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Vampires

Pietro_Mercurios said:
If only they'd spent more time out of the house, playing, cowboys'n'indians....

The female science fiction novelist I mentioned was also an experienced equestrian who target-shot black powder weapons from galloping horseback.

Ever notice there are some days you just can't win? <g>
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Pietro_Mercurios said:
If only they'd spent more time out of the house, playing, cowboys'n'indians....

The female science fiction novelist I mentioned was also an experienced equestrian who target-shot black powder weapons from galloping horseback.

Ever notice there are some days you just can't win? <g>
How did she feel about windmills?
 
I have personally witnessed deep friendships, among mature adults, of twenty or more years' duration, permanently break up over a single DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS game.

*shrugs* the same can happen over anything, on the flip side I have watched deep friendships grow over said games. I take it people were getting too attached to their fictional characters? D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, MMORPG's like World of Warcraft...it's all the same when you can't separate characters from players.
Some people just get too involved in their fantasy worlds...it's almost like they are running away from the mundanity of real life and their real selves to embrace a fantasy where they are different, where life and the world is different. I suppose the difference between rpg's and book or film is that it is more personally immersive, but all you have to do is to look at the amount of goths obsessed with Anne Rice to see how their psyche can be affected by fiction, image and vampiric romantiscisim.
I suppose we are all influenceable given the right stimuli.
 
many_angled_one said:
*shrugs* the same can happen over anything....

I wasn't condemning the game, merely pointing out that it CAN have a deleterious effect not only on adolescents but on mature adults as well.

...it's all the same when you can't separate characters from players. Some people just get too involved in their fantasy worlds...it's almost like they are running away from the mundanity of real life and their real selves to embrace a fantasy where they are different, where life and the world is different.

In the case of the "Kentucky Vampire Klan," mentioned above, that led to a double murder (in Florida), a death penalty conviction, a life sentence with no hope of parole, and several other lengthy prison sentences.

....but all you have to do is to look at the amount of goths obsessed with Anne Rice to see how their psyche can be affected by fiction, image and vampiric romantiscisim.

It's remarkable that you bring that up. The "Kentucky Vampire Klan" committed its murders while on the way (in two stolen cars) to New Orleans to meet Anne Rice! (Ms. Rice, please understand, was entirely unaware of the prospective visit.)
 
When I was a child I was scared stiff of a grave in our church yard that had iron railings around it. It was partly set into a wall and the railings went around the other three sides. I was convinced that this was to keep the occupant in! Most of the iron railings in our vilage had been rooted up to go to the "war effort" years ago, but these remained.

About the same time I was woken up night after night by wailings and howling outside my bedroom window. I know now that it was local cats, but then..

A neighbouring village churchyard was full of those tabletop tombs and most of these were cracked with age. I was wary of them as I again thought that the desceased were trying to get out.

To me the idea of the un-dead was feasable, I had never at that time read or heard of vampires or zombies but I had by the age of 5 a definite fear of the physical dead coming back to life and trying to do injury to the living (mainly me).

When I got older and I read about vampires I realised that they were what I had feared for so long. Since the books I read were fiction I assumed that vampires were fictional too and the fear went.

Later experiences taught me that perhaps I was too dismissive and that there are possiblities within the sphere of the vampire.
 
tilly50 said:
When I was a child I was scared stiff of a grave in our church yard that had iron railings around it. It was partly set into a wall and the railings went around the other three sides. I was convinced that this was to keep the occupant in!

Are you certain it wasn't? The origin of the tombstone is supposed to have been a large weight added to the grave to keep the dead from coming back.

Vampires were the very last of my childhood bogies to stagger off into the lands of folklore and fiction. But when I afterwards discovered the "vampire plague" which seems to have boiled through Central and Easten Europe during the second quarter of the 18th Century, and apparently extended tendrils even to the North American Colonies, they were also the very first to come back.
 
I'm more worried about Marvel superhero zombies, these days!

Not to mention World War Hulk. :(
 
OldTimeRadio said:
The origin of the tombstone was as a large weight to keep the dead from coming back.

