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Author
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Comment
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melusine
Unregistered User
(6/1/06 1:07 pm)
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vampires
I know this might be considered branching out from fairy tales, but does anyone know of any stories about the first vampire?
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(6/1/06 7:22 pm)
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vampire
An interesting question. Do you mean the earliest story about a vampire or stories of any age about the earliest vampire, if you see what I mean?
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 6/2/06 7:12 pm
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johnmichael
Unregistered User
(6/2/06 5:23 am)
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first vampire
I don't think there are any folk tales about the first vampire. If you want to learn about vampire folklore, Dr. Melton's Vampire Encyclopedia (which is soon coming out in a 3rd edition) is a good start. Stay away from Montague Summers' books. They're not always accurate. Now, if you mean the first vampire story, the first one in English was called "Wake Not the Dead," although I think I've also seen Polidori's "The Vampyre" listed as the first story. THe first full-length work was a penny dreadful, "Varney, the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood." These early tales are sort of halfway between the more primitive vampires of Eastern European folklore and the more familiar vampires of Bram Stoker.
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melusine
Unregistered User
(6/2/06 12:14 pm)
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vampires
Thanks. I meant the story of the first vampire. I will make sure to see Dr. Melton's encyclopedia
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(6/2/06 7:15 pm)
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Re: vampires
Melusine--just a note apologizing for the "roll eyes" face that was at the end of my previous comment. It was a typo--sometimes when I'm ending a comment I guess I hit something that ezboard thinks is that face and it shows up, and then I feel a bit embarrassed, because I would not roll my eyes at an interesting question. So, I'm sorry and I hope you didn't think I was trying to insult you.
The only "first vampire" story I can think of offhand is from the Buffy mythos, and even that is not too helpful, because I'm not positive how and where I read/saw/heard it. But I think the idea in Buffy is that way back when a demon...bit a person and sort of infected him/her with its demonicity, and that half-human/half-demon thing was the first vampire, and it bit more and more people.
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melusine
Unregistered User
(6/6/06 12:46 pm)
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rolleyes/vampires
no problem. I tend to do that too. The Buffy story sounds similar to Ann Rice's, the only one I've found. If you're interested, you should read Interview With The Vampire and it's sequel (which tells the story of the first vampire), The Vampire Lestat.
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searsmith
Registered User
(6/7/06 8:33 pm)
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vampire origins
I was just musing that we might not get a folkloric tale about the first vampire because vampires were not a separate collective people or even a singular and special being. They were a corruption of the corpse, a failure of the society in question to make the appropriate funerary arrangements, and to propitiate whatever spiritual entities required ritual. Pagan versions are anima-listic, and often sexual as well as cannibalistic predators.
After the Christian Era begins, the vampire becomes an anti-Christ figure, especially within the context of Catholicism (in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Harker has some moments of discomfort with the papist symbolism necessary to ward off vampires). e.g., Christ is an embodied holy spirit, the vampire is an embodied unholy vessel -- empty of spirit. The Christian body turns to dust, the vampire sleeps (the little sleep that is undeath) in its dirt of origins. Christians are redeemed through the blood of Christ, whereas vampires continue their unlife through devouring human blood. Of course, this corruption of Christianity is sacrilegious, and so its containment reaffirms the power of proper faith. Thus, the anti-Christian vampire requires no originating myth to explain his origins, since in the context of a religious culture the misappropriation of its signs, symbols, and powers by opposed forces is assumed.
When you get modern myths of the vampire, which are purely fictions, the writers are, in one sense, fulfilling the common fantasy / horror trope of explaining the origins of evil / superpowers. On the other hand, they are signaling where / how vampires fit in morally, through their ontological origins. That Anne Rice eventually places vampires outside a Christian tradition is significant. They become creatures imbued with elemental forces, and so are ultimately super and natural -- above humanity as we are above cows, and yet still admired for sharing the best qualities with humanity (as we find in Louis).
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AnamithimPhaerie
Registered User
(6/22/06 5:46 pm)
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Re: vampire origins
ok i no TONS about vampires. (of course, hehehehehe)
anyway, the first vampire wasn't actually a vampire. she was a person with a deadly sickness - one that causes a stinging to your skin to occur when you go into sunlight, your eyes go red and bloodshot, etc. the whole vampire thing. she thought she was changing into a vampire so she began feeding on blood. not cause she needed to, but because she forced herself to think that she needed blood. sick, i no. she passed this desire along to everyone who she bit, and somewhere along the line, that desire was turned into a need.
other sick people followed suit. there was a duchess that bathed in young girls' blood because it made herself look young, and then there were all those people who killed others that were thought to be vampires. this paragraph is actually true, while the other one is a legend - true or not, i don't know. anyway, there's your answer
guinevere 8)
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intrikate88
Registered User
(6/23/06 11:11 am)
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Re: vampire origins
One book that discusses the periods at which major vampire stories were written is Our Vampires, Ourselves. Sadly, I forget the author's name. It may have a story in it about the first vampire. Just skim it, though- it's mostly just about a society's needs for vampire stories reflects their blatant repressed homosexuality and I'm not so sure I agree, or even quite follow.
The only stories I know for sure are from the Buffyverse. *shrugs*
As for Guinevere's comments, there are many stories like that coming from a medical and not supernatural standpoint. Scott Westerfield's 'Peeps' and Charlie Huston's 'Already Dead' both use medical conditions to explain vampiric activity.
