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Vampires

"No one holds command over me. No man. No god. No Prince. What is a claim of age for ones who are immortal? What is a claim of power for ones who defy death? Call your damnable hunt. We shall see who I drag screaming to hell with me."
- Mark Rein Hagen

Vampires, at least to me, are the most mystical, beautiful, and mysterious of all mythical creatures. Their existence, whose beginning is unknown, is eternal. However, eternity here is considered as a plague, a curse, instead of a merit. Their only need is that blood, the primal essence of any living creature. Living in eternal night, for the sun is also their destroyer, these powerful creatures rule the darkness.

Folklore:
Many people have different theories according to their origins... Some say they are the offspring of Caine, the first murderer, killer of his own brother; and therefore each one carries Caine's curse: to live in darkness, to eat ashes and drink blood, and mainly, the fact that Death will never come for you. They are the primal undead, still capable of maintaining a physical body in perfect shape. Another unknown fact, is if vampires are either weakened or repelled by holy objects: be they crosses or holy water. Another destroyer is, of course, the stake through the heart; which in some Vampire Lore merely sets the vampire in a state of torpor, or paralytic unconsciousness. However, the most popular Vampire Lore declares that a stake through the heart will kill a Vampire. Honestly, I still haven't met a vampire, but when I do, I'll be sure to ask him or her.

Other sources indicate the origins of vampires to the great Count Dracula. It is important to note the true facts upon which this theory is based upon... First of all, there REALLY was a Count Dracula, whose true name was Vlad Tepes. Also known as Vlad the Impaler, he was a Wallachian Prince who ruled Transylvania from 1448 to 1476. Transylvania, for those who like trivia, means "The Land Beyond the Forest"; and was a Romanian Province. Now, it is divided between southern Hungary and northern Romania. Vlad was known as the Impaler because he liked to impale his victims alive on long stakes and watch them die. He was known to do some pretty atrocious acts like: inviting beggars to his castle for dinner, then setting the dinner room on fire with all the beggars inside. Also, it is said that he murdered 600 merchants because they were too rich. In any case, Vlad was taken by Bram Stoker, which used him as the protagonist for his novel: "Dracula". Little did Stoker know how much his novel would affect the course of human events.

In European Folklore, Vampires were the restless spirits of the dead, particularly dead witches, murderers, thiefs and suicides. These rose from their graves at night to feed upon the blood of the living, their only sustenance. Because of these legends, many a time the councils of small villages all over Europe invoked meetings to go to the graveyards, and exhumate (or dig up) recent graves or graves believed to contain vampires, and stake them through the hearts. It is interesting to note why people really believed they were vampires... you see, when someone staked a dead body, the body would move, as a reflex, and would make a humming sound. In some cases, bodies opened their mouths and let out groans; and in most cases, as a reflex also, the bodies opened their eyes. I'm sure if you would have been there, over two centruries ago, without any knowledge of science, you would have believed these were vampires. However, true vampires, if there are any ( and I hope so), are smarter (hopefully) than a dead body with a lust for blood.

An interesting Lore was recently created by White Wolf, Inc. for their game: "Vampire: The Masquerade" ; which contains a more likely story, origin and ideology about vampires, also a much more interesting one. Here, vampires are divided among clans, each clan being presided by an AntiDiluvian, or one of the children of Caine.

Supposedly, there are 13 clans, each one having different disciplines, powers, and abilities. These Clans, whose leader gives name to the clan, and a brief description are given below....

1. Tremere
They are Vampire-Wizards. Powerful and united, they are the most mistrusted clan of them all. They have learned how to use their vampiric blood to enhance their magical abilities and have created a series of incredibly powerful rituals for their benefit; ranging from boiling the blood of anyone they touch to a ritual which allows them to walk freely out in the sun and even catch a suntan. Their power is so that they made themselves vampires; in other words, no vampire embraced them.

2. Toreador
These are the Vampire Artists. Their primal purpose is to create and protect art. They are beautiful, and are probably the clan which most relates to mankind.

3. Ventrue
These are the Vampire Politicians, always meddling with leadership and trying to take control of everything.

4. Brujah
These are the reckless Vampires. Their basic want, after blood, is freedom and having fun. Usually they ride bikes and most love leather.

5. Malkavian
These are the crazy Vampires. They believe that only through madness can the truth and enlightenment be obtained. They are awfully funny, and make great companions. However, some are not as crazy as they might want you to believe.

