1. Introduction
Vampire. The word conjures many images. A figure evoking sexuality and power for some, for others it is an image of depravity and dependency. As an image of defiance of death, the figure is anything but autonomous, requiring the blood of the living to sustain its own undead status. Is the issue about bloodlust, repressed animal instinctuality? Or does the figure represent a distortion of spiritual longing for immortality confused and contaminated with the body, which defies the imagination of a materially bound consciousness? Is the vampire a metaphor of relationship between human beings only? Or is it simultaneously symbolic of dynamics within the individual psyche on the one hand, as well as between people, between our species and the planet, between our psyche and the image of God as it penetrates our egocentric, concretistic and linear orientation? Is the threat of the vampire a relic of adolescent psychology, or a reminder of the mystery of soul which consciousness would presume to possess, to master, or to deny and ignore, at its own peril? Does the vampire reflect a threat from outside ourselves, alien psychic predators draining off our life force over the millennia, or does it offer instead an abhorrent look at our collective parasitic shadow? Is it, as all archetypes, multivalent, of many meanings and moments?
The vampire is many things, but it is my hope to suggest the ways in which the vampire represents a manifestation of the repressed and consequently demonic spirit of nature, suspended in time, frustrated in its function of initiating consciousness through death into spiritual rebirth while embodied. I shall attempt to offer a round-about approach to the subject which, if successful, will attest to the significance of the vampire motif as a symbol of potential initiation on an archetypal level…
2. Intrapsychic
a) The Unbecoming Self
• Becoming whole as an individual is a struggle of monumental proportions. The process involves the confrontation with and successful differentiation of aspects of one’s own being which, for all intents and purposes, appear and indeed are quite separate from oneself. We discover that we are anything but one self. The forces which are powerful enough to subvert one’s sense of self are legion. In the pursuit of right relation with the Self, one must experience and survive what might be termed the unbecoming self…
b) Fragmentary Sense of Identity
• CG Jung: “Manifestations of a psychic activity not caused or consciously willed by man himself have always been felt to be daemonic, divine, or ‘holy,’ in the sense that they heal and make whole. His ideas of God behave as do all images arising out of the unconscious: they compensate or complete the general mood or attitude of the moment, and it is only through the integration of these unconscious images that a man becomes a psychic whole. The ‘merely conscious’ man who is all ego is a mere fragment, in so far as he seems to exist apart from the unconscious. But the more the unconscious is split off, the more formidable the shape in which it appears to the conscious mind–if not in divine form, then in the more unfavourable form of obsessions and outburst of affect.”
• In this fragmentary sense of identity, the ego will encounter the unconscious in all manner of dark guises, including that of the vampire, which appears to invade and violate the personality from without. Foreign and unfamiliar to consciousness, with which the ego is identified, the unconscious must inflict a penetrating wound to be taken seriously, to be acknowledged, and eventually to be integrated into the human psyche as the potential wholeness of self. The notion of “potential wholeness” is critical to the understanding of the vampire, which often claims those who are incapable of undergoing a transformation, those who cannot embrace the dynamic which itself transforms in relation to our own relationship with it.
c) Disalliance with the Source
• Jung leaves no room for doubt as to the seriousness of the endeavor or the uncertainty of the outcome of our relationship with the unconscious, stating that:
“We are greatly mistaken if we think that the unconscious is something harmless....A wrong functioning of the psyche can do much to injure the body, just as conversely a bodily illness can affect the psyche; for psyche and body are not separate entities but one and the same life."
Jung goes further to describe the instances in which the unconscious may be adversarial. The critical aspect, of relevance on individual and collective levels of the vampire motif, is the fact that the unconscious is not per se oppositional, but rather it assumes the stance in relation to our own alienation and opposition to it. As Jung puts it:
“The unconscious is unfavourable or dangerous only because we are not at one with it and therefore in opposition to it. A negative attitude to the unconscious, or its splitting off, is detrimental in so far as the dynamics of the unconscious are identical with instinctual energy. Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness.”
