I'll just copy a thread idea from another board over here, unless Chupa minds terribly. Hopefully it'll spark up some action...

So...a few theories on how the vampire myths came to be, ands what caused them. Feel free to add in your pro's and con's, as well as your own ideas. If you post a published article, or someone else's work, please add a link, or source when possible.

A True American Vampire Myth

The European settlers and African slaves brought the vampire mythology of their homelands to the New World. In some cases these myths became intertwined as settlers from many backgrounds melded into a single nation. While Native American mythology has some very fascinating monsters, some of them being flesh-eaters, others being shape-changers, none are true bloodsuckers.

Yet, there is a true "American vampire," one born of this young nation, one found only here in America. This vampire is much more than a meld of the beliefs of the Native Americans and those of our forefathers. The true "American Vampire" would have to be that of Hollywood. Let me explain: The vampire has been portrayed in Hollywood, since the original filming of Dracula (Tod Browning) to the recent filming of Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola) as a creature of the night who is suave, debonair, quite beautiful and hypnotically seductive. This vampire is a desirable creature, one that many mortals would become, yet in the ancient myths of other cultures, the vampire is an ugly, vile, evil creature, one that no mortal would choose to become.

While it is true that an Irishman wrote the novel that began it all, the story gave birth to two distinct interpretations of the vampire Dracula. F.W. Murnau (a German) created the first surviving film adaptation of the novel. In his "Nosferatu -- Eine Symphonie des Garuens" the Count was not suave, handsome, or even desirable. Count Orlock was ugly, with pointy ears, a bald head, and large pointy incisors. The vampire held true to the European myths, at least in physical appearance. Tod Browning brought a new image to the vampire with his filming of Dracula. Bela Lugosi portrayed the Count as a handsome creature of the night. He was very suave and debonaire, speaking in his Hungarian accent, hypnotizing women with his stare, and moving in a slow, yet smooth manner.

Women all over America fell in love with this Count Dracula, men all over America desired to be this Count Dracula. The Hollywood Vampire was born, a creature of myths from the old world blended with the American dream of beauty, sexual irresistibility, and immortality. Rarely has Hollywood portrayed the vampire as a despicable and ugly revenant. We have seen them become hideous creatures when exposed to sunlight or when hit with a bit of holy water. The body of the immortal is perfect and the behavior seductive.

However, you will be hard pressed to find any legend, regardless of origin, that paints this picture of the vampire. In a few cases, such as the Dearg-Due of Ireland, the vampire is a beautiful female that uses her beauty to seduce her victims. In most cases though the vampire is a walking corpse. It is not beautiful. It has no intelligence. He is no more than a re animated corpse that feeds on the blood of the living to sustain his re animated form.

The vampire we all know and love today has been created and refined over the years by Hollywood. Movies such as Dracula, The Lost Boys, The Hunger, and Dance of the Damned have continually fed the legend of the vampire as a desirable, beautiful creature of the night. Hollywood (as well as America's fiction writers) has, in fact, created a true American Vampire by combining the old myths (yes, staking the vampire, garlic, crosses, sunlight, native soil, and the like are found in the old myths) and the American dream of power, beauty, sexual irresistibility, and immortality. That vampire has become the "True American Vampire."


copyright 1994 - Andy Rose permission to reprint is granted freely

Rabies May Have Inspired Vampire Legend


NEW YORK, Sep 21 (Reuters) -- Mistaken for blood-thirsty ghouls, 18th century European rabies victims may have been the inspiration for the vampire legend, according to a report in the September issue of the journal Neurology.

Not only do people with rabies have symptoms strikingly similar to the traits ascribed to vampires, but the vampire legend also originated in eastern Europe in the 18th century -- the site of a major rabies outbreak in the 1720s, according to the study.

Rabies, a virus usually transmitted via the bite of an infected animal, can be tricky to diagnose, the study's author, Dr. Juan Gomez-Alonso told Reuters Health in an interview. Symptoms usually do not appear for at least a couple of weeks, and by then the bite has healed. Once symptoms have appeared, antirabies treatment is ineffective, and the infection is most often fatal.

