If a certain number of such cases of apparent death has really given rise to the faith in vampirism, then it is equally possible to suppose, that this kind of trance--for which there may exist a special predisposition in one or the other race--may become at times epidemic. Persons of peculiar nervousness will be ready to be affected, and a locality in which this has occurred may soon obtain an unenviable reputation. Even where the epidemic does not appear in full force, a disturbed state of the nervous system will be apt to lead to dreams by night, and to gossip in the daytime, on the fatally attractive subject, and the patient will soon dream, or really imagine, that a person who has died of the disease has appeared to him by night, and drawn his strength from him, or, in his excited fancy, sucked his life's blood. By such means even the popular way of speaking of nocturnal visits made by the "vampire's ghost" is not so entirely unfounded as would appear at first sight, and the superstition is easily shown to be not altogether absurd, but to be based upon a small substructure of actual truth.
It is remarkable, however, that the Germanic race has never furnished any instances of vampirism, although their ancient faith in a Walhalla, where their departed heroes feast sumptuously, and their custom to place food in the graves of their friends would have seemed most likely to reconcile them to the idea that men continue to live in their graves.
How sadly persistent, on the other hand, such superstitions are among the lower races, and in specially ignorant communities, may be gathered from the fact that, as late as 1861, two corpses were disinterred by the peasants of a village of Galicia, and decapitated. The people believed them to be vampires, and to have caused a long-protracted spell of bad weather!
Even more fearful yet than vampirism is the disease, very common already in the days of antiquity, which makes men think that they have changed into beasts, and then act as such, according to the logic of insanity. Petronius is probably the first to mention, in his "Feast of Trimalchio," a case of lycanthropy, when Niceros relates how someone who was journeying with him threw off his garments, changed into a wolf and ran away into the forest. When he returned home, his account continues, he found that a wolf had fallen upon his flock, but had been wounded by a servant in the neck with a lance. Thereupon he goes to inquire after his fellow-traveler, and finds him sick in bed with a physician by his side, who binds up an ugly wound in his neck. The well-known writer took this episode from the Arcadians, a rude nation of shepherds, whose flocks were frequently attacked by wolves, and among whom stories of men changed into wild beasts, were quite current. Nor must we forget, among historic personages, the daughter of King Proetus of Argos, who believed herself changed into a cow; and of Nebuchadnezzar, who according to his own touching account "was driven from meat, did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagle's feathers, and his nails like bird's claws." (Daniel iv. 33.) The early days of Christianity are naturally full of incidents of this kind, but what is remarkable, zoanthropy was then already treated as a mere delusion. The holy man Macarius once saw a large procession approaching his hermitage in Egypt; it was headed by a number of persons who led a large and imposing-looking woman by a bridle, and followed by a crowd of people of all ages. When they came near they told his disciples that the woman had been changed into a mare, and had thus remained for three days and nights without food--would the saint pray over her and restore her to her natural condition? The delusion was so forcibly contagious that the disciples also forthwith saw a mare, and not a woman, and refused to admit the animal to the presence of the hermit! Fortunately the latter had retained his self-control; he rebuked his followers, saying: "You are the real beasts, that imagine you see something which does not exist. This woman has not been changed, but your eyes are deluded." Then he poured holy water over her, and at once everybody saw her once more in her natural shape. He dismissed her and her escort with the words: "Go more frequently to church and take the holy sacrament; then you will escape such fearful punishment."