My last post was on vampires to honor the kick-off of the new True Blood season on HBO. In a comment from Blog Fodder he mentioned Ghost and Goulies, which I find another interesting subject. Christians have to believe in ghost – it’s part of the package – the Holy Ghost, Jesus resurrection… numerous accounts of ghost in the Bible and in the recounting of religious miracles.
To me, the idea of ghost is again the self-conceited idea that humans are not a link in the animal kingdom; but somehow a divine entity not linked to the evolutionary progression. That we have this soul that is immortal and beyond physical understanding; and therefore we can return from the dead by will or providence.
It also is understood that only WE can possess this soul – not dogs, cats, cockroaches, apes, birds… However, if some Civil War general wants to haunt the Vicksburg, Mississippi Confederate Battleground Park he is allowed to bring his ghost horse along to ride; and this specter is complete with saddle, uniform, sword, pistol and all the paraphernalia he carried in the war. I can’t take my cat, but the general can take his horse – that sucks.
This begs a question. Ok, let’s suppose that ghost can exist. You are born naked - clothing is a physical cultural addition – when you return as a ghost why do you have clothes? You should be naked. Is there a ghost wardrobe you can choose from? Are there ghost clothes? Are you stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in? The general can take his uniform and the beautiful girl ghost that haunts the bed and breakfast has taken with her a see-through nightgown. If a ghost takes his pants off does he have underwear? I’m just asking.
I do not believe in gods, devils, angels, ghost, gnomes, fairies, ogres, zombies, vampires, werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. However, I do like the macabre, and enjoy reading (and viewing) horror stories.
During the 1980’s my wife and I moved into an isolated, one hundred- fifty year old farm house, one mile off the main road in the middle of the Maine wilderness. The house had no neighbors, no electricity and no running water; and at night, in bed, by lamp light, my wife would read aloud a chapter from Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. It was scary as hell.
I am a member at large of The Occupants of the Empty House - a scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars - which hold their meetings in Du Quoin, Illinois. We are a group dedicated to the study of the chronicles of Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.
One of the Sherlock Holmes monographs I published in the Beeman’s Christmas Annual was an insight to “THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE; and I offer it here as a comment of interest at the kick-off of the new season of True Blood on HBO.
BRITIAN AND VAMPIRISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: as related to “THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE.”
But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corpse.
Thy victims are they not yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers withered on the stem
From: The Gaiour,” by Lord Byron
Baring-Gould sets the date for “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” as taking place between Thursday, November 19, to Saturday, November 21, 1896.
Holmes: “The idea of a vampire was to me absurd. Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England.”
Between 1600 and 1800 while Britain and Western Europe were in the throws of witch mania, Eastern Europe was experiencing vampire frenzy. In the East, even government officials frequently were involved in the hunting and staking of vampires. Westerners never seriously considered the existence of vampires until the mid eighteenth century when there was an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia (1721), and Austro-Hungary (1725).
Two famous cases involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Palole.
Plogojowitz
Plogojowitz died at the age of 62, but returned to raise havoc among his family and neighbors, many who died from loss of blood. According to records, Plogojowitz’s grave was opened and his body was found to be fresh.
Arnold Paole
Arnold Paole was an ex-soldier who claimed to have experienced a vampire attack while serving in Greece. Upon returning home he died from a fall while working on his farm. Within two months after Paole’s burial there were attacks attributed to him. All of the victims died shortly after. Two military officers, two army surgeons and a priest exhumed Arnold Paole’s body; and the corpse was found to be fresh. Over the next five years there were a number of inexplicable deaths. A mass exhumation was carried out in 1732 and eleven corpses were found to display the same trait as Paole – no decomposition.
Both of these cases were well documented by government officials who examined the facts and the bodies. These two cases created an epidemic of alleged vampire attacks in rural villages; resulting in a score of bodies being exhumed. Eventually the Austrian Empress Marie Theresa sent her personal physician to investigate. He reported back to her that vampires did not exist. The Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and the desecration of bodies, bringing an end to the vampire frenzy in Austria. (Vampires in Myth and History, by Beverley Richardson.)
One reason for the dichotomy of folklore between Western and Eastern Europe can be attributed to the split that took place in 1054 between the Orthodox Church in the East, and the Roman Catholic Church in the West. This difference can be linked to centralizing the vampire myth to Eastern Europe. The belief of the Catholic Church was that the bodies of saints would not decay in the grave; while the Orthodox Church believed that undecayed corpses were a sign of evil and a link to Satan.
