Articles

Jason Colavito
2011

In Dracula, Bram Stoker includes an intriguing allusion to a mysterious devil’s school in Transylvania: The Draculas, he wrote, “had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.” The vampire himself was one of these scholars, a diabolic genius.

This school is no mere piece of fiction, however. As has been well-documented, Stoker derived his knowledge of the Scholomance from Emily Gerard’s 1885 article on “Transylvanian Superstitions”:

As I am on the subject of thunderstorms, I may as well here mention the Scholomance, or school supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, and where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the devil in person. Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired and nine of them are released to return to their homes, the tenth scholar is detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju (dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil's aide-de-camp, and assists him in 'making the weather,' that is to say, preparing the thunderbolts.

But what exactly was this Scholomance, and where did the legend come from?

Gerard’s version of the story is not a professional anthropological report, but rather the story of an amateur traveling through the (then) Habsburg territories. By luck, a folklorist, R. C. Maclagan, produced a report for the journal Folklore in 1897 that included a more accurate version of the story then-current in Transylvania:

Here we find that the drac is the devil in person, who instructs certain persons to be magicians and medicine men in a college under the earth. Of these, one in eight receives instruction during fourteen years, and on his return to earth he has the following power. By means of certain magical formulae he compels a dragon to ascend from the depths of a loch. He then throws a golden bridle with which he has been provided over his head, and rides aloft among the clouds, which he causes to freeze and thereby produces hail.

Notice that now the school is under the earth, which forms one part of the solution to the puzzle of the Scholomance. There are two other parts that complete the picture. To understand this, however, it’s important to remember that before Transylvania was a Christian territory, it was part of the pre-Christian Roman province of Dacia, which before the Roman conquest was culturally affiliated with Thrace. In both regions, priests of the pagan gods retreated to the woods and secret places to learn the secrets of the gods.

The first puzzle piece is the presence of the supposed scholars of the Scholomance among the Transylvanians. These scholars learned to control the weather and ride dragons, which is a strange thing for the devil to teach until one realizes that Transylvania (now Romania) has an indigenous legend of itinerant wizards who perform those same two miracles: riding a dragon and summoning storms.

Later called the Solomanari (after the supposed connection between Solomon and alchemy), the Zgriminties or Hultan were shaman-priests who claimed control over storms and could summon a balaur (dragon) to ride. Before Christianity, they were seen as benevolent forces able to implore the gods to deliver much-needed rain to fertilize the crops. Christians defamed the Solomonari as devil-worshippers, but in reality they originated as pre-Christian pagan priests. They most likely worshipped the pre-Christian god Zalmoxis or Salmoxis (also: Zalmus), whose power they are able to wield. Remarkably little is known about this god outside of Greek reports, but  the ancients declared that he taught astrology (Strabo, Geography 7.3.5) as well as the doctrine of immortality (Plato, Charmides 156-158). According to Diogenes Laertius, he was the equivalent of the harvest god Kronos (Saturn) (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 8.1.1), and Hippolytus asserted that those who followed this god as disciples (= scholars) worshipped him in isolated, underground chapels (Refutation of All Heresies 1.2).

From Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a demon rides a dragon.

Illustration courtesy Liam's Pictures from Old Books.

Christians, following Biblical authority (e.g. 1 Corinthians 10:20), saw this god as a devil or demon, as with all pagan gods (e.g. St. Augustine: pagan gods are "most impure demons, who desire to be thought gods,” City of God 7.33, parallel to Psalm 96:5).

The earliest, and likely quite distorted, account of Zalmoxis occurs Herodotus (followed by all later authors) in a passage that explains, I think, the origin of the Scholomance, whose modern name is a corruption of Solomonari with influence from words for scholarship. Herodotus wrote that Zalmoxis was not really a god but a slave of Pythagoras, and that after being freed and gaining great wealth he

prepared a banqueting-hall, where he received and feasted the chief men of the tribe and instructed them meanwhile that neither he himself nor his guests nor their descendants in succession after them would die; but that they would come to a place where they would live for ever and have all things good. While he was doing that which has been mentioned and was saying these things, he was making for himself meanwhile a chamber under the ground; and when his chamber was finished, he disappeared from among the Thracians and went down into the underground chamber, where he continued to live for three years: and they grieved for his loss and mourned for him as dead. Then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and in this way the things which Salmoxis said became credible to them. (Histories 4.94, Macaulay translation)

Herodotus says this story is how the Greeks understood the Thracian/Dacian (pre-Christian Romanian) god’s story. But the likelihood is that this is a distortion of the actual Dacian religious story, which probably involved the god’s death and resurrection in an underground chamber, a great hall where he taught the secrets of immortality and of life and death. The ethnocentric Greeks interpreted this as a version of their own Pythagorean philosophy, and in so doing sought to make the Dacian faith little more than a derivative of a Greek original. Modern scholars believe the myth of Zalmoxis as Pythagoras' slave derives from the Dacian and Thracian priests' forehead tattoos, which the Greeks misinterpreted as slave-traders' brands (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 15; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 163n.44).

It seems to me that the pre-Christian religious teachings of Zalmoxis are what first Greeks, then Romans, and then Christians misunderstood, the Christians slandering the old god as the Devil himself, and his underground chamber where he taught the secrets of immortality as the school of the Devil. Whether this underground cult center was entirely mythical or whether it reflects a genuine Dacian or Thracian cult center where worshippers received priestly indoctrination and training (perhaps at what Strabo calls Zalmoxis' holy mountain of Cogaeonum in Geography 7.3.5), it is impossible now to say.

But, with this information, we now have the essential elements of the Scholomance and the scholars who study there. As for the dragon, so widespread are dragon myths in Greek, Slavic, and Christian lore that I'm not sure a specific origin for the Solomonari's dragons is possible, or enitrely necessary. Maclagan may well have been right in 1897 when he suggested that the dragon was a symbol for the thunderclouds the shaman-priests claimed to command.

It is rather remarkable that in its essentials this story should survive in folklore for 2,500 years, more remarkable still that our archetypical vampire Dracula more or less accidentally draws on this ancient set of beliefs in the power of pagan resurrection to fuel his own unholy un-death. And as with the pagan gods, the cross and the communion wafer destroyed Dracula. Without Stoker’s conscious knowledge, Dracula recapitulates the process whereby the pagan scholar-priests and their god were demonized and forced to submit to the dominance of Christianity.