Previously I discussed Sabine Baring-Gould, a Christian minister who also maintained a research interest in the paranormal and the horrific. I recently came across another individual like this when reading a paper from the 2010 conference of the Center for Studies of New Religions. In “Vampires and Alternative Religions,” co-authored by J. Gordon Melton and Angela Aleiss, they mention the work of a monk named Dom Augustin Calmet. In describing the controversy that followed the desecration of graves in an Austrian vampire panic and the report of Dr. Johannes Fluckinger on the subject, Melton and Aleiss write the following:

The Fluckinger report prompted a lengthy debate over the reality of vampires among Western intellectuals, a debate that peaked in the 1740s at Leipzig, when several faculty members wrote book-length contributions. It would culminate in the 1746 multi-volume work on a spectrum of supernatural entities including the vampire by the outstanding French-speaking biblical scholar and Benedictine monk Dom Augustin Calmet. In the first edition of his work, he proposed five options for understanding the various reports of vampires, the last of which left, however slightly, an open door for the existence of vampires. Calmet agreed with his German colleagues that in fact vampires did not exist; however, only in the later editions did he state that conclusion in no uncertain terms.

Calmet’s work on the subject was titled Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie, et de Silésie, or Dissertations upon the Apparitions of Angels, Demons, and Ghosts, and Concerning the Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (London: M. Cooper, 1759). In their footnote on this, Melton and Aleiss note that this was “reprinted as The Phantom World. 2 vols. (London: Richard Bently, 1850). Most recently volume two of Calmet’s treatise, which included the discussion of the vampire, was reprinted as Treatise on Vampires and Revenants: The Phantom World (Brighton, East Sussex, UK: Desert Island Books, 1993).” Interestingly, this volume is still available via outlets like Amazon.com.

Calmet is a fascinating figure for me in that he is described by Melton and Aleiss as an outstanding biblical scholar, and he is one who applies this expertise in the analysis of the vampire phenomenon. This provides another example of past religious scholars and clergyman with interests in such phenomena, who also connect to similar individuals in the present.