A man admitted killing his friend and told police he drank his victim's blood and ate part of his head, a court heard yesterday.
Allan Menzies, 22, is accused of murdering Thomas McKendrick, 21, of Fauldhouse, West Lothian, on December 11 last year, and of attempting to defeat the ends of justice by burying him in a shallow grave.
The crown says the defendant murdered Mr McKendrick at Menzies's home in Fauldhouse - striking him repeatedly with a heavy instrument and a blade. The body was found in woods in January. Police said they found vampire literature at the defendant's home.
Detective Constable Robert Lowe told the court of a conversation he and a colleague had with Menzies on January 22 as they took him to a first court hearing after his arrest.
The officer told the court: "He said, 'How do you think things will go today? I'm going to get 20 to 25 for this, for doing him with a hammer and my bowie knife. But I got his soul.'"
That the different revenants/vampires are similar, or even identical, in appearance, is easily explained. . . For many hundreds of years (and even in this century) bodies have been dug up or found, all over Europe, declared to be vampires (of whatever type), and "killed" a second time. . . It is only to be expected that the people of Europe knew what a vampire looked like: They were digging them up on a fairly regular basis. The seeming anomalies in the appearance of the body- the blood at the lips, the discolored face, the swollen trunk- are normal concomitants of the process of decomposition.
It will come as no surprise, then, that the "historical" vampire- the one dug out of graves by concerned citizens who chopped up, staked, decapitated, or cremated his body- was a sluggish creature indeed who had little to say to his executioners and never defended himself against attack.
In your first childhood sketches when you started drawing, you put arms on the human form in your own way. They came out of the head, the chest- everywhere. An arm going up, going out, an arm to stretch you with, to relax you, extend you more, extending you haphazardly, a makeshift arm not knowing where to come out, a just-in-case arm.
Yet you'd already seen men and women, those big bodies with never more than two arms coming out of them. You didn't care. You put arms the way you wanted them. You weren't about to count.
An entire week could be made from recent Ananova reports, but such cheap tactics can never come to much good. So today, a plethora of bodily oddity.
-----
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has spent a quarter of a million Pounds on a 16th Century Italian plate. Nothing odd in that, but the plate bears the portrait of a man whose head is made up of penises. There are pictures.
-----
"Real and false teeth, needles, fish hooks, nails, glass and pieces of metal." No, not the components of a new piece of modern art, but objects Russian doctors have recovered from their patients' stomachs. They are now part of an exhibition intended to encourage caution while eating.
-----
Remaining in Russia, an army captain was recently court marshalled for the nightly beatings he gave his troops with a black latex dildo. He received a two year sentence, which was suspended because, "he had to care for his two young children".
----
Finally- and again in Russia, where strangeness abides- a man is trying to sell Hitler's penis. He is willing to submit the 2 1/2 inch Nazi relic to DNA tests to ascertain its authenticity.
And a final post to round out this week of quotes from Piero Camporesi, the great Bolognese scholar, whose book, The Juice of Life, has been an invaluable inspiration for this project.
Tank of blood and heat, of blood coagulated (milk) or refined (sperm), the human body was interpreted along the lines of a vegetable organism, flowing with slow, nourishing sap. A network of canals great and small branching through the "inner person," in whom the veins, "like streams, spreading and dividing throughout the body" enable the "humors and blood" to flow, as they have "bathed and rendered fertile the entire body in vital juices."
. . .
. . . We have lost an interpretive key of health and duration, which we had borrowed from the moist vegetable dimension of waters and saps and juices that, in the age of computers, seems more and more of a distant ghost. If the human body is thought of as an animated world in which work bubbles along in a circuit of laboratories and a series of workshops that attend to the maintenance and increase of the bodily, vital substance, then the rhythm and time of this biochemical labor acquire a singular importance.
But while, in medical thinking and in the speculations of physicists, sorcerers, alchemists, and natural philosophers, this dialectic of life and death, generation and putrefaction, is felt to be strictly consistent with the sense of life, in the Christian Catholic ethic it is burdened with a funereal sign of death and damnation.
. . . I have said to putrefaction, "You are my father, my mother, and my sister-in-worms." "Man is rot, and the son of man is a worm." How foul a father, how vile a mother, how abominable a sister! Conceived is man of blood putrefied by the heat of carnal desire, and at last the worms come to his corpse as to a funeral. Living, he has begotten lice and nits; dead, he will produce rottenness and fetor. Living, he has fattened one man; dead, he will fatten multitudes of worms. Then what could be more putrid than the human corpse? What could be more horrible than a dead man?
Pope Innocent III,
De Miseria Mumanae Conditionis,
from Piero Camporesi's The Juice of Life
Human semen (the excess, the secret overabundance, of the nutritive process) was felt as belonging to that excremental area in whose upper spheres mother's milk, as well, was posited. . .
And inasmuch as every kind of food has some excrement in it, . . . it follows that we have always within us a notable abundance of excrement, which, if it is not discharged, being retained within, to a large extent corrupts; and being putrefied, the more it is shut up in the body, the more it dries that body. . . .In sum, one must suppose that our body is like a river, which is preserved through the continuous motion of its waters, as these follow one another, flowing in succession. Now, if one part of that water becomes stagnant, it putrefies, and having putrefied, corrupts what lies alongside it. Thus, the whole water together loses its vigor, and is deprived of all its vivacity.
A. Petronio,
Del vivere delli Romani et del conservare la sanita (1592),
quoted in Piero Camporesi's, The Juice of Life
It is well to marry early, . . . as we learn from the fact that it produces lightness of body, ease in breathing, and cheerfulness of spirit. For, in a well-fed body, a great abundance of the last and eighth nutrient. . . is transformed into semen, which, except it be duly evacuated, perniciously corrupts, causing a person great trouble, and presently reducing him to emaciation and senility. If evacuated as is fitting , just as it has weighed on a person before, so after it has emerged it lightens and cheers him with its great contentment.
A. Petronio,
Del vivere delli Romani et del conservare la sanita (1592),
quoted in Piero Camporesi's, The Juice of Life
Sperm, that milky variant of blood, was a distillation of blood- a special excrement, a vital "quintessence," marrow and flower of life. As Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) had acutely observed:
[All of the ancients] reduced the liquids [of the body] to blood alone. They called the spermal substance "blood" (as is demonstrated by the poetical expression, "sanguine cretus," sprung of blood, for "generated"), and correctly, since that substance is the flower and cream of blood. And, once more wth reason, they deemed the blood the juice of the fibers of which the flesh is composed: whence the Latins used succiplenus, "full of juice," to denote "plump, fleshy," or "basted with good blood."
And the poet theologians, again correctly, posited the flow of life in the flow of blood, in whose correct motion our life consists.
