Justbec
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Vampire Lore (For those that don't read the Supernatural Board)
VAMPIRES
“Most Vampire lore is crap. A cross won’t repel them. Sun light won’t kill them and neither will a stake to the heart. But, the blood lust, that part’s true, they need fresh human blood to survive. They were once people, so you won’t know it’s a vampire until it’s too late.”
Vampires are mythical or folkloric creatures, typically held to be the re-animated corpses of human beings and said to subsist on human and/or animal blood (hematophagy), often having unnatural powers, heightened bodily functions, and/or the ability to physically transform.
Vampirism is the practice of drinking blood from a person/animal. Vampires are said to mainly bite the victim's neck, extracting the blood from the carotid artery. In folklore and popular culture, the term generally refers to a belief that one can gain supernatural powers by drinking human blood. The historical practice of vampirism can generally be considered a more specific and less commonly occurring form of cannibalism. The consumption of another's blood has been used as a tactic of psychological warfare intended to terrorize the enemy, and it can be used to reflect various spiritual beliefs.
VAMPIRE ETHYMOLOGY
“Vampires. It gets funnier every time I hear it."
The word 'vampire' derives from the Slavic word 'vampir' or 'vampyr', first appearing in the 1600s in the Eastern European region in the Balkans.
'vampir' is derived from 'upir', which first appeared in print in an Old Russian manuscript from 1047 AC in which a Novgorodian prince is referred to as 'Upir Lichyj' (Wicked Vampire).
But the origin of 'upir' is even more controversial. Franz Miklosich suggested that 'upir' is derived from 'uber', a Turkish word for 'witch'.A. Bruckner proposes Russian 'netopyr' (bat).
VLAD THE IMPALER
Most authorities believe the character of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel was based upon the historical figure Vlad Tepes, who intermittently ruled an area of the Balkans called Wallachia in the mid 15th century. He was also called by the names Vlad III, Vlad Dracula and Vlad the Impaler. It has been suggested that this connection stemmed from a certain grotesque eating habit of Vlad's: rumor has it he would consume bread dipped in his victims' blood and he refused to eat anywhere but his garden where he had his enemies impaled on 6 foot stakes that were driven into the ground. He is credited with killing between 40,000 to 100,000 people in this fashion.
DRACULA
“This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination of the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat - the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown.”
- Van Helsing, Bram Stoker’s DRACULA
POWER OF EVIL
The vampire does not age nor will it die from the passing of time, though it may appear to age if it goes sometime without feeding. Most of the vampire's powers increase with age and experience. The vampire is also immune to most diseases and is invincible to mortal weapons. The vampire's physical strength greatly exceeds that of mortals. Dracula is described as having the strength of twenty strong men. The vampire may command several animal creatures such as the wolf, the rat, the fox, the owl, the bat and the moth and is also able to assume the form of a wolf or a bat and possibly any of the other animals subject to his command. The vampire may also transform himself into a mist or dust cloud drifting in the air. The vampire may exert his will over the will of his victim, even to the point of inducing a catatonic state. This power explains why victims often have no memory of being attacked.
DETECTING A VAMPIRE
All of the following symptoms MUST be present in order to justify a tentative diagnosis (exhuming the corpse) of vampirism:
+ An outbreak of several cases of unexplained sickness, severe and potentially fatal, untreatable by ordinary medical practice, and involving systems such as shock, pallor, weakness, loss of energy and wasting, beginning days or weeks after the burial of the suspected vampire;
+ Victims of the sickness independently report nocturnal attacks and those who see the presence may identify it as having the image of a person recently dead
+ The sites of these attacks are not separated from each other by running water, and if the grave of the suspected vampire can be located, all the sites of attacks can be reached from the grave without crossing running waters;
+ Those who use traditional protective methods, such as garlic, are not attacked even if they are in close contact with victims, and victims who survive an initial attack and then start using such methods recover fully;
+ The suggested vampire, if it can be identified, has been buried, not cremated, and has not been embalmed or placed in a metal casket or vault;
+ Other psychological, criminological, and medical explanations have been effectively ruled out
LUSTING FOR BLOOD
“Her blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestat's words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.”
- Luis, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
Most vampires take pleasure in killing their victims, justifying their act by the desire to remain secret or to save their victim’s soul from being damned.
