The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout. and the poor, the educated and the illiterate all participated in cannibalism on a more or less routine basis. Drugs were made from Egyptian mummies and from the dried bodies of those drowned in North

Compare, for example: ‘the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with From their midst a low furious bellow, offset by the frightened yapping of dogs. Bull-baiting: you do not have the time to give it a very hundreds of years, theory had the upper hand. Just before the midsixteenth century in Italy, this situation was at last challenged by the I now have the rights to The Smoke of the Soul and have almost completed a new trade version of this book. Please do write if you are interested in that title – it is proving a busy year… For more on the vagaries of mummy collecting, and associated ethics, see my article, ‘Collecting Mummies’, in Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture, ed. Matt Cardin (ABC Clio, 2014).kind, dirt, slime’ (OED, ‘gore’, 1) then he could well have been thinking of the fat or flesh of criminal corpses, found in apothecaries’ shops Two other possibilities are worth considering. First: it is quite possible that the youths died accidentally (although, if so, a doctor could bodies at their burials, as aloe, myrrha and balsamo, being coagulated and grown together (with the fat and moisture of the corpse) The hope that an upside down vampire could not wriggle itself over hints at another forgotten truth: the real vampires were not evil aristocratic masterminds with chilling plans for world dominance. Frankly, they were pretty dim. Mercia MacDermott explains that in Bulgaria ‘one could get rid of a vampire by approaching him with a warm loaf and inviting him to go to some distant place on the pretext of a fair or a wedding, and then abandoning him there. Alternatively, one could send him to get fish from the Danube, where he would fall in and be drowned’. She and Paul Barber add that numerous seeds, including millet, mustard and poppy, might be strewn along the path to the grave, as well as left in the grave itself. Perhaps suffering an early form of OCD, the vampire must count all these, and so is too busy to get to your bed and scare you to death. Count Dracula indeed…

brandy, hot pies and chestnuts. One particularly brilliant entrepreneur has set up a press, having rightly guessed that the rich will pay guarded elixirs were circulated among a few monastic correspondents across Europe. We hear, for example, of ‘a most precious water an attempt to revive his failing powers. The attempt was not successful. Innocent himself also died soon after, on 25 July.38 And in some cases this wild terror seems to have involved a poltergeist. It took me a long time to get my head around these; but they really do exist. A classic vampire poltergeist exploded through the island of Mykonos just before Christmas 1700. After a man died suddenly in the fields, something (his ghost?) began by throwing furniture around and grabbing people from behind. As the terror of the Greek vrykolakas intensified, so did the violence. The vampire-poltergeist broke doors, roofs and windows, beat people up, and shredded their clothes. Whole families fled their houses to sleep in the open square, or escaped to the countryside. Finally, having carved up the dead man and only made matters worse, the islanders took his corpse to a separate island and burned it on 1 January 1701. Happy New Year! For a very long time, vampires were as common in Greece as in Romania. And although they scared Greeks out of their minds, they were quite able to walk about in full Greek sunlight. As any Greek could tell you, the only time vampires were compelled to remain in their coffins was ‘between the hours of Vespers on Saturday and the end of the liturgy on the Sunday morning’. Typically, what matters in real vampire country is not a physical environment, but a sacred one. For similar reasons, a key cause of vampirism in Greece was excommunication.conservative physicians.89 In doing so she not only confirms the surgeons’ relative openness to Paracelsian treatments, but also makes or marmalade.56 Almost a hundred years after the supposed transfusion described by Infessura, we find that human blood has a status seemingly quaint, or disgusting. In March 2015 Nottingham University hit the headlines, when it was revealed that researchers there had Baker and his fellow surgeon, Clowes, played a particularly important role in mediating between these street mountebanks and the sweat, milk, urine, excrement and so forth. Blood could also conceivably be excluded from that primary definition. Because of the taboos