What the Daemon Said by Cardin Matt

Author:Cardin, Matt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2022-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Religion and Vampires

I. Introduction: An Intrinsically Religious Monster

For a ready indication of the profound interconnectedness between the subject of religion and the subject of vampires, one has only to look to the fact that four of the towering figures in the field of vampire studies have also been formidable presences in the field of religion.

The first of these, Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), was a renowned French Benedictine abbot and theologian who may have ranked as the eighteenth century’s pre-eminent Catholic biblical scholar. He is best remembered for having written a masterful treatise on vampires—Traité sur les apparitions des esprits, et sur les vampires . . . (Paris, 1746), translated into English in 1850 as The Phantom World—in response to the vampire hysteria that swept across Central and Eastern Europe in the 1720s and 1730s.

The second, Montague Summers (1880–1948), was a colorful British eccentric who achieved the reputation of being the world’s greatest vampire scholar for his books The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire in Europe (1929). He also claimed to be a Roman Catholic priest, although this was almost certainly a pose that he employed to enhance his mystique as a vampire expert. But he was, in fact, an ordained deacon in the Church of England (according to Father Brocard Sewell in his memoir of Summers) and thus formally bore the Christian title “reverend.” In any event, Raymond T. McNally, in his 1974 anthology of vampirana, A Clutch of Vampires (published by the New York Graphic Society), drew an overt connection between Calmet’s and Summers’s religious credentials and their canonical status in the field of vampire studies by identifying them as “the only major researchers in this field” and referring to them in the book’s dedication as “holy fathers in the Christian faith and the spiritual fathers of all latter-day vampirologists” (9, 5).

The second, Antoine Faivre (b. 1934), was called out as “the father of contemporary vampire studies” by the Italian sociologist of religion Massimo Introvigne in his 2001 essay titled, appropriately enough, “Antoine Faivre: Father of Contemporary Vampire Studies.” Introvigne asserted that Faivre, an eminent French scholar of religion and esotericism, “opened up and established the field of vampire studies as an independent and relevant academic discipline” with his Les Vampires: Essai historique, critique et littéraire by “proving that the vampire controversy was historically significant as the last great European theological and philosophical discussion of magic” (610).

The fourth figure, J. Gordon Melton, is a prominent American scholar of religious studies who, in addition to founding the Institute for the Study of American Religion and creating Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions—which has gone through multiple editions and is widely regarded as the standard general reference work in its field—is also a leading authority on vampires whose scholarly areas of specialization include parapsychology and the occult. His 1994 opus The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead is arguably the most comprehensive English-language reference work in the field of vampire studies, and he has also published a comprehensive bibliography of vampires in folklore, history, literature, film, and television.

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