"Even now we miss diagnoses in cases of rabies," Gomez-Alonso said. Citing an example in his study, Gomez-Alonso describes a relatively recent case in which a man presumed to be a "wandering lunatic" was found to be infected with rabies during an autopsy. "These missed diagnoses probably happened much more commonly in the 18th century," Gomez-Alonso added.

A neurologist at Hospital Xeral in Vigo, Spain, Gomez-Alonso decided to investigate the rabies-vampirism connection after watching a vampire movie in 1981.

"I had never seen a vampire movie before and I was struck by the similarities," he explained.

There are many, Gomez-Alonso reports in the study. For starters, not only people, but dogs, wolves, and bats -- animals traditionally associated with vampires -- can be infected with the rabies virus. Because the virus affects the limbic system, part of the brain that influences aggressive and sexual behavior, people with rabies tend to be aggressive, may attempt to bite others, and are "hypersexual," he writes. Since rabies also affects the hypothalamus, part of the brain that controls sleep, many patients suffer from insomnia, and are up and about in the middle of the night.

Rabies causes hypersensitivity to strong stimuli, as well, so patients are often repelled by light, by bright things -- such as mirrors, and by strong odors -- including the smell of garlic. Rabies victims may vomit blood, Gomez-Alonso explains. And since the disease causes hydrophobia, or aversion to water, they do not swallow their saliva, which can froth at their mouths, flecked with blood.

The disease can also cause facial spasms, in which the lips jerk back over the teeth, in an animal-like snarl. Moreover, rabies is more common among men than women, as is vampirism, at least according to most vampire tales. Finally, rabies, like vampirism, can be transmitted via a bite, Gomez-Alonso writes. The infection, however, can also be transmitted via a scratch or across mucus membranes. Consequently, it can be contracted during sex with an infected partner, or by inhaling air in caves heavily populated by infected bats.

In addition to the medical evidence, Gomez-Alonso provides historical support for his theory. Digging through centuries-old European archives, he found records of a rabies epidemic among dogs, wolves and other animals in Hungary between 1721 and 1728, the time people first began to report sightings of "vampires." There were reports, for instance, of people "who have been dead for several years, or at least several months? seen to return, to talk, to walk, to infest the villages? to suck the blood of their close ones, making them become ill and eventually die."

Gomez-Alonso also found accounts of bodies, exhumed after burial, that appeared lifelike, and were filled with still-liquid blood. This also fits in with the rabies theory, he writes. When people die of collapse, shock or asphyxiation -- as is often the case with rabies -- their blood is often slow to clot. Moreover, the region of Hungary where the outbreak occurred is damp and cold many months of the year, significant because corpses take longer to decompose in the cold. "Their good appearance would also suggest the presence of saponification," he explains. "This process, characteristic of burials in humid places, transforms the subcutaneous tissues into a wax-like substance."

"Much evidence supports that rabies could have played a key role in the generation of the vampire legend," later popularized in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and numerous other books and films, Gomez-Alonso concludes. "This would be in accordance with the anthropologic theory that assumes that many popular legends have been prompted by facts. Under this approach, saying that the vampire is 'mere fiction' may be somewhat inappropriate."

SOURCE: Neurology 1998;51:856-859.

that is pretty weird indeed
well, do you belive it?

wow rabies and vampirsm thats really odd.

Very odd...but makes alot of sense. Thanks, I apreciated that lesson in history. ^_^

Dearg-due... nice obscure reference. Should I mention obafiyo, chihuatateo, penangallans, kingu, or tantalusi? Please oh please catch those references....

Anyway, I'm just going to patch in one of my previous posts, because it addresses precisely this issue.