Vampires can live without feeding for long periods of time, entering a state of hibernation where they almost don’t move, sleeping or remaining in the dark without moving.
If the victim is not killed, he/she will turn into a vampire within 2 to 7 days. The master will then initiate the newborn vampire until he can survive by himself. The victim must drink the blood of the vampire. This is the act that Van Helsing calls 'the vampire's baptism of blood.’ Once the victim has swallowed the vampire blood, the victim dies as for a poison to reborn as vampire. The victim is under the mental domination of the master vampire and can only exert an independent will during the daylight hours or when the master vampire consciously releases his control. Only the death of the master vampire can free the victim from its curse and only if he has not killed to sustain his blood feed.
AT A LOSS OF A NON REFLECTIVE SOUL
Vampires don’t cast a reflection. This also means that his image does not appear on film or any other device that requires a light (or heat) source to produce and image. A flame can be seen through his body. In some areas, vampires are believed not to show in photographs or to cast shadows. A reason given for this is the old idea of the reflection of the soul into the mirror, since vampires have lost their souls they cast no reflection.
VAMPIRIC LIMITATIONS
+ The vampire may not enter a home unless he is freely invited in by one of the residents. From the first time he has been invited, he may come and go at will.
+ The vampire may not cross running water, except at the ebb and flow of the tide. He may be carried over or at certain times he may change shape and fly or jump over. If the vampire becomes immersed in running water he is completely helpless and will be destroyed. The reason comes from the analogy of standing water to the mirror.
+ Vampires cannot cross a thicket of wild rose or a line of salt. Vampires are compelled to stop and count every grain in a pile of grain or numerous objects (often grain) thrown into their path.
AVOIDING SECOND DEATH
A vampire survives only so long as its physical body remains intact. As long as the etheric body stays intact, the Second Death cannot begin; and so the goal of the vampire is to keep the etheric body strong enough to resist the natural process of disintegration. The first step is the preservation of the vampire’s corpse in a state that can sustain some etheric functions, for if the physical body is destroyed, the etheric body is destabilized and quickly unravels. The second is a regular source of fresh etheric energy to replace what is used up or lost in the course of the vampire’s night to night existence. Folk misunderstandings of the vampire’s thirst for etheric energy easily gave rise to the idea that vampires drank blood. After a vampiric attack, the victim would be left in deep shock from loss of life-energy, and the waxen pallor that comes with this condition would make it look as though the blood had been drained from his or her veins.
WEAKNESSES OF THE DARK SIDE
“Direct sunlight hurts like a nasty sunburn, the only way to kill them is beheading. And yeah, they sleep during the day, but that doesn’t mean they won’t wake up.”
The vampire is obliged to sleep during the day and to rest upon a protective layer of hallowed ground from its native land. Usually the vampire will rest in its coffin during the day in a trance that keeps him aware of things happening around it. This is clearly the vampire's time of greatest vulnerability since it is helpless when resting within its coffin. During the day of light, the vampire is severely weakened. Most will not leave the dark but the experienced vampire is able to move and act as a human. Nevertheless, he loses his supernatural abilities and mortal weapons may harm him. The Cross-, Holy Water and other symbols of the Church were almost universally held to be powerful weapons against vampires, werewolves, witches and other spawn of Satan. he consensus seemed to be that the power of the symbol derived from the faith of the wielder (or more rarely, from the belief of the vampire) rather than any intrinsic power of the symbol itself. If a person try to intimidate a vampire with a cross but has no faith, the cross will be useless.
DEAD MAN’S BLOOD
“Nothing makes a vampire sicker than a dead man’s blood. Those arrows are soaked to the core in it…”
I was unable to find authentic information about dead man’s blood as an actual vampiric weakness. However, Ann Rice has also used Dead Man’s Blood as a Vampiric weakness. “Dead-blood simply makes us (vampires) sick. It interacts with our own bloodstream and often contains infections. Consuming mass quantities of tainted blood is like drinking poison. Like sex without a condom. It’s almost certain death, being as how there are very few cures for blood-born diseases. Let alone doctors who make mid-night house calls (Interview with the Vampire draft Script).”
A GHOULISH, BUT CHARMING CULTURAL ICON
“In the movies Dracula wears a cape and some old English guy always manages to save the day at the last minute with crosses and holy water. But everybody knows the movies are full of ****.”