The loss of instinct and rootlessness is precisely the affliction which is synonymous with our culture and so many within it; the suffering of psyche and body within individuals and the world alike reflect this fundamental disalliance with the source. As a consequence, the image of the unconscious most appropriate to our age at this stage of our relationship is indeed that of the vampire.
• Permanently unknown, unfound, the living source of identity cannot be fully born into life, but remains suspended in the underworld suspension, undead yet preying upon the living as the returning repressed agent within. The resultant (negative) inflation of an attitude which ignores this fact constellates the monstrous imago of the vampire as part-Self, emerging from our repressed nature as a compensatory figure from the depths, reflecting our own lack of depth, our own lack of reflection, our collective defensive posture in a power-oriented copy of the true Self. We have become and can see ourselves in the vampire as a force without meaning, even as we struggle against a repetition of psychic violation, penetration, and consumption. Such views become a virtual psychology of the vampire, providing a rationale and model for an endless enactment of repression returning in ourselves. The cover against outside discovery and appropriation constellates a fascination with our own greed born of unmet need and deprivation begetting depravity. The consequence, collectively and individually, results in the lamentably high incidence of disorders which comprise and reinforce the experience of life in terms of shallow, marginalizing effects in time and space without true purpose or soul.
d) Complexes/Neurosis
• CG Jung: “(I)n psychotherapy the recognition of disease rests much less on the clinical picture than on the content of complexes....The real toxin is to be sought in the complex, and this is a more or less autonomous psychic quantity. It proves its autonomous nature by not fitting into the hierarchy of the conscious mind, or by the resistance it successfully puts up against the will. This fact...is the reason why psychoneurosis and psychoses have from time immemorial been regarded as states of possession, since the...complex forms something like a shadow-government of the ego."
• CG Jung: “To the degree that the patient takes an active part, the personified figure of anima or animus will disappear. It becomes the function of relationship between conscious and unconscious. But when the unconscious contents–these same fantasies–are not ‘realized,’ they give rise to a negative activity and personification, i.e., to the autonomy of animus and anima. Psychic abnormalities then develop, states of possession ranging in degree from ordinary moods and ‘ideas’ to psychoses. All these states are characterized by one and the same fact that an unknown ‘something’ has taken possession of a smaller or greater portion of the psyche and asserts its hateful and harmful existence undeterred by all our insight, reason, and energy, thereby proclaiming the power of the unconscious over the conscious mind, the sovereign power of possession. In this state the possessed part of the psyche generally develops an animus or anima psychology. The woman’s incubus consists of a host of masculine demons; the man’s succubus is a vampire.”
e) Narcissism
• Nathan Schwartz-Salant: “Narcissistic characters experience a deficiency in the areas of introversion and imagination as a result of an extremely negative field of personal introjects. Because the conscious ego of the narcissistic character anticipates no inner support and has no confidence in its own inner resources it avoids introversion and imaginal activity except of the most passive wish-fulfillment kind. However, when activated, the potential archetypal factors behave as inner objects far more powerful than personally acquired introjects. The possibility then emerges for the redemption of introversion and imagination. Once these are developed, they in turn facilitate the positive activity of the archetypal processes. Then the energy invested in narcissistic activity, defensiveness and self-adoration can instead find its proper goal: the discovery of individuality guided by the central archetype, the Self.”
• Schwartz-Salant: “...there is a vast difference between an archetypally toned Self image and the grandiose-exhibitionistic self which dominates the narcissistic character. That self is a merger of ego functions and archetypal dynamics; it would correspond to what in alchemy is called a premature coniunctio, a monstrosity. It has a strong defensive quality and does not carry the numinosity of the Self in Jungian terms. The narcissistic character also does not carry the numinous energy of the archetype; instead he carries a forced, power-oriented copy. The lack of genuineness of what he has to offer is generally seen by its lack of staying power, its marginal effect in time. In fact, he is defended against the numinosity of the Self for that power is far superior to his and could easily defeat his grandiose self. It is crucial to understand that the narcissistic character is defended against not only outer object relations, but equally against the inner world of archetypal reality. Both are a great threat. He is in fear of the Self for the Self is always a defeat for the ego, and especially for a grandiose, ego-Self merger.”
