Vlad Dracul and Count Dracula: Reflections on David, the King

Vlad Dracul and Count Dracula: Reflections on David, the King May 4, 2016

In September, 2014, I realized one of my lifelong ambitions; I traveled to Dracula_1931

the northwestern corner of modern Rumania. Like many lovers of the legend of Dracula, I imagined that his part of the world would be characterized by deep, impenetrable forests, overlarge and ravenous wolves, dark ravines, and swift carriages, guided by hunchbacked drivers with thick accents and flaming eyes. The reality, as often in these childhood nightmares, was quite different.

My wife and I drove from Budapest, Hungary across the Rumanian border and chose a road that was punctuated by stopped works every three or four miles for what seemed like a full day. It took us untold hours to get to our destination that was a Bed & Breakfast spot in the north of the country. We wish we had had some sort of carriage to meet us, since we drove around in the dark for some further hours, trying to follow the internet directions we were given, but failing miserably. Finally, someone came to us in our hopelessly lost state in an unknown village, and guided us to our spot. The inn was, incongruously, owned and operated in part by Prince Charles, heir to the English throne! It seems that Charles loves the Rumanian countryside, coming often for hunting trips in those dark forests (they really are there!) and to create environmentally friendly places on the land. Our place was one of these. The picture of my bald head on the masthead of this blog is indeed I, gazing out of our room at the Count Kalnoky (a friend of Charles’) Guesthouses where we stayed.

It was a delightful and fascinating few days. The food, all locally grown and served by the local farmers, was delicious and plentiful. We had our pick of two young guides, both of whom had learned their English from watching English and American television and movies. Both of them spoke splendid, if a bit overly colorful, English, for which we were grateful and entranced at the same time. One of them asked us during one trip if it was appropriate to use a certain word with her customers, a word she had apparently picked up from one gangster movie or another. We urged her to keep this word to herself! ( I will allow you to imagine just what word this was!)

250px-Vlad_Tepes_002 I, Dracula lover as I said, wished the first day to be guided to Bran castle, a lace with few if any blood-sucking connections, but a castle that looks like the old bat boy would have lived in if he had had a choice. Apparently, even Vlad Dracul, the infamous Romanian count credited with keeping the invading Muslims at bay some 500 years ago, had never visited the site. Yet, it is set against a protruding mountainside, surrounded by tall trees, and can be visited only by those intrepid enough and limber enough to climb a significant number of stairs. On the way up, there were numerous tacky shops, selling Dracula paraphernalia: masks, teeth, wings, puppets of various sizes, playing cards, plastic statues, refrigerator magnets, etc. Our guide was indulgent, but could not disguise her disgust at this place and its attendant schlock. It turns out that practically no one in Rumania knows anything at all about the Dracula legend! And they find we Americans and English slightly unseemly and not a little grotesque in our interest in the fictional count and his bloody ways. After all, the legend was practically invented by the English author, Bram Stoker, at the turn of the 20th century. Stoker never saw Transylvania, only imagining the place through extensive reading in the British Museum. However, his resultant book, Dracula (1897), is a corker of a horror story, and certainly hooked me on all things bloodsucking as a very weird ten-year-old.

 

davidgoliath1And so what has all this to do with King David, I hear you asking? David is never far from my thoughts, I have to admit; his story has been for me a touchstone of my life with the Bible. The David I find in scripture, far from the sweet peasant boy of sheep and song, is for much of his life a bloodthirsty thug. He fights and murders his way to the throne of Israel. While his king and rival, Saul, is struggling to survive against the Philistine hoard on Mt Gilboa, David is living the Philistine high life in Ziklag, raiding and murdering Amalekites and giving the rich booty to his Judean friends while lying to his Philistine master, Achish of Gath, that he is really killing Judeans and giving their captured booty to him! When his partner in crime, nephew Joab, murders Saul’s general, Abner, David forces Joab to pretend that he is dreadfully sorry that he stuck his knife in Abner, and to walk before his funeral bier in tears, while David is singing one of his political tunes, designed to convince his followers that he had nothing to do with Abner’s murder, pinning the whole thing on Joab. After that charade, however, Joab remains very much David’s man and serves no punishment for his deed.

And perhaps most gruesome of all are the last words of David. Dying, David calls his son, Solomon, who has become the heir through a clever stratagem of Bathsheba and Nathan, and bids him to murder a helpless old man named Shemei, a pathetic former follower of Saul, who had cursed David during his flight from Jerusalem caused by his traitorous son, Absalom. “Do not let his gray head go down to Sheol in peace,” croaks the expiring David, a vastly ignominious, but somehow fully appropriate, epitaph for a killer to leave. (The parts of the long David story I mention are found at I Samuel 28-31; II Samuel 3:22-39; I Kings 2:8-9.)

Yes, David is all too much like Dracula, the fictional monster whose demands for and need of blood transgressed all time and space, and like Vlad Dracul, who saved his people, but in the process performed acts of cruelty that go beyond the stark ravings of a madman. One of his favorite acts was to capture hundreds of his enemies, and impale them on long spikes, rammed through their anuses and out their mouths, creating a forest of writhing bodies under which he and his troops might pleasantly eat their lunch. We actually have portraits of these scenes, obligingly painted for us to keep the horror alive. He was thus remembered as “Vlad the Impaler” for these terrible deeds, and it may well be that memory that inspired Stoker’s notion that the only way one might kill a vampire like his Count Dracula is by driving a stake through his heart.

In Transylvania, Vlad (1431-1477) is revered as a great hero of the times when the Ottoman Empire had serious designs on the Balkans, including what is now Rumania. Vlad and his father played significant roles in keeping the Ottoman Muslims at bay, and thus protecting the country and preserving the Orthodox Church that is still the central religious expression in Rumania. Like Vlad, David played an enormous role in keeping the pagan Philistines, Arameans, and Moabites at bay, thus protecting his country and preserving the worship of YHWH in Israel.

Is it, thus, enough to conclude that both Vlad and David played necessary parts, however darkly cruel both were, in the overarching plans for the survival and ultimate success of the western world as we now know it? Are cruel actions justified by the results of our survival, of our thriving? I find here a very slippery slope. How cruel is too cruel? Do the ends finally justify the means?

There is a sort of delicious irony that Vlad’s memory has been kept alive in the monstrous story of Count Dracula, penned by an imaginative 19th century Englishman. Would Vlad have been known at all outside of modern Rumania without the repulsive Dracula filling our movie screens for over 100 years? And is there not an equally delicious irony that David is remembered as “the sweet singer of Israel,” author of the psalms (though he plainly was not), the greatest king in the history of the land, remembered even 1000 years after his death in the cries of those who welcomed Jesus of Nazareth to Jerusalem, shouting “Hosanna (“save us” in Aramaic) to the son of David; blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord?” Because the gospels attempt to connect Jesus to the house of David, his name is still very much alive, but all his horror remains, too, because his full story cannot be erased.

History remains full of such ironies; there are no pure actions on the part of human beings. Even our most apparently self-sacrificing acts bear the whiff of self-serving. This is not to mention those overtly terrible acts that we have been performing since recorded history began. Both Vlad and David, along with the fictional Count Dracula, remind us that we are not all we are meant to be, but for those of us who love a God who somehow still loves us anyway, we can only say, “thank you,” and keep on living as well as we are able, God being our helper.

(Images from Wikipedia common)


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