Vampire High

Righty, so we all know what a vampire is right? Are you sure?

The truth is that no one really knows what a vampire is because - drum roll please - they aren't real! Hey, you may think I'm stating the obvious here but there are people out there who truly believe in vampires, there are people out there who want to be one! But I'm getting ahead of myself here, we've got a long way to go before we get to those guys. So lets back ourselves up a bit, what is a vampire?

Well the modern myth of the vampire has our pallid villain (or these days hero) strutting round at night looking like a cross between Ville Valo and the Terminator. He has longish hair, sharp teeth and, if you believe Joss Wheadon and the Buffy gang, a rather bumpy forehead. He may be charming or rough, creepy or charismatic, sexy (in a living dead kinda way) and always dangerous. On the plus side he's not much for sun beds, garlic and though impervious to most ways to be killed decapitation and stakes through the heart are a sure fire way to get rid of them. But this is not how they started, truth is over the past 2000 years or so the vampire has experienced quite a bit of a make over!

Back to the beginning

But lets start with some of the oldest myths.

The vampire, in one guise or another, has been making appearances in various folklores around the world. There are tales of flesh eating monsters and demons that date back to Babylonia, Persia and Egypt. There are myths from ancient Greece of Lamia, who had the head of a woman and the body of a winged serpent, or the rather funky sounding vampire from China with red eyes and green fur, who sucked the victims qui or life source rather then their blood. India too had a goddess with some very vampiresque tendencies, the fanged goddess Kali who drank the blood of the demon Raktabija in order to kill him.

But perhaps the closest relatives to today's vampire has to be those from Eastern Europe - not that I'm sure he'd want to be seen with any of them! Here the vampires took on many characteristics, which varied from region to region. In Bulgaria they said you could tell a vampire by the fact they only had one nostril, in Brazil it was because of their furry feet and in Albania, following the foot theme, it was due to their choice in shoes! There were more generic traits to, aside from the obvious drinking blood and the vampire returning to kill family, neighbours and livestock, there was also the growth of hair and nails, pallid complexion and, obviously, long teeth.

Those Damned Vampires!

But not all the vampires of folklore were blood-sucking monsters, it took another element to unify and demonise vampires forever, and that force would be the church.

Tales of the living dead have always been around but it took two key ingredients to unify these beasties under the heading of vampire; they were fear and superstition. And nevermore so were these present then in the ninth century when the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches fought for the conversion of the Slavic people, turning pagan beliefs and folklore in to the stuff of nightmares.

Facts and Fangs

There may, of course, be some science behind the vampire legend, not in a Robert Neville sort of way; those ideas would come later. Partly it was to do with diseases, such as rabies, TB and to a greater extent Porphyria, a symptom of which is the retracting of the gums making the teeth look longer. All of these diseases had strange symptom which ninth or even the eighteenth century science was not really equipped to explain, and what could not be explained by reason became explained by superstition.

The vampires ability to rise from the dead also may have a scientific explanation. In part it was the general ignorance of what happens to the body after death, the fact that hair and nails keep growing for a period after death and the details of decomposition which can cause corpses to bloat, redden and produce gasses that can make the body appear to groan when moved, were not understood and were thought of as signs of a vampire.

A possibly scarier explanation would be the frequency of premature burials that took place. The distinction that science has shown us in the living and the dead weren't around then, and many people were interred whilst still very much alive. Of course some of these would wake up, find themselves in a coffin and fight their way out of the ground. It is not irrational to think that any family member who saw them after this wouldn't first think, "Ooops perhaps uncle Bob wasn't quite as dead as we thought he was", and welcome them back to the fold. But would, more likely, when seeing their beloved back from the dead, dirty, bloody and undoubtedly less then calm having clawed their way out of the grave, high tail it to the nearest church, or - if the poor guy had really bad luck - for the nearest pointy wooden object around!!

Bat Man

Of course we couldn't leave this introduction to the vampire of old without mentioning bats. Bats and dogs (and in China foxes), all carriers of rabies, the symptoms of which, as mentioned, could play a role in the origins of the vampire. But the bats association with the vampire legend was fickle. Like owls, as creatures of the night the bat was treated with suspicion in many traditions. However it was in the 16th century the conquistadors who, on exploring central and south America, discovered the, now famous, vampire bat that linked the winged nocturnal creatures on this new land with the legends of their old ones, though it took Bram Stoker to link these two forever.

Of course this isn't everything about the vampire, I could write books on the myths about vampires and their origins; people have! This is merely a brief glimpse at where mythology of one of horrors most popular villains, but for the vampire this was only the beginning; next he would be taken from freaky spook to charismatic killer, the vampires metamorphosis was about to begin...

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