• He goes on to note that:
“...the Freudian concept of narcissism is actually a description of psychic states and processes similar to the material Jung first set out in 1911 in Psychology of the Unconscious (later revised as Symbols of Transformation), the book that led to his break with Freud. There Jung was concerned with the transformation of psychic energy, but primarily with the energy-upgrading or value-endowing dimension of the psyche. This was often referrred (sic) to by him as the spirit archetype, which he found to be extremely ambivalent and paradoxical.
It is obvious that Jung was discovering then (and later in his work on alchemical symbolism), from an archetypal point of view, what psychoanalysts are now studying from a personalistic point of view under the term narcissism. Not only do psychoanalysts find narcissism to be extremely polyvalent and paradoxical, but many have also stressed that narcissism and its transformations can endow psychic contents with value. It appears that what Freud rejected in Jung’s work at the time of their break is now entering psychoanalytic thought through the back door, so to speak, in the subject of narcissism.”
• Mercurius and Narcissism
Schwartz-Salant states that, “More than any other image, the alchemical Mercurius, studied exhaustively by Jung, represents the archetypal analogue of the phenomenology known as narcissism.” Echoed by psychoanalytic descriptions of the dualities reflected in narcissism, Jung’s summary of his researches on Mercurius (CW, Vol. 13, par. 284) provide a strikingly similar portrait of the salient characteristics involved.
(1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures.
(2) He is both material and spiritual.
(3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa.
(4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature.
(5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex (the alchemist) that coincides with the opus alchymicum.
(6) As such, he represents on the one hand the self and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious.
f) Procrastination/Perfectionism
• Burka and Yuen explore procrastination in a way which frees the concept from the stigma of indolence and centers it in the tension of a delusional self-protection and virtual self-persecution associated with an unrelated, unrealistic drive toward perfectionism. For my purposes, I would liken it to a vampiric demon which, Saturn-like, devours all offspring before permitting of potential inadequacy to exist–or to expose the vulnerability of the creator itself. Seeing in the procrastinator a fused fear of failure and fear of success, the incapacitation of the ego is linked to self-worth identified with narrowly proscribed definitions of ability and performance.
g) Addiction
• As Linda Leonard states: “In the story of Dracula the victim offers himself, exposing his neck before Dracula sucks the blood. Once bitten, he is Dracula’s slave. Here there are two aspects to the phenomenon of addiction–giving oneself over and being taken and possessed. They are inseparable. For example, alcoholism is a physical, mental, and spiritual disease. A process takes place in the body and psyche of the alcoholic so that he is no longer predictably in control if he takes a drink. But he does have a choice to take the first drink. And to take the first drink is like offering his neck to Dracula–it is insanity! (This also applies to codependency, romance addiction, etc.) The problem, of course, is that he has already taken too many ‘first drinks,’ that he has become habitually predisposed to do so. He is in a vicious circle. The addict is caught in a state of possession not unlike the vampire’s bondage to Dracula. The addict is bound by a Demon Lover who has taken possession of his soul. And he lives in the realm of the ‘living dead.”
• Leonard: “Looking in the mirror and taking a drug or a drink (or a romance or power fantasy) to escape the devil who looks back is typical of the addict. In this way the act of reaching for an addictive escape becomes so habitual that it takes possession of the addict until he forgets who he is and begins to be unable to recognize himself. Finally, he begins to lose his soul. One of the characteristics of Dracula is that he casts no reflection in the mirror. Symbolically, this happens finally to the addict who, in the later stages of his disease, deep in denial, can see himself no longer.”
h) Depression
• Kay Redfield Jamison: “Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images....It bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect....Depression...is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you....They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you’re irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re ‘not at all like yourself but will be soon,’ but you know you won’t.”
