Vampires

By Judyth A McLeod

Vampires offers a bite-sized overview of the ever-mutating vampire, a phenomenon created by primal human fears of blood-sucking monsters.

Vampires offers a bite-sized overview of the ever-mutating vampire, a phenomenon created by primal human fears of blood-sucking monsters. The book delves into ancient vampiric beliefs including the Chinese hopping vampire Jiangshi and Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, as well as Gothic horrors from the late Middle Ages. The evolution of vampires in literature, film and television is comprehensively covered, from the iconic Dracula tale, Stephen King's Salem's Lot to Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' series; Nosferatu, the first Hollywood take on vampires and modern films such as the Blade trilogy and New Moon; and popular TV shows including The Twilight Zone, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pier 9
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781742662572

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Vampires seem to evolve in parallel to humanity. As our world view has changed, so has theirs. We can read the changing culture of Europe and, more recently, of America through the infinitely mutable archetype of the vampire.

Fear of vampires, a name that would not be used until the nineteenth century, began more than 5000 years ago with the Sumerian belief in the undead, those who wandered the earth after being turned away from the gates of the underworld. Many had been condemned for their wickedness, but others were refused entry for no more than the failure of relatives to give the correct attention to burial rituals. Some of the wandering undead were innocuous, but others were devils capable of killing babies and invoking terrible revenge on those they sought out. The revenants of the medieval period were also the wandering undead, ghouls, creatures of the dark, often but not always blood-sucking, and widely believed to spread the plague as well as attack the living. They had their counterparts, variously named, throughout a deeply religious and fearful Europe, and they represented a twisted form of eternal life, the dark promise of an Antichrist.

In the eighteenth century, our belief in the undead reached hysterical levels, particularly in Eastern Europe. It followed a similarly fear-fuelled century created by an obsession with witchcraft that ended in the persecution and death of many innocent women, not the least of whom was Joan of Arc.

No longer unknown devils, vampires became the recently buried dead from your street, your village. Fuelled by ignorance of the mechanisms by which diseases spread and the basic forensic events following burial, vampire hunters exhumed and dispatched hundreds of corpses by driving a stake through the heart, decapitation or immobilisation of the limbs.

Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula (1897), was not the first to write a vampire story about a recognisably modern vampire. Dr John Polidori, whose novella, The Vampyre, featured a Byronic vampire named Lord Ruthven, wrote the first fictional vampire story in English. Stoker would have been influenced by the creation of this aristocratic vampire. Even the first lesbian vampire book, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), appeared before Stoker’s novel. Dark vampire stories were also very fashionable in France and Germany at the time, but their protagonists were far less sartorially elegant: they resembled the

dreaded nosferatu.

If vampires of previous eras were the hideously decomposing undead carrying pestilence in their wake, or blood-engorged creatures of the night returning to their inadequately secured coffins in village graves, by the beginning of the twentieth century they enjoyed a place in high society and developed an aristocratic elegance, a nice turn of phrase, a taste for opera cloaks, a dark wit…and nasty canines. Dracula was sexually attractive, sophisticated, dominating, mysterious and wicked, just the thing to make a Victorian maiden’s heart flutter during an era of sexual repression. The blood-sucking count was all the more sinister for his refined and remote yet seductive manner.

The vampires of the twentieth century became either muscular knights with a conscience who fought on the side of good, or police detectives and journalists by day and vampire hunters and slayers by night. Sensitive and increasingly human, they were the stuff of tragedy rather than horror. With its suggestion of homoeroticism, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) evoked the sexual revolution of the 1970s. In The Vampire Lestat (1985), her 200-year-old aristocratic vampire Lestat was equally decadent, a beautiful creature who mirrored the 1980s era of yuppies and every hedonistic excess. Queen of the Damned (1988), on the other hand, reflected our growing fascination with the early ancient world and an anticipated Armageddon-style event in our own times.

But by the early twenty-first century, ever adaptable vampires had become teenagers with good hearts, fighting their blood lust with vegetarian diets or synthetic blood supplies. They fell in love with virgins (although it’s worth noting that virgins have remained the favourite prey of both straight and gay vampires since Stoker’s book appeared in 1897). They died for love, they sought redemption, they became noble. Above all, they became exceedingly beautiful, but in an almost asexual way.

