Vampyres, vampires, nosferatu, the undead . . .

Humans raised from the dead to spend eternity in constant quest of ruby-red, warm blood. Human blood is food of choice, but animal blood will temper their hunger. They are neither fallen angels nor demons sent by Satan to temp or corrupt. 

They can be evil, but the evil they do is their own.

But first, on earth as vampyre sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt they native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from they daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life . . .
Wet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave
Go - and with the ghouls and afreets rave,
Till these in horror shrink away
From specter more accursed than they!

by Lord Byron from The Giaour (1813)

My thanks goes out to the alt.vampyres newsgroup  (web site located at http://www.altvampyres.com/) for the information provided by the members and their FAQ, but most especially to BJ Kuehl for providing much needed information whenever it was requested.  Without this newsgroup, this page would have been even more difficult to build.  Thank you one and all.

Contents
(Click on a heading to move to that topic)

A Taste for Blood

The Making of a Vampyre

The Vampyre's Kiss

Types of Vampyres

Vampyre Powers

Vampyre Perils

To Kill a Vampyre

Vampyres Through Time

A Taste for Blood

Both the Vampyre (a human being raised from the grave) and the Werewolf (a man or woman transformed into a wolf) have much in common.  They are both made of mortal stuff; they are not fallen angles nor are they demons sent by Satan to tempt or corrupt.  Both display a supernatural strength and agility, as well as share the ability to "shape-shift", i.e. change their shape at will.  Further, both use their well-developed incisors in the never ending quest of the same nourishment -- hot, pulsing and deep red human blood.

However, while the vampyre needs blood to survive, draining his victims so that he might live;  the werewolf is both cannibal and carnivore,  relishing in the hunt itself and then reveling in the blood and flesh of his victims.

According to some occult lore, the werewolf, on his death becomes a vampyre -- an interesting graduation, don't you think?

Be that as it may, the vampyre and the werewolf have traveled through the myths of history trailing death and destruction forever burning their footprints into the blood they have spilled over the centuries.

In both occult history and folklore, the oldest vampyre figures were female, from the Greek Lamiai to the Malaysian Langsuyar and the Jewish Lilith.  In addition, there were many female "vampyre like" creatures that were prominent in the lore of polytheistic cultures.  Kali, the dark goddess of India was such a figure as were the witch/vampyres of West Africa.

Closely related to the female vampyres were figures such as the Incubus or Succubus and the Mara.  None of these entities were vampyres, though each behaved in ways reminiscent of vampyres -- attacking their male or female victims in the night and leaving them distraught and exhausted in the morning.

However, as the centuries passed, it was the male vampyre that captivated the majority of cultures.

                                                                       Castle Dracula  

The Making of a Vampyre

Based on mythology, there are many possible routes to the making of a vampyre.  Most vampyres, according to legend and lore, are made (or turned) by other vampyres.  Once bitten the victim then takes of the vampyre's blood and becomes infected with eternal life and burdened with the blood-lust required to sustain it.

The Vampyre's Kiss

He bent his head and kissed her palm.   The sudden unexpected sensuality of it took her breath away.

"What is it like?" Ardeth asked.

"Like food," he said, pausing to glance up at her, "or love." 

Some meals are sustenance, some feasts of delight."  He leaned over to put his lips against her wrist, to run his tongue along her vein.  "Some acts of love are mere biology, some a sacrament."

..... from The Night Inside by Nancy Baker

Types of Vampyres

The two most common vampyres are the sanguinarian (blood) vampyres and the psychic vampyres.  To my mind the most dangerous of the two are the psychic type vampyres.

Psychic Vampyres

Vampyre Strengths

There are many, many different versions of the vampire myth, both in legend and in fiction, therefore any ability you could name has probably been ascribed to vampires at some point.   Although each vampyre type has it's own associated powers,  here are some of the powers traditionally ascribed to European vampyres (i.e. movie and literature vampyres):

• Ability to shapeshift (change shape) . . . common forms assumed are: wolf, bat, rat, cat, owl, fox, weasel, raven, spider, scorpion, moth and fly.
  
  

• Ability to transform its body into mist or dust.
  
  

• Strength, speed and sensory perception far greater than that of any human.
  
  

• Ability to summon and control animals, particularly rats and wolves.
  
  

• Ability to control the minds of mortals . . . may command mortals, strike fear with a look, or cause selective amnesia.
  
  

• Ability to control the weather... summoning rain clouds and fog.
  
