Vampires

Probably these are the real roots of Vampires and Werewolves legends alike.
             In the XV century, the Balkans became the field on which the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church contended for religious supremacy. Needless to say, both the Churches tried to use the popular superstition to frighten and to force their believers not to give up their religion. In 1490 Pope Innocenzo VIII with the Papal bull "Malleus Maleficarum- fixed that suicides and excommunicates were destined to "live- again as vampires, because they were out of God's Grace and therefore Evil One's easy preys. The Bull reduced strongly the abjurations among the ignorant rural populations; consequently both Churches developed their own peculiar methods against "vampires-. The Roman Catholic one set up that same complex ritual described by Bram Stoker in "Dracula-; the first step is the staking of vampire's heart, then the chopping of his head off and the final step is the filling of the mouth with garlic. The stake must be made with the same wood used for crucifixes, like oak or ash. It is interesting to note that there are many pagan reminiscences in this rituals, as in many other Catholic ones: ash, for example, represented among Vikings the Life forces because the Cosmic Tree, Yggsadrill, was an ash-tree. On the other hand, the Orthodox Church periodically screened the graveyards , re-exhuming the graves and checking their degree of putrefaction. If the body showed no decomposition or less than expected, that one was the body of a vampire.
             In XVIII century in Slovak and Bulgaria there was an epidemy of cattle plague provoked by an invasion of vampire bats. Needless to say, farmers charged vampires with the plague and defended their cattle with holy symbols, circles of blessed fire, etc. etc. This disease provoked a fresh outbreak of vampire tales, and its easy to link this recrudescence with vampires' success among Romantic poets and writers: After numerous apparitions on works of poetry like Goethe's Braut von Corinth (1797), Byron's Giaour (1813), W.