Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [75]
Seventy years later, once Bram Stoker had given himself the challenge of writing a vampire classic, he, too, borrowed a name for his villain, although he took from history, not fiction. Vlad Dracula (1431–1476) was a prince born in the Transylvania region of Romania. Dracula came from his father’s nickname Dracul, meaning “the dragon”; the added a indicated junior status. Vlad, “son of the dragon,” sometimes translated as “son of the demon,” would emerge as a leader on the Christian side of the long-standing war against the Muslim Turks. He excelled in cruelty. He concluded one battle, for instance, with the command that the thousands of captive Turkish soldiers be impaled, a slow and horrific way to die, a public butchery also meant to torment the survivors. By this point Dracula had earned a new sobriquet: Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. Tales of his viciousness took on such life that, after he was slain by a Turkish assassin, the sultan of Constantinople ordered that Vlad’s head be staked and displayed. Come, believe your eyes, the demon is dead.
In co-opting the name Dracula, Stoker was aiming not to model his character after the historical figure but to evoke a kindred spirit of evil. Stoker may have employed a similar tack regarding another member of Transylvanian nobility, Elizabeth Bathory (1560–1614), although here a suggestion of real-life vampirism is not out of the question. Bathory, it’s reputed, regularly bathed in human blood, which she believed would preserve her youth and beauty, as Raymond McNally details in Dracula Was a Woman (1983), a biography of the so-called blood countess. Coincidentally—or, then again, maybe not—Count Dracula, over the course of twenty-seven chapters, grows ever more youthful as he drinks his victims’ blood, a theme that hadn’t occurred in earlier vampire tales. Because this was so Bathory-like, McNally contends that Stoker had indeed been inspired by her and points out that the first account in English of the Bathory case was included in a book Stoker used as a reference, a nineteenth-century encyclopedia of the supernatural. But did Stoker, I wonder, even read this entry? Couldn’t he have just plucked the de-aging idea from his imagination? Stoker scholars and vampire enthusiasts hotly debate this question. Speculation notwithstanding, Bathory’s legend is rich in its own right. Her victims were peasant girls, preferably virgins, either hired as servants or kidnapped outright. However obtained, they all ended up in the castle cellar, the location of Bathory’s torture chamber, where they were eventually exsanguinated. Of several gruesome methods, one involved being locked inside a spike-lined spherical cage that was hoisted to the ceiling, then rocked so that the girl was pierced again and again. The countess stood naked beneath, in the shower of warm drippings.
Portrait of Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called blood countess, at age twenty-five
Not to excuse her behavior in any way, but some historical context might be helpful at this point. The use of blood in one’s beauty regimen was not unheard of in the sixteenth century. To prevent wrinkles, wealthy women of the Renaissance would rub their faces each morning with the Kiehl’s moisturizer of its day, the blood of doves. As for the use of virgin blood, there, too, were numerous precedents. Aztec priests in the fifteenth century, to cite one example, sacrificed virgin girls as offerings to their primary deity, the corn goddess. In Europe during the Middle Ages, it was believed that physical illness, thought to be brought on by sin, could be washed away using “innocent” virgin blood, though the donor