Tag Archives: superstition

Lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women

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Reading Killing the Dead by John Blair for the Telegraph, 13 November 2025

St Cuthbert lived on the island of Lindisfarne on a diet of raw onions and died (with what sense of relief we can only imagine) in 687 CE. Four centuries later his coffin was opened, and his revealed corpse looked for all the world like a living man. Some duly proclaimed a miracle, but archaeologist and medievalist John Blair can’t help wondering: “Might his lifelike corpse have raised concerns?”

Comprehensively surveying the world’s undead was, Blair says, a project he saved for his retirement. Killing the Dead speaks to a lifetime’s storing up of mischievous treasures; also to Blair’s sheer enjoyment now, that teeters often (and who can blame him?) on unholy glee. What’s not to love about discussions of China’s “lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women”, or about a book with chapter titles like “Lying Undead in a Ditch: England, 700–1000”?

Dullards will call “cheat”, since the title mentions vampires while the book embraces all varieties of the undead. But be patient: Blair’s global history of the dangerous dead (restless dead, undead, revenant shroud-chewers — call them what you will) is structured to address this very point.

Blair reckons that vampires, commonly conceived, are a literary invention, and comparatively youthful. Our first true vampire novel is a pamphlet from 1600, now lost, featuring the widely florid tale of Johann Kunze of Bennisch.

Everyone knows that vampires are Slavic but, says Blair, “the intensity of a phenomenon at a late date does not prove that it existed from an early one;” also that historical discussions of the phenomenon “have hugely over-emphasized bloodsucking.”

Blair’s history begins around the 8th century BCE with the Neo-Assyrians, whose remarkably laid-back attitudes towards the restless dead found their way to Greece and from there to Rome, where they cross-fertilised with some Asian ideas (“veering between pathos and bawdy comedy”) about predatory female shape-shifters. These folkloric strains twisted and darkened as they head north, giving rise to some magnificent Icelandic monsters.

Scandinavian colonisation cast these “Viking-style revenants” across northern Europe, where they shaped beliefs in northern Germany, Poland, and Bohemia (witness “an intensive corpse-killing epidemic, which erupted during 1546–1553 in a series of small Saxon towns”). This lore then intensified and spread south-eastwards, eventually linking up with more oriental-flavoured Balkan beliefs. So while vampires are younger than we think, there’s no need for disappointment: their ancestry is much richer and more various than we ever could have imagined.

Some huge questions are being begged here, and Blair is assiduous in addressing them all. (Blair’s book’s over 500 pages long, and he wastes not a single one.) First and most important: are the undead a story we tell each other, or a real phenomenon?

For the phenomenon to be real, Granpa doesn’t actually have to leap up from his bier and chase us around the parlour. It would be enough that we shared some cognitive glitch that made us susceptible to belief in the undead. Perhaps we’re all inclined to see signs of life in post-animate matter. And it is true that corpses do not say still, they groan and fart, stiffen and flex and, when they finally decay, do so at rates that are far from normative.

These days we consider death a singular event — ironic, really, given how our medicine repeatedly brings us up against the processes of death. Earlier societies didn’t have quite so much understanding of coma, anoxia, brain death and vegetative states, but they steered much closer to reality (and offered infinitely more comfort to the bereaved) in viewing death as a process, not an event. “The cessation of breath, the laying-out, the liminal stage at the wake, the burial, and the ensuing physical decay are steps along a road that must be followed precisely,” Blair observes of the rites that grow up in these societies — the only wrinkle being, “if that journey is impeded, the implications can be horrifying.”

Except when it wasn’t. After all, the most memorable resurrected body of all belongs to a much-loved and still revered religious visionary who got up and left his tomb after actually dying. Solid enough — an animated corpse if ever there was one — Jesus Christ nevertheless also managed, in true vampiric style, to pass through the stone stoppering his tomb. No wonder some of the first Christians “found the bodily Resurrection problematic”.

Blair is less interested in picking holes in what people saw; he’s more interested in how people interpreted what they saw, and what this says about their ideas of life in general. In Shamanic societies, fluid spirits flow promiscuously in and out of matter: to be animated at all is to be possessed. Christians and Muslims pack the souls of the dead off to various divine resorts, so can only explain reanimation through the mischievous activities of unearthly (presumably devilish) agents.

Generally, though — and with the notable and quite niggling exception of the Resurrection myth — the phenomenon proves too slippery for dogma to easily attach itself: “One event gives rise to multiple folkloric forms,” Blair explains, “which, when reformatted by the observer… take on forms that we may not even recognize as the original event.”

In other words, whatever psychological universals underpin our experiences of the undead, they’re ever so quickly drowed out by all the inventive stories we spin around our experiences. Are the undead psychically real, or are they just an old wives’ tale, endlessly reglossed? The answer, frustrating as this is, is “Yes.”

A more productive question: what summons the undead? They get about a bit, it’s true, but they’re hardly an everyday occurrence. In the book’s single sophomoric moment, Blair says that their appearances are “triggered by attitudes, perceptions, and fears that are not automatic, but spring from social, economic, political, religious, and cultural variables.”

Don’t anyone panic: he’s quick to put flesh on these modish bones. Wars, plagues and religious controversies unsettle us enough that the walls between the living and the dead start to shiver. There’s also the well-documented abuse and tyranny dished out by Slavic matriarchs, right up until the early 20th century, to consider. Deliciously inconvenient, politically speaking, they have also generated the most recent outbreaks. The latest undead-mother-in-law-killing — a proper stake-through-the-heart affair — took place at Vâlcea, Romania, in 2019. Most vampires are a public nuisance, but undead babushkas are worse: they come after their own.

Ultimately (and somewhat incredibly) Blair’s history of the vampire provides inspiration and comfort. Digging up the dead and decapitating them with an iron spade is a gruesome business, for sure, but a sight less disgusting than treating a living human being the same way. Blair argues convincingly that corpse killings are prophylactic against the kind of mass hysterias otherwise burn witches or throw children into ovens. “Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards,” is Blair’s insouciant conclusion: corpse-killing is “mainstream”.

Blair leads us through innumerable vales of terror and out again, trembling, yet unharmed, and even enlightened, with the elan of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka (who, now I come to think of it, was another pretend retiree). No apologies — if I don’t deliver this crushingly obvious paean, who will? — Killing the Dead is a book to die for.

Spellbound at the Ashmolean: Sensible magic

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Visiting Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft at the Ashmolean for the Financial Times, 3 September 2018

Some wag has propped a ladder in front of the entrance to the Ashmolean Museum’s new autumn show Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft.

Visitors are more than likely to walk around that ladder, rather than under it. This demonstrates no mere quirk of psychology — no half-way embarrassing propensity to superstition. It reveals something fundamental about us: that we rely on symbols, and often these symbols carry more weight than our raw perceptions.

Perhaps someone told you, most likely in a quite unserious way, that it’s unlucky to walk under a ladder. Whether or not you ever took it seriously, this notion has enriched your idea of what a ladder is. Literally: it helps you recognise ladders. That’s why walking around the ladder seems natural, while walking under it requires a small conscious effort.

The world is big and it doesn’t come pre-labelled. We need to enchant the world in order to manoeuvre through it. For every daft superstition we pick up along the way, we acquire a hundred, a thousand meanings that do make sense, and without which we simply could not function.

To explain magical thinking from first principles is hard. To do so with exhibits is a real challenge. Spellbound proceeds by discrete steps, and the first of its three rooms seems to be introducing us, not to magic at all, or ritual, or witchcraft, but to cosmology.

John Dee’s purple crystal ball is here; the astrologer and antiquary claimed that the angel Uriel gave it to him in 1582. Dee’s reputation as one of Europe’s most gifted mathematicians was not in the least dented by his claim. The scientific spirit was abroad by then, but no one had any very clear idea which bits of the world would succumb best to scientific analysis.

Not far away is a French brass prognosticator used to calculate bloodletting times. It’s a handsome, precision-made scientific instrument, owing its existence to laws, then common throughout Europe, requiring physicians to calculate the position of the moon before conducting an operation.

The manuscripts and books here are less about what we would now call science, and are actually much more to do with love. For the Medieval mind, love is a cosmological principle: all parts of the universe, according to this alchemical vision, are striving towards union and self-fulfilment. Young things strive towards adulthood. Base metal strives to become tarnishless gold. Union generates at least the promise of perfection. Even the elements marry.

In the second room, we confront the obverse of this universal yearning: namely, unbridled anxiety. Becoming the best you can be does, after all, imply defending yourself against the worst.

A shoe hidden up a chimney breast; a mummified cat in the attic, a child’s cap in a wall cavity: the trouble with these objects is their simplicity. They can be touching. But many are ordinary to the point of tawdriness, and you can’t help but wonder whether we’re being invited to overinterpret these scraps of cloth and leather, discovered in walls and cellars and foundations. The point isn’t lost on the curators; a “witch’s ladder” — a long string tied with feathers — most likely began life quite innocently, we are told, as a device to scare off deer. Scholars of witchcraft are wise to, and no doubt coolly amused by, the salacious imaginations of amateur collectors.

Curated by artist Marina Wallace and Sophie Page, a medieval scholar from University College London, Spellbound treats with high seriousness a subject that’s often trivialised. Original artworks have been commissioned. (My favourite is Katharine Dowson’s Concealed Shield — a huge glass heart in a walk-in hearth-space, pierced with ruby-red lasers.) The exhibition seeks to distil much of a major three-year collaborative academic research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, into the interior lives of ordinary people between 1300 and 1900. The venue is, to say the least, appropriate. Dr Xa Sturgis, the Ashmolean’s director, was once a magician (“The Great Xa”, no less). The museum’s founder, Elias Ashmole, was a university astrologer whose clients included Charles II.

High seriousness can, of course, get awfully dull, and it says much for their nerve that Wallace and Page have saved so much of the connective tissue in their argument for the final room. The historian Malcolm Gaskill has had a hand in the arrangements here, and has pulled off something remarkable: a series of cases that comprehensively pricks our assumptions, humanising not only those accused of witchcraft, but also their accusers.

Most suspected witches, it transpires, were not isolated figures hounded by their hysterical communities. They were their accusers’ elderly relatives in the main. They were rarely ever prosecuted, since trials were discouraged and expensive to boot; and if they were ever brought to trial, it was to answer charges that (setting aside some notorious outliers) had far more to do with personal relationships and intense emotions than hysterical superstition. Even if you were found guilty, you had an evens chance of being let off.

My favourite object here is a 17th-century “witch balance” in which people accused of sorcery were weighed against a bound copy of the scriptures. If you weighed more than a couple of hardbacks, you were deemed innocent. This fearsome-looking device was, in truth, a ritual exoneration machine.

With its final spaces focused on two witchcraft trials from the English fens in the 1640s, Spellbound turns out to be, quite unexpectedly, a show about grief, and how it festers. When we are hurt, we find it easy to blame others. Now picture the intensity of hurt that holds sway in small communities absent antibiotics, and clean water, and refrigeration, and any real clue about the causes of disease.

Spellbound is about being poor and discontented so that, in the words of one clergyman in 1587, “she might seek vengeance when refused alms, whereafter he doth think himself unhappy that he was so foolish to displease her”.

It’s about watching your children die, one after another, and struggling to understand why. It’s about how, far from being brutalised, ordinary people harnessed every scrap of cosmological meaning — every hope, fear, rumour, bit of lore and priestly urging — in an effort to handle misfortune.

Spellbound is an unsettling show, and not in the ways you expect. You may hope to be titillated with all its talk of Satan and his little devils. What you don’t expect is that Spellbound will make you want to be a kinder person.