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Vampires on My Street
The origin of the vampire is ancient and complex. But For the early Egyptians
and Greeks, vampires were hungry ghosts. They left their tombs at night to vist
their grieving relatives and feast upon their vitality. Since blood has always
been regarded as the seat of the vitality in living creatures, these ghosts were
naturally attracted to it. They needed the life-force in the blood of the
living in order to gain sufficient strength to remember their identities.
Otherwise they would continue to wander the astral world as lost souls, never
knowing who they were or where they were going.
In prehistoric Egypt, before the time of the Pharaos, family members tried
to keep the spirits of their departed relatives near thier corpses by placing
offerings of food in the graves. To make doubly shure the dead would not walk,
relatives often cut off the head and feet of the corpse. The Egyptians also
feared vampires from hell, which the acient texts describe as:__ "serpents which
are in the Underworld, which live upon the bodies of men and women and consume
their blood"__ (Budge, _Gods of the Egyptains,_ Vol1, page 23).
There is a famous scene in one of the most ancient Greek epic poems, the
_Odyssey_of Homer, where the hero, Odysseuss, visits the land of the dead and
summons the lost souls who dwel there with the blood of sacrifices. Odysseus
cuts the throats of sacrificial sheep over a pit he has dug in the earth,
filling it with warm blood, and the shades of the dead come "swarming
around...from every direction with inhuman clamor" eagar to drink. The ghost of
the blind sage Teiresias informs Odysseus that once a ghost is permitted to
drink of the blood, it will remember is former idenity and give a true answer to
whatever question Odysseus might ask.
According to the acients, even though these hungry ghost did not remeber
their living relatives from their past lives, they were nonetheless drawn to to
them. To prevent the spirits from wandering away from their tombs, it became
the practice to drive a stake through the chest of the corpse. The stake iself
did not destory the spirit. Its purpose was to pin the spirit to the earth.
This custom of staking vampire ghosts is ancient. It is described in the
works of Saxo Grammaticus (twelfth century). Saxo relates the story of
Asmundus, who as the result of an insane oath, allowed himself to be entombed
with the newly dead corpse of his dear freind, Asuitus, Some tme later Ericus,
King of Suecia, who happened to be passing the tomb, caused it to be opened.
Asmudus emerged half-mad and bleeding from fresh wounds. He told the king that
the spirt of Asuitus had attacked him, and that he had only managed to save
himself by cutting off the head of the corpse and driving a stake through its
heart.
In India, the vampire was a type of demon in the shape of a large bat. It
is descirbed in the series of folk tles translated by Sir Richard F. Burton
under the title __Vikram and the Vampire__:
It's eyes, which were wide open, were of a
greenish-brown, and never twinkled.... It's
body was thin and ribbed like a skeleton....
Blood it appeared to have none....
In Slavonic folklore also, the vampire is linked with the image of a large
blood sucking bat. This is a remarkable coincidence, since there are no bats
that drink blood in the old world, only in the Americas.
Most of the vampire legends we are familar with come from the Slavonic
nations of Russia, Serbia, Poland, Bulgaria, and thier neighbors, but the modern
vampire is most cosly linked with Transylvania, a province in central Romania.
This was the home of the most famous of all vampires, Count Dracula. Dracula is
the fictonal creation of the writer Bram Stoker, who based his memorable
character upon the bloody life of a fifteenth century Romanian despot named Vlad
of Wallachia, surnamed the Impaler because of this tyrant's fondness for
impaling his enemies upon tall wooden stakes. So terrible was the memory of
Vlad that his name became a boogeyman to frighten children for centuries after
his death.
Because of Stoker's novel, and the modern literature of the vampire based
upon it, we tend to think of the vampire as an immortal physical being with
supernatural powers. In modern Western myth the vampire is repelled by crosses
and garlic, sleeps during the day in the coffin in which he or she was burried,
has great strength and hyonotic powers, can transform into a bat or a wolf, can
become mist to slip under covers or through keyholes, has enlarged incisor teeth
to bite into the necks of victims for the purpose of sucking their blood, cannot
be seen in a mirror, and can be destoryed with a variety of weapons, among them
holy water, sunlight, and a wooden stake through the heart. There are really
Six types of vampires:
THE HUNGRY GHOST
The most ancient and most accurate type is the hungry ghost, who separates from
it's corpse and visits the beds of it's relatives and freinds to drain away
their spirtual life-force, which is resident in thier blood then carries this
life-force back to its grave to vitalize its corpse and keep it from rotting.
