The Vampire

by Montague Summers

1928. In the present work, Mr. Montague endeavored to set forth what might be termed the philosophy of vampirism, and however ghastly and macabre they may appear, he felt that here one must not tamely shrink from a careful and detailed consideration of the many cognate passions and congruous circumstances which, there can be no reasonable doubt, have throughout the ages played no impertinent and no trivial but a very vital and very memorable part in consolidating the vampire legend, and in perpetuating the vampire tradition among the darker and more secret mysteries of belief that prevail in the heart of man.

Genres: Vampires, Nonfiction, History, Occult, Mythology, Horror, Reference

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Augustus Montague Summers was an Anglican priest and later convert to Roman Catholicism known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.

Reviews

[DJ Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Vampires by Montague Summers

Learn the origins of the Vampire, the generation of the Vampire, the traits and practices of Vampirism, learn about Vampires in literature, and more!

If you try to read this composition purely for pleasure, you may be disappointed. This book is a very thorough collection of Vampire folklore, literature, and facts. These pages are filled with a ton of research material, the likes of which you may never see anywhere else.

The book is heavily laden with religious context and historical reference. It also helps to brush up on your Latin before attempting to read this book, seeing as how many of the passages stray into the language (almost without warning).



Excerpt:

"It may now be asked how a human being becomes or is transformed into a vampire, and it will be well here to tabulate the causes which are generally believed to predispose persons to this demoniacal condition. It may be premised that as the tradition is so largely Slavonic and Greek many of these causes which are very commonly assigned and accredited in Eastern Europe, will not be found to prevail elsewhere."

Montague Summers, born Augustus Montague Summers (on May 10, 1880), was an English author and clergyman. He professed to believe in the existence of witches, vampires, faeries, and werewolves and studied them profusely until his death (on August 10, 1948). He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.

Learn more about Montague Summers at Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia on Amazon!



This review provided by DJ Harris (aka DJ6ual):

[Steve Cran]

This by far is one of the best books about vampires I have ever read.Some for you might feel that Montague Summers is dated but in. Reality when people write about vampires they will invariably consult his works. The book talks about exactly whet the title says , Vampires and things that are related to vampires. Vampires are all over the place: they can be seen in China, Ancient Mesopootamia, Egypts, Malaysia, Europe and Iraq. They share many of the same characteristics yet they can be different .

To be come a vampire in Europe, usually you have to be a suicide or buried upside a proper cemetery , like the crossroads. If someone is excommunicated or cursed by a church official their body will not decay. To rectify this situation the church official who executed the ban or consequence must be called in to renounce what he uttered. If not available then some other church official can lift the ban. This non composition of body does not pertain to the vampire yet it is somewhat related . In Asian societies the ancestors are venerated or remembered. People will place food and incense by the grave to nourish the spirit. If the spirits are neglected they can be vengeful toward the neglectful family members. THese instances are related somewhat t0 vampires.

What are vampires supposed too bee like, well prior to the movies and novels which glamorized theme. THe real appearance is pale skin with patches of hair on the palm of the hand. The nails grow up real long and there are long fang like teeth in certain instances. The breath wreaks like foul flesh. Vampires can be turned into vampires by a bite from one. Or like mentioned earlier suicides and those buried outside a cemetery or had a violent death may end up becoming a vampire. Werewolves can be become vampires after death. THe big question remains is what is the nature of the vampire. Is it a demon that animates the body or is it the soul that is trapped and earthbound. Some think it is the persons astral body that turns into the the vampire. Another question is how do they exit their grave without disturbing the dirt, Some researches have found that there are small holes in the grave which enable the vampire to slip through. Now is this a demon making a new body, or does the p[hysical body have a way of slipping through. Maybe the astral body can materialized outside the grave suickinjg ectoplasm along with the astral body.

When vampires strike sometimes they bring a plague to a whole town. Someone wil waste away slowly. To kill one it would be necessary to burn it, cut off its head and or drive a stake through its heart. Many strategies are discussed in the book.
Sometimes family obligations bring about the vampire. In Greece if some one was murdered a family member must avenge the death or the dead relative becomes a vampire and seeks vengeance on their killer and the family member. THe family member them self might become a vampire.

