Exploding the bloody myths of Dracula and vampires It may come as a terrible shock to millions of Dracula fans and lovers of Gothic horrors, but the Transylvanian vampire whose exploits have chilled the blood of four generations of Englishmen-was a woman. The supernatural terrors and fascination with creatures feast- ing on human blood, recreated with poetic licence in the Dracula fiction of the nine- teenth century, have their roots in true events. The fear en- gendered by the broken bodies of hundreds of pretty girls, found drained of their blood in the neighbourhood of a Gothic castle in the foothills of the Carpathians in the first decade of the seventeenth century, was real enough. Behind the dark superstition and horror tales inspired by the apparently senseless killings, the shadowy figure of the historical Vampire Lady can be identified with con- siderable certainty. As Mary Shelley said in the foreword of her best-selling V'ictorian horror story, Frank- enstein. " everything must have a beginning, to speak the San- chean phrase, and that begin- ning must be linked to something that went before. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos ". Her words fit per- fectly the genesis of the vampire Dracula myth created out of undigested facts and outlandish folklore traditions by Bram Stoker, a nineteenth-century Irish author, wit and theatrical manager. Wi,th an unerring eye for the Victorian love of horrors, Stoker transformed the traditionally cruel Dracula into a vampire to suit popuLar tastes. The fact that in Transylvamian folldore the dracul or devil stories and the vampire myth were never mixed, did not deter Stoker from en- dowing his hero with new traits and characteristics. His best-seller, first published in 1897, has seen countless edi- tioms and hs acquanted the entire English-speaking world with Count Dracula's attempt to conquer Bmtain and establish a vampire mrpire. Stoker appears to have got most of his historical and ethno- graphical information from the Bnitish Museum library. In Stoker's book, Jonatban Harker, the London lawyer entrusted with the task of preparing Dxacula's move from hbis Tran- sylvanian castle to Britain, gets his infomnation from the British Museum where he "made search among the books and maps in the library regarding Transylvania ". In the book Count Dracula presents himself to his lawyer as a noble boyar, a term applicable in south eastern Europe only to the noblemnen of old Rumania (Walachia). On other occasions he boasts of his Szekely, Hun- garian highlander, ancestry. But who was the real historical Dracula whose name has become synonymous with the devil (dracul) in Rumania and whose legend caught the imagination of Bram Stoker ? And even more to the point, how does the name of the devil incarnate, tradi- tionally a male figure, acquire a feminine-a ending ? Philologists agreed at the sixth congress of onornastic sciences in Munich in 1958 that Stoker's Dracula can easily be identified with the historical personality of Vlad the Fifth of Walachia, I A woodcut of Vlad the Impaler. called the Impaler for his cruel- ties. He ruled from 1456 to 1462 and was briefly restored to his throne in 1476. The name, although a homo- nym of the word denoting devil, derives its meaning from the Order of the Dragon, a church decoration bestowed upon Vlad by Sigismund, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor, for the Walachian ruler's spirited defence of Christendom against the Turks. The philologically unusual feminine -a ending in Dracula can be explained by the practice of medieval Walachian chan- celleries of adding a genitive -a suffix to denote " the son of " a person of rank, fulfilling the same function as du in French or von in German. The cruelties of Vlad the Im- paler, or Dracula, shocked and fascinated Renaissance Europe and grew into a legend which, not unlike Marlowe's Dr Faus- tus, found its way into the litera- ture of most European nations. The Dracula story was written in 1476 at the instigation of Transylvania Saxons. He de- prived them of their traditional trade monopolies in Walachia and repeatedly sacked their cities. It was intended as an in- dictment of Vlad Draclda's mon- strous cruelties, but his atrocities became one of the main topics of Renaissance news letters, the forerunners of newspapers. The earliest extant reprint of the 1476 Dracula story dates from 1485, and it was printed on the presses of Bartholomeus Gothan in Lubeck, The later Nuremberg and Augsburg in- cunabula recount in detail "the many dreadful and horrifying deeds" of Dracula, amnong them how he punished lazy women, disrespectful diplomats and fawning nronks insincerely prais- ing his aots, by ordering them to be impaled on stakes. A careful review of Dracula stories would reveal that Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, had never been accused of vampirism. Thus, neither in history nor in legend is there any justification for Brain Stoker's vampire Dracula. Yet there is strong belief in vampires in the valleys of the Carpathians, and women vampires still top the horror charts of Transylvanian folklore. According to generally accepted notions, vampires are the ghosts of heretics who leave their graves at night and suck the blood of grown-ups and bhildren and kill virgins for their blood. The vampire stories were more than simple tales of horror for the people living near or on the vast Bathory estates, where several hundred young girls were found murdered and drained of their blood in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Official investigations led to the Countess Elisabeth Bathory, one of the great society beauties of the Imperial court at Vienna. Her husband, Count Ferencz Nadasdy, was Master of the Emperor's Horses and an out- standing general. She was the offspring of an ancient and noble family which gave two of the most remarkable princes to Transylvania, a king to Poland and a host of church dignitaries and warlords to Hungary. According to Father Laszio Turoczy, an eighteenth-century Jesuit, the countess, driven in- sane by the fear of losing her looks, turned to sorcery and the reputedly magic qualities of vir- gins' blood, to stave off old age. "Elisabeth. therefore, formed the resolution to bathe her face and her whole body in human blood so as to enhance her beauty. Two old women and a servant called Ficzko assisted her in her undertaking ", Michael Wagener wrote in the first rational analysis of the coun- tess's bloodlust at the end of the eighteenth century. When arrested at the enad of 1610 by the Lord Palatine of ilumgary, "this blood-thirsty and blood-sucking Godless woman ", as the PaJatine re- ported to Parliament, "was caught in the eact at Csejthe Castle" in the Carpathians. It was the first and probably the only reliably recorded instance of vampirism in the annals of Europe. Her accomplices were tried and sentenced to be burned on a stake on January 7, 1611. The countess herself, be- cause of her exalted birth, was never tried. On the orders of the Lord Palatine she was irnmured alive in her own castle. Although her obsession with virgins' blood has been cOmmon knowledge, no one has until now linked her with vampirism be- cause of the preconceived notions, supported by ohurch dogmas, on the ghostly nature of blood-suckers. The mainsprings of vampirism, as an objective examination of Countess Elisa- beth's case would show, are, however, quite earthly. There is nothing metaphysical or spectral about them. Gabriel Ronav Gabriel Ronay's book, The Dracula Myth, is to be published by Gollancz next year. Exploding the bloody myths of Dracula and vamvires