First – thou shalt not make new vampires

A lot is being written and said about the toxicity of the modern society. Lack of tolerance, marginalisation of the minorities, ignoring of the needs of our mental health, excessive pressure, criticising or bulling in schools, work places or even in the public space (streets, busses, supermarkets etc). This toxicity of the modern society (often after adding to the mix computer games and/or violent action or horror movies) is cited as the main cause of rise in aggression, crime, delinquency and so on.

I am not a psychologist, a criminologist nor a sociologist, so I am not able to accurately asses if those analyses are correct or not. It seems however that the social alienation, particularly of young people and those who, for various reason (or sometimes, unfortunately, “reasons”) might blame the society for their failures or shortages, can be a likely cause of at least some of the problems of the modern, western culture.

Very often so called traditional values (which in the Western world are also the Christian values) are recommended as the cure of the problems of modern civilisation. All the time we hear/read in the media that religion, Church or even atheistic application of the ten commandments would for sure heal not only the lost souls of unhappy people but also the whole societies. It is also common for the traditional/Christian values, after scrubbing them from the religious context, to be cited as the universal values of humanity, which should be accepted and applied all over the world, regardless of the ethnicity, religion, nationality etc. One of those “universal” rules is so very Christian “love others as much as you love yourself”. Lets try to imagine then how our world would look if we loved others as much as ourselves.

Toxic love

According to WHO every year globally:

- 800.000 people kill themselves. It is also estimated that for every “successful” suicide attempt there are 20 “unsuccessful” ones.

At the same time every year globally approximately 450.000 homicides are (successfully) committed – 450.000 people decide to kill another human.

- 3.000.000 people die from the consequences of alcohol abuse;

- 275.000.000 people use other psychoactive substances and 450.000 die as a result of that.

Alcohol or other drugs/psychoactive substances abuse can be considered self-poisoning (like a suicide is a self-killing), which sometimes has a fatal consequence (overdose). Death caused by abuse of alcohol or other psychoactive substances can be called self-killing with poison. I did try to find statistical data about homicides committed by poisoning, but unfortunately I could not find any. However from the data I came across it appears that poisons are very rarely used a weapon of choice in homicides.

Considering the above statistical data as well as the fact that nearly twice as much people kill themselves, than kill others, it becomes very clear that people do not love themselves more than they love others. One could say they actually love themselves much, much less. Maybe then abandoning the traditional values is not so bad? Imagine only how high the homicide rate would have been if people suddenly started “loving” others as much as they “love” themselves.

So, if not traditional Christian values, then what?

Traditional Slavic values

We don’t know much about pre-Christian Slavic morality and ethics. The written sources are scarce (and mostly from second or even third hand), as are archaeological findings. However if we want to try and reconstruct intellectual/ethical values of Slavs, we can find some insights in analysing things that Slavs were scared of – Slavic demons and particularly – vampires.

Slavic world was full of demons. They inhabited forests, fields, rivers, mountains and homesteads. Not all the demons were – as we would call it today – evil. Some didn’t pay much attention to humans. If people did not bother them (or the places those demons inhabited), they did not bother people. Those „neutral” type of demons were mostly spirits created by the Gods or the forces of nature. Leshy, bagiennik, skarbnik, zmey or ćmuch did not show aggression towards people, sometimes helped them (Leshy for example was known from helping people lost in the forest), and hurt them only in self-defence or if angered. However there was a special category of demons, which existed only to torment the humanity. Those demons were “created” by humans or rather – from them. Vampires, dziwożonas, topielce, or poludnitsas – they all actively sought to hurt people, they wanted to kill them, hurt them, kidnap, enslave or steal human children. What made those demons so different from others? They were all humans once.

A vampire is nothing else but a human, who experienced injustice, rejection and who was forgotten after death. Of course those who became vampires (after death) had the bad fortune of being born with an unibrow, abnormal dentition or other congenital/developmental deformities. But those deformities were only factors predisposing to vampirism. The decisive factors were lack of proper burial (cremation or appropriate anti-vampiric burial rite) as well as the need of revenge or compensation for wrongs which were experienced by the vampire before his/her death.

The other human „born” demons were created in the same way: dziwożonas (the spirits of women died during or shortly after childbirth), topielce (spirits of people who drowned) or poludnitsas (spirits of women who died just before, during or just after their wedding) would not be “reborn” as demons after their death, if their bodies received a proper funeral and their souls were lead to Navia with proper rituals. And – of course – if their life was not suddenly lost, which, at least in some cases, could possibly have been avoided.

Vampiric lessons in ethics

After becoming familiar with Slavic demonology it cannot be doubted that our ancestors looked at the world with eyes of a vigilant observer, stripped of any delusions about the true human nature. Our ancestors knew that evil – the real evil – comes from and is created by people. They knew, what we needed two World Wars and the Holocaust to understand. They knew that humans are the biggest enemy of humanity. That only humans can inflict evil upon humans, can hurt and wound – deeply, methodically, ruthlessly and on purpose.

But Slavs not only understood human nature. They were also afraid of it. They were aware how evil a human being can be and, to protects themselves (and future generations) from this evil, they told stories – about a boy who was so unseemly that the whole village laughed at him and who came back after his death, as a vampire, to get his revenge of the villagers; a story about a young mother who died during childbirth, because no neighbour of her thought to check on her and make sure she did not need help. In the stories told by our ancestors this very young mother came back from her death and as a dziwożona, she stole all the infants leaving changelings in their place. Through stories like that, which after thousands of generations and hundreds of years became Slavic demonology, our ancestors passed on a very important lesson: don’t hurt others, because others can hurt you back. Don’t inflict injustice upon people, because the might of anger and the need of revenge doesn’t know the limits of time and death. Care about your neighbours, don’t abandon them in need and don’t forget about them. Don’t allow homicides or suicides, and if you can’t stop them, do everything in your power to respect the dead and show their spirits the way to Navia. Regardless of how people look, regardless of whether they had an unibrow, or their teeth are crooked, regardless of whether they are a mother or a deeply unhappy future suicide victim, treat them in a way, that gives them no reason to come back from the death as a vampire or other demon. This world, our world does not need new demons. We have created enough of them already.

But remember, under no circumstances “love” others like you “love” yourself. Statistics show that if you do that you are likely to hurt people more than or at least as much as they are already hurting themselves.

Slava!

Alvina - one of the characters from “The Tree of Memories’ (art by Goria)