-distance from their originating shops.

So what should we make of it?

I think the first thing is to remember that summer rioting is not that uncommon, and that it takes a very small number of people to make a very large impact. I think we should also remember that it isn’t just ‘the young’: we turn a generation into an alienated, feared fifth column at our own peril. The streets were full of young volunteers on ‘womble day’, cleaning up with everybody else.

Basically, I agree with those who think that there was a massive criminal component to these events, and the solution for that is normal, measured justice. No cutting off social media, no bringing in the army, no evictions for being a council tenant whose son could probably do with a very strong intervention. Now that the police are actually apparent, they appear to be doing a perfectly good job, and it’s has been pointed out by many before me that Twitter was as much a force for good as evil.

But simultaneously there is a very serious political heart to our present situation and it’s getting worse. The poor are getting poorer and somebody has pulled every other rung out of the ladder upwards.

Joseph Conrad’s seminal ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) famously inspired ‘Apocalyse Now’. Its theme was that the dark situations in the world parallel and reflect the darkness inside ourselves. Ideally then, we’ll address both the gripping anomie of those who think it’s OK to break a shop window for designer T-shirts, and those who have been disinherited of any real agency in their own lives.

Because the next time English cities riot, we may be facing both riot-shoppers and a more traditional crowd - people with deep and genuine grievances who are at the end of their tethers. They would be a formidable combination.

The Vampires of Rhode Island

Part 1

Watch the podcast first:



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Part 2

So here is a series of historical events, and a title: ‘The Vampires of Rhode Island’.

We should probably start by covering the ‘vampire’ part.

The contemporaries and friends of Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast and the other unfortunate victims never referred to them as vampires: the term has been retroactively applied (perhaps first in 1979 in a local newspaper article) and applied from 'above' (by the writer of 'The Vampire Tradition' and Geroge Stetson - see below for both). Not all supernatural draining creatures are called vampires by the communities which experience them, but we moderns like the word and apply it pretty indiscriminately.

But it’s not irrelevant or inappropriate – although many of the contemporary locals find it annoying.

The original vampire of folklore came from central and eastern Europe. It came to the attention of the west at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but The Austrian Empire had expanded that era. This means the multiple reports may be understood as bemused westerners observing and reporting upon a folk practice that was probably already well-established within its own locale.

The two most oft-repeated vampire accounts are of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, both from Serbia in vampire heartland.

The characteristics of a vampire attack are as pretty much as follows:

1 The ‘vampire’ is a person who has died suddenly, or violently, or of a ‘draining’ disease.
2 They are quite often, but not always, disliked in life
3 A series of epidemic deaths follow the death of the original ‘vampire’
4 When examined, the ‘vampire’ corpse isn’t found to be ‘suitably’ decomposed. There may be liquid blood in the vessels, viscera or around the mouth. The corpse may have moved in the grave, or ‘moaned’ when moved
5 The first victims are often the family of the ‘vampire’
6 The victims die in a pattern of what we would recognise as epidemic death

Eighteenth century New Englanders did not use the term ‘vampire’, but a few of them apparently performed rituals which would not have been out of place in Ottoman Serbia. This means one of three things:

1 Under certain circumstances, groups of people will spontaneously create rituals with similar characteristics: it’s a human constant
2 This was a common Europe-wide way of treating the dead in times of epidemic death and we only don’t know about it now because proper records weren’t kept
3 This bit of folklore was transmitted to New England some time around the eighteenth century, and was employed in desperate times.

The first point hits near the mark. Unnatural Predators do preoccupy people who are in extreme difficulty. But the ‘human constant’ theme that arises is the scapegoat. Digging up the dead is a little too specific a meme. Unfortunately, we sometimes blame the living too. Bookmark this site for 'Witch-Hunts', planned for the future.

The second thought is clearly wrong: if digging up the dead was common across Europe, why were the Austrians so repelled by it that they took to writing aghast official documents about Arnod Paole and Peter Plojogowitz? We have records of the most bizarre folk rituals, from throwing toad bones for divination, to marching lines of cattle between bonfires. Here is a fun book, full of them.

It is unlikely that this could have passed so completely under the radar for so long.

The third thought is probably the most likely. The anonymous author of ‘The Vampire Tradition’ (an article in the Arnold Collection of the Providence Public Library) thought that the tradition may have been carried by a group of French Hugenots who arrived in the area of the Rhode Island Vampires at the very end of the seventeenth century (There are more details here p183)

H. P. Lovecraft integrates this idea into his story, 'The Shunned House':

The swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf. It was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object

The Shunned House
H. P. Lovecraft (1924)

Lovecraft called his character ‘Roulet’ after a man who had been tried and convicted of werewolfism in 1598 in Caude, France.

That would mean there was about a century between the arrival of the Hugenots in Rhode Island, and the first ‘vampire’ – Rachel Harris. It’s feasible that the folkore passed from the immigrant community to the locals in that time.

To be sure that they were the real vectors, it would be nice to know how and why the Hugenots had taken up an eastern European tradition with such gusto, and whether there are other examples of it in Hugenot communities.

If there's no trace of such a thing, there may be a third, as yet unidentified, community which is responsible: the whole subject could do with more research.

So, moving on from the ‘v’ word, we are left wondering why these occurrences happened where and when they did. If the meme had been transmitted to New England by some means, why didn’t it happen everywhere and at all times?

Let’s look at four things: the first is the history of the area, the use of its land and resources.

This part of New England was very prosperous in the late sixteen and seventeen hundreds. The soil is rocky but fertile, and decades of hard labour by slaves, indentured men, tenant farmers and independent locals, so called ‘Swamp Yankees’, led to the stones being pulled from the earth to create the miles of dry stone walls which are still everywhere. To an English traveller, this makes the region seem quite un-American and frankly more evocative of the stony parts of England like Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cornwall.