3. Interpersonal
a) Abuse/Incest
• In exploring the theme of sexual abuse, Jung calls:
“...incest...a repulsive symbol for the unio mystica. Although the union of close blood-relatives is everywhere taboo, it is yet the prerogative of kings....Incest symbolizes union with one’s own being, it means individuation or becoming a self, and, because this is so vitally important, it exerts an unholy fascination-–not perhaps, as a crude reality, but certainly as a psychic process controlled by the unconscious, a fact well known to anybody who is familiar with psychopathology. It is for this reason, and not because of occasional cases of human incest, that the first gods were believed to propagate their kind incestuously. Incest is simply the union of like with like, which is the next stage in the development of the primitive idea of self-fertilization.”
• Mythologically, those who have been vampirized are often destined not only to die but to become vampires in turn, the abused often become abusers of others or themselves, and the incidence of such practices may well describe the symptoms of individuals suffering a fundamental lack of ability to connect and develop close, warm human connections, rather than their achievement of the same through a concretized exsanguination of others or themselves.
• One of my analysands who had been subjected to incest as a child made a clay figurine of a little man with an enormous penis arcing like a handle from scrotum to mouth. She brought it to me, wrapped in cloth and handled it as if it were an icon, which indeed it was. She was not a sophisticated or educated woman, and it is unlikely that this object of her imagination was influenced from outside reference. She tearfully confided that she had been compelled to fashion it. She spoke reverentially, fearfully, handling it as she spoke. She knew it was connected to her sexual abuse, did not understand precisely how, but insisted it was something profound. She felt she must cut off its feet and hands, since she knew he couldn’t reach out and hold or be held because of the abuse. The numinosity of the icon for her, the sacredness of the experience and the moment of sharing between us, the ability to expose what seemed shameful to her but what she knew was not somehow, proved both “awful and awesome” for us both. By our mutual acceptance of her “little man,” the transformation of her process continued and she was freed from the vampiric guilt and shame which had drained her development psychologically and handicapped her own maturation, as well as her relationship with the animus, previously. One might posit an externally forced or induced and consequently premature internal archetypal seizure of the Holy Ghost or the ambivalent Mercurius in the psyche of individuals who have experienced early sexual abuse or incest and be not far off a working model of therapy.
(b) Co-dependency
• In Linda Leonard’s On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship, the dream of a woman is related. Her husband had been dependent upon her, and she felt as though he was draining her life force away. At one point in her therapy, pregnant with new life, she had the following dream.
I was giving birth, but my husband was sucking the birth fluid. When the baby was born he demanded I give it to him. I refused! I was not willing to give up my baby or let him suck away the lifeblood of my baby or myself any longer.
Finally, following a gestation period of pregnancy, the woman gives birth to new life, at which point she summoned the energy, the adamant refusal, necessary to stop the vampirism that was a Dracula drain upon her creativity, according to Leonard. It might be the case that she was also recognizing the parasitic animus energy which siphoned off her energy on an intrapsychic level.
• Sam Dream
I enter a village in what appears to be a rather impoverished land, perhaps a ‘Third World’ country. Separating from a group of ‘natives,’ one young woman, or older girl, approaches me. She’s attractive and seductive, shameless in the expression of her desire for me. I’m rather taken aback but not altogether unmoved. She embraces me and, kissing me violently, I can feel the life energy drain from me as she acquires my strength for herself. It is not an unpleasant sensation, rather a languorous state of dreamy intoxication.
At the last moment, I push her from me, knowing I will otherwise die. I look at her for a moment then pull her roughly to me and begin kissing her. The flood of energy filling me is thrilling, inebriating. I sense that my ‘thirst’ for her will only abate when she has no energy left to give. I realize this will mean her death and, with effort, push her from me and forbid her to come closer, knowing and telling her we can have no relationship together, since one or the other of us would surely die.
4. Transpersonal
a) Psychic Danger/Epidemic
• CG Jung: “Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger.”