That sounds like wildly unlikely folk myth - or do you have a source for it?

Isn't it a lot more probable that large stones (as opposed to small grave markers) were there to stop scavengers from digging up bodies and nibbling them?
 
wembley8 said:
That sounds like wildly unlikely folk myth - or do you have a source for it?

Not any longer. I read this some time before November, 1958, because that's when my Mother's Mother died and the story/myth/whatever was "old news" to me then. (I turned 17 in September, 1958.)

I've edited a qualifier into my original post - "is supposed to have been."
 
Sadly the origins of tombstones are one of those things whose original use is permenantly lost in antiquity. Was it to stop scavengers, marking the burial site, a sign of respect, or for stopping the dead from returning? I doubt we will ever really know, probably it was a mix of several. Sometimes it was to keep out the grave robbers and desecraters as well.
I know as very young kids we were innately *sure* of the existance of ghosts, the undead etc and that seems to be a running theme in almost, if not all, every culture, ancient to modern.
 
Similarly, the opinion I've heard expressed by anthropologists, that the reason our prehistoric ancestors rubbed red ochre into the flesh of corpses was a vain attempt to restore life to the dead.

But our ancestors apparently performed this ritual for thousands of years.

How stupid do we think they were?
 
How stupid do we think they were?
For a lot of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists the answer is apparently that they were all primitive and inherintly stupidly superstitious.

Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. If they don't know why our ancestors did something it inevitably ends up as being because of religion, magic or superstition over any practical considerations. I remember watching a tv programme a few years back about extensive neolithic/bronze age copper mines in the South of England. They found remains of food in the mines next to mined out copper veins and surmised this was because ancient man believed they had to feed the earth to make the copper grow back. I say it was a lazy miner's packed lunch. They found piles of stones inside the mines and said they were piled up as some sort of shrine. I say it was quite reasonably a tool store to save them traipsing back all the way outside to get another.
 
The purpose of trepanning skulls in prehistoric times is said to have been to "let the evil spirits out."

But if that's true, mustn't modern cranial surgery be for the same purpose?

I suspect that archaeologists from the far future will excavate 20th and 21st Century bathrooms and decide that flush toilets were shrines for the deposit of votive offerings.
 
many_angled_one said:
If they don't know why our ancestors did something it inevitably ends up as being because of religion, magic or superstition over any practical considerations.

While trying to chart our family history with my Dad, we recently discovered church documents relating to an ancestor of ours who was repeatedly fined and rebuked by the kirk in the mid 19th century for fathering children with quite a number of the married women of the Orkneys.

Seriously, the number is staggering! This guy spread so much seed around that I wouldn't be surprised if every tree on the islands bore some kind of resemblance to him - his sprem must be like pollen up there!

I'd be even less suprised to find a DNA match with myself and every single person born there since his time.
 
I always thought the first legend about a vampire
was vlad the impaler thats where bram stoker got his idea apperntly.
I was surfing the web and came across this on an Irish ghost site.

Abhartach

Location: Glenullen - General area, Abhartach's final resting place marked by a large stone with a thorn tree growing up from the side
Type: Vampire
Date / Time: Fifth century
Further Comments: In a battle for the throne, the warrior Cathrain killed his rival Abhartach. Abhartach, however, returned from the grave two days later and preyed on the locals. Cathrain once again killed the undead fiend, but two days later, Abhartach came back and continued his attacks. Cathrain discussed the problem with druids, who told him to stab his adversary through the heart with a weapon made of yew. This he did, and Abhartach never returned.

The tale is from the 5th century a lot older than vlad :)
anyone else know of a vampire story older than vlad?
 
Bram Stoker got the name Dracula from Vlad Tepes for his vampire tale, but I'd imagine that the fear of the dead returning to prey on the living is as old as mankind.
 
I recall reading a few legends about vampires that were much older than Vlad the Impaler. I had a couple of books on vampires when I was little (I wanted to be one - no kidding). I can't remember any of them now, but I do recall that there were a few different kinds, depending on the culture, and that the one I found most disturbing didn't bite you and drink your blood, it stabbed you with it's pointy, hollow tongue and sucked the blood out of you. The image of that scared the crap out of me.
 