6. Gangrel
These are the shapeshifting Vampires. The ability to morph their bodies, basically changing organs or turning themselves into animals, primarily huge bats or wolves. These are the vampires who have the closest relationships tp animals. In fact, one of their abilities is to talk to animals. I myself have always wondered what those damn dogs are always saying when they bark.

7. Nosferatu
These are the deformed, bald-headed and horribly looking vampires. They almost always stick to the shadows, and live in sewers. They are the Vampire Spies, since they are experts at keeping themselves hidden. Ruthless, yet sentimental, they are a powerful bunch of vampires desperately seeking plastic surgery.

8. Lasombra
These vampires have the power to control and manipulate shadows. They are quite powerful and feared by many.

9. Tzimisce
These vampires are physically unstable. Their bodies are in constant morphing, almost always deformed into some pretty odd forms. Their minds are almost always as unstable as their bodies, yet they always seem to have a purpose.

10. Ravnos
These vampires are chaotic and reckless. They thrive in doing evil things and usually hang out around pagans, satanists, and anything that has a perverted, evil side to it.

11. Giovanni
These are basically the Mobsters in the Vampire World. They are intelligent, smart, ruthless and cunning. Little is known about them.

12. Salubri
These vampires are the Healers. They have a third eye on their forehead, and they can only drink the blood of those who give it willfully. They are also the ones who truly believe in Goodness. According to legend, Tremere himself drank the blood of Salubri, turning himself into a vampire. These vampires are also the ones who truly believe in Golconda (or Vampire Enlightenment) where a vampire's need for blood is no more.

13. Samedi
These vampires are even more hideously deformed than the Nosferatu, because they are not merely deformed, they are decayed. There bodies didi not stop rotting when they became vampires, therefore, they continue to rot. Their primal discipline is to decay anything else they touch, and cause things to rot. They usually prefer to hide themselves, but come out a lot more than the Nosferatu do. Also, they are known to have originated in Caribbean, primarily Haiti.

These vampires, however, have formed larger groups by combining their clans for a greater purpose. Those who believe in the Masquerade (a belief that vampires and humans CAN co-exist and that vampires can live in the human world as humans), have created the Camarilla. The clans who belong to the Camarilla are: Tremere, Venture, Toreador, Brujah, Malkavian, Nosferatu and Gangrel. Another belief is that of no belief at all, where you, as a vampire, do whatever you want. These are called the Anarchs, and are composed of members of any clan who wish to be free and spontaneous. Another belief is that vampires should BE VAMPIRES and let the humans know they are vampires. These believe that being a vampire is power, and should be encouraged, as well as a vampiresque behavior. These believers in pure and outright Vampirism are known as the Sabbat. The clans of the Sabbat are the Lasombra, Tzimisce and any member of other clans who believe in the Sabbat ideal. The members of Camarilla clans who choose to be Sabbat or are embraced within the Sabbat, are known as "clan name" Antitribu. (i.e. Ventrue Antitribu).

As you can see, this Vampire Lore expresses a very detailed view into the vampire world. I deeply believe in the vampire ideal, and am very interested in your comments and ideas. Please feel free to e-mail me about your theories and ideas.

Facts:
The folklore of the vampire has only a slight connection with the fiction, much the way the folklore of ghosts has little to do with the movie Ghostbusters. Most people aren't aware that, throughout European history, there have been extensive and detailed accounts of bodies in graveyards being dug up, declared to be vampires, and killed. I took some years out of my life to study these accounts and find out what in the world could have caused people to set out to kill dead bodies. And here we encounter our first real/non-real boundary: the digging up of the bodies was unquestionably real -- indeed, beyond any doubt. We know this because we have a vast array of evidence to that effect, both archaeological and documentary, including highly detailed accounts written by literate outsiders, who gave information that they could not possibly have made up. For example, unless you are a forensic pathologist, you probably don't know that decomposing bodies may undergo a process called "skin slippage," in which the epidermis flakes away from the dermis. The following account, from the eighteenth century, tells of the exhumation of a man named Peter Plogojowitz and remarks on this phenomenon: "The hair and beard -- even the nails, of which the old ones had fallen away -- had grown on [the corpse]; the old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled away, and a new fresh one had emerged under it. . . . Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him." When we see remarks about skin slippage, we know that the author has either (a) read a text on forensic pathology or (b) looked at, or heard about, a decomposing corpse.

