Chabot, Admiral of France, V, 2, Master Advocate exposing the villainies of the Chancellor declares: “He was born with teeth in his head, by an affidavit of his midwife, to note his devouring, and hath one toe on his left foot crooked, and in the form of an eagle’s talon, to foretel his rapacity. What shall I say? branded, marked, and designed in his birth for shame and obloquy, which appeareth further, by a mole under his right ear, with only three witch’s hairs in it; strange and ominious predictions of nature!” According to Allacci those children who were thought likely to become Callicantzari were taken to a fire which had been lighted in the market-square, and here the soles of their feet were held to the flames until the nails were singed and the danger of their attacks averted. The allusion in Chabot to the “toe on his left foot crooked, and in the form of an eagle’s talon” is particularly interesting in this connexion. It is evident that the old physical characteristics which mark a creature of demoniacal propensities had been remembered as of ill-omen and horror when exactly what they portended and betrayed had been lost in the mists of ancient lore. Moreover it should be noted that persons and animals attack with the hands or the claws, not generally with the feet to scratch and rend. Accordingly the custom in the days even of Allacci was practised but not understood, and it points to some belief reaching back to old Greek mythology, it is probably some link between the Callicantzaros and the Centaurs as Lawson suggests in well-founded detail.
The vampire is, as we have said, generally believed to embrace his victim who has been thrown into a trance-like sleep, and after greedily kissing the throat suddenly to bite deep into the jugular vein and absorb the warm crimson blood. It has long since been recognized by medico-psychologists that there exists a definite connexion between the fascination of blood and sexual excitation. Owing to custom, to inhibitions and education this emotion generally remains latent, although a certain mental sadism is by no means a mark of degeneracy. Dr. Havelock Ellis says: “It is probable that the motive of sexual murders is nearly always to shed blood, and not to cause death,”[82] an extremely significant fact. Since the vampire is generally held to seize the throat it is very striking that Leppmann[83] points out
