Part one
Antiquity - godesses and monsters
Summerian terracota relief showing a blood-drinking monster with owls via Wikipedia"Lilith" was a possible vampiric monster from the ancient Hebrew Bible and its later interpretations - old Hebrew texts removed from the Old Testament, known as Apocrypha. Although she is described in the book of Isaiah, her roots are more likely in Babylonian demonology . Lilith was a monster who roamed at night taking on the appearance of an owl. She would hunt, seeking to kill the weakest - newborn children and pregnant women. According to Jewish tradition Lilith was the wife of Adam before there was Adam and Eve, but she was demonized because she refused to obey Adam. One version of the story says that she left her husband due to his sexual ineptitude, becoming the Queen of Demons and Evil spirits. In modern terms and from a more liberated viewpoint, she demanded equal rights becoming almost a first feminist. Naturally, she was considered evil for such "radical" desires and became a vampire who eventually attacked the children of Adam and Eve - all their human descendants. Because Hebrew law absolutely forbade the eating of human flesh or the drinking of any type of blood, Lilith's blood drinking was described as exceptionally evil. To ward off attacks from Lilith, parents used to hang amulets from their child's cradle - this is in a way continued up to now, with different rattles adorning pushchairs and prams.
Lilith with a snake by John Collier via WikipediaIn the medieval text Alphabet of Ben Sira the story of Lilith is finished this way:
“Whenever I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that infant.' She also agreed to have one hundred of her children die every day. Accordingly, every day one hundred demons perish, and for the same reason, we write the angels' names on the amulets of young children. When Lilith sees their names, she remembers her oath, and the child recovers.”
The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet in one myth became full of bloodlust after slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood (other gods didn’t want her to kill all the humans so they decided to get her drunk and finish the folly). Still she was a goddess.
It was continued in the European civilizations - ancient Greece and Rome. There were numerous bloodthirsty Goddesses in both Roman and Greek mythology, known as Lamiae, Empusae and Striges. These names eventually evolved into the general terms for Witches, Demons and Vampires. The Vampires, though they did drink blood, were in fact goddesses not "living Dead" or “undead” people - disembodied divinities capable of taking on human appearances so that they might seduce their victims.
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The ancient Greeks believed in the strigoe or lamiae, who were monsters who ate children and drank their blood. The first Lamia, (Greek: Λάμια) was human, though - the beautiful queen of Libya and the lover of Zeus, the Greek king of all gods; Zeus's wife, Hera, fought against her (Hera, being one seriously jealous wife, fought most of her husband’s lovers whenever she could find them as she could do nothing to her philandering husband). Lamia was driven insane, and she killed her own offspring. Then she was turned into a monster - half woman, half serpent. At night, it was said, she hunted other human children to kill as well. Myths variously describe Lamia's monstrous appearance as a result of either Hera's wrath, the pain of grief, the madness that drove her to murder, or - in some rare versions - a natural result of being Hecate's daugter. Nothing is known about the creation of other Lamias or how they propagated. Apparently the name “Lamia” was popular among Greek courtesans (heteras). Other tale, known by both the Greeks and Romans, 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 very beautiful but somehow strange. 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. Talk about ultimate exploitation of a husband. Here we deal with the first myth about a human vampire.
Roman’s vampires were called Strix and apparently, were borrowed from the Greeks with one difference - they were male. The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author Boios, which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses. This tells the story of Polyphonte and her two sons Agrios and Oreios (their father being a wild bear), who were punished for their cannibalism, by being transformed into wild animals. Polyphonte became a strix (so an owl) "that cries by night, without food or drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to men”. Ovid tells the story of striges attacking the legendary king Procas in his cradle, and how they were warded off with arbutus (small trees or shrubs with red flaking bark and edible red berries) and placated with the meat of pigs, as an explanation for the custom of eating beans and bacon on the Kalends of June.
More legends about vampires continued throughout all the world, including India, Malaysia, Polynesia and the lands of the Aztecs and Eskimos but, as it is a concise version of history, I won't repeat here every single one of them, just a few which seemed more original than the others.
I hope the first part wasn't too long; in the next one I will try to describe the development of stories about vampires and werewolves from the Middle Ages to 18th century.
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