There's a lot of old legends from all over the place that have vampiric traits. Romania and the rest of eastern Europe do have enduring and ancient motifs, but there are many varieties - most can't fly, not all drink blood, few can shape-shift and in the main are more akin to zombies, often motivated by revenge or to right an old wrong. In some of the legends they behave more like ghosts, and indeed in some mythologies ghosts, zombies, ghouls and vampires are all lumped together as "the undead". In Romany tradition, the undead are more likely to curse a family with bad luck, and follow them in the shadows, just out of sight but nonetheless present. they may even take the form of an incubus or succubus, which in themselves are archetypes that goes back to pre-history.

Staying in the ancient world, the Babylonians had a demon called Lilitu who drank blood of children by night: she eventually morphed into the Hebrew Lilith, who was Adam's first wife until she descended to become queen of the demons. She and her daughters were supposed to attack people of any age to steal their life-force, though this is usually interpreted as their blood. There was a type of ghoul in Indian mythology that possessed and reanimated corpses, again to walk around by night, that were purported during the day to hang from trees or cave ceilings like bats.

The Greeks had a very old tradition, observed until quite recently, of burying certain corpses believed to be at risk of becoming vampires on small deserted islands as it is believed they cannot cross moving water.

For Dracula, Stoker amalgamated bits of each to create his character - a kind of super vampire. Any suave charisma can be traced back about as far as that - sophisticated vampires prior to Stoker are invariably demons who happen to have vampiric traits, and so are operating on a completely different level. Forget the cape and civilised discourse and "the cheeldren of the night" - a shambling, snarling mute would be closer to the mark. Basically, if you were to make a vampire movie, but stuck to original sources rather than post-Stoker, you'd probably end up with something that looked a lot more like Dawn of the Dead than Interview with the Vampire.
 
RE:vamps

Thankyou for the input stuneville.
very informative.
 
LaurenChurchill said:
I recall reading a few legends about vampires that were much older than Vlad the Impaler. I had a couple of books on vampires when I was little (I wanted to be one - no kidding). I can't remember any of them now, but I do recall that there were a few different kinds, depending on the culture, and that the one I found most disturbing didn't bite you and drink your blood, it stabbed you with it's pointy, hollow tongue and sucked the blood out of you. The image of that scared the crap out of me.
I think you might be referring a book that was collated in the Usborne Guide to the Supernatural world - if that's what it was called after all! It was a creepy thing that merged other books on ghosts, vampires, werewolves etc. I should still have mine somewhere, but that scared the crap out of me as a kid!
 
How is Vlad Tepes a vampire?

Stoker borrowed his nickname in 1897 for his novel. The character's history was an extremely veiled account of Vlad's life. But that doesn't mean that the main character IS Vlad.

I've not read a single account that says that Vlad was a vampire.
 
I didnt say Vlad was a vampire i just said thats were stoker seemed to get
his vampire idea from tho apparently not due to what i read about a 5th century irish vampire ...wich is the earliest i can find!
 
PlagueRider said:
I think you might be referring a book that was collated in the Usborne Guide to the Supernatural world - if that's what it was called after all! It was a creepy thing that merged other books on ghosts, vampires, werewolves etc. I should still have mine somewhere, but that scared the crap out of me as a kid!

Yeah probably. I had a lot of the usborne books. This one was smaller than the other ones I had though. I remember it was specifically about vampires. And I recall in one of the books there was an image of a snake with a cat's head. That scared the carp out of me too.
Weird things scared me. Scary things didn't. Go figure. :?

Edit: Heh. Just realised I wrote "scared the carp outta me. I'll definitely be saying it like that from now on :D
 
i would love to know where the first vampire came from, they are truely fascinating to me.
 
"Vampire" unearthed in Venice plague grave

Thu Mar 12, 2009 1:24pm EDT

By Daniel Flynn ROME (Reuters) - Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

"This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire," Borrini told Reuters by telephone. "This helps ... authenticate how the myth of vampires was born."