This post does not have anything to do with vampires. It is only about the legends and stories about vampires.
IN MY OPINION:

It all started back with the ancient man huddled around a fire, watching the darkness and clutching the grainy haft of a crude hatchet. As soon as the human learned to communicate his feelings, he communicated fear of the dark, fear of death, fear of pain, fear of starvation, fear of the unknown... and eventually they took these fears and talked of them more in depth, until these fears had a face. They whispered of things that walked in the darkness, and they told stories about the dead that walked, and they dreamed of monsters that drank blood. The darkness was too much to fear, they centered their fear on something that might be in the darkness. Death is too big to fear, they focused their emotions on one part of death. Blood was too great for their fear, so they concentrated on one way to lose blood.
And the scariest stories were the ones that took all these elements, all these things that men feared, and made them all one creature. But to have such a thing, so monstrous, so unstoppable, so frightening, and wrap it all up together, they needed a balance. If Thrag and Ugg are telling stories in the darkness of the dead that come back in the night to drink blood, then they need to comfort themselves. They need to be reassured, so they tell stories, legends, "I know a guy who..." kinds of things. Since these monsters were too horrible to fight, there had to be methods, hidden knowledge, magic means to kill them. Like facing them when they are vulnerable in the daylight and staking them down. Every time they did this, they dispelled a little more of their fear of the darkness. Or maybe they would ring their campsites with hawthorne to keep the monsters away, and doing this alleviated their terror. Or keeping a holy item or a charm could keep one safe, and wearing such a thing cured them of their horror.
It took all the things that were too much for human minds, the things that will paralyze you with fear, and they put them into stories so that they could go on with their lives in relative peace. And they found ways to protect themselves so that they could banish all their worst fears. And the legends stayed, and propogated, and became a vital part of our culture.
After a while, thousands of years, the nature of our fears changed. We discovered the world, we lit the darkness with electricity, we found the vessels and valves that made our blood run, we documented death so thoroughly that it left us no mysteries. But we found new fears: Castration, rape, distrust of our fellow man, impotence, ostracism. And the vampire changed to reflect these new values, these new fears.
Enter Dracula.
The stake through the heart: symbolic rape. Decapitation: symbolic castration. By using these methods against our enemy, we reassure ourselves that we are greater than our opponent, and that these weapons cannot be used against us. After all, we're not staked and beheaded.
The monster in the shape of a man, who could be anyone... symbolic of the monsters that truly do walk among us, the psychotics and the serial killers, the criminals and confidence men and pickpockets.
The vampire became a sexually powerful being, ravishing and seductive and terribly strong, a symbol of what men wanted to be, and what men thought women wanted from them.
But yet the vampire was never one of us, among us, next to us, but never the same as us. Always set apart and different from us, and always the outsider.
To examine the modern vampire myth, the post-Stoker vampire myth, is to examine man's self-revulsion, self-loathing, man's disgust at what he is and what he could be, and at the same time to watch man revel in those same qualities.
The vampire is both what he hate and what he want to be, he is what he wish and what we guard against. He is a symbol of all forms of sexual dysfunction, yet he is a sexual predator. He is outcast and vulnerable but eternal and powerful. We fear to be outcast and vulnerable, we wish to be eternal and powerful. The vampire is a balance, it is the hidden symbol, the key to the human psyche. It is the most powerful theme in the whole of mythology, and it is the most elemental monster in legend, and it is the most gripping theme in modern fiction.

Now then, Meatros has requested that I change the names from Thrag and Ugg to Burt and Stephan, so here.
Oh, and StJohn mentioned that disease probably figured a large part in the mythmaking, and I have to agree with him on that score. Especially from the Black Death, carriers of disease were a powerful fear of the common population, and STDs have only compunded that element.

Ooh, I like that story...and, you'd be please to know I just posted the background of the Civateteos in the myths of the world thread here...hehe.

I personally have a thing for the Kappa vampires though...they're just so darn cute. :)

Lots of good information you posted, keep 'em coming!
BTW, what do you use for a source? You pulling from a dictionary or sumpthin??

Vampires are far older than people imagine. They have been around since before there was death, Since a vampire cannot die it reasons to say that it is stronger than death itself .And since the first living thing lived and died , Death was there to greet it. Every thing that has lived has died and became dust or whatever When the first living thing become alive and died , weather it was a jellyfish the most primitive life-form on earth died. The first type of fish died. The first type of mammel died .the first human died .It is stupid to say that vampires were created later on like in the 12th century.They are older and stronger tan death .Modern man cannot cheat death.Nothing it does can defeat death .Man has created ghosts. But only by dying. And once ghostshave been avenged they go to heaven, Ghosts die.Or will some day.There fore it is easy to say since vampires cannot die tey have been hidding in the shadows for a long time .