- Hannibal King, BLADE TRINITY
VAMPIRES EFFECT ON CULTURE
It seems highly unlikely that one would not know what a vampire is and who Dracula is. Ranging from early childhood experiences of watching the Count on Sessame Street, to our more adolescent and adult fears and fantasies of these blood suckers. Vampires have bitten their fangs into all forms of popular culture, ranging from films to video games and even cereal boxes, such as Count Chocula!
Lord Byron introduced many common elements of the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813). These include the combination of horror and lust that the vampire feels and the concept of the undead passing its inheritance to the living.
John Polidori authored the first "true" vampire story called The Vampyre. Polidori was the personal physician of Lord Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord Ruthven, is based partly on him — making the character the first of our now familiar romantic vampires.
Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.
MERCY BROWN VAMPIRE INCIDENT
The Mercy Brown vampire incident, which occurred in 1892, is one of the best documented cases of the exhumation of a corpse in order to perform certain ritual activities, such as the conduct of 'magical' rites, supposedly for the purpose of banishing an undead manifestation.
In Exeter, Rhode Island, the Brown family suffered a sequence of tragic tuberculosis infections in the last two decades of the 19th century. Tuberculosis was called consumption at the time, and was a devastating and much feared disease.
The mother of the family, Mary, was the first to die of the disease, followed in 1888 by her eldest daughter, Mary Olive.
In 1891, another daughter, Mercy, also contracted the disease, dying in January 1892. Two months later her brother, Edwin, also became sick.
The father, George, believed that one of his dead family members was returning from the grave as a vampire and causing his son's illness. This was in accordance with certain threads of contemporary folklore that linked multiple deaths in one family with undead activity. Consumption was a poorly understood condition at the time, and the subject of much urban myth.
He persuaded several villagers to help him exhume the bodies. Both Mary and Mary Olive's body had been significantly decomposed over the intervening 4 years. The body of Mercy was still relatively intact. This was taken as a sign that the child was undead, and the agent of young Edwin's condition. Because of the cold New England weather the soil was impenetrable, and Mercy's body was kept in a tomb within the cemetery for the 2 months after her death. Therefore, the lack of decomposition was not surprising.
Mercy's heart was removed from her body, burnt, and the remnants mixed with water as a potion that was given to the sick Edwin to drink. Unfortunately, despite all his efforts, George was unsuccessful in protecting his son, who died two months later.
Modern medicine has demystified tuberculosis, although it is still held in great fear and shrouded in myth in certain cultures without access to modern medical understanding.
Mercy Brown- The Rhode Island Vampire
TYPES OF VAMPIRES
“Let me set you straight on something, Doctor. What you've "seen" so far is nothing. The world you live in's just the sugar-coated topping. There's another world beneath it, the real world -- and it's a freakin bloodbath.”
- Blade, BLADE
TRADITIONAL VAMPIRES
The Traditional description of a vampire is that of a predatory ghost who murders people to prolong its own unnatural existence, the vampire is actually the least attractive and most destructive of all monsters. Most common traditional belief is that what leaves the ground is actually a cloudy, blurred shape, tangible but soft to the touch that is sometimes described as a leather sack full of blood, featureless except for red, glowing eyes.
In most of central and eastern Europe, it’s held that a vampire will first seek out and attack the members of its family, then go on to neighbors and friends, before finally feeding on anyone within reach. In some areas, vampires are held to drink blood, usually by biting the chest of their victims. Other beliefs hold that vampires strangled their victims. Even a Vampire’s presence could spread illness and death. Most of the victims of vampire attacks die and stay dead.
All though vampire county, it’s held that vampires cannot endure the light of the sun and cannot cross running water, and it’s generally believed that they can be easily wounded or killed by sharp metal objects. Cremation, with or without staking, is the classic way to deal with a vampire. For killing vampires, the essential method was much the same everywhere: dig up the suspected vampire, drive a sharp stake through its heart, and burn the corpse to ashes
SLAVIC BELIEFS
The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Serbia to Poland, have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world.
The split between Orthodox and Roman Christianity caused a major difference in the development of vampire lore: The Orthodox church believed incorrupt bodies were vampires, while the Roman church believed they were saints.
Causes of vampirism included being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, being conceived on certain days, "irregular" death, excommunication, and improper burial rituals.
Preventive measures included placing a crucifix in the coffin, placing blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes.
