Vampire Weaknesses, where the fuck do they come from?

[Prak]

So, I want to write something in which the more powerful a vampire gets, the more "vampire rules" it gets to break, but in order to do so in a way that makes sense, I need to know the origins of various weaknesses so a logical progression can be made.

Frank's said, if I understood, that the "unable to cross water" and "unable to enter private property without invitation" both came from the "vampires as nobility" concept. I could use a bit more explanation on where that concept originated, as well as the reasoning behind the common stuff:

• Sunlight= Death*
• Burned/repelled by holy objects/water/cannot enter holy ground*
• counting (what the fuck indeed)
• must sleep in the earth of their grave
• No Reflection**
• Any thing else I may have forgotten

*This is all, as I understand it, tied to the whole "Cursed by God" concept, and if they actually are cursed by God, are going to be some of the more difficult ones to break.
**No soul, I'd imagine.

[Username17]

Vampires exist in various cultures and literary traditions as way to talk about certain things in a mythic context. Among them are:

• Vampires as Contagion: People get sick and they come into your village and then other people get sick and totally have the life drained out of them and fucking die.
• Vampires as Sex: Allowing yourself to become intimate with another person has severe consequences despite its obvious appeal. You can end up getting the syfy and/or lose your "value" as a marriageable person.
• Vampires as Nobility: The nobles are bigger and stronger than you are, and much longer lived. They live in a castle and never talk to you, but periodically they wander in, take one of your daughters away, and then she becomes one of them.
• Vampires as Miscellaneous Threat: The rules of society are religious in nature and not subject to much examination or reflection. You need to eat your vegetables / worship the right god with the right hat / take care of your livestock / whatever or "bad stuff will happen." With like curses and stuff.

So Running Water is pretty common, because it is well observable that going from stagnant water to running water brings the number of infections way down (so it shows up in vampires as contagion stories), and the nobles from over there have power that stops at the river (so it shows up in vampires as nobility stories too). Sunlight is pretty common too, because it's demonstrable that when the sun shines more people get sick less, and also that people have a lot more illicit sex at night.

Garlic is pretty good for the immune system and helps preserve meat. Throwing garlic into your sausages extends the shelf life and by extension keeps food borne ailments away. As you might expect, there are similar mystiques surrounding other natural preservatives including salt.

But if you want to go into the long list of shit that screws up vampires one way or another, you're going to have to wait a while, because that list is literally hundreds of pages long.

-Username17

[shadzar]

Creatures of the night...decent people didn't go out at night, ergo only good was out at day, ergo day was good, and good hurts vampires.

Same with holy items.

Sleep away form the light of day while staying hidden when you sleep, and how many people go messing with graves/coffins?

They cannot see what they have become, because they still think of themselves are their old selves. Part of the curse, but not a big one.

IIRC a vampire could only be killed by a stake of white ash, because that was what Jesus was nailed to. This ties into the holy items and such as well.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Sunlight is pretty common too, because it's demonstrable that when the sun shines more people get sick less, and also that people have a lot more illicit sex at night.

Also nobles were often pale as fuck in comparison the the peasantry.

[shadzar]

That was makeup. There is a reason having too much makeup is called made up like a French whore. Along with wig, nobility also made them selves up to look cleaner than other people because bathing still wasn't a main stream thing, and too much bathing back when could kill you, just like catching your death of cold form being in the rain. Water was bad to be in too much.

[RobbyPants]

My understanding of the whole stake-to-the-heart thing has its roots in Slavic folklore. My understanding is, it went something like this:

When people die, their skin shrinks back a bit, sometimes giving the illusion that fingernails and hair continue to grow after death. So, on the off chance that someone was dug up, people might assume that person was still alive. I'm not sure if that alone was where the idea of the dead rising as undead came from, but from my understanding, it fueled it.

On top of that, they had a whole list of things that they feared would make someone become a vampire (dying under certain circumstances, being born out of wedlock, and a slew of other things). So, if they were concerned the person might rise from the grave, they started taking precautionary measures. One such measure was literally staking the dead into the ground in their coffin with a three-foot stake!

I guess the decapitation may have similar roots. Another measure was to build a blade into the coffin so the vampire would decapitate itself when it rose from the dead.


