Behind the Folklore - Bloodlust

by Dee Reeves (AKA Team Ackles Medic)

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Vampire Lore and Mythology

CATTLE MUTILATIONS

The killing and maiming of cattle, under unusual circumstances.
Investigation of cattle mutilation asserts that it is a genuine practice attributed mostly to predators, natural decomposition, extraterrestrials, secretive governmental or military agencies, and cults. Sceptics claim that the “mutilations” are a misrepresented natural process. One example of how cattle mutilations can occur was shown through an experiment done by the Washington County (Arkansas) Sheriff’s Department. They found that when a dead cow was placed in a field for 48 hours that bloating, caused by the sun, led to incision-like tears in the skin and that blowflies and maggots then cleaned out the soft tissue so that the carcass looked exactly like those that had been attributed to satanic cults.


VAMPIRES

The vampire is one of the most dreaded and feared creatures of the supernatural world. He can live forever, shape shift, travel under cover of night and seduce victims, drain them of blood and grow stronger. A vampire can be male or female and can be beautifully human looking or horrific and monstrous.
Dating prior to the sixteen hundreds, some of the earliest New World accounts of vampires were documented. The beliefs of vampires are different for each region of the world. The origin and details of vampires differ based on geography, but are similar in one fact: a vampire is an undead creature that drains the life out of the living.
In West Africa and other areas of Africa, blood is powerful and if a person sheds blood, it has to be cleansed or covered so an evil spirit can not taste of the blood and seek out the person to whom it belongs. Blood could enable the spirit to revitalize the body of the dead and destroy the body and soul of the living. Blood is also of great importance in Australia among the Aborigine. It is considered the best remedy for the sick, giving an ill person more life.
Accounts of vampires can be found in cultures across the world and across the centuries. The word vampire (vampire, vampyre) has its origins in Slavonic, but with similarities in Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian. In addition, words for vampire are also found in the early Greek, Danish, Swedish and Hungarian languages.
The "creation" of a vampire, also differs with culture and beliefs. A human might become a vampire if they: practiced Black Magic, were of absolute evil, committed suicide, were a victim of a horrendous and violent death, were buried without proper rites, died excommunicated from their religion, were bitten by a vampire and lived or were bitten by a vampire and died. These origins of vampires instilled fear in many; fear enough to produce loyalty to the church and abstinence from anything deemed evil. Theories from religious experts suggest that vampires and other creatures of death were creations meant to put fear into the hearts of the people and bring them to religion. The fact that vampires exist with similar traits across the seas and from the earliest of recorded history, suggest other theories to other experts.
One thing that remains constant within vampire lore is that a holy or consecrated object or strong faith in a Supreme and good being, usually keeps the vampire away or at rest. In Greece the practice of placing a consecrated object on the lips of the deceased is still in practice. Other cultures sew the mouth shut and sprinkle the lips with blessed water. The mouth is thought to be the way the soul leaves the body, and also the way it, or another evil spirit, can re-enter. Vampires are great lead characters for stories, books and movies. Modern vampires have become more sensual and seductive and very alluring. Blood is known to be very powerful: it is the source of life and health and sexual passion. The sensations excited by the flow of blood are real and oftentimes intense. The image of a vampire embracing its victim, cradling the head and neck in strong hands while it gorges on the victim's blood can be an attractive scene in a movie or book. But a vampire that drinks blood is not the only vampire found in lore and literature. There are also psychic or spiritual vampires who draw the life energy of their victims and sometimes, the very soul.

Here were two threads of thought that combined into the modern conception of the vampire around the time of the Middle Ages. The first was the idea of the magical/healing properties of blood. Blood was thought to contain the magical essence of life, and it was widely used in various medical and occult practices.

The second thread was the emergence of legends and rumours about the undead, soulless and unbaptized abominations that clawed their way from the grave to wreak havoc on the living. Around the same time, some of the first really gory documented tales of psychotic killers began to arise, such as the case of Sawney Bean, the leader of an incestuous cannibal tribe in Scotland, and the extremely lurid tale of Gilles de Rais one of the first serial killers to immortalized in excruciating detail, who was convicted of Witchcraft, summoning Satan and other crimes.

