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Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:06 pm
by mortaine
AoM: Just tell the vampire they always have to "sleep through" the daytime events....
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:54 pm
by Surly
SekoETC wrote:Vampirism is also connected to early Christians because they were said to drink the blood of Christ and get eternal life out of it. Also Hocus Pocus magic words comes from Latin "Hoc Corpus"...
Well... who was the first vampire, supposedly? Cain. Of Cain & Abel fame. So its pretty inextricably linked with Christianity...
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 5:58 pm
by Floyd
was he the child of Eve that ate his brother? my bibles a little dusty...
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 6:22 pm
by SekoETC
Didn't eat him, just killed him because he was jealous that God valued Abel's sacrifice more.
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 6:24 pm
by Surly
Probably depends on your version of the Bible though...
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 6:25 pm
by Floyd
Swear there was some cannabalism in there....
How did he become a vampire?
Educate me people, i need to learn!
Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 8:09 pm
by AoM
The idea of Cain being the first vampire is a strictly modern interpretation... some dogma tells of how Cain's progeny became the various monsters of our world, but the curse of Cain really didn't extend beyond his banishment to the lands of Nod, never to die, and to bear the sevenfold mark. (Whomever brought harm to Cain would have it be revisited to them sevenfold)
Modern vampirism has swung the allegory of monstrosity in another direction. Contemporary vampiric tales have much less to do with Jewish stereotypes and argueably much more to do with the androgenous, bisexual nature of humanity. Stoker's Dracula only fed from women and was much more personal with his victims... but looking at Anne Rice's characters we see the vampire as a much more sexual predator, fulfilling a lustful need for blood. Religion becomes much less and issue with vampirism as well, as we read stories like Steven King's Salem's Lot where the vampires simply bat away the cross and kill priests at their leasure. Male vampires embrace male men, females embrace females. Children are embraced...
It's funny, but you can tell a lot about a culture's taboos by looking at what its writers are willing to put into defined form under the label "monster."
Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 7:52 pm
by Revanael
I'm gonna lock this for a moment, and split it. To keep things tidy.
EDIT: OK, it was hard to decide what to split - so I split everything from here down.
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4561