Staff | February 28, 2004
The vampire originated as a political metaphor used to critique tyranny. In 1725 and 1732, two villages in the occupied territories of Serbia suffered an outbreak of a vampire that spurned the threat of a mass nonviolent uprising and a collective demand for respect of their cultural practices. Perhaps fearing that a shadowy monster would challenge their rational-imperial might, the Austrian Habsburgs sent in the scientists and seven years later another report was received. This report by five medical officers confirming the existence of vampires must have quickly spread quickly; within three months the London Journal was discussing the episode. Thus, it was the London Journal that introduced the vampire into English in 1732 and used it explicitly as a metaphor for the abuses of the dominant noble class. It was an attack levied at a time that Jürgen Habermas describes as a transition between a politicized public society developed by the coffee house culture to a public constructed by the newspaper, or “World of Letters”. This historical coincidence places the origin of the vampire myth at a crucial moment in both the formation of the press and the psyche of the public.
The first account of the vampire came in 1725, fifteen years before the War of the Austrian Succession and the demise of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. The Imperial Provisor wrote to inform “the most laudable Administration” of the bizarre actions of their Serbian subjects who had demanded the right to exhume the corpse of Peter Plogojowitz as he was a vampire. Attempting to exert his control over their affairs, the Imperial Povisor tried to stop the procedure until the Austrian Empire was notified. The resulting clash between indigenous custom and occupation law brought about the emergence of nonviolent resistance.
The villagers, unwilling to delay their own customs in deference to the foreign occupier replied that they would vacate the city unless they were able to act. They made it explicit to the Provisor that they were contesting his authority and demanding “legal recognition to deal with the body according to their custom”. The demand for legal recognition and threat of nonviolent resistance was augmented by the implication that they, or someone, would use force. The Provisor was told that “by the time a gracious resolution was received from Belgrade, perhaps the entire village […] could be destroyed by such an evil spirit”. The Provisor was forced to allow the procedure but placed the blame fully on “the rabble”.
One can imagine the reaction this report must have elicited in the Austrians. Aware of their tenuous political position, the Spanish Habsburgs had fallen only 25 years before, the Austrians must have been alarmed. For the Austrians, the vampire likely appeared as a political entity that could hasten their demise, or at least frighten their subjects out of obedience, and thus worth investigation. Charles VI’s response was to send a medical team to investigate in 1732. The report titled Visum et Repertum (Things Seen and Reported) that was sent back was de-politicized through scientific discourse. Unlike in the earlier account, minimal time is spent explaining confrontations of the villagers with Austrian rule. Instead, the vampire was treated as a scientific problem, which explains why the report spends the majority of its time detailing the case histories of the various victims. The report did, however, add one crucial detail to the vampire. It was infectious: “all those who were tormented and killed by the vampires must themselves become vampires.”
From the reports of a military occupation force the vampire was borne. In 1732, within three months of the second report, the London Journal began to report on the phenomenon. This came at a time when the press was beginning to create a politicized public. It was a development brought about by several factors. Jürgen Habermas identifies one in particular that immediately gave the press added political power: the end of censorship with the expiration of the Licensing Act of 1662. The act whose title read “An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses” expired in 1695. The result was that “compared to the press in the other European states […] the British press enjoyed unique liberties.” Although the press may have had greater powers, it wasn’t until 1722 that the political opposition, the Tories, gained control of a leading newspaper. That leading newspaper was the London Journal.
The London Journal was the first major newspaper to be owned by the opposition. Purchased in 1722, the London Journal was “the most important and widely read journal at that time” and “created political journalism in the grand style”. It also marks the formation of a politicized public with uniform political views. Habermas supplies an informative quote on this subject that is worth citing at length:
The innovation brought about by the opposition was the creation of a popular opinion. Bolingbroke [the Tory leader] and his friends knew how to form such a public opinion that, aimed at the same objective and furnished with likeminded impulses of will, could be mobilized for political use. It was not demagoguery and sloganeering, uproars and mob scenes that were novel…. Also, there were still no regular public meetings…. Rather, this public opinion was directed by another factor: by the establishment of an independent journalism that knew how to assert itself against the government and that made critical commentary and public opposition against the government part of the normal state of affairs.
Concretely, we could say that for the first time the public, constituted by those who were reading the papers, was being taught political attacks against the dominant forces. It was an attack often framed in metaphorical terms: four years after the formation of the London Journal, the opposition printed “Swift’s Gulliver, Pope’s Dunciad, and Gay’s Fables”. It is in this context that vampirism was given to the public by the opposition in the form of “Political Vampyres”.
The London Journal piece uses the vampire as a symbolic through which the public is taught to understand political affairs. Accepting the above discussion about the historical context of the vampire, we can imagine that the public’s political consciousness was relatively unformed. The role of the article, then, seems to be to provide the public with a basic metaphor for the relationship between the people and the nobles that will benefit the Tories, who were wealthy but typically not nobles. Thus, the vampire is treated not as a problem for science nor for fantasy. This is established in the opening of the piece which contrasts the opinions of a “Doctor of Physick” and a “beautiful young Lady, an Admirer of strange Occurrences”. The doctor takes the literal approach and insists that corpses cannot “torment the Living by sucking their Blood” while the lady takes an apolitical, fantastic position and argues for their existence. The author of the piece then teaches the public the correct political interpretation - the vampire is a metaphor for oppression:
I must agree with the learned Doctor, that an inanimate Corpse cannot perform any vital Functions; yet, agree with the Lady that there are Vampyres. This Account, you’ll observe, comes the Eastern Part of the World, always remarkable for the Allegorical Style. The States of Hungary are in Subjection to the Turks and Germans, and govern’d by a pretty hard Hand; which obliges them to couch all their Complaints under Figures.
The author then goes on to insist that vampires do exist, namely in the form of the noble classes, the Whigs: “History, especially our own, supplies us with so many Instances of Vampyres in this Sense, that it wou’d fill Volumes to enumerate them. The Gavestones, Spencers, De la Poles, Empson and Dudley, Wolsey, and Buckingham, and were Vampyres of the first Magnitude…” The vampire was generalized from a phenomenon of military occupation to the taxation of the public. The vampire served as crude propaganda for the opposition, a way to attack the dominant class while basing the attack in something of base interest to the public: the living dead. The result is manipulative propaganda used to inflame the passions of the public against the political enemies of an only slightly less politically powerful social force. However, this does demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the vampire myth to function as a basic metaphor that aptly explains the oppression of government.