For now, let's slow down and look carefully at the observations in the account we have quoted:

1. "The hair and beard have grown on the corpse." Sorry, this just doesn't happen, even though many people believe it even today. It can appear to happen, however, because the skin may shrink back after death and make hair and beard more visible.

2. "The nails have fallen off and new ones have grown." The nails do in fact fall off as a body decomposes. The Egyptians were aware of this and dealt with it either by tying the nails to the fingers and toes or by putting metal thimbles over the tip of each finger or toe. The "new nails," according to Thomas Noguchi, former medical examiner for Los Angeles, were probably an interpretation of the nail bed.

3. "The old skin has peeled away and new skin has emerged under it." This is skin slippage: epidermis and dermis. Many accounts remark also on the "ruddy" or "dark" color of the corpse, a phenomenon that may be caused by decomposition and a variety of other things as well. Contrary to popular belief, the face of a corpse is not necessarily pale at all, since pallor results from the blood draining from the tissues. If the person was supine when he or she died, the face of the corpse may be pale; if prone, the face may be dark. Those parts of the corpse that are lower than the rest may be gorged with blood that, having lost its oxygen, is dark and causes the skin to appear dark as well. And the parts that are under pressure -- where the weight of the body is distributed -- may be light in color because the (now dark) blood has been forced away from the tissues. The dark coloration resulting from the saturation of the tissues with blood is called "livor mortis" or "lividity." It is this phenomenon that allows medical examiners to determine whether a body has been moved after death: If lividity is present where it shouldn't be, or not present where it should, then the body has been moved.

4. "There is fresh blood at the mouth." The adjective "fresh" is less puzzling if we suppose that the author hasn't actually tested the blood for freshness. What he was surely observing, and confused by, was the fact that the blood was liquid. This was remarked on many times by people who observed such exhumations. It is simply not unusual. In fact, blood normally coagulates at death, then either remains coagulated or becomes liquid again.1 The reason the blood migrates to the mouth is that the body, as it decomposes, bloats from the gases produced by decomposition, and this bloating puts pressure on the lungs, which are rich in blood and deteriorate early on, so that blood is forced to the mouth and nose.

And did you notice that we were just told why people believed that the dead sucked blood from the living? The standard theory about death was that it came from the dead, and when people dug up the first victim of an epidemic and found that he had blood at his mouth, they concluded that he had sucked the blood from the other people who had died. "Not without astonishment," says our author, "I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him." Moreover, the bloating of the body was taken for evidence that it was full to bursting with the blood of its victims.

So we have cleared up an old mystery merely by paying attention to the people who, centuries ago, tried to tell us about it. From here on things will be easier: If our informants tell us that the vampire "came to life and cried out" when they drove a stake through him, we shall accept the observation and reject the conclusion: Yes, a body would "cry out" if you drove a stake into it, because doing so forces air past the glottis -- but this is not because the body is still alive. Among modern medical examiners, there is remarkable agreement on both points.

The vampire lore did not die when people worked out forensic pathology: by that time it had become part of literature. The folkloric vampires had been peasants, but in the eighteenth century, authors were still reluctant to make peasants into major characters in stories, so the fictional vampire was moved into the upper classes. By the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), he had became a pallid count, rather than the ruddy peasant of the folklore. Along the way, Linnaeus named a Central American bat after the European vampire, since the bat lived on blood, and the fiction writers, noting this, added the bat to the store of their motifs. This is why, in modern movies, vampires are apt to turn into bats in the night, when they need to go somewhere quickly.

Oddly, when this material became fiction, it once again became "fact," for nowadays the media keep digging up not just scholars and pseudoscholars who talk about the folklore but also people who actually claim to be vampires. The scholars and the vampires are brought together by their common fate: The media trot them out every year around Halloween. The modern "vampires" derive their inspiration not from the perfectly good material from folklore, which in fact has been sadly neglected, but from the fiction, perhaps because it is more dramatic and coherent. The folklore is about cantankerous peasants who come back as spirits to torment their nearest and dearest, and this simply doesn't translate into a glamorous lifestyle. So our modern "vampires" drive hearses, cap their canine teeth, and wear cloaks when they go out at night. None of these things has anything whatever to do with the folklore of the vampire -- even the canines are an artifact of the fictional tradition. Some modern "vampires" claim a taste for blood and tell stories of raids on bloodbanks and of obliging friends who let them open a vein.

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