In parallel with their change of heart, they developed a whole array of new or contradictory characteristics. Some walked freely about by day, protected by nothing more than designer sunglasses. They shimmered in the light, levitated, shape shifted into bats or wolves, became invisible, possessed supernatural strength, were unimpeded by sea or running water, frequently retained their image in mirrors, were tolerant of religious paraphernalia, could eat a garlic-charged pasta with the best, and had no need to receive an invitation to cross a threshold. How is a girl to recognise them any more?

For creatures that crave darkness, vampires seem to be enjoying the spotlight. They have been the subject of an explosion of books, comics, movies and television series. They have been constantly, intimately and controversially analysed by academia, imitated and admired by Goths and become the focus of a vampire subculture that, fortunately, is largely confined to role playing. Vampires have not only inspired pop music groups but have also been the subject of numerous learned medical diagnoses, from porphyrism, tuberculosis and rabies to venereal disease and any number of psychiatric conditions, including lycanthropy. They have also become an inevitable blood-sucking metaphor for everything from class war and colonialism to rampant capitalism.

It was almost inevitable that teenage love stories would intersect with vampires in our time. Evil, violent blood-sucking monsters are still portrayed, but they have become the bad guys, the source of conflict in modern movies and books. In yet another generational shape change, the vampire now has the traditional attractions of the bad boy with the reassurance of the good-boy-at-heart, a powerful but safe sexual combination for an increasingly conservative world. Predictably, the Far Right share the world’s love affair with the virginal vampire. Puritanical restraint, in whatever form, is a welcome message.

But what form will our ever-mutating vampire take in the future? Underneath the constant melding of form and attitude there still lies the powerful archetypal vampire, capable of infinite evil, the darkest creature haunting our imagination and offering eternal, infernal life. We may not sleep so comfortably when the next vampire incarnation emerges.

It is really ourselves we should fear. At times throughout history, mass hysteria has overcome all rational thought, and consigned us back to our darkest version of ourselves. We need look no further than our excessive reaction to the events of the twenty-first century — our fearfulness of terrorism, globalisation, refugee movements — to understand how little we have progressed.

I

ANCIENT VAMPIRES

The dark fear

In the dark recesses of our minds, deep in the primeval id, lurk devils, demons and unknown horrors. In this eternal midnight, vampires — with their promise of a life-draining, fear-fuelled transition into a rapturous death, and beyond — haunt our dreams.

The three great evidences of life — blood, breath and procreation — are a sacred triumvirate around which our most terrible and primal fears have evolved. The uncontrollable loss of blood, the final expiration of the spirit, and the death of a newborn child have all been the seeds of horrifying myths that have evolved worldwide. Vampire-like creatures are among our oldest fears. Some drain their victims of blood, some feed on the life force itself, while others satisfy their monstrous appetites with newborn babies. Are these myths so universal that we are bound together by some dark force-field of archaic memory? Do we have a fatal gene for darkness and fear rather than joy? Or is there some real basis for our fear of vampiric creatures?

The demon Lilith

Vampires seem to have been with us always. Belief in vampiric entities and their activities has existed in the most highly advanced cultures of all periods, dating back at least 5000 years to the first known civilisations of Sumer, Akkad and the Indus Valley, and it has continued, albeit with cultural variations, into the twenty-first century.

Descriptions of vampire-like demi-goddesses and demons are found in our oldest known texts, which were excavated in Sumer, in the region of modern-day Iraq. The area around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, bordered to the east by the almost impassable high mountain folds of the Zagros Mountains, was known from ancient times as Mesopotamia. The region where the two great rivers almost converge became known as Babylonia but first it witnessed the rise of two great civilisations — the cities of Sumer, which developed in about 4000 BC in the complex delta region on the Persian Gulf, and the land of Akkad further inland.

By 3100 BC, the Sumerians had created a highly advanced civilisation that boasted a remarkable knowledge of engineering, hydrology, agriculture, geometry, mathematics, astronomy and medicinal herbalism. They built monumental architecture, such as stepped pyramids; engineered roads; invented sailing boats and wheeled chariots; controlled the floodwaters of the Euphrates; and drained the marshes of the delta with complex canal systems, creating fertile polders thousands of years before the Dutch.

