| The word vampire (vampir, vampyre) has hazy origins, although scholars generally agree that it can be traced to the Slavic languages, with debates continuing as to its etymological sources. The word may have come from the Lithuaniam wempti ("to drink"), or from the root pi (to "drink"), with the prefix va or av. Other suggested roots have included the Turkish uber ("witch") and the Serbo-Croatian pirati ("to blow"). Cognate forms developed, so that there can be found in Serbo-Croatian the term vampir, upyr in the Russian, upior in the Polish, and upir in the Byelorussian. Some scholars prefer the concept that upir is older than vampir, an eastern Slavic name that spread westward into the Balkans, where it was adopted by the southern Slavs and received vigorous circulation. The word vampire (or vampye) arrived in the English language with two 1732 publications: the March translation of a report by the investigators looking into the case of Arnold Paole of Meduegna and the May release of the article "Political Vampires." It is as difficult to define a vampire as it is to trace the origins of its name. For example, Webster�s International Dictionary defines a vampire as "a bloodsucking ghost or reanimated body of a dead person, believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep. .." This definition does not include psychic or astral vampires or those peculiar species that are nonhuman. A broad definition was humbly offered by Brian Frost in The Monster with a Thousand Faces (1989), proposing that a vampire is "fundamentally a parasitic force or being, malevolent and self-seeking by nature, whose paramount desire is to absorb the life-force or to ingest the vital fluids of a living organism in order to sate its perverse hunger and to perpetuate its unnatural existence." |
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| Song :Temptation waits by Garbage |