Augustine Calmet (1672–1757)

I honestly did not know what I was getting myself into when I picked up this book.

I'm first and foremost a writer who loves to read the gothic, the horror, and the monstrous. I've read a fair number of vampire novels and have even written about vampires and such in my time, but I've always been fascinated by the vampire mythology, rather than what they are in a modern literary sense. To the writers of now, vampires are more or less just a storytelling device to tell tales of sexy, studly show more blood suckers who are dangerous but who are still human deep down despite their inhuman nature.

But for the people of the past who believed in these stories, they were a very real danger that they believed haunted them.

So I've picked up books that detail what vampires are and how their mythology came about, and when I saw that this was one of the definitive texts on them, I chose to read it. What did I end up getting out of it?

Well... honestly... quite a lot! A lot more than I bargained for. I'll not mince words here: The actual stuff on vampires isn't the main focus of the book. In fact, they're among several supernatural and even occult entities that Calmet tries to reason through theologically. In this book, you'll find him discussing Angels, Demons, Ghosts, Poltergeists, the excommunicated, revenants, witches, sorcerers, shapeshifters, pagans, and everything else where he uses theology, philosophy, and even reason to discuss how these supposed paranormal entities could either exist or not exist.

That was what got me hooked. I was expecting a collection of old vampire stories and a dissertation upon their evil nature, and what they are in the context of a 1750 religious mindset, but I honestly liked the way that Calmet rationalized these beings' existence using the lens of religion. For some beings, he explained that they either should or should not exist because God is the only being who can willfully change his creation and add or take away from it. For others, he actually has a modern mindset on the explanation of the supernatural phenomena.

Seriously. For the witches, he posits that 90% of witch tales are bunk, and that most of the time it's a community attacking an old woman who has no support network, and whose mental faculties are diminished because of age. While he doesn't outright refute the Malleus Malificarum, he does at least hint that he thinks it's not applied right.

He also lends this sort of modern mindset to vampires, too. While it's clear that he thinks the idea of them is neat, he explains that their existence doesn't make sense, as even a normal, healthy person is unable to move 6ft of earth atop of them from the grave, and that corpses are normally observed as growing their hair and nails after a time. While he doesn't understand the whys that happen, he does say it's not a supernatural phenomenon and that if vampires are the risen dead, why do none of them answer questions about heaven and hell?

It was this sort of rationalizing that made me interested in the book.

Was there a downside to it, though? Well... yeah. Honestly, a lot of the stories he used as proof or to set up the arguments he used were very similar. There were only so many times I could read about how someone observed a ghost/vampire/demon/angel/apparition in a field who disappeared or who had a family member that died return to dinner before I kind of got bored and skimmed some of it to get to the good bits.

Yet despite all that, I would love to one day own a hardcover copy of this book with a beautiful cover and put it on my shelf for easy research. show less