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NOTES ON VAMPIRES

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Current Research Interest (September 2002)

To investigate the eastern vampire or 'ghoul' as found in the stories of Vikram and the Vampire and the various Buddhist ghouls (hungry ghosts, the Tibetan Book of the Dead) especially within the framework of 'the double', i.e. as ourselves (see Meyrink's The Golem and the Arabian Nights tale of The Prince and the Ogress).

The Story of Menippus

"One tale known by both the Greeks and Romans, for example, concerns the wedding of a young man named Menippus. At the wedding a guest, who was a noted philosopher called Apollonius of Tyana, carefully observed the bride, who was said to be beautiful. Apollonius finally accused the wife of being a vampire, and according to the story (as it was later told by a scholar named Philostratus in the first century A.D.) the wife confessed to vampirism. Allegedly she was planning to marry Menippus merely to have him handy as a source of fresh blood to drink."

Robert Burton writes in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

"Philostratus, in his Fourth Book de vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius a young man 25 years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. "The young man, a Philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, among other guests, came Apollonius, who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece."