Beginnings

Revenant simply means one who returns after death, and usually refers to the non-corporeal apparition of some recently departed relative.  However, it can also corpses which refuse to remain in the grave and that reputedly wander about and molest the living, what I would call ‘undead-corpses’.  According to folk tradition, however, there are various types of undead-corpse, ranging from cadavers reanimated by magic like the Haitian zombie to the Slavic vampire, which feeds upon the supposed blood of its victims. Indeed, I would argue for a distinct taxonomy of revenants that differentiates between different types or species of the undead, be they incorporeal ghosts, corpses reanimated by magic, vampires that feed on blood or ghouls that feed on rotting flesh.

Despite lurid tales of demonic beings from various cultures across the world that fed on blood and human flesh, I would argue that the specific tradition of a reanimated corpse that feeds upon human blood in order to sustain its physical existence is a notion that has its roots in the European tradition.  Indeed, the notion of drinking human blood to sustain physical existence is the flipside to the theological notion of bodily resurrection through drinking the blood of Christ (a subject for a future blog).

If we consider the history of the undead in Europe, we discover an interesting transition over the centuries. Even though there were revenants reported in medieval England, for example, these undead-corpses were evidently a different species to the folkloric vampire, a species of revenant that originated in Eastern Europe and did not gain notoriety in Western Europe until the 18th century. Suffice to say that we can see the following trends in regards to revenants:

a) Medieval revenants like the undead-corpses of twelfth-century England and the Scandinavian draugr were very corporeal beings that terrorized the living and spread death and disease

b) Subsequent undead-corpses like the spectrum of sixteenth-century Silesia took on a more semi-corporeal nature, indulged in all manner of legerdemain and acquired more and more features previously attributed to other folkloric beings.

c) By the end of the seventeenth century, three main theological/metaphysical notions had developed to explain the existence of undead-corpses, namely, that they were animated by the soul of the deceased, and fuelled by some sort of remnant energy or vestigium vitae, or reanimated by the Devil and/or necromancy, or no more than Devilish legerdemain.

d) The outstanding feature of eighteenth-century vampires was their implied thirst for blood, although a distinction can be made between ‘historical’ vampires and the vampire of folklore which took on more and more features normally attributed to other folkloric beings.

e) An extensive campaign was undertaken by the Austro-Hungarian authorities, educated elite and Church hierarchy of the latter eighteenth century to eradicate popular belief in vampires but was not entirely successful, largely because the masses and lower echelons of the Church at the time were fuelled by entrenched medieval thinking and a pre-modern belief-system that had itself promoted belief in undead-corpses.

f) Although belief in walking corpses per se had largely ceased by the nineteenth century, the rise of spiritualism, theosophy and popular occultism increasingly emphasized the semi-corporeal nature of revenants and encouraged the notion of astral vampirism in that it was the ghost of the deceased that fed upon blood and siphoned it back to its moribund corpse still lying in the grave.