Langsuir

The Langsuir is the vampire of Malay folklore that is born from the most feared death in the rural world: that of the woman who dies during childbirth or in the forty days after, or that whose child is born dead. Her soul, broken by a truncated motherhood, returns to the world turned into a winged being that feeds precisely on the children of others. Tradition considers it the most ancient and primordial form of the Pontianak archetype, linked to the pre-Islamic animist substratum of the Malay peninsula. Walter Skeat, in Malay Magic (1900), collects the rites with which they tried to prevent a deceased woman from rising as Langsuir: her mouth was filled with glass beads so that she could not launch her scream, chicken eggs were placed under her armpits and needles in the palms of her hands so that she could not open her arms and fly. That there existed an entire funeral protocol to contain her reveals to what extent the fear of the Langsuir structured the mourning for dead mothers.

In its diurnal form the Langsuir is a woman of great beauty, dressed in a green suit, with black hair so long that it reaches her ankles and some sharp and extremely long nails. That hair is not only a trait of beauty: it hides the hole she has in the nape, through which she feeds by sucking the blood of the children. At night she unfolds her winged nature and flies emitting a hypnotic and seductive voice with which she attracts her victims. A singular motive of her legend is that the Langsuir can be domesticated: if one manages to trap her and cut her nails and put her long hair in the hole in the nape, she becomes tame, adopts human form and can come to live years as a normal woman, marry and have children. But the spell is fragile: it is enough that at a party she sets to dance and to spin until losing control so that she recovers her primeval form, rises through the airs and disappears in the jungle forever.

The territory of the Langsuir is the rural world of peninsular Malaysia, with its rice fields and its villages of houses on stilts: it is located above all in the northern states, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu, and also in ancient Singapore, northern Sumatra and the Malay communities of southern Thailand. Its defining feature within the Malay pantheon is antiquity: it is understood as the archaic and peasant version from which the Pontianak derives, the best-known and urban postpartum vampire of modern tradition; in fact, it already appears mentioned in the Hikayat Hang Tuah, the Malay chronicle of the 15th century. It shares with figures from other cultures the same core, the dead mother who returns turned into a threat to the living, although with an opposite polarity to that of the Japanese kosodate-yūrei, who returns out of love for her child while the Langsuir returns out of thirst for blood. It is, in short, the mythical memory of the enormous danger that childbirth was for centuries.