• While the potential outbreak of a diseased psyche is clearly central to any study of dysfunction and abuse existentially, it is important to recognize that part of the threat of the species’ succumbing to a “psychic epidemic” may also be understood in the context of our imbalanced attitudes and disruptive behavior in relation to the planet. This provides a relevancy both in terms of our contaminating the ecosphere with poisons and environmentally non-sustainable practices and in so far as our rapacity also exposes us to more threats from the plundered planet’s microbes and non-human parasites.
b) One Sided Relationship with Nature/Repressed Spirit In Nature
• …the imago of the vampire, although present and reflective of abuses for millennia, developed rapidly alongside our culture’s changing views of nature, serving almost as a barometer of our species alienation from and exploitation of the natural world.
• Our legacy and challenge to live in some semblance of mutually sustaining relationship with the environment is rightly considered a threshold phenomenon. It is only now that our numbers and impact are so large that we threaten the life of our species and planet that we are in a position to accept a global rite of passage. This is an initiation which, however torturous, we dare not eschew. The long, harsh reality of our one-sided relationship with nature, repressed, buried beneath indifference but far from dead, continues to drain away vitality the longer we ignore our responsibility in its formation. The undead specter of our own making must be acknowledged, confronted in action as well as ideology, and lain to rest. Only thus can the vampire be transformed from demon to cultural psychopomp. Only then can a new renaissance occur, a new rebirth of actions, values and vision vis-a-vis the living world.
• Like an all-devouring dragon, we wish and attempt to see it all, be it all, consume it all, as if this were a divine right any more than a demonic delusion of worldwide proportions. The one-sided extraversion makes insight moribund, and intuition becomes a vampire of the unconscious, looking for the life it should have but is denied. Rather than, in this case, representing a content that should have died but remains sucking life force from an otherwise healthy ego (or culture), the dragon or vampire of certain psyches might well symbolize a sort of natural holy war, waged by the unconscious on behalf of the repressed soul and spirit within nature. The static image of spirit separate from matter, soul distinct from life, is itself an injustice to life.
c) Parasitism
• Carl Zimmer: “There’s no shame in being a parasite. We join a venerable guild that has been on this planet since its infancy and has become the most successful form of life on the planet. But we are clumsy in the parasitic way of life. Parasites can alter their hosts with great precision and change them for particular purposes: to take them back to their ancestral home in a stream, to move on to their adulthood inside a tern. But they are expert at causing only the harm that’s necessary, because evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves. If we want to succeed as parasites, we need to learn from the masters.
d) Vegetable Soul
• Peter Bishop notes that with proliferation of “green” labeling from spirituality to politics, consumerism to economics, there is an enantiodromia from the lofty ideals of the original vision to a jaded cynicism of commercial exploitation. As Bishop writes,
“The adjective green has moved rapidly from being a radical source of hope, renewal, and harmony into becoming a meaningless haven for opportunism and cliche. Already the freshness of ‘green’ is becoming rotten–green around the gills. On a metaphorical level, we have moved quickly from the green bud to the green of decay without experiencing ripeness in-between. A cynicism is already apparent, as the popular press mockingly contrasts those people who are ‘pale green’ with those who are ‘dark green’; many on the political left insist that this so-called radical greening is merely a bourgeois ploy to make the middle classes feel nice. The rapid corruption of this ‘greening’ is blamed on the dubious ability of consumer capitalism to appropriate any idealism and to market it as a product or is seen as an indication of the political naivete and shallowness of the ‘Green’ movement itself.”
Abstraction alienates, becomes an intellect without body, life or soul. It makes of us the walking dead, virtual vampires seeking nourishment from all sources finding none within oneself. In grounding the abstractions of the vegetable soul, Bishop notes how the psyche compensates for our one-sided consciousness. The retribution of the Self for our unconsciousness as well as our inflation can be terrifying indeed, and certainly Bishops following remarks give appropriate amplification to the notion of the return of the repressed spirit and exploited matter within nature.
“The very power of...plants is revealed in the destructive shadows that they cast once removed from their specific sacred and psychological contexts.
