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| Vampirism: The act of being a vampire, involving the taking of blood, of psychic energy, or of some other power in order to survive or to increase personal vitality. while most people today associate vampirism with the traditional bloodsucker, there are, in fact, various types and degrees of activities performed by them. Psychic predations involve the draining from a victim of their spiritual, mental, pysical, and life essences, leaving them weakened or even dead. Sexual vampirism is actually quite common and entails the ceaseless need for sexual conquest, manipulation, and abuse. Other, less defined forms can range from political vampirism to financial vampirism, in which person or even institutions feed off society. Compared to some of these, which involve social ills and the degradation of entire peoples, the blood-drinking variety of vampirism seems tame to some. The most common vampirism in the modern world involves people who drink blood for pyschosexual satisfaction. |
| True Accounts Apollonius of Tyana: A noted first-century (A.D.) philosopher and sophist, whose life was recorded in famous Life of Apollonius of Tyana By Philostratus. In the work ( Book IV) was the tale of one of Apollonius' puplis, Menippus, who was saved from certian death at the hands of a female vampire species, the empusa . This story was the basis of the famed poem "Lamia" by Keats. Garnier, Gilles: A late-sixteenth-century French mass murder, considered in his day to be a kind of werewolf/vampire. He murdered young girls or women and then ate them, drinking their blood for nurishment. What made him particulary horrifying was his habit of choosing prime cuts from his victims, which he then took home to his wife. Condemned, Garnier was executed. Bathory, Elizabeth: Hungarian noblewomen (1560-1614) and member of the powerful Bathory family who became known as the "Bloody Countess" for her multiple murders and obsession with blood. Married to the warrior count Ferenz Nadasdy, Bathory spent many nights alone while her husband was fighting the Turks. She developed obsessive interests in her own beauty, in pleasure, in the accult, and in most depraved kinds of sadism, which were normally manifested toward her serving girls, with whom she engaged in orgies before murdering them with the help of her lieutenants. Bathory became convinced that blood was a useful cosmetic and restorative when she hit a victim so hard that her blood splashed onto the countess's face and arms; when she washed off the blood she believed that her skin felt smoother and younger. Henceforth, she drank, bathed, and showered in the blood of maidens, murdering hundreds of young girls who were brought into her service. Exact figures on the number of her victims vary, but some accounts put the number at 610, others as few as 50. Inevitably, however, the truth became known, and in 1610 the countess and her henchmen were arrested, tried and convicted. Her accomplices were executed or imprisoned, and Bathory was walled up in her bedroom at Castle Csejthe. Four years later the guards who attended her looked through the tiny slot used to provide her with food and discovered that she was dead. The "living vampire" was no more, although her memory was kept alive by legends and tales. Several films were made about her, including Daughter of Darkness ( 1970 ), Countess Dracula ( 1971 ), Blood Castle (1972), and La Noche de Walpurgis ( 1972 ). Walachia': The coffin was abserved carefully on all sides, and they found it as undamaged as they themselves had made it. We opened the coffin, and, to be sure, with most of the dead, one saw that a foaming, evil-smelling, brown-black ichor welling out of their mouths and nose, with the one more, with the other less. And what kind of joy did this cause among the people? They all cried, "Those are vampires, thos are vampires!"....But with those (deceased) that had died of lengthy diseases, and had lain buried for awhile, the epidermis lifted away, but the thick skin underneath was not red but yellow-white. When one pushed on their chest, blood flowed out of the mouth, but by far not as much as the others ( in the previous paragraph). They had not all decomposed. I asked the bystanders if these were not also vampires, but they declined to answer. - Eighteenth-century account. Greece: On the top of the bones of other men there was found laying a corpse perfectly whole; it was unusually tall of stature; cloths it had none, time or moisture having caused them to perish; skin was distended, hard, and livid, and so swollen everywhere that the body had no flat surfaces but was round like a full sack. the face was covered with hair dark and curly; on the rest of the body, which appeared smooth all over; the arms by reason of the swelling of the corpse were stretched out on each side like the arms of a cross; the hands were open, the eyelids closed, the mouth gaping, and the teeth white and long. - Seventeenth-century Greek account. ~ If anyone still wish more of these accounts, I ask that you read "The Vampire Encyclopedia" By Matthew Bunson, "Transformation" By The Editors of Time Life Books, " Strange But True Vampires" By Rowan Wilson, and " Vampires, Burial and Death" By Pual Barber~ |
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