THE VAMPIRE: HIS KITH AND KIN MONTAGUE SUMMERS0 UK – 1928
“Carmilla” or Polidori’s The Vampyre, that is? Thanks to those tales, and the many long-since-forgotten stories of gothic ro- mance and horror they inspired, you are probably aware that there are creatures of the night that return from the dead to prey upon the living. But all the details modern readers have come to understand about “real-life” vampires – where they come from, how they transform, their powers and weaknesses, how to destroy them, and so on – were not yet part of the public con- versation, or consciousness, until British academic Montague Summers gathered all known writings on the subject and pub- lished the handy guide The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. Summers (1880-1948) was an eccentric,
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a religious man who embraced Catholicism yet was fascinated by the occult. He had already published his History of Witchcraft and Demonology and would present the first English translation of the infamous witch-hunting bible Malleus Maleficarum in the same year he came out with, as he put it in the in- troduction, “the first serious study, in English, of the vampire.” The book attempts to catalogue the whole of vam-
pire folklore from both a philosophical and theolog- ical point of view. Summers believed the legends, you see, and took the subject very seriously indeed. And so Kith and Kin is a dense read, tracing the ori- gins of the vampire back to the earliest examina- tions of body and soul, and various African tribes such as the Ovambo, who used staking and decap- itation to prevent magicians and other suspicious folk from rising up from their graves. You’ll find ref- erences to Hungary’s Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, and Jack the Ripper, but most of what’s covered is much more obscure: de- tailed accounts from newspapers and academic journals of the day, and
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t’s 1928. What do you know about vampires? Besides what you’ve learned from reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Sheridan le Fanu’s
correspondence from religious figures in the field. Fluent in many languages, Summers in-
cluded long passages from vampire texts in Latin, French and other tongues, without translation. It makes his book a frustrating slog at times, but back then allowed him to relate first-hand accounts of Greek vryko- lakas monsters or the Romanian strigoi. (If you were journeying to Russia, for example, you might very well have appreciated the detail that your stake should be of aspen for maximum effect.) The chapter on “The Vampire in Assyria, the East and Some Ancient Countries” is an ex- haustive study of such creatures as the Malaysian penanggalan, and even looks at the biblical figure of Lilith through vampire-ob- sessed eyes. This international approach gave Summers’ project a scholarly heft that proved invaluable for researchers at the time and has since been regurgitated in layman’s terms in countless vampire guidebooks that line store shelves to this day. As someone who genuinely feared the power of the vampire, Summers often focused on the more frightful aspects of these stories, making multiple references to the
blood, gore and screams gushing from vampire victims as they are dispatched by pious men. Equally fascinating for fans of bloodsuckers in fic-
tion, Summers’ chapter on vamps in literature ends with the publication of Dracula, and catalogues the many lesser-known poems, novels, dramas and op- eras that preceded it (in case you need to know the cast of a theatrical vampire play in Paris in the 1800s). He’s quite dismissive of Stoker’s story, actu- ally, and its “careless writing” – a reminder that Drac- ula was not a critical or commercial success at the outset and that it’s the popularity of vampires as a whole that has helped it become a genre classic. Summers’ The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, and its fol- low-up, The Vampire in Europe, surely had just as much to do with feeding the public’s fascination with this monster in the early 20th century. He would certainly be pleased were he alive to see how popular the vampire remains today. LIISA LADOUCEUR