See you next year!

Wikipedia

Rather than a customary reminisce of the year gone by, I thought I'd do something different for New Years' Eve—and give you a treat, instead.

You'll recall one of my recent discoveries involved a pre-White Wolf reference to vampires descending from the Biblical Cain, the first murderer. What I didn't tell you, is that there's more to the story.

The remainder of J. Theodore Bent's article discusses the behaviours and attributes of these 'Cains' in Greek lore:

They come down the chimney at night; so a careful housewife is bound, during this time, to keep embers smouldering on the hearth. When crickets come to a house, they say that it is a sure sign that "Cains" will come and play all sorts of horrible antics with the food and household utensils. Cain was a huge man, they told me, taller than the tallest chimney, with the feet of goats, and wooden shoes; in short, the satyr of ancient days. In like manner they imagine Lazarus to have risen from the grave an abnormally tall, thin man, with a round, flat head; for this reason they call the pole with an oval board at the end of it, which they use for putting their bread into the ovens, a Lazarus.¹

Bent also wrote The Cyclades: or Life among the insular Greeks (1885). That book also discusses Greek 'vampires'. Thanks to the magic of the internoodle, you can download it from here. You're welcome!

In the meantime, I wish everyone a safe and Happy New Year! Oh, and don't forget to check out Niels' latest post. It's a run-through of essential vampire books published during the year. More stuff for the Amazon wishlist. Better start saving the pennies. Peace out.

---

^{1. JT Bent, ‘Personification of the mysterious amongst the modern Greeks’, The National Review, April, 1887, p. 233, 26 December 2011, retrieved from British Periodicals.↩}