The Devil’s Advocates: the Vampires of Medvedia, and Catholic Cannibals – A Pietist Understanding

Johan Zopf and Christian van Dalen's 1733 treatise on the vampiric events at Medvedia is one of the most theologically thorough and doctrinally censorious explications of the phenomenon. It has been cited (by Montague Summers and Nick Groom) as an example of a supernaturalist explanation. Certainly, unlike the medical scholars Nikolaus Boye (1732), Nils Retzius (1736), and the theological scholars Stock and Nobling (1732), these two proposed that vampires held a reality that could not be explained by natural understandings. However, they denied the possibility of Paracelsan and neo-Platonic variants of either phantasms or astral repossession, using both scripture and theological logic to do so, and in the process reaffirming orthodox Pietist beliefs. The following article summarises and quotes this treatise before explaining its debt to other sources, its scotching of both naturalist debunkings and of the tripartite theory of the soul, before delineating the authors' solution to the enigma of vampirism.