We all hate cannibals, but for some inexplicable reason, everybody loves a vampire.
OK, maybe it's explicable. Vampires have a lot going for them. The eternal life thing is a big plus. And the wardrobe kicks ass. Super-powers, sleeping in, pointy teeth, sex appeal... Vampirism is a sexy thing, and the dismemberment of victims is strictly optional. Who wouldn't love it?
Now granted, it's not all fun and games. You lose out on sunlight and silver jewelry. People have a tendency to try to impale you with wooden stakes, cut off your head and burn you to bits. And the currently documented number of vampires proven to have eternal life is zero, so you could be drinking all that blood for nothing.
The practice of drinking blood goes back to the first time someone bled around someone else, with notable archaeological records supporting the notion found in Mexico, China and the Middle East, as well as more recent and documented practices in Africa and the South Pacific.
Drinking blood almost always had a ritual or magical component attached to it (as opposed to cannibalism, which was often simply a dietary strategy in prehistoric times). There's just something about blood which speaks to the innermost human condition. Long before the days of DNA typing, blood was understood to be something very integral to identity.
But the blood-rites of ancient religions aren't vampirism. The historical record suggests that the concept of the vampire as recreational blood-drinker/supernatural being dates back to around the time of Jesus Christ, who fueled the growth of such stories in very specific ways that people don't like to talk about.
After all, two particularly notable aspects of the Jesus story are present in the vampire legend — the concept of rising from one's grave, and the concept of drinking human blood in order to have eternal life:
"He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, dwells in me, and I in him."
Nothing ambiguous about that. The vampire as supernatural creature lingered for some time at the fringes of civilized consciousness, but it didn't emerge as a full-fledged category of its own until much later.
There 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 rumors about the undead, soulless and unbaptized abominations who 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.
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Anne Rice's detailed historical novels also prompted a lot of revisionist vampire lore, as hundreds of thousands of impressionable teens went to college and learned the deadly art of misusing research. Pretty soon you couldn't swing an undead cat without hitting some historical "evidence" of vampires in ancient times.
With the patent difficulties involved in finding actual vampires from whom to receive the Dark Gifts, many would-be children of the night were left foundering and directionless — until the Internet came along and saved them!
One of the Internet's great strengths is the ability to unite small cliques of people who enjoy deviant behavior, which previously was very difficult owing to social stigma, laws concerning certain interstate activities and burning at the stake. Prior to the Web's emergence in the 1990s, there was a small underground club scene in large cities like New York and San Francisco in which people indulged in fetish-oriented blood-drinking.
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 hygenically drink the blood of others, ettiquette in soliciting blood, and safety tips to help avoid piercing major arteries and otherwise killing the person you're playing with.
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.
Vampires
I've never heard of "psychic vampires" before. Have you?
Well, it looks like there is a thriving vampiric community out there.
What do you think about the whole deal? Is modern vampirism dangerous to society, in your opinion? Do you personally find vampires charming? Or do you prefer zombies?
If you are having trouble choosing, there is some useful info provided by The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency:
Vampires versus Zombies
When vampires and zombies were pitted together in one-on-one competition, the vampire's advantage in the areas of speed/agility and brain power would usually be enough to trump the zombie's indestructibility. But the zombie tendency to cluster together in large packs often spelled trouble for vampires when the two met out in the real world.
