Chapter 107

APPLICATION OF THE PRECEDING INSTANCES TO VAMPIRES.

Supposing these facts, which I believe to be incontestably true, may we not imagine that the vampires of Hungary, Silesia, and Moldavia, are some of those men who have died of maladies which heat the blood, and who have retained some remains of life in their graves, much like those animals which we have mentioned, and those birds which plunge themselves during the winter in the lakes and marshes of Poland, and in the northern countries? They are without respiration or motion, but still not destitute of vitality. They resume their motion and activity when, on the return of spring, the sun warms the waters, or when they are brought near a moderate fire, or laid in a room of temperate heat; then they are seen to revive, and perform their ordinary functions, which had been suspended by the cold.

Thus, vampires in their graves returned to life after a certain time, and their soul does not forsake them absolutely until after the entire dissolution of their body, and when the organs of life, being absolutely broken, corrupted, and deranged, they can no longer by their agency perform any vital functions. Whence it happens, that the people of those countries impale them, cut off their heads, burn them, to deprive their spirit of all hope of animating them again, and of making use of them to molest the living.

Pliny,[607] mentioning the soul of Hermotimes, of Lazomene, which absented itself from his body, and recounted various things that had been done afar off, which the spirit said it had seen, and which, in fact, could only be known to a person who had been present at them, says that the enemies of Hermotimes, named Cantandes, burned that body, which gave hardly any sign of life, and thus deprived the soul of the means of returning to lodge in its envelop; "donec cremato corpore interim semianimi, remeanti animæ vetut vaginam ademerint."

Origen had doubtless derived from the ancients what he teaches,[608] that the souls which are of a spiritual nature take, on leaving their earthly body, another, more subtile, of a similar form to the grosser one they have just quitted, which serves them as a kind of sheath, or case, and that it is invested with this subtile body that they sometimes appear about their graves. He founds this opinion on what is said of Lazarus and the rich man in the Gospel,[609] who both of them have bodies, since they speak and see, and the wicked rich man asks for a drop of water to cool his tongue.

I do not defend this reasoning of Origen; but what he says of a subtile body, which has the form of the earthly one which clothed the soul before death, quite resembles the opinion of which we spoke in