Although generally arrogantly dismissive of the sacredness of the vegetable soul, Western culture is racked by the negative effects of the misuse of plants: tobacco, sugar, chocolate, coffee, alcohol, heroin, petrol, even plastic, to name but a few. Torn from their complex mythological roots, such plants and plant derivatives have wrought their revenge on a culture that has relocated them within a fast-living, rootless, consumer-oriented world. For example, secular smoking of commercial tobacco for pleasure was totally unknown in the pre-Columbian Americas despite tobacco’s rivaling maize in its distribution and being used for a greater variety of sacred purposes than any other plant in the New World.”
The vampires of so many addictions lick their lips in the thousand anticipations of the junkie of tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, sugar--consumption. The vegetable soul speaks the language of the Self; whether we hear only the curse of materialism and disease or the sacred song of the universe is an individual matter of evolution and relationship. It is certain that the demonic and the divine alike reside within the veins of plants. Reflective of the wholeness of the Self, the world of plants, as of the entire web of life, contains the opposites in one. Good and bad relative to the circumstance, goal, symptoms, results, and costs involved, plants can be serum and salve or poison outright. Sometimes the same species might mean life to one and death to another. The dragon and the treasure are one.
e) Mutualism
• Ours is a unique existence, participating in many ways and on many levels in the environment. The global ecology we are part of includes inner and outer realms of being. The vampire within, the parasite without, each represents distinct aspects of our nature, our relationship within nature. They no more limit and define the sum of our nature or our relationship with nature than can self-proclaiming ideologies of speciocentricity and delusions of existential or spiritual pre-eminence in a hierarchy of human devising. We must, instead, discover our wholeness within the whole of nature, including the potential symbiosis of mutual benefit between human and other species, human and the environment as organism.
6. Death
• Because Death is not the easiest reality to swallow, let alone to psychically digest, much of our pathological profile as individuals and a species has a distinct bearing on the archetype and our inadequate relationship with it. Our relationship with life is so intimately bound by and reflective of our relationship with death, that the failure to adequately affirm its presence and role in the whole of being is fraught with disastrous consequences. We can deny death, but death’s own peculiar participation mystique will not be denied; instead, it will manifest itself in any number of ways as a result of our ignorance and deliberate avoidance of the great equalizing archetype. Naturally, from our perspective, death appears to cause much of the pain, grief, and suffering in the world; whereas from the perspective of life and death combined, which is the perspective of the Self, not only is death simply the inevitable consort to life but much of our pain, grief and suffering are caused by our refusal to accommodate its mystery and multiple meanings into our view and experience of life. When that is the case, death, or the Self which it serves, has no alternative but to remind us of our impiety in any number of ways and forms.
• Caught in between realms of life and death, the vampire wanders in suspension, undead but anything but alive. An archetype of liminality or an archetype of stagnation, in limbo going nowhere, the vampire is a medial imago of unsuccessful transformation. As an oxymoronic guide, the imago can serve as psychopomp, even if it is itself condemned to static status forever.
• Von Franz: “Death and Self–God’s image, that is–are de facto indistinguishable....From my own experience, it seems to me that the terror-filled, uncanny aspect of the ‘other’ appears especially when the dreamer has as yet no relation to death or does not expect it. Basically, the figures of personified death (death, devil, Yama, Jesus, Hades, Hel, etc.) seem to be nothing other than a dark side of the god image. It is actually God, or a goddess, who brings death to man and the less familiar he is with this dark side of the divine the more negative his experience of it will be. But the great religions have always known that death and life are a part of the same divine mystery which lies behind man’s physical existence.”
The Vampire, A Russian Fairy Tale
In a certain kingdom in a certain land there lived an old man and his wife. They had a daughter named Marusia. In their village it was customary to celebrate the holiday of St. Andrew: the girls would assemble in one house, bake cream puffs, and make merry for a whole week or more. Upon one such occasion the girls gathered together and baked and cooked whatever was needed; at nightfall the young men came with pipes and wine, and there was dancing and merriment. All the girls danced well, but Marusia best of all. After some time a handsome fellow entered the house, a man with a fine complexion, dressed neatly and richly. ‘Good evening, lovely maidens,’ he said. ‘Good evening, young man,’ they said. ‘You’re welcome to join us.’ Straightway he drew a purse full of gold from his pocket, sent for wine, nuts, and gingerbread, and began to treat all the girls and youths; he gave enough to all. Then he danced so beautifully that it was a pleasure to look at him. Best of all he liked Marusia, and he did not leave her a minute.