The population of the area peaked in the late 1700s. But after that, the young and vigorous left for better prospects elsewhere, either in the towns and cities, or in the expanding territories to the west.

The region referred to, where agriculture is in a depressed condition and abandoned farms are numerous … Farm houses deserted and ruinous are frequent, and the once productive lands, neglected and overgrown with scrubby oak, speak forcefully and mournfully of the migration of the youthful farmers from country to town.

‘The Animistic Vampire in New England’
George Stetson (1896)

So by the 1800s, parts of New England embodied the depressed and darkly haunted environment described by the American Gothic Romantics like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe and H P Lovecraft.


Lovecraft even referred directly to Mercy Brown in one of his stories:

As lately as 1892, an Exeter Community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace

The Shunned House
H. P. Lovecraft (1924)

Secondly, there is the specific nature of religiosity in the area. This isn’t Puritan heartland – that’s further north. Rhode Island was characterised by a more frontier, independent religious quality, self-authoring and authorising. Among the sectarians and free-thinkers, the Quakers and the Shakers, there was a spiritual life in which folk-practice coexisted with recognisable, conventional religion.

The independent Rhode Islanders felt free to turn to ancient beliefs, not regarding them as incompatible with either science or religion.

This independent form of living is apparent in the numerous family burial plots, such as that of the Tillinghasts, rather than central town graveyards. That may also mean that there were a great many more exhumations than we know about, as they could have been done free from outside scrutiny.

By some mysterious survival, occult transmission, or remarkable atavism, this region, including within its radius the towns of Exeter, Foster, Kingstown, East Greenwich, and others, with their scattered hamlets and more pretentious villages, is distinguished by the prevalence of this remarkable superstition

‘The Animistic Vampire in New England’
George Stetson (1896)

Thirdly, there’s the issue of epidemic death, specifically death from tuberculosis.

The tuberculosis bacillus was discovered by Robert Koch in 1882. It was, and is, a disease that associated with poverty, and the poor, cramped conditions of industrialisation.

There were no significant medical interventions ‘til the widespread use antibiotics in the 1940s, but by then the disease had already started to decline through improving social circumstances and routine pasteurising of milk, one method of transmission. Even now, it’s not a simple disease to cure or eliminate.

Because of the long, slow draining death process, consumption appears as a central theme with many folkloric Unnatural Predators, including fairies and the vampires of Eastern and central Europe.

Just like many other places at this time, New England was becoming industrial and encountering new public health problems such as TB. Even those who lived rural lives were probably living at close quarters with their family and livestock. They may also have been relatively poor and malnourished.

The fourth issue here is that the bodies had not decayed as one would have thought. They appeared to show signs of ‘life-in-afterlife’. However, knowledge about the massive variability of post-mortem changes is a modern luxury. You and I can Google the effects of temperature, soil pH and micro-organisms upon decomposition. But nineteenth century people buried their dead quickly for the very good reason that they were a source of contagion.

As odd as it seems, liquid blood at the mouth and in the viscera are not as exceptional in corpses as you might think. The relationship between the folkore of the undead and post-mortem processes are covered in this excellent book by Paul Barber. In the particular case of Mercy Brown, as we have seen, she could even have been stored semi-frozen in a crypt.

So, the eighteenth century inhabitants of Rhode Island witnessed an epidemic of a disease against which they were powerless, a disease that passed freely among family members. Death is contagious.

Without modern knowledge about decomposition, specific signs like liquid blood in the heart ‘living blood’ as it was called, were taken as an indication that the loved one hadn’t quite passed over to the other side. They remained in shadowy form, draining the life from those who remained.

Ingesting the blood or body of powerful enemy to placate it is an ancient and reasonably common ritual. Charlemagne even took the trouble to make it illegal, as it was a fairly common measure taken against witches. It’s an attempt at communion. Even established religions perform the same ritual today.

So somehow, maybe via French Hugenots, a meme passed from one community to another.

People aren’t daft, but they do get desperate. I think it would be unfair to think of the participants of these rituals as gullible yokels. George Brown was apparently unconvinced that the exhumations would work, but was persuaded to try it by neighbours. See p21 here. He can’t have been the only New Englander to reluctantly submit to the last resort.

Rest in Peace, Mercy Brown.

She bloom'd, though the shroud was around her,
locks o'er her cold bosom wave,
As if the stern monarch has crown'd her,
The Fair speechless queen of the grave,
But what lends the grave such lusture?
O'er her cheeks what such beauty shed?
His life blood, who bent there, had nurs'd her,
The living was food for the dead!

Old Colony Memorial and Plymouth County (Massachusetts) Advertiser
May 4th 1822

Massive 'thank-you's to:

Karl Derrick. Makeup effects supervisor, successful author and screenwriter. Also cameraman and enthusiastic supporter of Jourdemayne.

Arnie Koch is an awesome New York based techie-bod, logistics guy & pizza homing device. This would have been very hard without him.

John Rael is an LA based actor, director and skeptic. Have a look at some of his hilarious podcasts.

'Reversion' by Stone Idols is an ambient album by Rob Jenkins, Martin Smith & Neil Cowley. It’s my very favourite music to write to. Please support the music by downloading it here.

Further reading:

For more background on the Rhode Island Vampires, I recommend this by folklorist Michael Bell.

I LOVE this book about the differerent waves of immigration onto north America, and the cultures that accompanied them.

A facsimilie of George Stetson's classic essay from The American Anthropologist is available on the 'net here.

It's always worth reading Montague Summers for the purple prose and utterly confabulated extras. He covers the Rhode Island vampires in this book.