In China the bones f a dead person can become reanimated by the po or the lower soul. The Chinese vampire is called a Chang Shieh. In Mesopotamia there are the Lilin, night time spirit creatures who seduce men and suck their energy and blood. THere is also the Emmiku a wandering spirit that is neglected by family or remains unburied. They suck the life energy out of a wandering person. In the Middle East there are ghouls that being female demon that feast on flesh. In other parts fun the world there is the bagjang and other vampiric creatures.

The book finishes off with an examination of the vampire in literature and plays. I found this p[art a bit boring and uninteresting. I like to stick with the legend and lore. THis book was awesome.

[J Mueller]

Interesting Historical Point of View

Considering this book was written by Summers as an aid to help train novice vampire hunters in his life time, it is very interesting reading. He goes through on how to identify victims, a large number of the many types of cultural vampires and how to identify and dispatch them.
At the time he was actively researching his book, he was in fierce competition with another gentleman (a member of the clergy) as to who was correct. Both men published several books on different supernatural topics. Summers did two on vampires, one on werewolves and their like, along with a few more covering several other topics.

[Steven Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a book you read for pleasure, this book scores a strong two stars. As a book you read for information, it rates a solid five. I am compromising.

Montague Summers knew and wrote more about vampires, werewolves and who knows what else than any man of his time. If you want to know about the world view of these creatures, Summers has it. You say you prefer to learn about the traditional Eastern European beliefs? No problem, Summers is your man.

And he writes about it in flowery, urn-of-the-century English that is dry as a bone and filled with anecdotes, stories, first-hand accounts, and legends.

[Julia Bilderback · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first thing I want to address is that Montague Summers is notorious for translation issues which was most evident in his translation of The Malleus Maleficarum, so when reading this I was very cautious about the information he presented. At the same time there were also large sections that he didn’t even bother to translate which took away greatly from this work. Only because I have studied other nonfiction vampire sources was I able to understand what was going on during some parts. I would not recommend this to someone new to the subject, but I think that it should at least be read if someone wants to make sure that a person as read all the ‘classics’ on the subject.

[Kelly Allen-Kujawski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wishing I understood Latin and Greek, to better understand parts of this... that being said what is in English is actually a good and informative read on the vampire. Would I suggest this to someone looking for an easy read? Absolutely not. But looking for something more informative on the occult, yes.

[Crystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is incredibly informative. It's got tons of legend & lore for lovers of vampire fiction.

[John Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most definitive edition of Summers's inaugural work on vampires to date, but I'm probably bias.

[Ilana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic reference book and one that has aged quite well in spite of the scientific advances since then.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my search for weird spooky season reads I figured it was time to finally pick up the rest of Montague Summers’ The Vampire (originally published as The Vampire: His Kith and Kin), the first two chapters of which I read sometime when I was still in school, and which I have been moving around from house to house with a bookmark in Chapter 3 for a good 15 years now.

Montague Summers is not an easy read. He was an incredibly strange person, initially studying to be an Anglican priest and then converting to Roman Catholicism and styling himself a Catholic priest despite there being no records of him having ever been ordained. He believed wholeheartedly in witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, and all sorts of things that the Catholic Church had since come to see as embarrassing superstitions. He was writing in the early 20th century and dressing like it was the late Middle Ages. He is the absolute wordiest man in the world, and his writing is full of long rambling digressions, vehemently earnest editorializing, untranslated passages in Latin and French, half-translated passages in Greek and German, and quotations from every conceivable source, no matter how dubious–from Ovid to newspaper articles to “an authority” to some guy he once met. His works are likely best read on a hefty dose of NyQuil.