Later observers, such as Aleister Crowley, would conclude that de Rais was the victim of a politically motivated frame-up, however the list of charges and the content of the French nobleman's confession are so astonishing in their detail that it's hard to imagine there wasn't some grain of truth. According to the Inquisition, de Rais used the blood of the hundreds of children he had allegedly killed for alchemical experiments. The real legend of the vampire was born about the same time, over in good old Transylvania. Vlad Tepes, or as he is famously known, Vlad the Impaler, was a bloodthirsty prince of Transylvania in the 15th century. His father and grandfather were members of a secret society not dissimilar to the Knights Templar or the Masons.
Vlad, who also went by the name Dracula, had the bad luck to see his father ousted from the throne of Walachia when he was just 17. Hungarian nationalists backed an invasion by Dracula, who captured the throne, lost it, went into exile, then captured it again much later.
Once he was firmly in place, the fun stuff began. Vlad's excesses are chronicled elsewhere, but he was mostly famous for impaling. (Didn't see that coming, did you?)
Vlad wasn't actually thought to be a vampire at the time; he was seen as more of a total bastard. The connection would come later, thanks to the turgid prose of Bram Stoker.

However, the same region would play host to a more legitimate vampire about 100 years later — Elizabeth Bathory. Bathory was a Hungarian noblewoman who enjoyed torturing her servants and took up an interest in the Black Arts. Legend has it she was beating a servant girl for some minor infraction when the girl's blood spilled on her arm. Bathory immediately determined that her skin had improved where the blood landed, so she had the girl bled to death and bathed in her blood.
Although it seems unlikely, Bathory was convinced that this technique was making her young again, and she decided to keep it up. For about 10 years, she bathed in and drank the blood of kidnapped peasant girls on a regular basis. Eventually, her nobility was her downfall. She decided she needed a better quality of blood (possibly when her continued aging became too difficult to ignore), and started to prey on girls of noble birth. This obviously didn't sit well with the nobility, which ordered her arrested.
More than 650 girls had fallen victim to her obsession with eternal youth (she was only 50 at the time of her arrest, although that was a whole different thing in the 17th Century than it is today). Her primary servants, the ones in charge of the bleeding, were sentenced to death, but it was considered gauche to try and execute nobles, so Elizabeth herself was never put on trial. She was confined to her castle for the remainder of her life, which ended up being four years.

The Bathory case is perhaps the first real example of the fully formed notion of modern vampirism — the idea that the blood of others will somehow provide eternal youth. The whole idea of the supernatural vampire didn't fully take form until Bram Stoker virtually created the concept in his novel, Dracula.
Stoker was an Irish author in the 19th century. He wove together a series of legends and old wives tales concerning the undead to define the parameters of the modern vampire, including the aversions to silver, garlic, sunlight and the cross, sleeping in coffins and fangs. He attached the Dracula name to his story almost as an afterthought, and he knew virtually nothing about the historical Vlad.

With the advent of the Web, just about anyone who had ever thought about drinking blood could easily find and talk to anyone else who had ever thought about drinking blood. There are dozens of Web sites with tips on how to hygienically drink the blood of others, etiquette in soliciting blood (for example under Human Rights Laws Donors have to be found and a contract arranged where the donor signs to allow permission for you to take their blood !!!! its and odd world), and safety tips to help avoid piercing major arteries and otherwise killing the person you're playing with.
There are some sites that look very genuine that explain that vampires are still in existence, not in the fly like a bat, shape shifting, immortal mode, more of the human, blood drinker type, however they do claim to be a continued blood line of the previous Counts and Countesses’ royalty of vampires. It is explained that the names of Count, My Lord etc should be a sign of respect for the culture amongst its own people as they are brought up in a traditional graduated order where the oldest has supremacy, although now as the author of the site says the titles are used by power hungry youngsters trying to be something they are not. She also explains that the need to drink blood is starting to fade due to mixed marriages and the blood line of the children over the years becoming a weaker connection to the vampire race.
The Web has also allowed the creation of Web sites made by people claiming to be supernatural-type vampires, but these sites rarely display the mastery of English grammar which one would expect from a preternaturally intelligent person who has lived for centuries, raising the uneasy suspicion in the minds of readers that maybe — just maybe — the site was created by a disturbed 14-year-old.

A distinct subclass of vampire has also become fairly ubiquitous in modern occult circles and pop psychology. Known as "psychic vampires," the term refers to persons who suck spiritual, magical, psychic or psychological energy from their victims without drawing blood. While the odds are very good that you've personally met a few of those, as of this writing, no one has captured and publicly displayed a real, live vampire of the "hundreds-of-years-old, garlic-hating, cross-spitting, bat-summoning" variety.

Should that change, we'll certainly let you know. Vampire lore and myth will continue, as will the books and movies. Our fascination with this creature will never end and as long as there are authors to create further reasons to be seduced by the vampire, we will be under its spell. Do vampires really exist? It is an age old question alongside the existence of werewolves, Big Foot and alien life forms. Do we really want to know? The mystery of the vampire is one of the biggest attractions to most things supernatural.


(thanks to Julie for her help on the start of the notes)