Victorian vampire-slaying kit up for auction in Yorkshire

[Van-Helsing]

Whereas this kit does - which was precisely my point in the first place!

ACTUALLY my point was purely about appearance, not methodology - so your point is still spurious sorry.

[Steve F]

I think we'd better just agree to differ.

[Van-Helsing]

I think we'd better just agree to differ.

I'm down with that.

[Van-Helsing]

@Van Helsing
Interesting summary you came up with of the Bulgarian folklore. Do you have a recommended English Language reference that gives a good overview and some more details? Exactly the sort of book I am looking for to move "Witchfinder General" into the Balkans.

The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters (by Rosemary Ellen Guiley) is a great place to start, though an encyclopedia in format - it's quite detailed.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Encyclopedia-Vampires-Werewolves-Other-Monsters/dp/0816046859

Forests of the Vampire: Slavic Myth (by Michael Kerrigan) is also very interesting, but like Rosemary Ellen Guileys Encyclopedia it covers more than just Vampires.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forests-Vampire-Slavic-Myth-Mankind/dp/0705436136/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1339258535&sr=8-5

A Google search for "Vampire Myths of the Balkans" is generally unsatisfying (believe me I know LoL) - but http://theshadowlands.net/vamp3.htm has some interesting little nuggets of information if you want to read something straight away.

[robh]

Thanks, I have just ordered the Kerrigan book on Amazon. Looks like an interesting read.

[Van-Helsing]

Thanks, I have just ordered the Kerrigan book on Amazon. Looks like an interesting read.

It's very interesting that one!

[Stavros Banjo]

As a little aside, and for those of you drooling uncontrollably over the vampire-slaying kit, have you seen the works of Alex CF? He has produced numerous kits & gribbly specimens of ungodly creatures that may capture your imagination. I love his work & my wallet constantly screams in fear whenever I go anywhere near his site. If I was filthy rich I would have a house full of his work.... and an ex-wife too, probably 

http://alexcf.com/blog/

[Van-Helsing]

Absolutely Fantastic!

[Doomsdave]

These kits periodically show up in the US at gun shows. Everyone I've seen was produced in the  early 20th century. The ones I've seen here are authentic (1920-50's antiques), but I suspect that even when produced they were a curiosity or novelty rather than a serious prophylactic against the undead.   There are some websites that even show you how to reproduce these kits.

[Hammers]

I'd be very sceptical about the authenticity of this.  As the report quoted in the OP points out, a lot of the specific ideas about killing vampires embodied in this kit were only drawn together by Dracula in 1897, though they had all been kicking around beforehand in various bits of fiction and ethnography.  That does leave much of the 19th century available to make it.

Mind you, even if the kit as a whole is a later fake, it might still be valuable - if the box is mahogany, the crucifix silver, the pistol authentic and so on.

I was about to post exactly what you are saying, then I went  back to actually read the replies. A sly person would know how to put together contemporary pieces to make a kit which as a whole would sell for more than the individual parts together.

To me, a kit like this seems just too much a construction made to tap into contemporary popular culture.

That said, my initial skepticism has been put to right before, notably in the department of witchhunter 'bell-book-and-candle' department and also in Medieval torture museums. (This is a cliché, but after having seen the  torture museums of both Geneva and Prague my approach is also now that the human mind knows no bounds when it comes to inflicting pain to his fellow man.)

Nevertheless, I am the kind  of person who  would LOVE to have a set like this. £2000 is nothing!

[Steve F]

@robh - Some of the early compendia of East European folklore, which influenced the later popular fictions, are fairly easily obtainable.  Wordsworth published a cheap paperback edition of an 1850 English translation (by the wonderfully named Henry Christmas) of the book by Dom Augustin Calmet which Van_Helsing mentioned, under the title The Phantom World: Concerning Apparitions and Vampires. It's very readable, and its where most Westerners would have learned about the case VH cites, either directly or indirectly through plagiarism and recycling.

As I mentioned, the most influential of those recyclers was the fake Catholic priest Montague Summers.  His two books The Vampire, His Kith and Kin and The Vampire in Europe are highly readable collections of pretty much every previous account known in the west by the early 20th century, though his commentary is rather batty.

The other influential 19th century collection that's worth seeking out is The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould (author of the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers").  As with Summers and Vampires, he ranges far wider than a Monster Manual definition would suggest.  I used to have a battered old paperback copy (Coronet, I think), but like so much else it has gone to pay for food.

All of these are out of copyright, so there may well be online editions.

[Van-Helsing]

To be 100% certain, you would need to have each component authenticated.

Which would be a shame as all the individual elements exist within pre Stoker Vampire Lore.

Garlic Paste - Late 17th Century Romania - smeared on the neck and around the threshold.

Stakes - everywhere around Europe, particularly Bulgaria (up to the early 20th Century if you can believe it) where they favoured Iron Stakes too!

Bibles and Christian Paraphernalia - as far back as the Middle Ages, the Christian Church had "embraced" (no pun intended) Vampire Lore to be Satanic rather than simply Pagan.

Pistols with Silver Bullets killed Undead First (Werewolves were "added" to the list much later), Silvered weapons as protection against the supernatural is a Pagan belief dating back to the Babylon Moon Goddess Anunit.

Whilst the whole kit is most likely a fake - the fun with it is that it MIGHT not be fake . . . . .

[Steve F]

Pistols with Silver Bullets killed Undead First (Werewolves were "added" to the list much later), Silvered weapons as protection against the supernatural is a Pagan belief dating back to the Babylon Moon Goddess Anunit.

Interesting.  The moon/silver association is certainly a common one, given the colour of moonlight.  Presumably that was why Siodmak chose silver weapons to kill his lunar monsters. 

Is there evidence of continuity in the 3,000 year gap between the two examples, or might it be coincidence based on that colour association?  (I mean that as a genuine, not a rhetorical,  question, as my library has gone.  A quick google search turned up a Wikipedia entry on a 17th/18th century Bulgarian folk-hero called Delyo, who was supposedly killed by a silver bullet though impervious to harm otherwise, but (a) Wikipedia always needs double-checking; and (b) all the references are in Bulgaran (and Cyrillic), so I can't tell what they are, or when the story first included this element, or why silver was the relevant substance.)

[Van-Helsing]

Anunit's High priests carried silvered weapons "lest the dead rise up" - Sumerian Gods and Their Representation (Irving L. Finkel & Markham J. Geller)

Most modern fiction describes werewolves as vulnerable to silver weapons and highly resistant to other injuries. This actually quite simply does not appear in stories about werewolves before the 19th century - there is claim that the Beast of Gévaudan (18th-century) was shot by a silver bullet - this is one of the roots of the "myth" of Silvered Weapons.

It was taken on board by writers who wrote about that story (from about 1933 onwards - which might explain the Lon Chaney Jr Movies taking it so to heart) but prior to that it simply did not exist as part of Werewolf legends.

It crops up in Movies from time to time Vs the Undead - in "The Satanic Rights of Dracula" Lorimar Van-Helsing tools himself up with Silver Bullets to confront Dracula.

It's all sketchy really - but the information is all there. In some cultures Werewolves (like Vampires and their Kin) are considered Undead - to become a Werewolf one first must die from the attack, then rise on the next Full-Moon. In other beliefs Werewolves are cursed, or not affected by the moon at all etc, etc

Fascinating stuff all of it really.