Vampires and Death

More on "specifying" Real Vampires.

The folklore of vampires always involves death, in one way or another.

Pre-Stoker vampire beliefs and concepts usually identify vampires with the dead. There are of course other kinds of vampires and vampiristic beings, which are nonhuman entities mentioned, as well as plenty of allegories, but even these have to do with death.

It has been explored in Vampires, Burial and Death, as well as other books, that funeral practices began to include anti-vampire rituals when people noticed peculiar phenomena around the death of the human body, and the grave after death. A skeptical view of many vampire accounts is that various post-mortem conditions arose which account for bloating corpses, moving corpses, corpses which claw the insides of coffins, and other physical manifestations.

Other accounts tell of vampires, which are more like phantoms, apparitions, returning to not just haunt the living, but attack them. What happens to a person upon death, after death is certainly understood as 'the unknown,' and while vampirism seems to be the cause of all these problems according to these old accounts, not everyone becomes a vampire in the end. Many explainations are given as to what causes a person to become this after-death-vampire. Most of these reasons have to do with morality, religion, beliefs in the supernatural, and not much to do with biology. Most of the accounts also seem to describe what we today know, thanks to Hollywood, as 'zombies.' Not the kind found in Voodoo, but the kind from Night of the Living Dead. Essentially, a dead person returns to life, to feed on the living, and is usually without any special powers, other than that they were once dead, and now seem to be walking around attacking people.

Mythological entities have also been cataloged. Entities in many different cultures and religions. Studying these entities can be confusing as they usually do not represent historical people at any time, and are either non-human deities, beings, which seem to live somewhere in the past, or in some invisible world, and then we have beings which are more of the sort found in the cryptozoological world, such as chupacabras, various kinds of night creatures which attack people, suck their blood, and often have some sort of supernatural powers.

In folklore, regarding human beings which become vampires, most often, a state of death is required prior to becoming a vampire. The legends of werewolves when combined with vampires saw to it, that vampirism would be viewed as potentially both living and death prior states.

In the case of a dead person becoming a vampire, it is seen as a sort of supernatural after death state. The human body undergoes some sort of transformation, and then the person who has died, and buried, must make their way out of the grave, and find something from living human beings to either maintain this state, or survive, or live forever.

So, for starters, we have this concept, and we have immediate logical questions. A person dies. He will be buried and at some time transform into a vampire-state.

The cause in folklore is usually understood as some sort of consequence of human action, like moral choices, but it usually unclear as to what specifically causes this. There are various speculations put forth, most often having to do with sin, sometime mere ridiculous superstitions like being born on a certain day of the week, or not being baptised, etc.

In the case of the post-death, post-human, physically manifest vampire, since it is a body, which performs the physical functions of drinking or sucking blood, the question is, how does a body come back to life, why, why does it seem to need blood, and so on.

Is the body the same person as it was before in an individual sense? We assume the transformation is related to the human being which was living before the transformation or death took place. If a supernatural process takes place, in order to make a dead person, become a dead-but-now-living-vampire-person, what is this process? By saying it is 'supernatural' does not immediately suggest an unknowable process. Perhaps it is not a supernatural process, as far as the body, but perhaps it has to do with the person's soul(or mind, essence, whatever you want to call it). Is the person a kind of mindless zombie, or more like the movies, a sort of diabolically transformed person which has the memory of the person, but has changed dramatically? What are the causes of the process, and once it has 'come back to life' what does it need to maintain its new biological state? Blood? Human flesh? Some sort of abnormal non-food substance, not plant, not animal? How and why?

These are all reasonable questions, assuming of course we are talking about a dead, then buried, then transformed-into-vampire type of person.

The other possibility is of course, a dead, then buried, then transformed-in-body, but also which has become a phantom attacker of some sort. We have folklore accounts which describe a dead person that remains in its grave, but somehow escapes in the sense of 'astral projection' and is a kind of demonic ghost, which can sometimes form physically, temporarily. While it is 'astrally projecting' it is reported that the body which stays in the coffin undergoes gruesome changes, and these are indicative of vampirism.

We also have further superstitions, beliefs, concepts, old and modern, regarding persons who are transformed into vampire-states while still alive, never having undergone death.

In All of this we have some reasonable questions. In the sense of reality, if vampires of the sort which crawl out of the grave exist, why do we never hear of reports of holes in cemetaries where bodies have escaped? Then again, how often do we even read of crimes committed in cemetaries in the news when they occur? They do occur. Would we be told? Depends on who runs your cemetary I suppose.

Regardless, we have to ask questions about not only the biological state of this transformed person, but the mental state. Does the mental state dictate to the body it needs blood, because of some distorted or evil state, or does the new biological state require blood and causes a new mental state, or does it have no effect on the new mental state?

I am asking all these questions in advance because all of them have to be considered before we continue. We also have to consider that the post-human transformed vampire-state may involve a variety of variables. Perhaps all of them take place at various stages, or perhaps they develop into different results depending on the conditions during the transformation process, or the conditions of the original cause.

The important distinction that we are trying to make here is, does a real, physical (or half-physical, or temporarily physical) vampire state exist as a potential condition for some human beings? We know of the allegory, the mythology, the symbolic, the fictional, the literary, etc, the specific focus is, whether there is such a condition, which has come to be called 'vampire.'

Fictional concepts of 'races' and genetics will be ignored, because the entirety of vampire folklore involves normal human beings which are transformed. Perhaps genetics plays some part in the transformation, but in cartoons and fictional movies which concern mutants, genetically modified or engineered 'vampires' under various ridiculous names like 'anthrophage' or even alien races, or 'parallel evolution' are so far out of the realm of reality, and conformity to prior known folklore, and because many of these concepts are coming from political or religious/anti-religious ideologies, we won't give them our energy. Heinrich Himmler, Nazi SS leader, once suggested that Jews were vampire-aliens, literally from another world. Much rationalization of convenient factoids were culled to 'prove' this, and much of this had to do with 'alienating' people and convincing others that they were a 'superior race' or 'genetically superior.'

We are not looking at vampires in this way. In the right hand links section, you will find "Vampire Hunter Library" links to books which are integral to learning the actual vampire lore, and not fictional works. These books contain the documented accounts which we know of, and define them either religiously, skeptically, or not at all, but these books contain perhaps 75% of the actual documented original folklore that we have Pre-Stoker. We will be utilizing the information in these books, essentially, because it is what we have to go on.

The original accounts do not suggest alien races, different species or races of people or genetically modified or engineered human beings. They usually refer to transformed people, whether through death, after death, or before death, or they refer to non-human never human beings or entities, deities, and creatures which are non-human, mostly animal, with a supernatural quality to them.

Modern accounts of alien abductors are of course interesting in that they seem to suggest beings which are completely non-human, and only barely resemble humans, taking blood, bodily fluids, raping, and attacking people in the middle of the night in their beds, and this is definitely a 'vampiristic' model, but do not necessarily follow in the generalized definitions we may gather from the folklore which usually points to human beings becoming vampires.

Perhaps these alien accounts are related, but since we are not investigating aliens, nor do we know whether even aliens exist, we cannot possibly pursue this. Perhaps there is some plausible connection, but we are not going to use one set of unknowns to attempt to define another unknown. Lets look at one unknown at a time.

Simply, the focus is about humanity. Essentially, it is humanity that vampirism is about, and whether biological, or supernatural, the importance to humanity of the answers to these questions is these predators "was us." (Forgive my slang, these predators were at one time...human.)

We are the enemy. So, as we continue, we want to know, how did this happen and why. (Or... how DOES this happen, if it indeed does happen, and Why?)