That said, the book furnishes us with a fascinating array of legends, ghost stories, and murders, as well as whatever other anecdotes Summers feels like telling on any subject whatsoever. To the degree that they are tied together by anything, they are being sorted into Summers’ attempts to “prove” what beliefs about vampires are true and which ones are embellishments. He is entertainingly disdainful of people who do not believe in them at all, and extremely judgmental in his tours through the folklore of the world. I don’t remember very much about the first two chapters, since I read them umpteen years ago. The third chapter, “The Traits and Practices of Vampirism,” talks a lot about suicides and Greek drama, then relates many interesting folkloric beliefs about types of blood-eating ghosts and demons from various places and what causes someone to become one of these ghosts, then embarks upon a supremely awkward analysis of “love-bites” before relating to the reader the career of serial killer Fritz Haarmaan, who would have been reasonably recent news at the time of publication (Haarmaan was exposed in late 1924). The fourth chapter concerns vampire legends in “Assyria, the East, and some Ancient Countries,” which is very A Nineteenth-Century British Guy Writes About Asia at times, but is great fun if you can remember not to take any of it seriously (which is easy, given that Summers is largely relating these legends with an eye towards somehow proving that vampires are real, and therefore takes great pains to point out commonalities with European vampire legends and explain away differences).

The last chapter is undoubtedly the funniest and the most obviously dated. It is called “The Vampire in Literature” and it is like 75% about French theater. It references many interesting-sounding works that have apparently not stood the test of time at all as I have never heard of them, and I have heard of a lot of old vampire literature. He discusses Polidori’s The Vampyre at little length and then the bajillion stage adaptations thereof at much greater length. He professes that good scary stories have to be short, which is hilarious coming from the Reverend Augustus Montague Summers, Wordiest Motherfucker in the World, of all people. He opines that even Le Fanu’s Carmilla is possibly starting to get overextended in how long it is (it is a novella); he then immediately contradicts himself by gushing over what an impressively long-running artistic work the 800-page monstrosity Varney the Vampire is. (He also misattributes it to Thomas Peckett Prest, which is one of his more understandable errors–this was a popular belief at the time.) His gushing praise for Varney contrasts hilariously with his disdain for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the unprecedented popularity of which he attributes solely to the fact that it’s about vampires, as he thinks that it is too long, the characters are boring, only the first five chapters have any real narrative tension, and–predictably but hilariously–that Bram Stoker erred in including aspects of the vampire legend that are poorly sourced and that Summers has therefore concluded are unfounded, and he thinks that Stoker should have stuck only to true and proven vampire facts. It is extra funny reading this in the context of doing the Dracula Daily readalong on Tumblr, where everyone is discovering anew after decades of unfaithful movie adaptations that “the polycula,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed, consists of absolutely fantastic characters that movie makers have done dirty for years. Of course, the only Dracula movie adaptation that even existed at the time this book was published was the unauthorized German expressionist film Nosferatu, and anyway, Summers does not acknowledge that movies exist. He instead closes out the book by slamming the Dracula stage adaptations and misspelling Bela Lugosi’s name.

In short, this book is almost unreadably terrible in an uncountable number of ways and yet I am tempted to be like “Absolutely perfect, 10/10, no notes,” because if it were in any way better it would be less funny. Highly recommended if you want to get real serious about insane pseudo-scholarly works on the occult by eccentric throwback Catholics who fancied themselves real-life vampire hunters.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book, well-written and extensively sourced. I got the "Critical Edition" edited by Browning, which is probably the best version with an appendix for Latin and Greek translations. There's still a lot of untranslated French and some others, maybe 5% of all the text. You can treat it as a reference book or read it cover to cover.

[Rooney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh Montague, what are we to do with you?

After reading One of Mr Summers' previous books (The History of Witchcraft and Demonology), and finding his frothing, almost raving writing more entertaining than I thought, when I saw he'd written a book about vampires, I knew I had to get it.

I hate to say it, but I was disappointed. Don't get me wrong, Summers has clearly done his research, and covers vampire legends from large swathes of the world. Much of it is (obviously) very dated, and from his contemporaries, which gives it a sort of quaint element. However he fails to really draw any conclusions from the broad variety of evidence presented. The book almost feels unfinished, as if there's a chapter missing, or as if the last chapter "The Vampire in Literature" was swapped-out at the last minute for a more succinct one - as a side note, that final chapter is almost worthless, and consists mostly of Summers telling us what vampire books/plays he likes, and what ones he thinks are rubbish.

