Which came first, rabies or rabid creatures?

Which came first, rabies or rabid creatures?

In terms of when they first appeared, rabies is at least as old as vampires and werewolves.  Of course, this only means that they both appear in the earliest of human writings.  Rabies makes its way into our earliest books of law, not long after the advent of writing.  Rabies may be referred to in the Codex Eshnunna of ancient Mesopotamia (1930 B.C.E.).  A more definitive reference, specifically noting a mad dog, is found in the code of Hammurabi (1750 B.C.E.), still nearly 4,000 years ago.  To be specifically mentioned when writing was considered an essentially mystical creation meant only for demigod-like royalty strongly indicates that rabies infection was already a very prominent fear and a fairly common occurrence!

Rabies is well-documented within the pantheon of gods and goddesses of the earliest written European cosmologies.  Lyssa, the Greek goddess of rage - who has a rabid dog crowning her head - certainly dates from earliest Olympian cosmology.  The Romans had their own counterparts -- Ira, Furor, and Rabies.  Lyssa is perhaps best known for driving Hercules (Heracles) to madness during which he murdered his wife and child.  Many cosmologies have wolf gods, Fenrir in Norse mythology and Wepwawet in Egyptian, but their raging characters are a given rather than a unique excess that might be due to rabies infection. Of course, with wolves it’s best to presume they are rabid.

We have already noted that a werewolf, King Lycaon, is mentioned in Ovid’s Metamorphoses from around 1 C.E.   This story almost certainly followed the lead of earlier oral traditions.  Humans living and behaving like animals are fairly common in Greek tales – Circe certainly did a number on Odysseus’s crew.  But this jumbles lycanthropy into the mix.  Tales of werewolves exist, but are generally just added in to tales of shape-shifting in general.  Still, as King Lycaon’s tale attests, transformation into a werewolf has a specific character, and a specific implication, that is, the loss of social, civilized behavior, and of killing or turning new victims

Vampires, in their earliest form as revenants, are clearly noted in folktales from earliest times.  For historical purposes, these folktales were perhaps best kept alive in Eastern Europe where pantheistic, pre-Christian beliefs were still common at the same time the printing press was invented making preservation of oral traditions a reality.  As the modern (since the Americas were discovered) view of vampires did not coalesce until Europeans observed vampire bats (1600’s), it is difficult to directly or simply trace the early conceptions of vampires.  Many of the words from which vampire has been derived may originally have referred to witches.  Witches could turn people mad, or drove themselves into madness in search of mystical knowledge.  A deeper analysis of the origin may not be fruitful since vampires as we understand them almost certainly required the discovery of vampire bats to take on their distinctive, singular persona.

In summary, rabies, werewolves, and vampires have coexisted as far back as we can trace.  This doesn’t prove they are one and the same, but it is definitely consistent with that notion.  In concert with the similarity of behaviors and the commonality of how they are passed from one victim to another, it is almost impossible to deny their unity.