Vampire

Abishai100

New Member
For so many centuries and epochs, the eerie folklore and myth of the bloodsucking vampire has endured. Strange stories about other-worldly humanoids have been around almost forever, or at least since the advent of tool-using civilization. Sure, cavemen didn't believe there were hairy werewolf cavemen, but even as early as Ancient Egypt, beliefs in other-worldly humanoid immortal 'greats' and 'titans' or 'elves' like Anubis (a 'wolf-man') of Egypt have flourished. Vampire folk-tales have been paralleled to myths about werewolves and witches, if not other cryptic humanoid 'beings' such as Bigfoot or the Mothman. Perhaps because vampires are night-like in consciousness, as the folklore usually goes, they pair nicely with prowling werewolves and sinister witches! Nevertheless, the vampire is unique in folklore and proportion, and there're so many cultural symbolic weighty tales afforded to many civilizations regarding the ingestion of blood which may not be simply purely basic or animalistic cannibalism. The propensity of such blood-drinking storytelling has given way to even scholarly notions of comparative dissections of Christianity and its devotion to the drinking of the blood of Christ! Of course, we don't entertain lackadaisical folk-talk like, "Jesus was a vampire!" formally or with more sophisticated analyses of folklore.

Regardless of the exact 'shape' of the development of vampire folklore, the vampire has remained a great interest among theologians, philosophers, poets, artists, musicians, and laymen. Vampires appear in iconic movies, comic books, cartoons for kids, and storybooks and great works of literature. Count Dracula is of course the most iconic 'real-life' vampire, said to be some comparison to a real-life historical figure named Vlad the Impaler from Europe. While American horror-films have evolved greatly and offer widely varied depictions of dark-side beings and eerily evil humanoids such as Leatherface and Candyman, a general social fascination with vampires and vampire-lore continues to be studied, and perhaps this is not completely unrelated to the basic and normal Christian spiritual fascination and devotion to the drinking of the blood of Christ. That is to say, the vampire (unlike the wolfman or Leatherface or the 'wicked witch of the West') is somehow eerily but tangibly 'normal' or even 'divine' or sophisticated. Indeed such 'worldly' accessibility of the vampire-tale reflects the popularity of rather lauded modern movies such as Francis Ford Coppola's
Dracula (Gary Oldman) and Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire (Tom Cruise).

Because the vampire is not simply a 'ghost-story' of a 'Halloween trick' for play and childish play, scholars have taken vampire mythology rather seriously. While a seemingly normal psychopath might drink blood of human victims and then claim to be a vampire(!), the vampire folk-tale represents a shockingly serious focus on the strange mystical intrigue associated with the ingestion of blood without the ingestion of flesh for cannibalism. That is to say, the vampire has become something of a 'fancy fare' because of the creature's rather 'pure' dark-side behavior. That's why many vampires are often characterized as sophisticated, worldly, fancy, or even religious. This is not like the werewolf or the wart-faced witch!

So, we might ask and wonder why the vampire is considered so 'mainstream' despite the creature's obvious opposition to the divine representation of the Christian ingestion of the blood of Christ! The vampire is obviously a blood-sucking ghoul and not Christian or divine or peaceful or normal or social or even civil in any way, in terms of the creature's anti-social activity, but the mythology and folklore surrounding the blood-sucker reflects a widespread human fascination with the 'presence' of blood-ingesting humanoids who stir in our normal human minds a curiosity about the mystical quality of human blood itself! Why, after all, would we normal Christians seek to 'deify' the rather offbeat activity of the mystical symbolical act of drinking the blood of Christ?

This thread is therefore meant to explore the inquiry, "Is the vampire a representation of human design itself?"



:cool:

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"After wandering around Romania for about one year as a post-graduate American student, I realized I'd become completely fascinated and hypnotized by the entrancing beauty and mystical quality of the enigmatic blonde-haired woman named Ilsa who claimed to me to be a real-life breathing vampire and even offered me the opportunity to drink some of her blood after making love to her! I had to return to my studies and read some of Bram Stoker's novel to ask myself if I was somehow hypnotized by Ilsa because something in me actually wanted me to believe that she was indeed a blood-sucking vampire. Was it because blood-sucking (say, from the neck) is such a sensual act? Is it because the vampire is somehow more worldly than the ghoulish wolf-man or Chupacabra or cannibal? Whatever is the rationale for the inner-workings of my own mind, I find myself inexorably drawn to Ilsa in Romania, and I do think strangely enough it's because I find myself completely overwhelmed by the tangible notion that her claim that she's a sensual vampire may be linked to my own 'human' interest in the visceral quality of blood or anemia! Am I 'becoming' a vampire because of Ilsa, or should I just brush up on my Bram Stoker scholarship before jumping to such 'theatrical' conclusions during my European travels?"

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