The truth about vampires
papajohn
that burdens
this group. And since the creature is not *actually* human, I guess
it'll pass.
So let me tell you about my pursuit of the myth beginning when I was
15.
The one thing that piqued my interest was a book called "The
Vampire:His
Kith and Kin." It was an old, musty tome I found in the library near
my home.
It yielded a great deal of the history of the critter, and I read all
of it by taking
it out, renewing once, then turning it in and in a week it was back in
the stacks
(apparently no one else was interested), checking it out again.
The first mention in history appears to have been from a Persian tale,
where
it was called Qeri or Keri, and was not purely a vampire. A Persian
prince
had wed a beautiful young girl who had the odd habit of creeping away
at
night. Fearing she was going out to meet a lover, he followed her one
night,
and found her in a graveyard devouring a corpse, the blood running
down
her face. The tale dates back perhaps 500 years b.c.e. Strictly
speaking,
this was really a ghoul, though the actual term ghoul is from
Sumerian
tales of the 7 servants of the goddess Inanna.
The tale next pops up among the Greeks, possibly brought back by the
Greek army of Alexander, in the 3rd or 4th century b.c.e. They had
more
than one take on the creature, calling female bloodsuckers "lamia",
portraying her as a beautiful woman with a lower body of a serpent
with
wings. There was also a tale taken from the Persian of "Lilitu", or
Lilith,
purportedly the first wife of Adam, who was cast away because she
would not place herself beneath him, demanding to be his equal, as
she was created at the same time as Adam. This may also have had
sexual connotations. She is always portrayed as a strikingly
beautiful
woman with the talons of an owl for feet. Her attempt to procreate
always engendered monsters, and she spent her nights hunting and
stealing the infant childrean of mankind, either pouring out their
blood to drink or just devouring them.
The male version of the vampire was called "vrykolakas", and was a
corpse with leathery skin which made a loud boom when struck, not
at all pleasant to look at, and which required some rather involved
remedies to lay it to rest. The head must be cut off, the mouth
stuffed with garlic, and buried in a different place than the body.
The
body must be weighted down with heavy stones inside the grave,
buried face down so it couldn't dig its way out using its claw-shaped
hands. In Greece there is no mention of religious rites or objects,
which appeared later in Catholic tales. None of the Greeks I met
in Athens knew anything of this monster, only recognizing the idea
when I mentioned Dracula, though I never got a chance to talk to
any of the more rustic types in outlying areas.
From Greece, the tale migrated to the other Orthodox countries,
being called by the old Russ either "Opuir" or "Vampyre" and
was absorbed by most of the other slavic nations where it was
happily absorbed into the rather dismal cultures of these nations.
And so it was for a long time, though tales turn up in Japan (with
its Vampire Fox), in China, Indonesia, India, the middle east and
even Africa. There are even legends in the Americas, sometimes
viewing the creature as a god or goddess.
Near the end of the Dark Ages, vampires were blamed for plagues,
tuberculosis, and other wasting diseases, the most common
remedy being to bury the corpse with a brick in its mouth, though
dismemberment was still in vogue.
Then along came Dracula, who was most certainly *not* thought
to be a vampire, though Bram Stoker used him as a stereotype
of the blood-sucker. Vlad's name would have been Vlad Vladovich,
Dracula, the last meaning "son of the Dragon" because his father
had been a holy warrior for the (Catholic) church, called Dracul,
whereupon our Vlad would be Dracula, son of the Dragon. He is
also called Vlad Tsepesh, or "Vlad the Impaler", for his preferred
method of execution, i.e. hang them on poles through their bodies,
a particularly agonizing and slow death. He *was* known to drain
the blood of a particularly hated enemy into a chalice and drink it
with his meal, probably giving rise to the vampire claim, though it
played no role in his legend.
The term "Transylvania" only means "beyond the forest", referring
to the ridge of mountains that was Wallachia, his native land. This
land was governed not by a king or prince, but by a body of Boyars,
or tribal chiefs. These chiefs killed Vlad's father by nailing him
into
a box and burying it. It seems the Boyars wanted to ally with the
Hungarian king to make them stronger for the imminent Turkish
attack across the mountains. When things had simmered down,
Vlad invited these same chiefs to a feast, locked all the doors, and
burnt the place down. He hated the Magyars (Hungarian tribesmen)
too, and many of them ended up impaled. But when the Turks envoys
showed up, he had them impaled, showing his disdain for the
muslims. Vlad, too, was betrayed by the Boyars, and he was buried
at his castle. When his grave was dug up a couple of centuries
later, the grave contained nothing but animal bones.
A better candidate for the term "vampire" was the Romanian
Countess Elizabeth Bathory. She decided somehow that if she
bathed in the blood of a young, beautiful woman, she would be
young and beautiful as well. This was not a problem at first,
since young women disappeared quite often in that wild and
savage land, but the sheer volume of disappearances had risen
high enough to come to the attention of the Hungarian king, she
was found out and imprisoned in a single room. When, after long
imprisonment, she was brought from her cell, she was a shriveled
old hag. She died quite mad.
So then, as to the supposed characteristics of vampires, many
notions must be laid to restl
1)Vampires are sexually attractive, and attract their victims with
this charisma
Rebut: Nothing of the sort. They were repulsive in at least some
sense, whether deformed as in the Persian tales, or just because
they were nothing but dead flesh.
2)Anyone bitten by a vampire would become one.
Rebut: A bald-faced lie, probably originating with Stoker.
3) Vampires are rich nobles.
Rebut: The rich ones garner more notice, but there are tales of
poor people becoming the same sort of monsters.
4) Vampires still exist.
Rebut: in the sense of psychic vampires who drain life-energy
from their victims, yes. But as undead creatures of the night, no,
I'm sorry, but no such creature exists today, and probably
never did.
Love,
Papa John
John E."Papa John" Mayer
Magick, Musick, Mayhem
papa...@yahoo.com
"If it don't hurt a little bit, it ain't Rock & Roll!"