Vampire slayer

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For the Vampire Slayers from the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer see Slayer (Buffyverse).

The vampire is a folkloric entity that emerged in the South Slavic regions (Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia) possibly as early as the fourteenth century. Originally, the term vampir (Old Slavic вампир), probably coined between the tenth and eleventh centuries, was a pejorative label used to designate indigenous inhabitants of the Balkans who refused to replace their pre-Christian agrarian rituals (including blood sacrifice) as Byzantine Christians attempted to convert the Balkan Slavs (and other ethnic groups, such as the residual Thracians). Non-Christian groups ("pagans") gradually ceased to have any social significance, but a second threat to the supremacy of Christianity in the Balkans was posed by the Bogomils, a dualist sect known for their antagonism to ritual. The meaning of vampire seems to have been extended to these "heretics": Felix Oinas has pointed out that the Old Russian word vampir was synonymous with eretik, "heretic." It was not until after the disappearance of both pagans and heretics in the Balkans, or at least their elimination as any sort of threat to the hegemony of Orthodox Christianity, that the word vampire began to pick up its folkloric and supernatural attributes.

The social function of the vampire, it has been argued, was not unlike that of the witch in other societies: the witch was often a sort of scapegoat. A significant difference, however, is that witches were living people, whereas vampires were always (in Slavic folklore, at least) corpses.

In the earliest period of the folkloric use of vampire, the class of vampires included only those members of the community (primarily rural, agrarian) who had been excommunicated or were otherwise anathema. Thus a connection was made between anathema and evil, and the term vampire eventually came to designate a specific unholy entity, a corpse that could return from the dead.

So long as the moral character of the deceased (excommunicate) was unambiguous, in the event of a local catastrophe or threat (e.g. dying sheep, unexplained pregnancies, etc.), the vampire was easily identified. However, under some circumstances, when there was no recent death of an individual who had been excommunicated, yet there was a social need for a scapegoat, there was a motivation to either extend the range of conditions under which someone could become a vampire, or to find someone who could perform a service for the community by "identifying" the potential vampire. This person, who was more or a seer than a vampire hunter or slayer, was marked in some way, either physically or by social status. This seer's job was to remove from the community the responsibility of designating a deceased member of the community as a vampire. The townsfolk, not unlike a lynch mob, could thereby avoid any guilt for accusing and destroying the body of an innocent victim (since dead people, like the newborn, are clearly innocent).

[edit] Bibliography

• Bruce McClelland, Slayers and their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
• Jan Perkowski, Vampire Lore. (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006).