The time came to go home. The young man said: ‘Marusia, come and walk a few steps with me.’ So she went out and walked with him a little. He said: ‘Marusia, my darling, do you want me to marry you?’ ‘If you want to take me as your wife, I will marry you gladly. But whence are you?’ ‘From such and such a place; I am a merchant’s clerk.’ They said farewell, and each went his way. When Marusia came home, her mother asked her: ‘Did you have a good time, little daughter?’ ‘Very good, mother. And I want to tell you a piece of good news: there was a fine young man there, handsome, with plenty of money, who promised to take me to wife.’ ‘Listen to me, Marusia,’ the mother said. ‘Tomorrow when you go to the girls, take a ball of thread. When you say farewell to him, loop the thread around a button on his clothes and quietly loosen the ball; then you will learn from this thread where he lives.’
Next day Marusia went to the party and took along a ball of thread. The young man came again. ‘Good evening, Marusia,’ he said. ‘Good evening,’she replied. The merrymaking and dancing began; the young man clung to Marusia even more ardently than before, he did not leave her for an instant. When the time came to go home, the guest said: ‘Marusia, come walk a little way with me.’ She went out into the street, began to take farewell of him, and quietly slipped a loop of thread around a button of his clothes. He went his way and she stood there loosening the ball; when it was all unrolled, she ran to find out where her promised groom lived. At first the thread followed the road, then it stretched across fences and ditches and led Marusia straight to the main gate of the church. Marusia tried the gate, but it was closed; she went around the church, found a ladder, put it under the window, and climbed up to see what was going on inside. She peered inside: her promised groom stood near a coffin and was eating a corpse, for a dead man was then laid out in the church. She wanted to jump quietly down from the ladder, but in her fright she stumbled and made a noise. She ran home in terror, fancying that she was pursued, and when she arrived at home she was half dead.
Next morning her mother asked her: ‘Well, Marusia, did you see that young man?’ ‘I did, mother,’ she answered, but she did not tell her mother all that she had seen. When evening came, Marusia sat thoughtful, wondering whether or not to go to the party. ‘Go,’ said her mother. ‘Make merry while you’re young.’ She went to the party and the evil stranger was there. Again there were games, merriment and dancing; the girls did not suspect anything. At the end of the evening, the evil spirit said: ‘Marusia, will you walk a few steps with me?’ She refused to go, she was afraid. All the girls pressed her: ‘What is the matter with you? Are you timid? Go and say farewell to the fine young man.’ She had no choice but to go, putting her hope in God. As soon as they were in the street, the young man asked her: ‘Were you in the church last night?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you see what I was doing there?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, tomorrow your father will die.’ Having said this, he vanished.
Marusia returned home sad and listless; next morning when she awoke, her father was dead. They wept over him and put him in a coffin; at night the mother went to the priest and Marusia remained at home. She felt frightened and decided to join her friends. When she came, she found the evil one there. ‘Good evening, Marusia, why are you so sad?’ the girls asked her. ‘How can I be merry? My father has died.’ ‘Ah, poor girl!’ Everyone grieved with her; so did the vampire, just as though it were not his work. The guests began to leave, The evil youth said: ‘Marusia, come walk a few steps with me.’ She refused. The other girls pressed her, saying: ‘What are you, a little girl or a woman? Why are you afraid? Walk with him!’ She went out with him. In the street he said: ‘Tell me, Marusia, were you in the church?’ ‘No.” ‘Did you see what I was doing?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, tomorrow your mother will die.’ Having said this, he vanished.
