Scholarly article on origins of vampire myth

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sauvin
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Re: Scholarly article on origins of vampire myth

Post by sauvin » Fri Sep 17, 2010 6:24 am

lombano wrote: I think these origins may also explain why vampires went from being terrifying to nowadays being everything from sexy to appearing on children's shows; rabies, once common enough in Europe for there to be special hospitals for the rabid, is now pretty rare in most of the world, and moreover immunisation is pretty effective. It is a sufficiently distant fear so that vampires can be portrayed as 'friendly.'
Assuming this line of speculation is well founded, and I do so assume, one of the horror genre's cornerstone archetypes went from being a fear of disease to being something almost entirely demonic to... what it is today. The physical basis is fascinating, and I think you VERY MUCH for brining all this to the fore.

I believe there's plenty here to argue about what it all might mean, and I'll leave that to much keener minds than mine. Apart from succubi and incubi, I still believe that much of the contemporary sexualised vampire sources from what I'm calling the modern archetype: Stoker's.
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Re: Scholarly article on origins of vampire myth

Post by lombano » Fri Sep 17, 2010 7:25 am

sauvin wrote:The physical basis is fascinating, and I think you VERY MUCH for brining all this to the fore.
No problem.
sauvin wrote:Apart from succubi and incubi, I still believe that much of the contemporary sexualised vampire sources from what I'm calling the modern archetype: Stoker's.
The older forms of the myth included neither aristocratic characteristics nor immortality - don't know if Stoker invented that, but he definitely popularised it.
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Re: Scholarly article on origins of vampire myth

Post by sauvin » Fri Sep 17, 2010 7:50 am

lombano wrote:
sauvin wrote:The physical basis is fascinating, and I think you VERY MUCH for brining all this to the fore.
No problem.
sauvin wrote:Apart from succubi and incubi, I still believe that much of the contemporary sexualised vampire sources from what I'm calling the modern archetype: Stoker's.
The older forms of the myth included neither aristocratic characteristics nor immortality - don't know if Stoker invented that, but he definitely popularised it.
I did a fairish amount of reading on this quite a while ago and have rudely forgotten what I'd read. Seems to me beings like Lilith and her spawn should be pretty effectively immortal, and the incubi and succubi I'd remembered reading about, being demonic, likewise so. As for aristocracy, well... ancient people might not have thought to question such things, but 19th century Stoker would have had a few questions about the proper place for the "highborn" in the wake of the American and French revolutions, I'd think.
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