Vampyres
(I thought this was interesting (Mirrored From):http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/vampyres.html)
Vampyres: What can be said of them? It is said that those who know say nothing, or that which they
might say is disinformation - intended to mislead. Perhaps little is known - if indeed there are
vampyres, they might well be expected to guard their secrets well, and if they have grown old, they
would well understand the value of misdirection.
It is also said that while those who might know say nothing, those who know nothing say much. I
believe this to be a reasonable statement. I must say that one should take what I may say with the
proverbial grain of salt - most of this is unsupported speculation. It's not as if I actually know much
about them firsthand, for which I guess I should be thankful.
Vampyres are the subjects of widely-varying legends, which are nonetheless repeated worldwide,
most of those legends antedating contacts between the various cultures which have formulated and
continue to express these legends. We might try to establish concordance between widely-scattered
legends devolving from widely-scattered cultures, in search of commonlity of theme or import.
Universally, at the lowest common denominator, vampyres are very manlike beings, perhaps a cult,
perhaps a separate species of hominids or manlike apes, or they might be the result of infection with
some sort of DNA-altering retrovirus. Whatever their origins, or their reality, vampyres are reputed
to be occasionally subtle, occasionally fierce, yet universally predatory within a scale ranging from a
sort of gentle nibbling harvest of the unwary to harsh apolitical murders of the cream of society. In
some cultures, vampyres are universally reviled as the exterminators of entire families, which legend
has often been attributed to interpretations of the Black Death or a regional plague of human rabies.
In some cultures, vampyres are fanciful demonic creatures endowed with the ability to separate their
heads from their bodies, thenceforth to fly by night around the community sucking the blood of
misbehaving children. This can clearly be viewed as a mere remonstrative legend, designed to
promote socialization of errant youth. Yet the legend seems to be, no matter the origin, archetypal:
There is no culture on this planet which has no legend of nocturnal intelligent manlike predators upon
unwary or venturesome Men.
Vampyres as Cultists
The most probable assessment of vampyres would be of a deviant cult of purely human beings.
They might or might not have access to some sort of drug, or other regimen, which allows them to
accelerate their reflexes, or they might be, more probably, well-schooled in a particularly-powerful
martial art, and acculturated into a mindset similar to the mindset taught to station chiefs within
intelligence services, a sort of tradecraft inculcated from an extremely young age. There may or may
not be some evidence of vampyre cultists being afflicted with some sort of Dissociative Identity
Disorder, or Multiphasic Personality Disorder. Certainly, vampirism is one of the criteria by which
investigative agencies categorize persons as serial-killers. Serial-killers are generally categorized into
two sets, the Disorganized serial-killer, or the Organized serial-killer. Generally the first type, the
Disorganized serial-killer, is a schizophrenic who has internalized some odd idea which leads them to
kill. Occasionally this type collects parts, and occasionally devours these parts as some sort of
trophy; this is the result of some sort of internally-generated or culturally-supplied symbolism equating
consumption of the victim as a specie of their own power. The Organized serial-killer who engages in
acts of cannibalism or vampirism, on the other hand, tends to act upon their own belief of total
superiority, and quite often while the disorganized serial-killer is quickly caught and brought to justice,
the Organized serial-killer may never be caught, or be caught only after an extremely long trail of
violence and horror in which they may murder many dozens of victims. Ted Bundy is a classic
example of this type.
There have been some modern cases in which it appears that serial-killers of the Organized type have
acted in concert with others of their ilk. One can presume that these groups of organized serial-killers
might exchange ideation, and become more confirmed in their sociopathic mindset, assuming an
ideology where before there had only been pathology. What if they were to marry and raise children
in these ways of thought, until a shared delusional supremacist ideological system, possibly genetically
linked (sociopathy may have a genetic component) became a family theme? From this supposition,
one might extrapolate to the development of a subculture of organized serial-killing, and given enough
time, one would see the development of a crypto-culture of well-trained and devoted killers. They
might perpetuate their kind throughout history thenceforth unless caught and brought to justice as a
group, and certainly such individuals or groups could easily give rise to legends regarding vampires,
or ninja for that matter.