Marusia went home even sadder than before; next morning when she awoke, her mother lay dead. All day she wept; then the sun set, it began to grow dark, and she was afraid to stay alone, so she went to join her friends. ‘Good evening! What is the matter with you? You look quite pale!’ they said. ‘How can I be merry? Yesterday my father died, and today my mother,’ Marusia said. ‘Poor girl, unfortunate girl!’ Everyone sympathized with her. The time came to go home. ‘Marusia, come walk a few steps with me,’ said the evil spirit. She went out with him. ‘Tell me,’ he asked, ‘were you in the church?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you see what I was doing?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, before tomorrow night you yourself will die.’ Marusia spent the night with her friends; in the morning she got up and wondered what to do. She recalled that she had a grandmother, who was very, very old and had been blind for many years. She decided to go to her grandmother and ask her advice.
She went to her grandmother. ‘Good day, grandmother,’ she said. ‘Good day, little granddaughter! How does God favor you? How are your father and mother?’ ‘They are dead, grandmother.’ And she recounted everything that had happened to her. The old woman listened to her and said: ‘Ah, you poor girl! Go quickly to the priest, and ask him to see that when you die a hole is dug under the door sill, and that you are carried from your house not through the door but through that hole; and also ask him to bury you at the crossroads.’ Marusia went to the priest and with tears in her eyes begged him to do everything that her grandmother had told her to ask for. She returned home, bought a coffin, laid herself in it, and died at once. The priest was called; he first buried Marusia’s father and mother, and then buried her. She was carried out through the hole under the door and buried at a spot where two roads met.
Shortly afterward the son of a boyar happened to drive by Marusia’s grave; and he beheld a wondrous little flower growing on that grave, a flower such as he had never seen. The barin said to his servant: ‘Go and dig up that flower with its root; we will take it home, put it in a pot, and let it blossom in our house.’They dug up the flower, took it home, planted it in a glazed pot, and put it on the window sill. The flower began to grow and blossom gloriously. One night the servant somehow could not sleep. He looked out of the window and saw a miracle: the flower suddenly began to sway, fell to the ground, and turned into a lovely maiden. The flower was pretty, but the maiden still prettier. She went through the rooms, got herself food and wine, ate and drank, struck the floor, turned again into a flower, ascended to the window, and sat on the branch.
Next day the servant told the barin about the miracle that he had seen during the night. ‘Ah, brother, why did you not rouse me? Tonight we will both keep watch.’ At the stroke of twelve the flower began to stir: it flew from place to place, then it fell to the floor and a lovely maiden appeared. She got herself food and drink and sat down to sup. The barin ran to her, took her by her white hands and led her into his room; he could not feast his eyes enough upon her beauty. In the morning he said to his father and mother: ‘Give me leave to marry, I have found a bride for myself.’ The parents gave him leave. Marusia said: ‘I will marry you only on condition that for four years we do not go to church.’ ‘Agreed,’ he said.
They wedded, lived together one year, then a second, and had a son. One day visitors came to them; they made merry, drank, and began to boast of their wives. One said that his wife was good; the other said that his was better. ‘Well, say what you will,’ said the host, ‘my wife is better than anyone’s.’ ‘She is good, but she is an infidel,’ answered the guests. ‘Why do you say so?’ ‘She never goes to church.’ The husband felt insulted by these words; the following Sunday he ordered his wife to get dressed to go to mass. ‘Don’t contradict me! Get ready without delay!’ he commanded. They made ready and went to church; the husband went in and saw nothing, but she saw the vampire sitting on the window sill. ‘Aha, so you are here?’ he said. ‘Do you remember what happened long ago? Were you in the church last night?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you see what I was doing there:’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, tomorrow both your husband and your son will die.’
Marusia rushed straight from the church to her grandmother. The old woman gave her one phial of holy water and another of the water of life, and instructed her as to what she was to do. Next day Marusia’s husband and her son died. The vampire flew to her and asked: ‘Tell me, were you in the church?’ ‘I was.’ ‘And did you see what I was doing?’ ‘You were devouring a corpse.’ When she had said this she sprinkled him with holy water and he turned into dust. Then she sprinkled her husband and her son with the water of life and they breathed again at once. From that time on they never knew distress nor separation, and they all lived together long and happily.
-- Aleksandr Afanas'ev, Russian Fairy Tales
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