In 1486 the Catholic Church had published The Malleus Maleficarium as a handbook for the discovery and eradication of witches. It also covered vampires and how they should be dealt with. By 1600 this treatise was being used as a “bible” by witch and vampire hinters across Europe. (Christianity and Vampirism, by Angie McKaig.)
Holmes: “Make a long arm Watson and see what V has to say.” I leaned back and took down the great volume to which he referred…”Hello! Good old index. You can’t beat it. Listen to this, Watson: Vampirism in Hungary and again in Transylvania.”
Vampire myths go back thousands of years and occur in almost every culture. The Vampire folklore spread out along the Black Sea Coast to Greece, the Balkans and the Carpathian Mountains, including Hungary and Transylvania. The Slavic people from Russia to Bulgaria and Serbia to Poland also had rich vampire folklore. (B. Richardson.)
He turned over the pages with eagerness, but after perusal he threw down the great book with a snarl of disappointment. “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their graves by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.”
The vampires of folklore of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have only basic similarities to the vampire fiction of today. The vampires then did not fly, or wear capes, or change into bats. A man who was contaminated died; then returned to feed on the blood of his family and neighbors. After a while (anywhere from a few days to a few years, depending on the country of the occurrence) he became more humanlike and was indistinguishable from living humans. He was able to remain out in the daylight and eat normal food. At this time he would move to another village and often get married and have children, reverting to his blood lust only on weekends or certain saint’s days. (The Socially Sophisticated Undead in Folklore, by Patrick Johnson.)
Considering the original vampire legends, the actions of Delores Ferguson in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire could well have been interpreted as vampirism.
Though vampire fiction became popular in the eighteen hundreds in Britain, the stereotype of today’s vampire fiction had not yet embedded. In 1813 the vampire appeared in Britain in Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour.” In 1819 John Polidori wrote The Vampyre on a challenge from Lord Byron (Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at the same time/challenge.) And, In 1848 Varney the Vampyre begin serialization as a penny dreadful. If we accept Baring-Gould’s date of the Sussex incident as 1896, Holmes was conducting his investigation one year before Bram Stoker introduced Dracula, and set the pattern for vampire fiction as we know it today.
Accounts of vampirism in the rural areas of Eastern Europe were not unheard of even in Sherlock Holmes’s time. In The Twelve Years Study of the Eastern Question in Bulgaria by S.B.G. St. Clair and Charles A. Brophy (London: Chaman and Hall Press;, 1877) the authors account an episode that alleged to have taken place in the 1840’a in the Bulgarian village in which they were presently living. The locals told them that a man had arrived in the village and established himself as a tradesman. He married a local girl, but his new wife complained that he was out every night until dawn. Cattle and horses became sick and died and it was noted that blood had been drained out of them. The village suspected the man of being a vampire and when they examined him they found he had only one nostril – a sure sign that he was a vampire. The villagers bound him, took him to a hill outside the village, and burned him alive. Surely with Holmes’s penchant for the unusual he had knowledge of this and other incidents.
Watson: “A living person might have the habit. I have read, of example, of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth.”
“You are right, Watson. It mentions the legend in one of these references. But are we to give serious attention to such things?”
This reference is obviously of Elizabeth Bathory who was born a noblewoman to a powerful family in Transylvania in 1560. Elizabeth was married as a teenager, but lived with a constant fear of aging. Her husband died in 1604 and she moved to Vienna. Countess Elizabeth became convinced that the blood of young girls was the secret to eternal youth and beauty. She is believed to have murdered more than six hundred young women in order to have blood to drink and bathe in. In December of 1610 she was put on trial for her crimes, but being a noblewoman she was not allowed by law to be sentenced to death. She was sentenced to life imprisonment in her castle in Cachtice, where she died in August 1614. (Who is …Elizabeth Bathory? By Angie McKaig.)
Holmes constantly reminds us that it is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts (SCAN, SECO, STUD) – yet in the case of the Sussex Vampire he does exactly that. Before leaving Baker Street he has decided the outcome of the case, and he commences to pursue his investigation to secure facts to support his theory. Considering the extensive vampire folklore of Eastern Europe that goes back for centuries, why is Holmes so adamant and closed-minded in considering the possibility of the existence of vampires? Is this an indication of some prior experience with the preternatural, supernatural, and things that go bump in her night? This is the real mystery in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far from being on a curise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back, the brain has shut down, the flesh begins to soften, nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.
