The talamaur is a vampire legend of the Banks Islands, Vanuatu, located in the South Pacific. A talamaur was a type of vampire who controlled the ghost of a dead person, and could use it to drain the vitality from the living and the recently deceased.[1] Some people actually aspired to become talamaurs.[2] The power of a talamaur could purportedly be gained by eating part of a corpse, thus gaining kinship with the soul of the deceased.[3]
A talamaur could be identified by exposure to the smoke of certain burning leaves, which would cause it to shout the names of the deceased person whose ghost it controlled and of the person whom it was afflicting.[4] Injuries inflicted on the talamaur's ghostly form would appear on its living body; such bruising was used to identify a talamaur.[5]
Name edit
The name talamaur [talamaur] comes from the Mota language, spoken in the Banks Islands of Vanuatu. It is cognate with Mwotlap na-talmiy IPA: [natalmij]. Both forms descend from Proto-Torres-Banks *tala-mauri, literally "living soul" (*tala "soul", *mauri "to live"). The etymological basis of this legend is grounded on the fact that this practice is carried out by a living person in order to bring the soul back to the body.[6]: 212
Further reading edit
- François, Alexandre (2013), "Shadows of bygone lives: The histories of spiritual words in northern Vanuatu" (PDF), in Mailhammer, Robert (ed.), Lexical and structural etymology: Beyond word histories (PDF), Studies in Language Change, vol. 11, Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton, pp. 185–244, doi:10.1515/9781614510581.185, ISBN 978-1-61451-059-8
References edit
- ^ Daniels, Cora Linn; Stevans, C.M. (2003). Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World. Minerva. pp. 1364–1365. ISBN 9781410209160.
- ^ Melton, J. Gordon (2010). The Vampire Book. Visible Ink Press. pp. 664–665. ISBN 9781578592814.
- ^ Róheim, Géza (1972). Animism, Magic, and the Divine King. Taylor & Francis. p. 109. ISBN 9780710073020.
- ^ Summers, Montague (1928). The Vampire, his Kith and Kin. Forgotten Books. p. 227. ISBN 9781605065663.
- ^ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. 10. 1881. p. 285.
- ^ François (2013).