Revenant

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A revenant ("macabre type") leaves his grave
( incunabula from 1500, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek , Munich)

As a revenant , even in the spelling revenants occupied various apparitions from various cultural areas are designated. The two spellings do not refer to different manifestations.

The core of the revenant mythologem is the idea of ​​the deceased who - often as a physical appearance - return to the world of the living (" undead "). They are uncanny towards the living and mostly have an evil mind, be it because they want to take revenge for injustices they have suffered (e.g. disturbance of their dead rest); be it because her soul was not redeemed because of her way of life .

In journalism , the term is also used pejoratively as a synonym for successor.

shape

The French medievalist Jean-Claude Schmitt , who examined Central European image sources from the 12th to the 16th century, divides the undead into revenants, Lazarus , soul and ghost types, depending on how they are presented. While the ghost type is clad with a translucent shroud and the Lazarus type appears like a resurrected person, the revenant resembles a living person. With the soul type, on the other hand, a little man appears as an image of the soul of a deceased person. Intermediate types are the invisible spirit and the "macabre type" of the living corpse, which as revenant shows different stages of decay caused by decay.

Mythology and Popular Beliefs

German popular belief

In various parts of Germany, until the early 20th century, the belief was widespread that the dead would still live after their death and that they would exert a disastrous influence from within the grave. In some cases this was done through a telepathic effect ( sympathy magic ), so that the monster called the after -eater did not have to rise from the grave and the living could still suck the life force through his open mouth, one open eye and by chewing on the shroud.

According to popular belief, other undead climbed out of the graves and jumped on the backs of night hikers. This stool , which could also take various forms, for example that of the werewolf in the Rhineland , had to be carried by humans, often to the cemetery wall or to the place where the corpse was buried or buried. The stool (also called "Huckop" or "Huckupp") became heavier and heavier and the victim finally collapsed, exhausted or even dead. In some legends, the afflicted man succeeded in banishing or redeeming the monster with a saying or a prayer. Especially in the Catholic areas, the belief in the crouching revenant merged with the belief in the soul, so that around 1920 folklorists found it very difficult to peel out the old core - the belief in the undead revenant - from a diffuse belief in ghosts. According to the definition, the booster could not be a ghost , because he had a noticeable body, which also gained weight from step to step, which would not have been possible for a materialless mind.

One of the revenants who appear to be physical is the headless rider , often mentioned in West German legends , who went down in world literature and even in film history through the American poet Washington Irving and his novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow .

Norse mythology

In the sagas , revenants in the form of the draugr are a frequent motif. For example in the Hrómundar saga Gripssonar or in the Laxdœla saga . Those who met a revenant often faced imminent death. What is striking here is the emphasis on the corporeality of the revenant, which shows itself on the one hand in its superhuman strength, but on the other hand in its vulnerability: Draugar can be killed by having their heads cut off. A special form of the revenant is the Swedish Myling (also Myrding ), which represents the spirit of an unbaptized newborn in physical form, who was murdered and hidden by his mother.

Slavic popular belief

In Slavic popular belief, the revenant is an undead , a deceased who gets out of his coffin and goes back to the living. Its appearance is almost always associated with calamity and death, and therefore causes fear and horror.

Often the revenant still has something to do from his lifetime or wants to take revenge on his murderer or something similar. Even if the dead are mourned too much, this keeps them from the final transition into the hereafter .

In old graves one can still find corpses that were tied up, had their tendons cut, their limbs smashed or cut off and placed crosswise on their chests, those staked into their hearts or with crosses or clods of earth overgrown in their mouths or on their foreheads were laid. All of these burial rites were intended to prevent the dead from returning. The belief in the revenants is mixed with the belief in vampires , but their diet is not an issue. A revenant story from northern England ( The Revenant of Annant Castle ) handed down by William of Newburgh in the 13th century describes a case that is reminiscent of the more recent vampire stories from Southeast Europe and, according to the French legend and myth expert Claude Lecouteux, unambiguous belongs to the realm of vampire belief. It can therefore be assumed that beliefs, which folklore previously assumed were limited only to the Slavic area, were actually spread over much wider parts of Europe.

backgrounds

The belief in revenancy was mostly justified by the fact that, as Democritus claims to have already established, the hair and nails of the corpses continued to grow for some time (today refuted; due to the drying of the skin, the nails and hair / whiskers of the same length appear fresh grown as the skin shrinks.) and that corpses are bloated after a while due to bacterial putrefaction. This may have contributed to the vampire belief, since the bloated corpses looked "healthier" than the (emaciated) sick. People therefore believed that the corpses withdrew the vital force from the living. The “smacking of the dead in their graves” can also be traced back to putrefaction processes and the associated gas bubble movement in the esophagus-gastrointestinal tract, which at the time was also considered evidence of a “blood meal” recently given by “vampires”.

