Barbarians sucking blood

fibi ducks

Active Member
I heard somewhere that there are farmers of livestock in east africa who harvest blood from their cattle - opeing a vein and then closing it again after they've tapped some. i also heard that this used to be much more common practice long ago when cattle were too valuable to just kill and eat. So blood puddings are maybe an ancient food type. This got me to thinking: when that sort of farming started, it must have been a short step on to thinking that the person over there had food in their veins too. Is this where vampire stories come from?

by the way, i made the title about 'barbarians' cos this used to be the term that was used for people who kept livestock for a living (as distinct from farmers and also savages - an archaic name for hunter gatherers as i understand it).
 

LegendofJoe

Active Member
I don't know too much about this, but I did see a history program about vampires once. It did not mention this.
The oldest vampire story actually is Chinese.
According to one book on vampires I read, the whole thing was spured on by people examining the graves of those who
died and finding that they did not decompose as much as was expected. The corpses also looked bloated and had some blood around the mouth.
This led to the belief that these were the undead, and that they came out of their graves to draw blood from the living.
Ofcourse we know today that people do not always compose that quickly, and that the bloating is due to a buildup of gases.
The vampire bat sucks blood from certain farm animals; so maybe there could be some comparisons between humans
and vampire bats in the ancient mind set.
The tribe that lives on only the cow's blood and milk I think is the Masai tribe.
 

Alejandro

Active Member
You must be talking about the Maasai, who come from southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, and also the Chagga in Tanzania. Animals' blood as human food is actually more common and more current than you might think, but incidentally more so in other places around the world than in Africa, the aforementioned two peoples being the only ones of whom I'm aware that do that on the continent. And in fact, with the continuing urbanisation and Westernisation of both Kenya and Tanzania, it seems like the practice, like many other old local traditions, will soon die out. On the other hand, the use of animal blood in the human diet is still quite the rage in numerous countries in the Americas, in Asia, and in western and northern Europe. In Ireland, bleeding live cattle was apparently done well into the 1800s. It was considered there, as is the case among the Maasai and the Chagga, to be a preventative measure against cattle diseases, so scarcity is not the only factor giving rise to the practice. (Black pudding, one of whose essential ingredients is blood, is still a staple breakfast food in Ireland today.)

Rather than the short step you're suggesting, I think it's quite the stretch to jump from using every part of an animal as food, which has always been done all over the world, to drinking human blood! By the same logic, since people are made of flesh, as well as blood, wouldn't the consumption of animals' flesh therefore lead meat-eaters in general to think of their fellow human beings as a meat-source? Hey, I'm just saying... :rolleyes:

The entities who are supposed to be the precursors of vampires, in most of the ancient cultures from which they originate, have always been supernatural beings, either evil spirits or revenants [dead people who have been reanimated by the power of evil spirits]. Revenants have a lot less direct interaction with humans in ancient myths and legends than they do in modern popular culture, in the latter of which we even have vampire and werewolf heroes. Traditionally there seem to be more connections between witchcraft and vampirism than between the latter and the use of animal blood as a foodstuff. If, on the other hand, one were to find a whole herd of his livestock mysteriously dead by blood-draining, then well... hence la Chupacabra in the Americas.

(By the way, while the term savage has been used archaically for hunter-gatherers, it is also pretty much synonymous with barbarian, rather than an antonym for it regarding pastoralism [livestock-keeping]. From the urban use of the word, both pastoralists and hunter-gatherers would be lumped together as barbarians.)
 

fibi ducks

Active Member
I like black pudding, and am glad that it could at least theoretically be made from live animals - i.e. not mean killing them in the process. Hi Alejandro - I wonder if the idea of this preventing diseases in cattle was related to bleeding humans with leeches. If you don't know I will ask the curator of the surgical museum down the road.

Of course there's a difference between sucking another humans blood - but leaving them living, and killing them and eating them. I used to be a vegetarian but ate dairy products with this in mind. I'd definitely feel a bit easier about vampirism than canibalism. Mind you I think I'd stop short if someone offered me some.

What is 'la Chupacabra'? Blood drained herds of cattle?
 

Alejandro

Active Member
Off the top of my head, bleeding live cattle to prevent them getting sick sounds the same in principle as clinical bloodletting of humans using leeches, but I honestly don't know enough about the latter or modern hirudotherapy to answer that with more authority than that. The curator-person would definitely be more equipped, methinks. I'll grant you that there is a higher level of gruesomeness in a human eating another human's flesh than drinking his/her blood, maybe for the same reason it seems less cruel to eat animal products without the death of the animals which produce them(?). Or maybe there's just something much more inherently visceral about the body of any creature being broken and ingested by another. Ancient Greek precursors of vampires, by the way, such as the Lamiai, Empousai and Mormolykeiai, consumed the flesh of young men in addition to drinking their blood.

La Chupacabra is Spanish for "The Goat-Sucker," the name of a mysterious animal (or a creature like one) rumoured since the mid 1990s to inhabit parts of the Americas, including Mexico, Central and South America, and southern parts of the US. The name comes from the animal's reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock, especially goats. The first reported attacks occurred in March 1995 in Puerto Rico. In this attack, eight sheep were discovered dead, each with three puncture wounds in the chest area and completely drained of blood. Since then there have been numerous more cases of such animal deaths all over the aforementioned parts of the Americas. The Wikipedia article on the creature has lots more info on the legend and attempted explanations thereof. If I recall correctly my first hearing of it was in an episode of the Cartoon Network cartoon Dexter's Laboratory, in which the titular boy genius discovers that Charlie, one of his lab experiment creatures, has become a semiurban legend in South America as a vampire-like goat-chewing monster whom the locals have entitled la Chupacabra. (But this is not the foremost scholarly explanation of the legend, though Dexter, being a scientific genius, might claim so :p)
 
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