Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Of all the undead this chronicle has raised, the Chinese jiangshi — the "stiff corpse," rendered in the West as the hopping vampire — is the one whose horror is most precisely a matter of unfinished travel . The jiangshi is a corpse that has not been laid to rest in the right ground: rigid, arms outstretched before it because rigor mortis has locked them so, unable to bend its stiffened joints and therefore hopping — bounding forward on locked legs, stiff and dreadful, in the one gait a rigid body can manage — its face greenish-white with the mould of the grave, its breath a killing cold, hunting the living for the qi , the life-breath, that it drinks to sustain its own unnatural motion. But behind the hopping horror that later ages made into comedy and cinema lies one of the most poignant institutions in the whole world's dealing with its dead: the xiangxi ganshi — the "corpse-driving of western Hunan," the tradition of the men who walked the dead home . D...

In the townland of Slaghtaverty in County Derry — the name is Leacht Abhartaigh , "the Abhartach's sepulchre" — there stands, in a field, a great old thorn tree with a heavy stone half-sunk beneath it; and the people of the district, when they still spoke of such things freely, would tell you not to disturb either the stone or the tree, because of what lies under them, and what it did, and how hard it was to make it stop. The story is one of the oldest recorded vampire-tales of the British Isles — set down by the antiquarian Patrick Weston Joyce in the nineteenth century from local tradition, and argued by more than one scholar to be a source, or at least a sibling, of the great vampire that came out of Ireland's own Bram Stoker a generation later. It concerns the Abhartach: a dwarf — the word means a small person, and the tradition makes him small, deformed, and correspondingly cruel — who was a chieftain, or a wizard-chieftain, of that country in the deep past: a ...

Poland's native vampire is built on a theory of the soul, and the theory is the terror. The strzyga (masculine strzygoń )—her name descends, through the Balkans and old Rome, from the strix , the shrieking night-owl of classical witch-lore that fed on the flesh of the young—is, in the Polish tellings, a person born with two souls : a doubling the villages diagnosed at birth or after by its signs— two hearts , a double row of teeth (the second row often discovered only at death), the early teeth, the caul, the unusual and unsettling infancies. Such a child, baptized once, had one soul christened and one left pagan ; and when the person died—often young, for the double-natured were held marked for early graves—only the christened soul departed. The second soul stayed in the body —and rose with it: the strzyga is the corpse animated by its own unbaptized remainder, and its career follows the appetite of its owl-ancestress: it leaves the grave at night—sometimes as a ruffled, huge-e...

The ghosts of most traditions are made of mist. The Norse dead are made of meat . The draugr —the "again-walker," aptrgangr , of Icelandic saga and Scandinavian folk belief—is no transparent wisp wringing its hands in a corridor: he is the corpse itself, risen in the body, swollen and heavy, "blue as death and fat as a bull" in the sagas' relished phrase, possessed of more than mortal strength, stinking of the grave, and at home in it—for the classic draugr does not wander the earth homeless: he occupies his burial mound as a lord occupies a hall, seated on his treasure in the barrow's blue-lit chamber, and defends it against all comers. He crushes intruders, rides roofs at night until the rafters crack, breaks the backs of cattle and the minds of shepherds; iron may bite him but rarely stops him; and the sagas—the most unsentimental literature Europe produced—treat him neither as allegory nor as superstition but as a problem : a physical, legal, and fina...