See also

literature

  • Augustin Calmet : Scholarly negotiation of the matter of the apparitions of spirits, and of vampires in Hungary and Moravia. Edited and annotated by Abraham and Irina Silberschmidt. Edition Roter Drache, Rudolstadt 2007, ISBN 978-3-939459-03-3 .
  • Peter Marion Kreuter: Belief in vampires in Southeast Europe: Studies on genesis, meaning and function; Romania and the Balkans (= Romanice , Volume 9), Weidler, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89693-709-X (Dissertation University of Bonn 2001, 218 pages).
  • Erwin Rudolf Lange: Dying and burial in German and Slavic popular belief between the Vistula and Memel. A religious folklore study. Jena 1953 (Dissertation University of Jena, Theological Faculty, March 13, 1953, 206 pages),
    • Also as: death and burial in popular belief between the Vistula and Memel = Göttingen working group. Publication No. 140, ZDB -ID 134036-0 = yearbook of the Albertus University of Königsberg, Prussia. Supplements 15. Holzner, Würzburg 1955 (a lot of information about revenant beliefs in the east of the German Empire).
  • Claude Lecouteux: History of Ghosts and Revenants in the Middle Ages. Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1987, ISBN 3-412-02587-9 .
  • Angelika Franz, Daniel Nösler: beheaded and staked. Archaeologists on the hunt for the undead. Theiss, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-8062-3380-3 .
  • Michael Ranft : Treatise on the chewing and smacking of the dead in graves. In which the true nature of those hungarian vampires and blood-suckers is shown, also all writings that have come to light from this matter are reviewed. Teubner, Leipzig 1734 (reprint. Ubooks, Diedorf 2006, ISBN 3-86608-015-8 ), digitized version of the original edition .
  • Jean-Claude Schmitt : The Return of the Dead: Ghost Stories in the Middle Ages. Klett-Cotta Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-608-91716-0 .
  • Matthias Schulz: Swamp of the Vampires. A bog body discovered in Lower Saxony is over 2600 years old. Researchers prepare high-tech studies. Main question: Why were so many mummies mutilated and pegged? In: Der Spiegel . June 27, 2005, p. 122ff.
  • Thomas Schürmann: Der Nachzehrerlauben in Central Europe (= series of publications by the Commission for East German Folklore in the German Society for Folklore eV Vol. 51). Elwert, Marburg 1990, ISBN 3-7708-0938-6 .
  • Abraham Silberschmidt, Irina Silberschmidt: From the blood-sucking dead. Or philosophical writings on the Enlightenment on vampirism. Revised edition and transfer of the editions from 1732. Hexenmond-Verlag, Nürnberg 2006, ISBN 3-9809645-5-8 (Contains 1: WSGE: Curieuse and very wonderful relation, from which blood suckers or vampires, which show new things in services authentic news, and accompanied with historical and philosophical reflections. snnl, 1732. 2: Christoph Friedrich Demelius: Philosophical attempt, whether the remarkable incident of those bloodsuckers in Nieder-Ungern, An. 1732., from which principiis natura […] could be explained. snnl, 1732).
  • Wolfgang Schwerdt: Vampires, revenants and undead. On the trail of the living dead (= small cultural stories ). Past Publishing, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940621-39-9 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Revenant  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hitler's Revenant , Der Spiegel , February 4, 1991
  2. ^ Counter -draft to the party apparatchik , by Alexander Will, NWZ Online November 8, 2018
  3. Angelika Franz, Daniel Nösler: Beheaded and staked. Archaeologists on the hunt for the undead. Darmstadt 2016, p. 76 f.
  4. Johan Egerkrans: Nordiska Väsen . Wahlström 2013, pp. 98–100
  5. H. Diels (ed.): The fragments of the pre-Socratic . Edited by H. Kranz. Volume II, 6th edition Berlin 1952, 79.23 f.
  6. Christoph Drösser: Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death. Right?
  7. ^ Digitized version of the Göttingen State and University Library, 10974989 in VD 18 .