Post by Kendra_Corvinus on Jan 1, 2006 21:04:46 GMT 1
Pathology and vampirism
Some people argue that vampire stories might have been influenced by a rare illness called porphyria. The disease disrupts the production of heme. People with extreme but rare cases of this hereditary disease can be so sensitive to sunlight that they can get a sunburn through heavy cloud cover, causing them to avoid sunlight — although it should be noted that the idea that vampires are harmed by sunlight is largely from modern fiction and not the original beliefs. Certain forms of porphyria are also associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders. However, the hypotheses that porphyria sufferers crave the heme in human blood, or that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a severe misunderstanding of the disease. There is very little evidence to suggest that porphyria had anything to do with the development of the original folklore. [4]
Others argue that there is a relationship between vampirism and rabies.
There have been a number of murderers who performed this seemingly vampiric ritual upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered, for example. Legends that Erzsébet Báthory, a medieval Hungarian aristocrat, murdered hundreds of women in bizarre rituals involving blood, helped mold contemporary vampire legends.
Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism (or Renfield's syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman in the novel by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from animals or humans.
Finding vampires in graves
When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found the cadaver in a relatively undecomposed state, which could have been interpreted as the corpse being the equivalent of a well-fed vampire. Another reason to believe that a body is a vampire that has fed on the living is the strange illusion that the hair, nails, and teeth have grown [5]. It is a well known phenomenon that after death the skin and gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even teeth that were concealed in the jaw. [6] Folkloric accounts almost universally represent the alleged vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of vampires in literature and film. In the past, people were often malnourished and therefore thin in life, which could account for the pale skin often referred to. Corpses swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and blood tries to escape the body. During decomposition blood can often be seen emanating from nose and mouth, which could give the impression that the corpse was a vampire who had been drinking blood. Natural processes of decomposition, absent embalming, tend to darken the skin of a corpse — hence the black, blue, or red complexion of the folkloric vampire.
Vampire bats
Bats have become an integral part of the vampire myth only recently, although many cultures have myths about them. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the other hand, the gypsies thought them lucky and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos"[7]. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld.
The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. The bats were named after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.
Vampires in fiction
Main article: Vampire fiction
Lord Byron introduced many common elements of the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813). These include the combination of horror and lust that the vampire feels and the concept of the undead passing its inheritance to the living.
John Polidori authored the first "true" vampire story called The Vampyre. Polidori was the personal physician of Lord Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord Ruthven, is based partly on him — making the character the first of our now familiar romantic vampires. The story is sometimes still falsely attributed to Lord Byron.
Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.
Some people argue that vampire stories might have been influenced by a rare illness called porphyria. The disease disrupts the production of heme. People with extreme but rare cases of this hereditary disease can be so sensitive to sunlight that they can get a sunburn through heavy cloud cover, causing them to avoid sunlight — although it should be noted that the idea that vampires are harmed by sunlight is largely from modern fiction and not the original beliefs. Certain forms of porphyria are also associated with neurological symptoms, which can create psychiatric disorders. However, the hypotheses that porphyria sufferers crave the heme in human blood, or that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a severe misunderstanding of the disease. There is very little evidence to suggest that porphyria had anything to do with the development of the original folklore. [4]
Others argue that there is a relationship between vampirism and rabies.
There have been a number of murderers who performed this seemingly vampiric ritual upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered, for example. Legends that Erzsébet Báthory, a medieval Hungarian aristocrat, murdered hundreds of women in bizarre rituals involving blood, helped mold contemporary vampire legends.
Some psychologists in modern times recognize a disorder called clinical vampirism (or Renfield's syndrome, from Dracula's insect-eating henchman in the novel by Bram Stoker) in which the victim is obsessed with drinking blood, either from animals or humans.
Finding vampires in graves
When the coffin of an alleged vampire was opened, people sometimes found the cadaver in a relatively undecomposed state, which could have been interpreted as the corpse being the equivalent of a well-fed vampire. Another reason to believe that a body is a vampire that has fed on the living is the strange illusion that the hair, nails, and teeth have grown [5]. It is a well known phenomenon that after death the skin and gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even teeth that were concealed in the jaw. [6] Folkloric accounts almost universally represent the alleged vampire as having ruddy or dark skin, not the pale skin of vampires in literature and film. In the past, people were often malnourished and therefore thin in life, which could account for the pale skin often referred to. Corpses swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and blood tries to escape the body. During decomposition blood can often be seen emanating from nose and mouth, which could give the impression that the corpse was a vampire who had been drinking blood. Natural processes of decomposition, absent embalming, tend to darken the skin of a corpse — hence the black, blue, or red complexion of the folkloric vampire.
Vampire bats
Bats have become an integral part of the vampire myth only recently, although many cultures have myths about them. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the other hand, the gypsies thought them lucky and wore charms made of bat bones. In English heraldic tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos"[7]. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld.
The three species of actual vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted presentation or memory of the bat. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with vampire bats and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. The bats were named after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. It wasn't long before vampire bats were adapted into fictional tales, and they have become one of the more important vampire associations in popular culture.
Vampires in fiction
Main article: Vampire fiction
Lord Byron introduced many common elements of the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813). These include the combination of horror and lust that the vampire feels and the concept of the undead passing its inheritance to the living.
John Polidori authored the first "true" vampire story called The Vampyre. Polidori was the personal physician of Lord Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord Ruthven, is based partly on him — making the character the first of our now familiar romantic vampires. The story is sometimes still falsely attributed to Lord Byron.
Bram Stoker's Dracula has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.
