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Este Halloween vamos de vampiros

Translation: Alexandra Sorina Radulescu

This Halloween we dress up as vampires

Art by Fernando Vicente. One of the illustrations from Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ published by Reino de Cordelia in 2014.

This is the Halloween special volume and we celebrate it in style. If you want to join us, you already know that this year’s costume is the vampire. We hope you enjoy it. 

The Crystal Ball

John William Waterhouse. The Crystal Ball, 1907.

Talking about Whitby, today we will tell you about the history of two canvases which are linked with the city through the Pre-Raphaelite painter J. W. Waterhouse. In 1904 he painted an eerie canvas: The Crystal Ball. The woman is a fortune teller who observes the image being reflected inside a crystal ball. We can see a spell book opened on a page from which the protagonist will have pronounced the magic words. Next to the book, a skull, an element with many meanings that could make reference to witchcraft or death. If we take a look at the dress and the interior of the room we notice that this is a medieval scene. The crystal ball is part of the fortune telling practice dating back to the Celtic culture, where druids saw the past, the present and the future inside beryl stones. However, in the Middle Ages, the balls used for fortune telling were crystal balls. 

Ironically, this painting is paired with another now vanished painting named The Missal, in which a young devout woman prays kneeling. It is said that Frederick Pyman requested Waterhouse these matching paintings for his residence in Whitby. Whitby is a coastal town in the northeast of England where both Christian traditions and devotion to white magic have a strong presence. What’s more, Whitby is the town in which Bram Stoker found the first references about the name “Dracul” and where he was inspired to create his masterpiece: Dracula, which takes place in this town. This is an element that suggests a possible connection between Waterhouse and Stoker, both suspected of having belonged to thHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It has been suggested that the matching canvases painted by Waterhouse represented Christianity and magic in Whitby.

Some books about vampires

Enthusiasts of the vampire field normally use these texts as main references: The Vampyre by Polidori, and most importantly, Dracula by Bram Stoker. However, the original source of these blood-drinking beings seems to be almost archetypical, and their trace appears in folk history since immemorial time. That is what Father Calmet manifested in his work named Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al. published in 1751 in Paris. We could say that this is the first volume about vampires in Universal Literature. 

In some manner, Calmet compiles the stories that have come to his knowledge (mostly coming from Europe, although there were some reported cases from Peru) of what he likes to call revenants; that is, people who return to life after having died, with the intention of taking others to the grave with them. The volume collects these incidents but also dedicates some chapters searching for antecedents in Greco-Latin and Old Testament sources, as it tells us about lamia, shtriga, and of course, the evil Lilith. Calmet does not affirm or deny the veracity of these stories, he only acts as the compiler. 

You can see the book here.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and at the same time much less explained chapters of Dracula by Bram Stoker is the journey that leads Count Dracula and his entourage from Romania to Whitby in England. That is why the artist and writer Ana Juan wanted to recreate that journey in this illustrated book, whose title is the name of the fateful ship that transported the cohort of the vampires: the Demeter. 

As soon as we open the cover of this magnificent volume, we find a sinister map of Europe at the end of the 19th century, where the cities of Varna (Romania) and Whitby (England) are marked with a bloody trace, which indicates the route of the sinister ship. 

The work is a collection of black and white illustrations carefully crafted by the author, who has used mixed techniques among which we can recognise pencil, charcoal and watercolor. The horrific imaginary is made up of drawings of the ship, frightened sailors, shadows, devilish characters, grotesque and cadaverous shapes and flies and moths. 

Facing Bram Stoker’s Dracula is like facing the colossus Goliath, as it is a backbone of universal literature and, without a doubt, the greatest model inside vampire literature. 

The first thing that is striking in Stoker’s text is his use of the epistolary genre to build the story. We learn about the unfolding events as Madam Mina, Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing and their colleagues write in their corresponding diaries. This makes us consider the events that happened in past tense, and implies that the writer of the diary has lived to tell the tale. Another feature of this genre is that protagonists talk in first person: their own way of writing describes these characters to the readers, along with the assessments their colleagues make about them.

On the other hand, although we can get to know the “good guys” directly, we know nothing about Count Dracula with the exception of the speculations of his opponents. The count does not talk. The image we have of him is modeled on what the rest of the protagonists describe. It is interesting that one of the arguments used to predict Dracula’s behavior is his “childlike mind”;  deduction that clashes with the fact that he is a character who has lived centuries and has been ruling and a bloody predator.

You can see the book here.

A little bit of music to say goodbye

We leave you with the song Vampyre’s Cry from the British gothic group Nosferatu, which suits this farewell down to the ground: 

Dr. Pedro Ortega

Ingeniero Industrial, Historiador del Arte, Máster en Edición Digital y Doctor en Estética. Es Gestor Cultural de Patrimonio Mundial del Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Edita la revista académica Herejía y Belleza y dirige el sello académico Ediciones Aulós. Es autor en Penguin Random House y ha escrito artículos para El Imparcial, Jot Down e Historia National Geographic, entre otros medios. Pedro Ortega PhD Industrial Engineer, Art Historian, with a M.A. in Digital Publishing and a PhD in Aesthetics. He is the cultural manager at the World Heritage Service of the Madrid City Council. He is a published author at Penguin Random House and has written articles for El Imparcial, Jot Down and Historia National Geographic, among others. Pedro Ortega doktorea Industria Ingeniaria, Artearen Historialaria, Edizio Digitaleko Master-duna eta Estetikan Doktorea. Kultur kudeatzailea da Madrilgo Udaleko Munduko Ondare Zerbitzuan. Penguin Random House-ko idazlea da eta artikuluak idatzi ditu El Imparcial, Jot Down eta Historia National Geographic-entzat, besteak beste.

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OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (25 de octubre de 2024). Este Halloween vamos de vampiros. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 19 de marzo de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/12knd


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