They also invented writing, and left behind a literature that survives to this day in the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC). It includes the earliest (and very similar) versions of two biblical stories: the first of Moses in the bulrushes — the hero of the Sumerian story is Sargon the Great, King of Akkad — and the second of the Great Flood, including the building of an ark under divine instruction, its resting place on a high mountain and the release of the three doves. The stories may predate the Old Testament by as much as 1000 years, and it has been proposed that Abraham, who was born in the once vibrant city of Ur, which flourished from about 2800 BC, may have taken the Babylonian stories with him when he left in c. 1800 BC.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh is the first known reference to a female demon-goddess, Lilitu, who would metamorphose several times as her story was passed on and adopted by a number of civilisations of the ancient world. In the process, she would change from a rather nasty but not exceptional Sumerian storm demon to become the embodiment of all the world’s darkest deeds and acquire a vampiric reputation.

According to one of the tales related in this epic story of gods and mortals, a huluppu tree was ripped out of the ground and its canopy shredded by a great storm. The tree was tossed into the Euphrates River, then rescued, replanted and tended by the goddess Inanna in her sacred grove. She intended the tree, when fully grown, to be made into a throne and a bed for her use.

The tree grew big, its trunk bore no foliage,

In its roots the snake who knows no charm set up its nest,

In its crown the Imdugud-bird placed its young,

In its midst the [dark] maid Lilitu built her house —

The always laughing, always rejoicing maid,

The maid Inanna — how she weeps.

The goddess Inanna first appealed in vain to her brother Utu for help in dealing with her stricken tree and then to her other brother, Gilgamesh, the great warrior of Uruk. After conquering the monstrous snake that could not be charmed and frightening away the bird and its young, Gilgamesh so frightened Lilitu with his enchanted bronze Axe of the Road that she smashed her way out of the trunk of the huluppu tree and fled back into the wasteland.

The Imdugud-bird, later identified by some authorities as the Anzu bird, was a monstrous creature with great claws, the head of a lion and the body of an eagle, and it was so powerful it could attack bulls, although it also preyed on babies. Later depictions combined the head and wings of a massive eagle with a human body, or a winged eagle with human gait and arms and protected by layers of chain mail.

The link between the beautiful temptress Lilitu and the monstrous serpent coiled through the ailing tree in the sacred grove may well be associated with the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in Eden. In some early stories Lilitu was blended with a particularly malevolent Mesopotamian blood-drinking and death-dealing demon called Lamashtu. One of her powers was to shrivel the foliage of trees, and that may indeed explain why Inanna’s careful tending of the replanted tree was unsuccessful.

Descriptions of the Sumerian demon Lilitu became the stuff of horror–fantasy as her story was passed on. In Assyria, she had an evil reputation as a harpy-like demon with long talons who attacked women and children and spread disease. In later Babylonian mythology she was depicted as an evil succubus called Lilith, a beautiful demonic prostitute who had sexual relations with men, sucking from them their psychic energy and potency, and thereby incarnating one of men’s greatest fears. Together with her evil daughters, Lilith entered into Hebrew stories, in which she is depicted as feeding on the fresh and innocent blood of newborns. To the Akkadians she was synonymous with disease and was associated with the screech owl, a connection later perpetuated by the Romans in their vampire stories. She was also associated with snakes (she has been equated with the evil and seductive serpent in Eden) and lions (hence the lion-headed appearance of the Anzu bird). In some texts she has also been synonymous with the ‘seven witches’ or ‘seven demons’.

In the medieval period, according to The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a document of mysterious origin that dates to between the eighth and tenth centuries AD, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, before Eve. There are earlier texts that also support this idea. As Lilith was created from clay, in the same manner as Adam (according to part of the Genesis text), she refused to be treated as an inferior by him or to lie under him. He in turn demanded to lie on top, stating: ‘For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Not surprisingly, Lilith angrily took her leave. Three angels — Sanvi, Sansanvi and Semangelaf (variously spelt) — begged her to stay, but she refused. As a result of her disobedience, she was cast out and forced to roam the world in monstrous

Reviews for Vampires

[seldombites · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For the most part, this book is a fascinating and informative dive into the history of vampires and vampire-like creatures around the world. I was interested to learn just how far back in time vampire legends exist, and just how similar are the stories in vastly different societies. It is certainly enough to make you wonder.Most of this book is well written, if necessarily brief. Unfortunately I felt that the entire work is let down by the final chapters. When discussing the vampire in entertainment (books, TV, film), the author is presented with a golden opportunity to discuss how the portrayal of vampires has evolved over time and assess how this reflects the changing fears and attitudes of society. This opportunity was missed, however, as the final chapters degenerated into nothing more than a long, boring list of vampire novels, movies and TV shows.As it stands, I would recommend reading the book, but skip the final few chapters. Had the final chapters been handled properly, I would have given this book a perfect score.