Revenant (folklore)
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| Grouping | Legendary creature |
|---|---|
| Sub grouping | Undead |
| Similar creatures | Vampire, werewolf |
| Country | Transylvania, SerbiaHungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia |
| Region | The Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa |
A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that is believed to have revived from death to haunt the living. The word revenant is derived from the Latin word reveniens, "returning" (see also the related French verb revenir, meaning "to come back").
Many stories were documented by English historians in the Middle Ages. William of Newburgh wrote during the 1190s, "It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony."
Medieval European stories of revenants have some common features. Those who revive from the dead are typically wrongdoers in their lifetime, often described as wicked, vain, or unbelievers. Often the revenants are associated with the spreading of disease among the living. The appropriate response is usually exhumation, followed by some form of decapitation, and burning or removal of the heart.
Several stories state that revenants drink blood. For example, in Historia rerum Anglicarum the corpse of one revenant is reported to have been found in the grave, swollen and "suffused with blood". When it was pierced, a stream of blood flew out of the wound. This part of the story is paralleled in many accounts of alleged vampires, and the phenomenon it depicts is, in fact, known to occur frequently as part of the natural process of corpse decomposition. Revenants are therefore another example of the widespread historical belief in vampires.
Augustine Calmet conducted extensive research on the topic in his work titled Traité sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie, &c. (1751) in which he relates the rumors of men at the time:
Calmet compares the ideas of the Greek and Egyptian ancients and discovers the old belief that magic could not only cause death but also evoke the souls of the deceased as well. Revenants were then ascribed to sorcerers who sucked the blood of victims, inevitably causing their death. He further states how some instances of Revenants mentioned in the twelfth century in England and Denmark were similar to those of Hungary but "in no history do we read anything so usual or so pronounced, as what is related to us of the vampires of Poland, Hungary, and Moravia."
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