The Vampire in Culture

by Jordan VonTeese
Check out her site at http://www.myspace.com/onelastdeath

The vampire has been a frequent fixture in our culture for virtually all of the roughly two hundred and fifty years since the word arrived at the English language. The creature and its behaviour is so emblematic that the word has been (and still is) regularly applied in other contexts: the adjective "vampire" has been applied to troublesome ghosts, needy personalities and vilified social classes. While these multiple uses are a tribute to the vampire's potency as an icon, they have also confused the origins of the real vampire, a creature which can be precisely defined in location and habit, rather than the all-purpose "life-draining" beings which often go by its name.
In addition to these factors which have affected our perception of the historical vampire is the existence of the literary variety, which constitute an entirely more forgivable class of liberties; art must use whatever raw materials it finds to comment upon life, and the vampire has been well used on more than one occasion.

The word "vampire" entered English early in the eighteenth century, with reports of a rash of the creatures from their native countries. The word is Magyar (Hungarian), via Slavonic. Regional variations such as "upir" in Russia, "upier" in Poland and "vepir" in Bulgaria all relate back to "vampire". The ultimate origin from here is disputed: one theory was it that it was related to a Lithuanian word "wempti" which means "to drink", and thereby denoted "blood drunkenness" ; another more likely source was the Turkish word for witch, "ubour", which now means "vampire" too.

Definitive vampire habits varied slightly from region to region but broadly, as John Heinrich Zopfius wrote in his Dissertatio de Vampiris of 1733: "vampires issue forth from their graves at night, attack people sleeping quietly in their beds, suck out all their blood from their bodies and destroy them. They beset men, women and children alike, sparing neither age nor sex. Those who are under the fatal malignity of their influence complain of suffocation and a total deficiency of spirits, after which they soon expire. Some who, when at the point of death, have been asked if they can tell what is causing their decease, reply that ..... persons, lately dead, have arisen from the tomb to torment and torture them." Despite Zopfius' description of the vampire as a nocturnal creature, this is not always true in every region; the two most significant characteristics of the true vampire, are that it is an animated corpse which has not decomposed and that it drinks blood to sustain itself.

by Jordan VonTeese
Check out her site at http://www.myspace.com/onelastdeath