Many of the features of the vampire that we are famillar with today are based
upon this spiritual vampire. For example, the reason we cannot see vampires in
the mirror is because they have no physical reality. They are present in our
minds, and are merely projected into the physical world of our perceptions like
a holographic image. however, this mental projection does not reflect in the
same way physical objects relfect. Alternately, we can sometimes see this
spiritual creature in the depths of mirrors when it is not present in the
physical environmrnt.
This also explans why it is necessary to invite a vampire into our house
before it can enter. The house ia a metaphor for our subconscious mind. When
we invite a vampire into our house, we are symbolically invoking it into our
personal subconscious, where it is then free to feed upon our spiritual
vitality. This is why the vampire visits us during night, when we are asleep
and dreaming, and most vulnerable to entities in the subconscious mind.
The corpse of this hungry ghost serves as an anchor that binds it to the
physical plane. If the vampire could not be securely staked into its grave with
its physical corpse, it was possible to banish it by destorying the corpse in
several specific ways. The head might be cut and its mouth stuffed with garlic,
which is noxious to vampires-an echo of the acient Egyptian practice. Or the
heart, the physical seat of the life-force, might be cut out and burned. An
even surer course was to burn the entire body to ashes. The modern myth that
destorying the coffin of a vampire deprives it of its resting place is a
variation on the traditional remedy of destorying the corpse.
THE HUNGRY DEMON
The second type of vampire is also nonphysical. It is not the ghost of a person
who has died, but a spiritual entity that seeks nouishment from living men and
women, often by preying upon their sexual energies while they sleep. Those
beings variously known as incubi,succubi,lamia, hags and lilitu fall into this
category. They are not usally regarded as vampires, but their funtion is the
same.
The ancient Romans belived that spirits they called stirges came to the
cribs of sleeping children in the shapes of owls and drank thier blood. The
Roman poet Ovid writes: " By night they fly, and they seek the children un
protected by the nurse, and pollute their bodies, dragged from thier cradles"
(Ovid,Fasti,Book6 lines 133-40).
THE LIVING DEAD
The third type of vampire is the one we know so well from the Dracula legend-a
reanimated corpse that arises from the grave with an uncontrollable bloodlust.
This physical vampire mantains its strenght by drinking the blood of living
beings, somtimes animals, but humans by preference. It is no clearwhat would
happen if theese creatures could not get blood-presumably they would become very
hungry, since they cannot die fromm starvation and are immortal. Perhaps they
would simply waste away growing weaker and weaker, untill thet were incapable of
goin in searchof prey.
PSYCHIC VAMPIRES
The fourth type of vampire is a living human being who feeds upon the spiritual
vitality of other humans psychically, often without being aware of this
activity. These are indivduals who drain others of their will and energy.
Frenids and family members unfortunate enough to endure their company becomes
listless and depressed without knowing the reason. Psychic vampires carry out
the bulk of their feeding during sleep, when their asral bodies vist those close
to them and suck vitality from them on the asral level. Psychic vampires seldom
know that they are draining the life force from those nearest and dearest to
them.
BLOOD DRINKERS
The fifth type of vampire ia a living human being with a passion for blood. A
small percentage of this group suffer from a rare formof anemia that causes
their bodies to crave some of the substances contained in fresh blood, but most
are obsessed with blood on an emotional level. This can take the form of blood
drinking, but also of blood-letting or bathing in blood. The Countess Ersze
Bathroy (1550-1615), a Hungarian noblewoman, was tried and convicted in 1611 of
having murdered 650 young girls by draining their blood so that she could bathe
in it and preserve her beauty.
FASHON VAMPIRES
The cult of vampirism has never been more popular than at present. There are
thousands of individuals in America to day who sleep in coffins, wear black, and
drink small amounts of the blood of their sex partners. When they cannot obtain
this, they cut their own bodies with razors and drink their own blood, or kill
animals for this purpose. Some of them believe that they are immortal and
possess supernatural powers. However, most have adopted the cult of the vampire
for shock value and as a fashionable lifestyle.
I hope you find this information useful.
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