The Origin Of Vampires?

Evil Angelus 95

Evil Angelus 95

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Sineya
Just a weird little question, but does anyone know where the entire vampire "myth" got started? I always assumed it was a part of European folklore, although i'm beginning to have my doubts.

Any ideas?
 
Wikipedia has a decent history of vampires that includes precursors in earlier cultures: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire
 
Two legends that I have heard of are:

Adam's first wife, Lilith, was expelled from Eden for refusing to "submit" to her husband. She wandered out into the wastelands and mated with fallen angels or supernatural beings of some sort, and her offspring became all of the demons and vampires.

The second one is that Judas was the first vampire, cursed to never die or see the light of day until the Second Coming. His tie in with the Crucifixion explains why the cross and other holy relics can repel and even kill his descendants. The wooden stake was originally a branch from the tree from which he hanged himself, but has become simply any type of wood.

On a somewhat similar note, Dracula was never bitten by another vampire, but was, instead, transformed by making a pact with Lucifer, basically becoming his son, and the satanic equivalent to Christ.
 
K
kittenpoker
Interesting!!
Myth? Who says it is a myth?
A lot of crap is spouted about them, a lot of speculation about their authenticity has come from modern (in the last 2000 years) religions.
Vampires are known as demons, in the olden days they were just evil entities.
In the case of Angel and Spike, they could be regarded as the mutants of vampires.
 
arabella said:
Wikipedia has a decent history of vampires that includes precursors in earlier cultures: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire
Click to expand...

What a great, in-depth article! Yes it appears that while there are various myths worldwide, the vampire myth as we know it cones primarily from Eastern Europe. And no, I don't believe in literal vampires (you guys are kidding about that, right?). But I find the scientific, psychological, & sociological reasons for the myths fascinating, as well as our continued current interest in vampire stories.
 
The first-known alleged vampire was from Croatia, from the small village of Kringa (Istria), and he had died there in 1652. He was a farmer and was named Jure Grando. In 1672 he will be risen from the grave and frequently have terrorized the village. In the book of Vajkard Valvasor this vampire is literature mentioned for the first time in European. Johann Joseph von Gorres, this story took over in his multi-volume work "The Christian mysticism," which was printed in 1836-42 in Regensburg.
 
There really was a Dracula. He was a relentless master of war. He was incredibly ruthless. They called him Vlad the Impaler, because he left people's heads on pikes. They called him "vampyr" (pronounced wamp-eer) in his native tongue, which meant blood-thirsty. To those that couldn't quite understand his native tongue, they thought this meant he thirsted for blood, as in he drank it. That's where the blood-drinking myth comes from, and the word "vampire" as we see it today. (Or, we see it as Vampyr sometimes. Like the book that Giles gave Buffy.)

(This is basically all I remember from Classical Humanities lol)

Here's a wikipedia article on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_impaler

I guess that's why we typically see Dracula with three wives too.
 
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