I'm surprised people have not heard about the rabies explanation. It is such an old and established one! :o

If Vampires existed before Death, they existed before the first living being died. So they were the first beings on the planet, yeah? Why would they look anything like us? :lol:

Books and websites. There's a bunch of sites with a little info on each, if you combine that, you get pretty much the whole picture. :) Oh, and the local librarians fears me...hehe.

The theory that mythological vampires are immortal doesn't mean they've been around since the dawn of time...it could just as well be a later mutation, or avenging spirits. You'll need a little more basis for your beliefs...

Bloodfangs:

I can't be bothered to dignify that.

Clearwitch:

Fascinating Rabies article, thank you. I do however dispute your American vampire theory. True the film vampire has become the dominant presence and has perpetuated the myth and shifted it greatly but the first filmic vampires are derived from gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. Poldori’s Short story, the recognised first vampire literature contained a rather graceful debonair monster Lord Wolfvayne, derived from ideas from the poet Lord Byron. Tod Brownings Dracula was taken almost in entirety from a stage production, written by a European. This is where Bela came from also, originally Lon Channey snr was cast but died shortly before production. There is quite clearly a Hollywood vampire however.

Khrymzynn:

This is a wonderful essay on the existence of monster myths, but it doesn’t explain the exact nature of the vampire myth. This all relates just as well to werewolves and the various boogiemen of folk tale. I mean you are right about them, but do you have any ideas on the reason for the potency of the blood drinking myth?

Blood is supposed to be the essence of life. Native americans used to drink the blood of their kill, to get the strength and other traits of the animal. The vikings would slaughter a pig, or sometimes a horse during their blôts, splatter the blood on their Godstatues, and drink the remainder. Jesus sent around a vial of wine, claiming it was his blood. Blood has, in many cultures, been assumed to hold not only the life, but the soul of the person.

By creating a boogeyman who not only attacked innocents, but drank their blood (i,e. stole their souls) they would have a character not only a lot scarier, but also relevant to the oncoming christian religion...after all, what is Satan supposed to do?

Just my ideas though...

And Taiwo...would you like to throw together something about how books has inspired the modern vampire myth? You seem to know a lot about it...

Some interesting theories here. I'm going to put in Csicop's explanation.

Here's a snippet that might explain the 'blood' angle:

Since before there was death?? In other words Vampires were around since before life arose? I thought a vampire *could* die.



You do realize that 'living' and 'dieing' isn't really a choice that organisms make, right?

Why is that stupid, at least there's evidence of it, which might I point out you have no evidence. This whole thread is begging the question.



Again, you are begging the question.

Clear witch:

Yes, not simply death of the body but of the entire eternal entity. (check out the alliteration)

The only vampire literature I have read at length is early gothic stuff (and only because they didn't make to many films in the 1800s, far too much like hard work). Obviously this was the jumping off point for early cinema (although apparently a long running cartoon character, Varney the vampire had a major effect) however the modern vampire has come largely from its filmic evolution, always the most powerful medium. Obviously some others influences have been introduced but only in small doses, so the modern vampire has become rather detached from its early gothic cousins. I could probably go through the process but that would be sort of book length, if there were a great deal of interest though I’d post snippets.

Perhaps a short version..?

Aaargh so much work. I only come here so I can avoid actual writing and discovering whether or not I have writers block……I’ll have a look at my notes, see if theirs anything I can bang out…..

i'm readin this book right now called"THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT"
by Brent Monahan...check it out ... :ph34r:

Care to explain excactly how that book has anything at all to do with this topic?

Khrymzynn, when you spoke of the origins of vampirism: it began with the origins of man and communication around the campfire...did you have a source to this... or is it purely your theory / opinion!? If you do have a source, would you mind citing it?? I don't mean to be rude of doubt you or anything, but I'm writing a research paper and I need to have cited souces! Thanks!