I decided to look up information on older vampire myths and legends and I found a good article on howstuffworks.com. According to this article, the first vampires showed up around 4,000 years ago. Mesopotamia’s Lamastu and Lilith were mostly used to explain infertility and early childhood deaths, as they would steal or kill children in their beds in the middle of the night. These first vampires and vampire-like demons were all described as part woman and part animal. Vampire type figures in Asia were more like the blood-sucking, reanimated corpses that most people know today.
Vampires were very well known in Eastern Europe. The Russians and Greeks said that sinners, unbaptized people, non-Christians, and witches were most likely to be vampires after death. There were many occurrences in the 1600s and 1700s of people digging up dead bodies to burn them or stake them because they were afraid they were vampires. For Dracula, Stoker chose bits and pieces of the eastern European vampire myths and added some of his own details, such as vulnerability to sunlight and crucifixes. Unlike the general myths of the time, Dracula had no reflection and was very smart.
The rest of the article goes into detail about some of the different early vampire forms. It also explains some diseases that look similar to vampirism that could have spurred some of the vampire “witch-hunts” in Europe. If interested the link is below. These vampires all seem to have at least one thing in common: they all place human fear of death into a monster.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/vampire.htm
2 comments:
I like how you used the article to help summarize about your research. It helped get insight on to what vampires are and also give me a brief history on vampires. This was very helpful because I learned things that I did not know. For example I always believed that vampires were only male.
You thought only guys were vampires?? (Sorry. That surprised me.) You haven't seen a lot of vampire movies then, have you?
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