ich I believe to be incontestably true, may
we not imagine that the vampires of Hungary, Silesia, and Moldavia,
are some of those men who have died of maladies which heat the blood,
and who have retained some remains of life in their graves, much like
those animals which we have mentioned, and those birds which plunge
themselves during the winter in the lakes and marshes of Poland, and
in the northern countries? They are without respiration or motion, but
still not destitute of vitality. They resume their motion and activity
when, on the return of spring, the sun warms the waters, or when they
are brought near a moderate fire, or laid in a room of temperate heat;
then they are seen to revive, and perform their ordinary functions,
which had been suspended by the cold.

Thus, vampires in their graves returned to life after a certain time,
and their soul does not forsake them absolutely until after the entire
dissolution of their body, and when the organs of life, being
absolutely broken, corrupted, and deranged, they can no longer by
their agency perform any vital functions. Whence it happens, that the
people of those countries impale them, cut off their heads, burn them,
to deprive their spirit of all hope of animating them again, and of
making use of them to molest the living.

Pliny,[607] mentioning the soul of Hermotimes, of Lazomene, which
absented itself from his body, and recounted various things that had
been done afar off, which the spirit said it had seen, and which, in
fact, could only be known to a person who had been present at them,
says that the enemies of Hermotimes, named Cantandes, burned that
body, which gave hardly any sign of life, and thus deprived the soul
of the means of returning to lodge in its envelop; "donec cremato
corpore interim semianimi, remeanti animae vetut vaginam ademerint."

Origen had doubtless derived from the ancients what he teaches,[608]
that the souls which are of a spiritual nature take, on leaving their
earthly body, another, more subtile, of a similar form to the grosser
one they have just quitted, which serves them as a kind of sheath, or
case, and that it is invested with this subtile body that they
sometimes appear about their graves. He founds this opinion on what is
said of Lazarus and the rich man in the Gospel,[609] who both of them
have bodies, since they speak and see, and the wicked rich man asks
for a drop of water to cool his tongue.

I do not defend this reas