Certain people would bury those believed to be potential vampires with scythes above their necks, so the dead would decapitate themselves as they rose.
Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, sprinkling holy water on the grave, or exorcism.
ROMANIAN BELIEFS
Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that Romanian and Slavic vampires are similar.
Romanian vampires are called Strigoi, based on the ancient Greek term strix for screech owl, which also came to mean demon or witch. There are different types of Strigoi. Strigoi vii are live witches who will become vampires after death. They can send out their souls at night to meet with other witches or with Strigoi i, which are reanimated bodies that return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbors.
A person who died an unnatural death, or died before baptism, was doomed to become a vampire, as was the seventh child of the same sex in a family, the child of a pregnant woman who did not eat salt or who was looked at by a vampire. Moreover, being bitten by vampire meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.
Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most active on the Eve of St George's Day, the night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad.
A vampire in the grave could be discerned by holes in the earth, an undecomposed corpse with a red face, or having one foot in the corner of the coffin.
Graves were often opened three years after the death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.
Measures to prevent a person from becoming a vampire included removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat any of it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it on cattle.
To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body, followed by decapitation and placing garlic in the mouth. By the 19th century, one would also shoot a bullet through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and given to family members as a cure.
ROMA BELIEFS
Traditional Romani beliefs include the idea that the dead soul enters a world similar to ours except that there is no death. The soul stays around the body and sometimes wants to come back.
The ancient home of the Roma, India, has many mythical vampire figures. The most famous Indian deity associated with blood drinking is Kali, who has fangs, wears a garland of corpses or skulls and has four arms.
Female vampires could return, lead a normal life and even marry but would exhaust the husband.
Anyone who had a hideous appearance, was missing a finger, or had animal appendages, etc., was believed to be a vampire. If a person died unseen, he would become a vampire; likewise if a corpse swelled before burial. Plants or dogs, cats, or even agricultural tools could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood.
To get rid of a vampire people would hire a Dhampir (the son of a vampire and his widow) or a Moroi to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, decapitating the corpse, or burning it.
VAMPIRE AS ANTICHRIST
Another interesting origin of the vampire is the negative image of the Christ. The vampire is the total negation of all the symbol of the Eucharestia as Dracula sucks the blood that Jesus is giving away. More interesting is the process of contamination by which the Vampire is dividing himself into new Vampires by having them drunk his own dark blood, thus the “giving away” of his own blood. Christ is the source, an energy that radiates, and a supernovae. Dracula is the end, a place where nothing comes out, and a black hole. Both are lying on wood before they die – Christ against a cross and Dracula in the wooden coffin. The nails of the cross correspond to the fangs of the vampire. Christ dies loosing his blood from the wounds caused by the nails on the Golgotha as Dracula sucks the blood with his fangs causing his victim’s death for his own survival. There is a parallel between the roman soldier that put his spear into Jesus’ chest and the killing of the vampire through the perforation of his heart with a stake. To the holy couple sun/dove correspond the satanic couple moon/bat.
THE PSYCHIC VAMPIRE
Psychic vampires are people who have the ability, consciously or unconsciously of draining energy from others. Whether this ability was developed through meditation, mentally altering drug usage, or inherited, it can be used by the Psychic Vampire to drain energy for its own use.
Although psychic vampirism seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, legends about vampire-like beings that drain the body of its energy or 'life-force', soul or vitality, who use humans as a means of procreation, predate blood-drinking revenants by thousands of years.
THE BLOOD FETISH VAMPIRES
“They're vampire wanna-bes. If they're loyal, if they prove themselves, then their masters will turn them.”
- Blade, BLADE
The Blood Fetish Vampire is a human that has a strange attraction to blood. Although blood induces vomiting in humans, these Blood Fetish Vampires are able to swallow it. Blood cannot be digested by humans for energy, and is no different in these Blood Fetish Vampires, which pass the blood out in their dung, urine, and sweat gland excretions. There really is no explanation as to why certain humans have these blood fetishes, but some of the afflicted actually believe they are Biological Vampires. They may bleach their skin lighter, sleep in coffins, or have their teeth capped to create fangs. Classic and Biological vampires, being immune to all forms of disease, have nothing to worry about by drinking blood. However, these Blood Fetish Vampires can contract AIDS, or any other communicable disease via the blood they ingest.
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