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 -- in which the artist Titian died -- on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse's teeth, and vampires became known as "shroud-eaters."

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the "undead" were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

"To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there," said Borrini. "It's possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized." ...

SOURCE: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEno ... RU20090312
 
I've just spent a very enjoyable and nerdy day reading the whole of this thread and e-meandering around all (well, most of) the sites and stories referenced. I have alternatively been shouting at the computer and going "oooh, that's cool."

My academic background includes a period of study of the politics of visual representation, and when I was learning all the language and tricks of critically deconstructing images, I realised it all happily fitted in with my earliest interest in the paranormal and associated folklore.

I read Stoker's Dracula just as I got to Uni, in the late '90s, and the vampire myth of disease, sexuality, blood and death felt to me to be appropriate to ideas about AIDS, although in the earliest development of the stories of course it'd've been TB and rabies. The oral tradition of fairy tales and campfire stories impart valuable information and warnings of how to avoid the sickness and examples of early non-scientific ideas of what to do if the worst happens.

One of my 3 tutors' pet topics was Buffy and all the various representations contained therein.... although we've discussed all sorts of other subjects, I've not yet put it to her that the 1990s resurgence in interest in vampirism, and it's new sexy wardrobe, was a reaction to the threat of Aids, made slightly safer by advances in medicine that have all but stopped it being as deadly as it first was in the west.

I really must see what she thinks.
 
Your theory makes a lot of sense - I've studied cultural theory and I could dissect Buffy til the cows come home.

It's particularly interesting that although much is made of the sexual symbolism behind the idea of the vampire, the character of Angel is effectively neutered in the early series of Buffy - he does not feed and is not permitted the release of sexual ecstasy. The vampire is made safe and sanitised in the 90s landscape - to link with your theory perhaps this is because now society is aware of how to protect itself from STDs and they no longer hold any fear? Buffy is ALWAYS able to eliminate the vampire threat.

Of course, later in the final couple of series we see Buffy actively seeking out a dangerous, thrilling and ill-advised relationship with the vampire Spike. This is a very different experience because it is definitely sexual and both parties get satisfaction from it. Haven't quite worked out what that symbolises yet...
 
Since films like The Lost Boys (1987) and Interview with the Vampire (1994), the mainstream cultural idea about vampires has become a creature of the night; a being for whom ageing has stopped, usually allowing them eternal youth; the threat is of sexual intoxication that results in the loss of your life, and eternal undeath is a state of life limited only by the need to feed and avoid daylight (read as getting HIV, taking medication and using a condom?). The loss of grace, or your mortal soul, which used to be attached, is no longer the fear (society's not that religious anymore). Vampirism can be managed, and the afflicted can live an almost normal life, as long as they abstain for the behaviour although they are pathologically driven to do it. Given that, Vampirism would appear to be sex itself in the age of AIDS.



Ooh great Myrtlee! Maybe I could bounce some ideas off you some time?

Somehow I managed to miss out on Buffy when it was being broadcast, and have probably seen the most important episodes (to get the gist of what was going on), but not in chronological order, so I'm all over the place. I've just started occasionally immersing myself in box sets to try to figure it out. My OH loves Buffy, but gets a bit sick of me going off on different tangents, armed with the back of an envelope, a pen, and a wild look in my eyes, about how Buffy either sets up, questions, subverts, then replaces or occasionally reaffirms various ideas about women, the paranormal, sexuality, religion, family, race, life, the universe and everything.

There was another lass on my course who'd just got her BA in painting with a dissertation about vampirism in surrealist art, and was moving on to representations of the werewolf for her MA. We had some verrrrry cool conversations. Werewolves are my favourite creatures, and I'm still trying to figure them out. (Mine was about the inability of photography to represent any minority as anything but a stereotype...
The tutor who was into Buffy's other pet subjects were the Alien films and Elvis. The other 2 tutors on the course were experts on (among other things) Frida Kahlo, religious and sexual symbolism in the gardens of English stately homes of the 16th-18th centuries, the map of the London Underground and miniaturised reconstructions of sea battles of the 2nd world war. I bloody loved that course!)
 
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