Oops!
I posted pictures earlier and none of them took - I ended up with big empty boxes with some kind of script at the top. Not sure why. Blog Fodder thanks for the heads-up - Linda thanks for the input.
But after all I'm OLD.
(excerpt from FOOL by Christopher Moore. A parody of King Lear
as told from the point of view of his jester.
A great read.)
"Goneril went to her father and took his hand, "yes father you are old. Very old. Really , really, extraordinarily, mind-blogglingly -"
She turned to me for a clue, "Dog fuckingly, " I suggested.
"- dog-fuckingly old,' said the duchess. 'You are feebly, incontinently, desiccatedly, smelling-of-boiled-cabbagely old. You are brain-rottingly, balls-draggingly -"
'I'm fucking old!' said Lear. "We'll stipulate that."
Moving from Cosmology in my last blog to the self-exalted divinity of God’s human clones, we might wonder just what place mankind actually holds in the history of the earth.
When I taught school in Alaska, one of the Science projects (Science deserves to be capitalized) I used was to lay out a time line of the earth that began behind the school and ran 100 yards into the bush (spruce forest.) A path would take observers to the beginning point farthest from the village, and travelers would work their way along the time line back into the village.
As a math skill the students found 100 yards to be 3600 inches and divided that into 4.5 billion years (the age of the earth) to determine that each inch represented 1.25 million years. Each group of students were given an era and they had to determine their position on the time line and decorate it with appropriate art work to demonstrate the evolution of the earth during their time period. Of course a traveler would advance in time finally ending up in the village at present time.
The point I am trying to make with this blog entry is that Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) and her relatives first appeared about 4 million years ago, or 3.2 inches from the end of the timeline; and homo sapiens (modern man) appeared about 200,000 years ago: at .16 or 1/6th of an inch from the end of the 100 yard time line. We have been here a minuscule amount of time.
Woman kind (for she came first) and her spawn have been on the earth almost an insignificant time when compared with the history of the earth – and because of our self destructive nature our kind will probably be a short lived species
I get a kick when I hear people talk about the end of the world, or Armageddon; for the earth is not going to end as imagined by human reality: we very likely will destroy ourselves and some of the other life forms, but the earth will heal itself and continue to evolve after we are gone.
Of course, at some point in the distant future our solar system will expire according to cosmic law.
But we the people, in our shallowness, create gods in our own likeness, image and liking; and believe that the earth and the heavens and the cosmos are here as a tribute to immortal us and some immortal supreme entity from which we are cloned.
What a self-deluded, self-important, trivial species we are.
The reality is that we are here with some limited reasoning faculty, for a brief time, due to a chance turn on the evolutionary time line; and as such, we should try to appreciate and live fully each day of our allotted time.
This leaky, tumbledown grass hut
left and opening for the moon
and I gazed at it.
All the while it was mirrored
In a deardrop fallen on my sleeve.
Saigyo
ZEN comes as a reminder that if we do not perceive the mystery and beauty of our present life, our present hour, we shall not perceive the worth of any life, of any hour.
Cost of living going up.
Income fixed
Unexpected bills.
Growing old.
Aches and pains.
As if that's not bad enough:
We jumped from Ben Laden shot in the eye to Weiner’s wiener.
Where is the sanity – is there any left – or was there ever any.
Does any of this fucking matter?
I started out this blog asking: Is the hokey pokey really what it’s all about.
My Kentucky great grandmother was a Presbyterian and believed in predestination - everything that happened was god’s plan: a real head-in-the-sand way of looking at things; but at least she wouldn’t have to question the lunacy of existence: she saw war, politics and social conditions as god’s will; deaths, famine, hardships as god’s test.
I can’t buy it: the world is happenstance – Chaos theory rules.
Our universe came into existence in its present incarnation some 15 billion years ago by some chance explosion we explain as the Big Bang Theory.
Our universe is composed of some hundreds of billion galaxies one of which is our Milky Way, which contains some 400 billion stars, one of which is our sun. Here on earth we have matter, life and laws of nature that may be totally different from other universes.
String theory proposes multiple parallel universes: the same universe presented in different space times and perhaps forms.
Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (and like evolution it is not a theory but substantially proven) built on the constancy of the speed of light proves time is a variable and not a constant – predicting the ability to time travel forward (but not backwards) in time.
