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capri0mniSometime late in October, I think, I posed a question here asking why it is that vampires are almost uniformly seen as evil (even in pre-Christian/non-dualistic cultures. I remember hinting at the time that I had some theories, but that I would not post them for discussion until after NaNo was behind me.
Well, now, it's behind me; I'd link back to that previous post, but I can't tell which one it is, by the title, and I don't want to go back and read the whole month to find it.
Anyway, my theory is this: humans have an innate (and healthy) sense of shame over being at the top of the food chain, pretty much.* That's why, you get rituals like those of the Haida, who cover the eyes of salmon with ashes before fileting them, so the spirits won't see the oncoming knife, and other apology / thanksgiving rituals to the spirits of hunted animals. One of the things that keeps us, as a species, from collapsing into a collective pile of shamed goo is the idea that we will all, one day, be the the ones who are eaten-- by the worms: the mightiest brought down by the lowliest.
[The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout. They eat your clothes, they eat your hat, they crawl in skinny, and crawl out fat...]
But the vampire figure (traditionally) is a complete perversion of that: a mighty hunter of superhuman strength & magical power who is also immortal-- who, in other words, will never pay back its debt to the creatures it hunts, unless we force the issue by forcing it into the sunlight.**
Now, how it is that the vampire has become the romantic and sympathic lead in recent generations, I'm not quite sure, even with my own fascination with the vampire as sympathetic...
Any ideas?
*And by "shame," I mean the sense of having of having clear and proper boundries, and feeling lousy when you overstep them-- the "my bad!" feeling.
**some other means (crosses, wooden stakes, holy water -- all those sorts of means vary by culture, but being destroyed by sunlight seems more widely spread, if not absolutely universal.
Well, now, it's behind me; I'd link back to that previous post, but I can't tell which one it is, by the title, and I don't want to go back and read the whole month to find it.
Anyway, my theory is this: humans have an innate (and healthy) sense of shame over being at the top of the food chain, pretty much.* That's why, you get rituals like those of the Haida, who cover the eyes of salmon with ashes before fileting them, so the spirits won't see the oncoming knife, and other apology / thanksgiving rituals to the spirits of hunted animals. One of the things that keeps us, as a species, from collapsing into a collective pile of shamed goo is the idea that we will all, one day, be the the ones who are eaten-- by the worms: the mightiest brought down by the lowliest.
[The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout. They eat your clothes, they eat your hat, they crawl in skinny, and crawl out fat...]
But the vampire figure (traditionally) is a complete perversion of that: a mighty hunter of superhuman strength & magical power who is also immortal-- who, in other words, will never pay back its debt to the creatures it hunts, unless we force the issue by forcing it into the sunlight.**
Now, how it is that the vampire has become the romantic and sympathic lead in recent generations, I'm not quite sure, even with my own fascination with the vampire as sympathetic...
Any ideas?
*And by "shame," I mean the sense of having of having clear and proper boundries, and feeling lousy when you overstep them-- the "my bad!" feeling.
**some other means (crosses, wooden stakes, holy water -- all those sorts of means vary by culture, but being destroyed by sunlight seems more widely spread, if not absolutely universal.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 04:54 am (UTC)Here.
(Didn't take me long to find once I realised I only needed to check the flocked posts.)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 06:46 am (UTC):-/
I haven't gotten into the habit of tagging my posts, because for so long I had a journal style that didn't support tags. But now, I'm seriously considering it...
"Vampires" may end up being too rare a subject to be useful, but "folklore" wouldn't...
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:02 pm (UTC)Perhaps it's to do with the whole savior complex thing. People want to be able to come face-to-face with the ultimate darkness/perversion/evil/whatever, and rescue it.
"Sure, he's the personification of everything anathema to all that is right and good, but the power of my love will save him and make him nice!"
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 04:56 pm (UTC)That's certainly part of it-- especially, I think with characters like Angel (how's that a name to hit you over the head with symbolism?), and his broken romance with the Slayer...
But as someone who's dabbled around the edges of vampire "fandom" (can one be a fan of a genre?), and also more deeply with Neo-Pagan groups, I've noticed a lot of identification with the vampire-- not as the Other, that needs to be rescued, but the Self, that is noble, or romantic, or whatevers;
I sometimes joke that Wiccans and Neo-Pagans sympathize with vampires because we, too, are hassled by people thumping the Bible and waving crucifixes at us. But sympathetic views of the vampire come from a much wider population than the Neo-Pagan/New Age crowd. I wonder, now, if it's a reflexion of the deep, spiritual, isolation we feel as individuals in our society...
Hmmm....