Ecclesial Recognition of Vampirism

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Curialium, written 1182-92 by the noted ecclesiastical scholar Walter Map (1140-1209) and Historia Rerum Anglicarum, written 1196 by an Augustinian monk by the name of William of Newburgh (1136-1198), contain all manner of tales of the undead, mostly excommunicated, who leave their tombs at night to torment those close to them or to provoke a series of suspicious deaths. When their caskets are opened, their bodies are found to be intact and spotted with blood. The only way to end the demonic pollution was to burn the body after impaling it. Lacking a specific term, the English chroniclers named these undead cadaver sanguisugus, Latin for "blood-sucking corpse." Numerous accounts attesting to the existence of revenants who returned from the dead have been collected since as long ago as the eleventh century, well before the term vampire entered the dictionary or common usage. The Minutes of the Council of 1304 recounts the Bishop of Chartres' report which told of a corpse wandering beyond its grave. A report made by the Bishop of Cahors, a city in central France, in 1031 told of corpses found intact outside their tombs, as recorded in Dictionnaire Infernal (1818). In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Reformation, a movement led by dissenters from Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, contributed to making vampirism official.
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Pope Innocent VIII sanctioned the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (1486) which treatise included the discovery and eliminantion of nocturnal demons and revenants. Many saw this as the Church officially sanctioning the existence of the undead, ie predatory demons able to materialise, demateralise and appear to be the living dead or what we now call vampires. The word vampire did not yet exist and instead the terms incubi and succubi will be found in Malleus Maleficarum. For example, there is reference to "the bewitchment of human beings by means of Incubuc and Succubus devils" which, it is noted, "can happen in three ways." The three ways are those who "prostitute" themselves to demons, those with a connection to demons, and, thirdly, those who are molested by demons against their will.
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Dom Augustin Calmet and other high-placed clergy also conferred on vampirism what in effect amounted to official recognition. Such is the case with both Archbishop Guiseppe Davanzati (1665-1755) in his Dissertation on Vampires (1744) and, perhaps unintentionally, Pope Benedict XIV in Book IV of the second edition of the voluminous On the Beatification of the Servants of God and on the Canonisation of the Beatified (1749).

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Demonologie (1597) by King James is a treatise expressing a particular point of view and not one shared by everybody that vampiric spectres are not the souls of the dead but demons masquerading as the deceased. The Vampire Research Society tends to hold the view that the two possibilities are not necessarily mutually exclusive if the person who had led an exceedingly wicked life devoted to the black arts dies in a state of mortal sin as a result of demonic interference. The trapped soul and demonic presence might very well occupy the same metamorphosed shell (corpse). Some take the view that those who become vampires were never truly deceased in the first place, ie not God's true dead but the Devil's undead, masquerading under the appearance of the "resurrected" dead. However, these are areas about which we can only speculate.

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Only dissenting traditionalists within the Catholic and Protestant Churches continued to openly subscribe to the existence of vampires from the "Age of Enlightenment" onward. Individual priests and bishops nevertheless remained vigilant even though the Western Church appeared (to the outside world, at least) to now refute revenants and the undead. The Eastern Churches, particulary the Orthodox Churches, remained openly convinced of the existence of them, however, throughout and after the so-called "Age of Enlightenment." Many Eastern Churches still accept this pestilence to be real and in need of exorcising.
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Liberal clergy and modern philosophers in the eighteenth century started to condemn belief in vampirism in the name of logic and "common sense" without considering too deeply that most of what the Church teaches (eg the Resurrection, completely defies all logic).
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In 1852, Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary, wrote: "You will find stories of vampires in the Jewish Letters, 1738, whom the Jesuits have accused of believing nothing. It should be observed how they triumph in the history of the vampire ... how they thanked God and the virgin for having at last converted this poor d'Argens. ... Behold, said they, this famous unbeliever, who dared to throw doubts on the appearance of the angel to the holy virgin; on the star which conducted the magi; on the cure of the possessed; on the immersion of two thousand swine in a lake; on an eclipse of the sun at the full moon; on the resurrection of the dead who walked in Jerusalem; his heart is softened, his mind is enlightened: He believes in vampires."
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The Age of the Romantics witnessed a renaissance in vampire belief, culminating with Victorian society which took a lively interest in all things supernatural, not least the cult of the vampire, but it was Montague Summers in the early twentieth century who truly restored vampirological interest with his classic works The Vampire: His Kith & Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929).

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