News Stories from the Vampire Universe Salon

Stories for November 4, 2016

The Closing of Vampire Community News

How to Become a Vampire and Why You Should Think Twice

Interview With A Real Life Vampire

Vampires--Fact, Fiction, and Folklore

The Real Life Diseases That Spread The Vampire Myth

Vampire Cemetery Found In Poland

Vampgeisticon

When we’re talking about a concept that is as fluid and as fantastic as the vampire, we really need to define our terms upfront. We’ve already outlined our definition of vampire. For the sake of clarity, here are some more words we use and what we mean by them in this instance.

ADVISORY

An advisory is an announcement with the intent to warn or otherwise make readers aware. When an advisory is posted to this site, it means that there has been sufficient evidence to consider a given situation as a threat.

AUDIENCE

These are the people you want to get yourself across to, whether in writing or another form of media. There really is nothing so valuable as an interested audience.

COMMUNITY

A group of individuals united by a common interest is a community.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

This academic field is really what Vampgeist is all about. A fuller definition is here reposted from Wikipedia.

Cultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology (the holistic study of humanity). It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept. Cultural anthropologists study cultural variation among humans, collect observations, usually through participant observation called fieldwork and examine the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. One of the earliest articulations of the anthropological meaning of the term “culture” came from Sir Edward Tylor who writes on the first page of his 1897 book: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” The term “civilization” later gave way to definitions by V. Gordon Childe, with culture forming an umbrella term and civilization becoming a particular kind of culture.

The anthropological concept of “culture” reflects in part a reaction against earlier Western discourses based on an opposition between “culture” and “nature“, according to which some human beings lived in a “state of nature”. Anthropologists have argued that culture is “human nature,” and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically (i.e. inlanguage), and teach such abstractions to others. Since humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, people living in different places or different circumstances develop different cultures. Anthropologists have also pointed out that through culture people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances).

The rise of cultural anthropology occurred within the context of the late 19th century, when questions regarding which cultures were “primitive” and which were “civilized” occupied the minds of not only Marx and Freud, but many others. Colonialism and its processes increasingly brought European thinkers in contact, directly or indirectly with “primitive others.” The relative status of various humans, some of whom had modern advanced cultures that included engines and telegraphs, while others lacked anything but face-to-face communication techniques and still lived a Paleolithic lifestyle, was of interest to the first generation of cultural anthropologists.

Parallel with the rise of cultural anthropology in the United States, social anthropology, in which sociality is the central concept and which focuses on the study of social statuses and roles, groups, institutions, and the relations among them, developed as an academic discipline in Britain. An umbrella term socio-cultural anthropology makes reference to both cultural and social anthropology traditions.

EDUCATION

The process of attaining knowledge of both a practical and esoteric nature hopefully leads to better awareness and understanding.

MEDIA

For our purposes, a medium is that by which we gather our knowledge of the world around us. The media refers to the relay of information from a source to an individual.

RESOURCE

Hopefully, this would be a trustworthy and honest repository of information that can be accessed by individuals.

SEEKER

We are all seekers. Here, we will use “seeker” to differentiate from “vampire”, the latter being self-described as such.

At the moment we are undertaking an enthusiastic public relations campaign both with vampire groups and sites and with various media outlets (US, soon to go global). We are also interested in showing that real vampirism doesn’t have to be a masquerade and can be based in some very solid philosophy and experience.

Vampire? Say What?

What is a vampire, anyway? There has to be something more than cloaked gentlemen from Creature Double Feature. Time to play my favorite game (isn’t it everyone’s?)—etymology!

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary gives a tidy summary. The word “vampire” is of French origin and came from the German Vampir, which in turn came from the Serbo-Croatian vampir. As for the vampir, it can be a reanimated corpse that rises from the grave by night to suck the blood of the sleeping, or simply a creature that exists by preying on others.

This would be a neat definition if it were complete. Historians, linguists, and many other scholars trace “vampire” to Slavic origins. One example is the Lithuanian wempti, meaning to drink. Another possible root is the Turkishuber or witch, the Russian upyr, or the Polish upior. In the end, the term came into English from the French in the Eighteenth Century, which is why we have “vampire” instead of “wempti” or “upior”.

Where does this leave the modern real vampire? They’re not walking corpses and they don’t necessarily prey on others. One connection I see is longing. The vampire of lore is drawn to commit certain acts because of an inner need. Real vampires also have a need, whether it is for emotional soothing, power, awareness, or energy. We could say that real vampires have needs, know they have needs, and do something to satisfy those needs, as opposed to the usual human who may aspire but never attempt. What is a real vampire? Ultimately you may come to your own understanding.
We go from the real to the folkloric entity that binds human societies together. There are hundreds of vampiric creatures in worldwide legend and folklore. It’s my conclusion that there is something in the human psyche wired to explain certain occurrences through vampire-like creatures. In turn, this is a clue as to how the vampire in some form can be found in virtually every world culture. To me, each creature is more colorful than the next. Here’s a brief sampling.

In the Philippines, the aswang is an extraordinarily beautiful woman by day. At night, she turns into a flying monster. Her preferred prey are local children, but sometimes her blood thirst is so strong that she will feed on anyone convenient.

The civatateo of the Aztec Empire were servants of the central god Tezcatlipoca. This status was their afterlife reward for having died in childbirth, which to the Aztecs was as noble as dying in battle. Hideous to look upon, the civatateo were especially fond of feeding on children, perhaps in a kind of revenge for the infants that claimed their own lives. To a mortal, a child would appear to be dying of a wasting illness.

Appearing in many Japanese folktales, the kitsune is a shape-shifter. Most often she takes the form of a wild fox or a beautiful maiden. Sex is her device for feeding from a victim. The kitsune is also a great prankster.

Lamia was once the queen of Libya. As punishment for some affront, the goddess Hera slew Lamia’s children. As revenge, Lamia abandoned her mortal form to drift through the countryside draining the blood of infants. Later, lamia was any child-killing demon.

The rakshasa is an especially powerful vampire in India. Its shape-shifting abilities are unparalleled. At the very least a human can be struck with nausea and vomiting just by passing through the area where a rakshasa has been. A young boy who, for whatever reason, eats human brains will become a rakshasa.

Greece has an especially rich vampire tradition, and the common name for these creatures is vrykolakas. They can be created through improper burial, immorality in life, or dying unbaptized. Everyone who is killed by the vrykolakas will then become vrykolakas.

I can’t leave this subject without mentioning my personal favorite, the Balkan vampire watermelon. Any object left outside on the night of a full moon was believed to become vampiric, so why not watermelons? Of course, vampire watermelons aren’t to be feared. They don’t have teeth, and if they did, they wouldn’t create much horror by biting ankles. More than anything, they are a nuisance, rolling around and growling at people. I bet you’ll never look at a watermelon the same way.