  

• Ability to command some form of magical or mystical beings, with the implicit idea that the vampyre is in league with an evil entity.

Vampyre Perils

Based on legend, stories and novels, the vampyre that myth has made is prone to the following weaknesses:

• Weakened or harmed by sunlight. Although this vulnerability seems very prevalent, there are notable exceptions to it. As mentioned above, Dracula was relatively unaffected by sunlight. Poppy Z. Brite's vampires were only sensitive to the sun, not harmed by it.
  
  

• Repelled/harmed by religious symbols. This appears to be a subject of great debate. A very prevalent belief, is the symbol itself is useless unless the wielder possesses a strong faith in the efficacy of the symbol, as a despoiler of evil. As such, the symbol is just the vehicle for the faith of its holder, and the actual symbol need not be religious. There is a movie in which a yuppie dispels a vampire by holding up his wallet! Apparently, his faith in money was enough that he could harm the vampire. Again, it was the faith and not the symbol that mattered.
  
  

• Repelled by garlic and/or wolfs bane. During the Middle Ages when an illness would appear in a town, it would at times be attributed to the appearance of a vampyre in the area. These people would often be fed garlic that would, due to its antiseptic nature, destroy the bacteria causing the illness. This led many people to attribute garlic with the added property of a "vampyre repellent". As with everything else, this is not a wholesale answer to why garlic is given the properties it has, but it does offer at least one, up to now, acceptable explanation. Again, this doesn't seem to be universal. Its inclusion in the vampyre mythology may be due to the belief that since wolfs bane supposedly repelled werewolves (it's mild medicinal uses gave it a reputation for being magical during the plague years), it would exert a power on vampires (who are lumped in with lupines because both were supposed to be supernatural), as well.
  
  

• Unable to cross running water, except at the ebb and flow of the tide. The reason for this is linked to the reason why vampires do not cast a reflection in mirrors. In the case of a reflection, the reflection was thought to be symbolic of a person's soul, something a vampire was thought not to have. Most mirrors, at the point in time that many of these beliefs were springing up, were not any better than a standing stream of water, so the water became associated in a fashion with the mirror.
  
  

• Needs an invitation to enter someone's home of someone - cannot enter without one.
  
  

• Cannot pass a thicket of wild rose or a line of salt
  
  

• Has to stop and count every grain in a pile of grain (type of grain varies)
  
  

• Does not cast a reflection. In some areas, vampyres are believed not to show in photographs, and in some, they are believed not to cast shadows.

To Kill a Vampyre

Although it is NEVER a good practice to harm vampyres let alone kill them, some of the more favoured methods of Slayers to destroy a vampyre include:

• Immobilized/destroyed by driving a stake through the heart. Some legends say the stake must be of a particular type of wood (generally ash, hawthorn, maple, blackthorn, buckthorn, or aspen), and some say that the stake must be driven through in one, continuous, blow.
  
  

• Cutting off the vampyre's head. Some legends say this must be done with a gravedigger's shovel. The two above things, cutting off the head and using a stake, have a common origin in the belief that the brain and the heart were the seats of life and power in living things. If you put a piece of wood through the heart, there is a good chance that you're going to kill whatever it is. Also, if you cut off a vampyre's head, you are cutting it's brain off from the rest of its body, therefore, you are cutting it off from its life-force.
  
  

• Burning the vampyre. This seems to be a relatively universal method of destroying vampires, in both legend and fiction.
  
  

• Cutting out the heart and burning it.
  
  

• Dispelling the vampire with holy symbols and/or water. This idea seems to have come about through Christian beliefs, because vampires were postulated by Leo Allatius, and later by Dom Augustin Calmet, to be somehow related to Satan. One further method of dispelling or harming vampires was by use of the Eucharistic Wafer (the bread used in Holy Communion, which is believed to be mystically transformed by blessing, into the actual flesh of Christ). Today, with the characterizations of vampires, given by modern writers, this belief is not widely utilized.

It should be kept in mind that, although these practices are supposed to harm a vampire, they also tend to put a hurting on mortals as well. As a result, any attempts made in the early years of human lore to destroy vampires by these methods were pretty well guaranteed to work... Make what you will from that.

Vampyres Through Time

A collection of items and links related to Vampyres through time.  The lists seem endless, like the vampyre itself, and the items here are only a small sampling of information available on the most notorious of all Night Children.

Vampyres: A to Z     Vampyre Movies     Vampyre Writings

( Literature, Books, Novels, and other writings)