Greek Origins
While most of us are familiar with the mythological gods of ancient Greece, it's less well known that according to legend, it was those same all-powerful deities who bred the creatures who would become the ancestors of vampires throughout the folklore of European history.
The origination of vampiric demons in ancient Greece began in the world of the supernatural and remained there for centuries. Not surprising to vampire aficionados, it was Zeus, the supreme god of Greek mythology, who would become responsible for the creation of one of the earliest life-sucking demons in history — and he did it with an all-too-mortal dalliance of fooling around with another woman.
The Lamia
The writings and legends of ancient Greeks, including references from Aristophanes and Aristotle, tell the tale of an illicit love affair between the all-powerful Zeus and the Libyan princess Lamia, who's variously described as the daughter of the sea god Poseidon or a daughter of Poseidon's son, Belus. The downside of this celestial fling is that it attracted the wrath of Hera, Zeus's jealous wife, who took vengeance upon the unfortunate Lamia by kidnapping and killing all of her God-spawned children and driving the bereft woman into exile.
Grief-stricken and unable to retaliate against the power of the gods who'd brought her such misery, Lamia began a campaign of exacting revenge upon humankind by stealing and sucking the life from the babies of mortal mothers.
In later legendary incarnations, lamia evolved into a legion of unearthly beings with the upper bodies of women and the lower shapes of serpents. These creatures are called lamiai, and they suck the blood of children and can also alter their horrific appearances at will to seduce young men and lead them to ruin or death.
When we discuss the gods, demons, and religion of Greek mythology, it's helpful to remember that to the ancient Greeks these “legends” had nothing to do with fiction or fantasy. We have the benefit of science, education, and a healthy dose of skepticism, but the Greeks, like the ancient Egyptians, believed in the existence of their gods and their supernatural designs for humankind with as much conviction as modern believers do in their own choice of religion and deity.
The Vrykolakas
In Greece, the most ancient of the demons with vampiric tendencies are directly tied to the supernatural world of spirits sired by the gods, but soon after Greece's conversion to Christianity, there grew the cultural suspicion that demons and the recently deceased were often one and the same.
In modern terms, the dead who return to life are revenants, and in Greece, they're known as vrykolakas. Although there are various spellings of the term and variations of the word itself throughout regions of Greece, the vrykolakas are generally considered to be the most virulent demons of the undead, who return to life to cause misery to the living.
The word vrykolakas trickled into common Greek usage from the southern Slavic people of the Balkans. The term originally developed from descriptions of wearers of wolf pelts and gradually evolved into a depiction of demons with wolflike characteristics. Although the Greek interpretation of vrykolakas was essentially vampiric in nature, variations of the same term were used by the Slavs to describe the equally frightful lycanthropes or lycans, otherwise known as werewolves.
The belief in vrykolakas was, in fact, so prevalent that the Greek Orthodox Church was compelled to address the issue in the first century to help allay the fears of the populace and offer solutions to the suspected mischief of the wandering undead.
It's no great surprise that the Church offered the opinion that those most likely to return from the dead had perished before receiving proper clerical rites. This included stillborn children, those who'd led sinful lives or were excommunicated, and, in a bizarre twist, those born on a holy day were particularly at risk — no doubt because of the blasphemy of competing with days devoted to the saints.
The long litany of possible reasons for the creation of vrykolakas was, in many ways, a stern admonition from the Church for its followers to toe the lines of religious devotion or suffer the hideous consequences. The Church's common sense solution to the pesky vrykolakas was to simply dig up the body of the suspected troublemaker and burn the remains to ash; a remedy that would mollify a nervous population for centuries.
