CHAPTER II
EXCOMMUNICATION AND ITS POWER
The Greek Church at one time taught that the bodies of persons upon whom the ban of excommunication had been passed did not undergo decomposition after death until such sentence had been revoked by the pronouncement of absolution over the remains, and that, while the bodies remained in this uncorrupted condition, the spirits of the individuals wandered up and down the earth seeking sustenance from the blood of the living. The non-corruption of a body, however, was also held to be one of the proofs of sanctity; but, in this case, the body preserved its natural colour and gave an agreeable odour, whereas the bodies of the excommunicated generally turned black, swelled out like a drum, and emitted an offensive smell. Very frequently, however, when the graves of suspected vampires were opened, the faces were found to be of ruddy complexion and the veins distended with blood, which, when opened with a lancet, yielded a supply of blood as plentiful, fresh, and free as that found in the veins of young and healthy living human beings. For many centuries in the history of Greek Christianity there was scarcely a village that had not its own local vampire stories which were related by the inhabitants and vouched for by them as having either occurred within their own knowledge or been related to them by their parents or relatives as having come within their personal observation or been verified by them.
The bodies of murderers and suicides were also held to be exempt from the law of dissolution of the mortal remains until the Church granted release from the curse entailed upon them by such act. The priests, by this assumption of power over the body as well as over the soul, made profitable use of this superstitious belief by preying upon the fears and credulity of the living. They also included in this ecclesiastical law of exemption from corruption after death those who in their lives had been guilty of heinous sins, those who had tampered with the magic arts, and all who had been cursed during life by their parents. These were all said to become vampires. This belief spread to other branches of the Christian Church, and the story is related that St Libentius, Archbishop of Bremen, who died 4th January 1013, once excommunicated a gang of pirates, one of whom died shortly afterwards and was buried in Norway. Seventy years afterwards his body was found quite entire and uncorrupted, nor did it fall to ashes until it had received absolution from the Bishop Alvareda.
Leo Allatius, a Roman Catholic, describes a corpse which he found in an undecomposed condition. He implies that the Greeks connected the circumstance with the power invested in them by the text: “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” and by which they hold that the soul is excluded from all hope of participation in future bliss so long as the body remains undecomposed. Poqueville, another writer, also states that whenever a bishop or priest excommunicated a person he added to the general sentence of excommunication the words: “After death, let not thy body have power to dissolve.”
A manuscript was discovered many years ago in the Church of St Sophia at Thessalonica, which is an interesting commentary upon the power claimed by the Church over excommunicated bodies. The manuscript states that:
(1) Whoever has been laid under any curse or received any injunction from his deceased parents that he has not fulfilled, after his death the forepart of his body remains entire;
(2) Whoever has been the object of any anathema appears yellow after death, and the fingers are shrivelled;
(3) Whoever appears white has been excommunicated by the divine laws;
(4) Whoever appears black has been excommunicated by a bishop.