Interpreting the Vampire

	Vampire legends have been around for centuries and have captivated the minds and imaginations of many.  Today, we are still enthralled by this legendary creature, making it the focus of numerous novels, television shows, and movies.  This fascination knows no limit, boundaries, or origins.  There are countless number of legends around the world, each detail varying according to different beliefs and customs.  The core of the vampire legends remains the same though: a creature that takes in blood for its own survival and enjoyment.  For this endeavor, I shall look at one particular realm of vampire legend that is quite known among European folklore and its historical background in order to further understand and interpret why historically people have told these frightening legends and what these legends meant to them.  To do this, I will look at the symbolism of the particular characteristics of the vampire legend and what these symbols may represent for the people who told the legends.
	Vampires were at one time believed to exist.   Since biblical times, when Lilith, the first wife of Adam before Eve, was thought to roam the night sky in order to suck the blood out of children, the legend of the vampire has terrified many.   Brian J. Frost argues that by the beginning of the historical era the vampire was a well-established denizen of the demon world, appearing in a variety of guises.  Records left by the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians confirm that vampirish demons were a great menace to the people of those times (p5).  Many variations of this legend exist around the world and throughout history taking on numerous changes.  I could collect hundreds of such stories of the different kinds of vampires and its legends, but for the sake of this endeavor I will only look at the basics of the broader and more common legends of the vampire.  
According to the vampire legend of European folklore a vampire is a dead but animated corpse that sucks the blood of humans. They were most commonly thought of as spirits or demons that left their graves at night to seek and enslave their victims; it was thought that the victims themselves became vampires.  Sometimes, though it could take human form in order to deceive its victims.  The vampire could be warded off with a variety of charm, amulets, and herbs and could finally be killed by driving a stake through its heart or by cremation. Sometimes the vampire assumed a nonhuman shape, such as that of a bat or wolf. The legendary vampire of Europe's most notable features are extreme paleness, finger marks around a seemingly freshly dug grave, an allergic reaction to sunlight (sunlight usually kills them), a swollen and gorged appearance if the vampire has just feed upon blood, no signs of the corruption of the body even years after the burial and the lack of rigor mortis. The vampire must attack and drink the blood of other people, usually biting the jugular vein located in the neck and drinking much of their victim's blood. The victim of a vampire usually dies from the loss of blood and in turn becomes a vampire after death. Vampires are said to have eternal youth and life, the only cost being they must drink blood every night to sustain themselves, and they must stay away from the sunlight, which kills a vampire instantly because they have no soul (not a common part of the folklore until about the mid 19th century, before then vampires were thought to be able to walk amongst "normal" people during the day).  The most common way of killing a vampire is to take the body out of its coffin, removing and burning its heart, beheading it and impaling the corpse with a wooden stake made of any wood except pine, which is a symbol of everlasting life due to the fact the pine never loses its leaves (Dilworth, internet site).
	These details describing the elements of the vampire has transcribed itself in various stories, legends, and truths.  As stated earlier, the history of these vampire legends is many.  The most widely known historical vampire was Vlad Tepes or Dracula who lived in Transylvania from 1431-1476.   During his period of power in his country side of Wallachia, he terrorized his people, mostly peasants, and outsiders who dared to cross him.  This particular form of legend and the reason for the infamous branding of vampire arose out of the atrocities he so lavishing and gleefully committed.  It is said that he impaled some 100,000 people and forests of these impaled and decaying corpses surrounded his castle.  He was also have said to sit among these corpses to eat his meals.  According to one historian, Alexander Cepesi, Dracula went so far as to collect the flowing blood from the freshly killed victims in copper vats and drink it down, either straight or blended with alcohol and brewed with herbs of his liking (Glut, p10).  Whether this is true or not, Vlad Tepes existed and his legends helped to further the various legends of today about vampires.  
	While Vlad Tepes Dracula is sometimes the most prominent figure in some legends of vampirism, the fear of these creatures goes even further back than that of V. Dracula.  Even before this time, legends of vampires were circulating.  Most often, these legendary creatures appeared not as a human form as in the legend of Dracula and his predecessors but rather have taken the shape of spiritual demons or gods.  According to Frost, in Babylonian times, the most feared of all were the Seven Spirits, a consortium of tyrannical, blood-quaffing demon-gods who rampaged throughout the countryside causing havoc (p5).  Frost presents a translation of cuneiform inscriptions of the description of these creatures that parallels the common legends surrounding the undead human-like vampire: They rage against mankind:
They spill blood like rain, devouring flesh (and) sucking their veins (p5.)  Other such demonic or god-like vampires of legend include the snake-goddess Lilitu, who was later borrowed by the Hebrews for their own traditional lore and renamed Lilith.  She was said to be a succubus, who not only "preyed upon the blood of innocent children but also appeared before unsuspecting and sleeping males in order to take them as her lover of the night" (Frost, p6).  
	In his article "Psychic Ambiguity at the Legend Core", Carl Lindahl states "at the center of the classic legend is the overlapping of two worlds, an intersection of the everyday and the supernatural.  The supernatural steps in at those moments when human desperation or desire reaches a certain intense pitch" (p70).  In trying to interpret the reasons why people, in particular the peasants during the height of these vampire legends of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would tell these stories when fear of this blood-sucking creature was so great.  Using Lindahl's argument that desperation drives people to tell these stories in order to explain certain things, I argue that this was the case of the people telling vampire legends.  During this time when it was most circulating around the countryside, disease, illness, and death was rampant.  The image of the corpse reanimating and achieving youth and immortality may have been a desire on their part to believe that the ravages of disease on the body can be transgressed and a sort of "afterlife" can be achieved.  Agnes Murgoci likewise argues "the folklore of vampires is of special interest from the light it throws on primitive ideas about body and soul, and about the relation of the body and soul after death" (Dundes, p12).  In addition, vampires may have been used to not only explain the transgression of disease, but may have explained the cause of mass illness.  John V. A. Fine states "vampires were believed to exist and in some instances were thought to be responsible for local outbreaks of disease or other community calamities"(Dundes, p57).  
	The drinking of blood may also have been used to explain the life force of the person and the transgression of death and disease.  This is linked to Barbara G. Walker's statement in which "the primal notion that all life depends on the magic of menstrual blood-or the Blood of the Moon...and evolved a corresponding notion that the dead crave blood in order to make themselves live again" (p1039).  Walker's notion of the link to menstrual blood also has sexual connotations which have developed into the legends of the vampires often times sexualized cravings for the blood of victims.  This sexualization of blood may constitute for the tellers of the legends a way to surpass the bounds of the "virtuous virgin" and the matrimonial and/or the heteronormative ties of sexual intercourse.  The idea that the vampire walks during the night preying on sometimes sleeping victims only further substantiates this claim that the tellers were able to disclose publicly their inner sexual desires and erotic longings that were most certainly shunned out of these contexts, especially when it came to young female tellers.  Lindahl argues that in these classical legends the supernatural creature, in this case the vampire, fills a function in which to "demonstrate that success or failure in the everyday world depends on the rigid rules of an unseen one, rules perceivable just often enough to validate mortal moral codes" (p72).  The tellers, by widely circulating the sexual blood-sucking deviances of the vampire are validating their own moral code by remaining aware of these dangers and speaking to others of them and protecting themselves at night through the use of garlic and other such magical methods in their bedroom while at the same time under this guise they are eliciting their own secret sexual fantasies.
	The legend of the vampire has circulated for hundreds of years and will continue as evidenced in various outlets such as legend, novel, and movie.  These stories have its origins all around the world and in many various aspects.  Some of these legends have arisen out of actual human cases of vampirism such as Count Vlad Tepes Dracula and other numerous cases which were too many to present here but all nonetheless attributed to this legend of the heinous creature we love to talk about.  Other stories have reachings further back in historical times when it was thought that blood-sucking demons or gods could roam the night sky.  Despite these origins of the legends however, the fact remains, the vampire symbolizes aspects of humanity that cannot be explained without this creature.  What once explained the fears of death, disease, sexuality, still perpetuate itself today.  In modern times, the vampire represents all that it used to, it may have changed some but its essence has remained intact: it is still the blood-sucking creature of the night.

References Cited

Dilworth, James.  "The Legendary Vampire".  Taken from the website: www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/v/vampire_the_legedary.html

Fine, John V.A., Jr.  "In Defense of Vampires".  From The Vampire: A Casebook. Edited by Alan Dundes. 1998. University of Wisconsin Press: Madison.

Frost, Brian J.  The Monster With a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature.  1989. Bowling Green State University Popular Press: Ohio.

Glut, Donald F.  The Dracula Book.  1975.  The Scarecrow Press: New Jersey.

Lindahl, Carl.  "Psychic Ambiguity at the Legend Core". In the Journal of Folklore Research, 23 (1986): 1-21.

Murgoci, Agnes.  "The Vampire in Roumania"  From The Vampire: A Casebook. edited by Alan Dundes.  1998. University of Wisconsin Press: Madison.

Walker, Barbara G.  "Vampire".  In The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.  1983: HarperSanFrancisco.