But that last chapter (and lack of any really closure in the book) aside, my biggest issue is the lack of translations. Maybe back in 1928 everyone could speak multiple foreign languages, but in 2022? Not so much. There are frequent tracts of text taken from other publications which are replicated here in their native tongue, be that French, German, Greek, Latin, or Italian, and almost all of them are presented without translations, which (whilst not preventing the book from being enjoyed) means that you either frequently need to go away and translate the text (difficult with the greek, which is written in cyrillic script), or just skip over them, and infer the content from Summers' comments on them.

Overall a nice addition to any fan of the occult or the paranormal, but not the concise treatise on vampires I'd hoped for, and perhaps better in a later edition which includes some translations.

[J.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really dense, with a lot of interesting content. My only problem is that the author tends to put the original language text in the main text so that my reader often has to read a page of Latin, French, etc. It makes the text harder to read, but overall, it was well-researched. I'm slightly concerned at the tone of the author, who is a little too willing to accept first-hand accounts as fact instead of a result of their time and easily explained by unreliable witnesses. Looking into the author, I fully understand now that he's not writing this as an academic but an interested possible believer, so take that into consideration. I enjoyed the read, and the various stories were often detailed and grotesque.

[Rufusgermanicus Meelberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was slow-going for the first half, and the part I best enjoyed was the critique of Vampire fiction at the back. The author is fairly restrained and scholarly when speaking of the history of vampire myth. He analyzes every major culture with a history of vampire myths, breaks them all down, and finds the common threads as well as the peculiarities. It is when he is reviewing works by other authors on the same subject, that he is at his most amusing. "Reviews" could easily be changed to "assaults". He's snide, none-to forgiving, and he gives a window into the sort of snarky remarks that passed for constructive critique in the early 1900s London society. He does, however, have the exact opinion of Dracula that I do: It's brilliant in the beginning, but runs on too long, and the atmosphere of the book wanes towards the end as it becomes more about adventure. All in all, this book is great for anyone interested in the truth behind all the vampire legend, but a light summer-read it is not.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a reprint of Summers' 1928 tome The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. It reads like a crazed parody of an academic textbook - it displays admirable scholarship and Summers has read far and wide; the material is backed by reams of citations and footnotes. Yet in terms of its intellectual validity, it falls far short, with the author continually and groundlessly asserting that vampires are real, and that folklore is documentary. Summers is an author with a complete inability to keep to any point, so much of the book - despite the author avowing it is about these creatures he is sure are real - has very little to do with vampires; Summers alights on some tangential subject, and then goes on about it for page after page. Nevertheless, it's an entertaining read, full of extraordinary stories and lore, and a marvelous insight into a crazed mind.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. When I first picked this up I thought it would be short stories or something like that. I was surprised to find it a captivating scholarly work on the likly origins of the vampire myths around the world and how similar the mythology is in different cultures around the world. Cultures that had no known contact with one another when the mythology was written. Also the differences between the vampire myths in different cultures.

[Jay]

had some tedious stuff about miracles and saints, but the connection was made between that and the vampire myth, my favorite chapter being the one about the myths of the middle-east, china, and other ancient countries.

[Zane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've ever had. Montague Summers is such a nut and I love it. He'll make some extraordinarily bombastic claim and then cite as a source "a respected friend once told me this". It's pure fun

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is it a fiction? Is it a history? Reads like research only in older English with heaps of French. It does satisfy some of the want for more gore and horror. Overall, it was boring and I skipped through quite a bit.

[Julia]

Another book on my shelf that I haven't actually taken out the time to read, but plan to quite soon and am excited about it.

[Lamprini · Rating 5 out of 5]

ΠΟΛΥ ΚΑΛΟ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΤΙΠΡΟΣΩΠΕΥΤΙΚΟ ΤΟΥ ΕΙΔΟΥΣ. ΠΡΟΤΙΜΩ ΟΜ��Σ ΤΗΝ ΕΜΙLΙ GERARD KAI TON CALMET.