It is easy to hypothesize that in mankind's distant past, when society had not yet developed past the
hunter-gatherer stage, that some social groups tended to hunt more, and it is similarly easy to
hypothesize that one or more groups specialized in hunting human beings. If this truly occurred and
did so in the very remote past, it might be that sufficient natural or artificial selection had occurred to
create a new breed of human, which was adapted to prey upon men. It can be argued, however, that
war in and of itself would bring similar evolutionary pressures to bear on even those societies which
were exclusively farmers or nomadic pastorals, leaving the hunters of men with no real "advantage" in
the hunts other than an "advantage" of cultural precepts, a sort of predisposition to unscrupulousness
and skulduggery.
Vampyres as Predatory Hominid
If one will credit the hypothesis that certain ancient cultures, far back at the time of the emergence of
homo sapiens, might have assumed a lifestyle based upon the hunting of men, one can easily bridge
to the idea that at some even-more remote time, one branch of our predecessor race, homo habilis,
had followed the same path. Given enough time, sufficient divergences within gene pools kept apart
by a genocidal enmity might diverge sufficiently as to produce, if not a completely new species, a new
race of hominid. Present evolutionary theory tends towards the idea that homo habilis evolved into
modern mankind through a widely-distributed parallel convergent evolutionary process facilitated by
interchange between boundary zones of isolated gene-pools. (There may in fact be no clear species
division between h. habilis and h. sapiens.) Some gene-pools may have been more isolated than
were others, and evolutionary pressures might have created a race of men adapted to nocturnal
predation on other men. Certainly that's an evolutionary niche that was wide-open to exploitation
after the last Ice Age, when the niches which had been filled by the Neandertal opened up after that
race's disappearance, absorption, or demise, and the sudden greening of the former wastelands.
Evolution and adaptation to a new niche can occur rapidly. Perhaps it did, and as some branches of
mankind began to explore the the emerging fringe niches left behind by the retreating glacial ice, they
might have often found themselves feeding populations which had preceded them to the bleaknesses
and had there devoured all other food. At the fringes the forces of desperation may have forged a
new being, the night hunters, the vampyres. Having lived primarily on human flesh, they might well
have become dependent upon it, and thus even should they relocate to greener pastures, the bleak
wasteland heritage would always travel within them.
Vampyres as Retrovirally Modified Humans
There is some possibility that some fluke of nature has allowed some virus to jump species, afflicting
human victims with some sort of nutritional disorder following a period of coma. This might or might
not be heritable, and thus passed on to offspring. It is much more likely that the "infectious vampyre"
legend results from distorted tales of localized plagues of rabies. Were one to for the moment
presuppose the possiblity of some sort of retroviral infection that could so greatly modify a human as
to be practically pre-programmed for an eternity of weeding out humankind, one must either wonder
at the possible evolutionary paths of such a viral-human symbiosis or parasitism, or one must wonder
at the technology that would be required to create such a virus in the absence of such an evolutionary
path to symbiosis.
In any of these cases, one can only hope that vampyres are, with the exception of deranged humans
on killing sprees (or lifelong careers of serial killing), to be consigned to the realm of the purely
literary, a mere bold fiction of mass-entertainment.
Coming soon, analyses of the vampyre in popular literature and film, from an anthropological and
scientific-deconstructionist viewpoint.
No discussion of the modern perception of the Vampyre could possibly be complete without a
deconstruction of Dracula. This is a "Dracula97" site - celebrating 100 years of terror delivered by
Bram Stoker's eponymous novel of the Count.
Search Altavista for Vampires.
Search Altavista for Vampyres.
Search Altavista for Vampyr.
There are several discussion groups on the UseNet which discuss the topic of vampires.
The newsgroup alt.vampyres discusses vampires in film and literature.
The newsgroup alt.culture.vampires discusses "the truth behind the legends", possible explanations of
the phenomena of vampirism, including actual practices by individuals who either represent
themselves publicly as vampires, or those who may practice a more traditional, more secretive
vampirism. Please see the alt.culture.vampires Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ). It's also
absolutely replete with links to all things vampiric.
The newsgroup alt.games.white-wolf is for discussions of White Wolf Games' extremely-popular
interpretation of the myths of vampires. Their set of role-playing games involving vampiric characters
have profoundly influenced many younger persons' conceptions of what vampires are and what they
do, up to the point of inspiring certain sick individuals to engage in murders which included vampiric
practices.
Email: jesster@micron.net