Einstein's theory (again proven) of General relativity deals with the ability of a mass's gravity to bend light resulting in a curvature of space time. This theory allows us to accurately predict the navigation results of space shots and allowed us to develop accurate Global Positioning Systems to within a few feet.
So there we are: one of a billion billion solar systems in galaxies where time and space bend and are variable, with a probability of multiple parallel universes – and on a random planet containing an animal life form that believes itself intelligent, immortal and the reason for all existence; and is obsessed with Anthony Weiner’s wiener.
Ok, I would really like to blog on something else, but with all the news programs obsessed with Anthony’s Weiner people aren’t paying attention to unimportant stuff like wars, the economy, global warming, radiation in Japan and the Republican’s drive to limit personal liberties.
I am constantly appalled by the prudishness of the American public. It all boils down to the Christian notion that sex is dirty (original sin.) I have had people tell me that I should read a certain book and that it’s a “clean book”; or that certain movies are “clean movies.” I feel like telling them that I’m a fucking adult and colorful language and adult sexuality doesn’t bother me. The thing that bothers me is censorship: pixelation of nipples and sex organs and bleeping out so called dirty words when I am watching a movie on TV - that bugs the shit out of me and I usually end up changing the channel.
As long as America claims to be a Christian nation there is no hope for the population to ever mature to adulthood. We will constantly be obsessed with someone else’s sexual proclivities and feel that moral judgments must be passed.
Bill Clinton got a blow job and the Republicans were outraged – what could be more American than a blow job in the oval office? I applaud him. It is nice to know that some of our presidents are not eunuch – that they enjoy adult sex. Again, that should have been only between he and Hillary.
All normal adult males watch porn on the internet – and this includes priest and preachers; politicians and teachers (I can’t speak for females – they are not as sexually obsessed as we are – I don’t think.) If Anthony Weiner has any explaining to do – it is only to his wife; it is really none of our business, and as long as no laws are broken Weiner should be able do with his wiener what ever he damn well pleases.
MY GOD, I'VE BEEN HACKED ! (MAYBE)
I can't really say if that is a picture of me - or not!
It may be Anthony Weiner probably Andrew Breitbart - ya
I need to hire a law firm that specializes is internet hacking to get to the bottom of this.
When you are seventy plus years old your mind becomes a repository of ancient knowledge: a walking, talking historic archive. You don’t really realize how antiquated you are until you start reminiscing.
The other day a friend and I were talking about some of the cars we could remember that are no longer around. I mentioned the Packard, Hudson Hornet, DeSoto, Studebaker, Kaiser, Henry J, Nash Rambler and Rambler American. Then I started talking about some of the cars I have actually owned – the list got long, so when I got home I decided to to write out a list in order – from my first to present.
I have owned – in order:
1. 1952 Pontiac
I was 18
2. 1949 Ford
3. 1951 Ford
4. 1957 Ford
5. 1956 Pontiac
6. 1949 Packard
7. 1964 Rambler American
8. 1965 Rambler Station Wagon
9. 1968 Pontiac Station Wagon
10. 1971 Mercury Station Wagon
11. 1949 Ford Pick-up
12. 1957 Ford Pick-up
13. 1976 Chevrolet 4X4 (piece of crap) Mine was red.
14. 1977 Chevrolet diesel pick-up (real piece of crap.)
This was such a piece of crap you can't even find a picture of it on the internet.
15. 1978 Chevrolet six calendar van (I loved it but it was a piece of crap.)
16. Unknown vintage Datsun farm truck (the biggest piece of crap I ever owned.)
17. 1976 Ford sedan
18. 1985 Toyota small Toyota Pick-up (a good vehicle)
Me, 30 years ago
19. 1988 Ford F-350 4X4 (crap, crap, crap.)
20. 1998 Saturn (good car)
21. 2002 GMC ¾ ton heavy duty (Still have it – love it.)
That's right: twenty-one vehicles - and hopefully not my last.
My GMC is not a green vehicle, it gets eleven miles to the gallon; but on a fixed retirement income I have choices to make - the GMC is paid for, it is a high-end vehicle, with all the bells and whistles, in excellent shape and only has 72,000 miles on it - for the amount of money I would spend on monthly payments for a green vehicle I can buy a lot of gas and it is still cheaper.
This is the hypocracy we all face; we would like to do right by the environment, and we rail against those who don't - but when push comes to shove we all do what is best in the short term for ourselves.
