I am perfectly delighted to bring you this post about Vampire-babies and witches in Ancient Rome. The skull you see here is that of a 10-ish-year-old child, recently excavated in a 5th-century CE Italian graveyard known as “La Necropoli dei Bambini” (the Cemetery of the Babies). Notice the large rock jammed into its jaw — it has teeth marks, btw. Archaeologists note that whoever burried the child thought that they could prevent the body from being resurrected from the grave. The whole cemetery contains the bodies of children and markers of concern that witchcraft might interfere with their corpses. Thus, a 3-year-old had stones deliberately laid on her hands and feet — those Ancient Romans didn’t want a creepy zombie child in their midst. Raven talons, toad bones, and even sacrificial puppies (!) were also found in the burials.
The remains fit in with the general picture historians have of how the Ancient Romans thought about the association of witches with the dead. Often in literature (and art, as you can see from the mosaic in the second slide), these evil female magic-users — also called Lamiae — were thought to use their powers to shapeshift (owls was a favorite form), hypnotize the living, and resurrect the dead. One famous account comes from the work _The Golden Ass_, which tells the story of two Lamiae who break into the room of an ill-lucked man named Socrates. He awakens in the morning and tells of a horrific nightmare of the witches cutting open his throat and collecting his blood in a bladder and removing his heart. In the dream, the women stop up the bloody openings with a sponge. Later, after existing in the land of the living all unbeknownst, poor Socrates drops dead. Happy Halloween, dear readers.
Source(s): “Witchcraft and Lamiae in ‘The Golden Ass'”, by David Walter Leinweber, in _Folklore_, 1994, vol 105, pp 77-82. “Roman ‘vampire burial’ tells tale of ancient undead fears,” by Michael Irving, October 14, 2018, _New Atlas_.