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LadyErmine
Unregistered User
(6/23/06 3:54 pm)
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Vampire origins
Our Vampires, Ourselves is by Nina Auerbach.
A very sane and sensible book about the origins of vampire folklore is Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death
I would query the "medical origins of the vampire" theory because in folklore the main characteristic of the vampire is that he or she is dead, not that s/he is a living person with odd tastes... I am also unhappy about suggestions that sufferers from certain diseases gave rise to vampire legends - it is quite bad enough to have a nasty medical condtion without people telling you you have the Dracula syndrome as well.
The interest that the vampire panics of the eighteenth century roused suggests that a lot of people were hearing about vampires for the first time... I wonder, seriously how old this particular piece of folklore really is.
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korin
Unregistered User
(7/7/06 11:00 pm)
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first vampire
There are, of course, the stories about Erzabet Bathory, the Slavic countess who murdered young women. Supposedly she bathed in their blood with the intention of keeping her skin young and firm, but if you look at the historical evidence this is probably just an urban legend that grew up after the fact. There was Vlad the Impaler, who liked to stake his enemies (and, once he ran out of enemies, the unfortunate local peasants), who supposedly had cannibalistic tendencies -- but once again, the vampire associations grew up because of his behavior, that wasn't what inspired the vampire legend. There are vampire myths all over the world -- one of the oldest blood-drinking characters from mythology was the Hindu goddess Kali. She fought a demon whose every drop of blood turned into another demon, and she drank all its blood to prevent this from happening. In apocryphal Jewish folklore, Lilith was Adam's first wife before Eve, but she was banished. She's the ultimate femme fatale, who seduced and preyed on men and made demons, and you could say she was viewed as predatory and somewhat vampire-like. Hecate, a Greek goddess of sorcery, crossroads, and various other things was supposed to drink blood (and eat excrement), and in Virgil the shades of the dead must drink blood in order to talk. The word 'vampire' itself may be from the Turkish 'ubyr', meaning ghost. Blood has long been associated with life (see the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament of the Bible, where God instructs Noah's family that they may not eat blood because 'the blood is the life'), so the idea of people (especially the dead) drinking blood is a natural progression -- Transylvanian folklore, which is always associated in the popular consciousness with vampires, has a lot of Christian influences in it. Usually the Vampire in folklore is sort of a class of 'creatures', with specific examples in some stories -- not just one particular character, so you can't really compare them and see which one is the oldest. I can't think of any folklore that has its own legend about the origin of vampires, probably because the idea of vampires has been around for so long nobody felt the need to 'explain' it with a story. I guess, if you're speaking in literal terms, the way to figure out the oldest vampire would be to work out which culture's folklore is the oldest.
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babastudio
Registered User
(7/9/06 5:23 am)
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Re: first vampire
Actually, according to this (admittedly not very well-researched) piece, the belief in vampires in central europe (Bohemia is geographically and culturally central not eastern europe) is much older than 18th century. Of course, the "vampire" from this time may not be very similar to the Stoker vampire, but some of the elements are recognisable
www.praguepost.cz/feat032900a.html
_________
quote:
most famous of all such graves was discovered in 1966 in Celakovice, 10 kilometers (six miles) northeast of Prague. There, archeologists uncovered 14 skeletons dating from the 10th century. The mouths were filled with stones and sand; the heads were removed from the bodies. Stories began circulating that the skeletons had fangs. The archeologists denied this.
Just last August, a dig near the Moravian city of Olomouc turned up an early medieval grave. This time, it was a woman. Her body was buried face down, her arms and legs tied together. Unlike the rest of the skeletons found at the site, the woman was lying from north to south. This sort of treatment was reserved only for the damned: Christians of the period always buried their dead in an east-west position. That same year, archeologists struck blood again in Moravia. Two adult men were buried with several children. The limbs of the men were severed from their bodies, and the bones of the infants were shattered.
What was their crime? Were they a demonic brood that rose to prey on the living, or simply the victims of a superstitious age?
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LadyErmine
Unregistered User
(7/19/06 6:56 pm)
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Vampires?
Well, these modes of burial certainly suggest that the dead were feared or hated - but it doesn't suggest that they were vampires - the woman buried face down and fettered could have been suspected of witchcraft, the men and children could have been victims of a feud... it is only hindsight which suggests a vampire connection - especially as the approved method of dealing with vampire corpses in the eighteenth century was to sever their heads, burn the bodies, and scatter the ashes...
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hagalilith
Registered User
(7/24/06 6:50 pm)
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lilith
there are many versions of the origin of vampirism, depending on the culture of that area. the one i go by most faithfully, is the story of Lilith. the story is a midrash ( a story that goes alongside the bible but was never written down with it) which says that Lilith was the first woman- created equally out of dust. because they were equal, adam complained that she was too dominating (specifically in bed- why complain, right?) so she was cast out into the Dead Sea where she copulated with demons to create incubi and seccubi (smaller demons of our realm) and that she later convinced cain to kill able, and took cain under her wing where he became her man-slave. there's more- you can either research it or you can email me Hagalilith@optonline.net- i'd be more than happy to type it out for you if its what youre looking for.
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