Edit:
I don't know the origin or reason, but I think the whole counting thing has its roots in Asian folklore.

[tzor]

That was makeup. There is a reason having too much makeup is called made up like a French whore. Along with wig, nobility also made them selves up to look cleaner than other people because bathing still wasn't a main stream thing, and too much bathing back when could kill you, just like catching your death of cold form being in the rain. Water was bad to be in too much.

That’s a common misconception and while there are accounts of people insisting that one could catch a cold from frequent bathing those notions could equally reflect the general uncertainty about what caused colds in the first place. Many people thought illness was the result of “bad air” (although to be fair when you cough into the air you make that air bad, disease carrying insects fly through the air, etc.). Benjamin Franklyn at one point thought it was due to variations in air temperature, in other words cold air drafts entering warm rooms. (His solution was to stand in the freezing air naked, a process he called an “air bath.”) It was in this confusion about what caused disease that the notion that dirt might be a barrier against bad air began to have popularity. (Sounds like an excuse to me.)

But the real problem with baths was a moral and a practical one. In the late 16th century the various churches in Europe began a campaign against the public bath house. It really would not be until the early 19th century when the average home would have enough of a water supply for personal bathing. Also in this time, most of Europe was pretty deforested because of the excessive use of lumber for construction, especially of naval fleets used by the European nations at the time.

[Koumei]

The thing about staking or decapitation killing them is an interesting one: it totally works against humans, too.

[shadzar]

Right, so they didn't bathe that much, and nobles didn't want to look as dirty as normal people...thus make up.

The why they didn't bathe as often is kind of moot if we both agree they didn't, right?

Not my fault they preferred leeches to willow for a headache.

[RobbyPants]

The thing about staking or decapitation killing them is an interesting one: it totally works against humans, too.

I always thought that would be funny too. You could use it like a sort of Salem-witch-trial-like way of testing if someone's a vampire.

Step 1: stake their heart
Step 2: remove the stake

If they live, they're a vampire and must be killed!!!

Never mind that you could test this with sunlight.

[shadzar]

I don't know why but you gave me another source of the reflection thing Robby.

Thinking about using light to test for a vampire, some would use mirrors.

Gorgons, if you recall could turn men to stone with a look, and mirrors were used to see them such as Perseus did with Medusa.

The myth about the mirror could have something to do with gorgon myths as a gorgon did not LIKE to look at their own reflection. Something I was trying to think of earlier, but couldn't place it for the other post until you said using "sunlight to test" for a vampire, and using mirror to see a gorgon hit me.

I think there was even a vampire related myth from ancient Greece or Rome as well, but cannot remember it right now. They had a god for everything else, so why not Hades being transformed into a new scare called the vampire?

Here is a good source for vampire myths.

Source for some of the myths.

[Username17]

Never mind that you could test this with sunlight.

So you put them into direct sunlight and if they have no magic powers they are a vampire? I can get behind this.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

I suppose a mirror might be a bit more reliable.

[Kobajagrande]

The wooden stake thing almost certainly comes from the indigenous people of the Balkans. They also name one specific kind of wood (I think hawthorn) as effective against vampires. Simplification to a stake out of any wood probably came while spreading the myth around.

[fbmf]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... -a-vampire

Game On,
fbmf

[Ganbare Gincun]

Never mind that you could test this with sunlight.

So you put them into direct sunlight and if they have no magic powers they are a vampire? I can get behind this.

-Username17

We should get down to Wall Street right away and test this out prono!

[Data Vampire]

Sunlight= Death*

*This is all, as I understand it, tied to the whole "Cursed by God" concept, and if they actually are cursed by God, are going to be some of the more difficult ones to break.

This one came from the old black and white Dracula movie adapted from the screen play.

[Prak]

Sunlight= Death*

*This is all, as I understand it, tied to the whole "Cursed by God" concept, and if they actually are cursed by God, are going to be some of the more difficult ones to break.

This one came from the old black and white Dracula movie adapted from the screen play.

Was that the first appearance of it?

Are you talking about Nosferatu (which includes this exact weakness).

I'd heard the whole "burst into flames in sunlight" thing was because of the sun's rays representing "the purity of god" or some shit like that.

[Data Vampire]

Vampires busting in the flame when exposed to sunlight came from movies. If you go to the novel Dracula then he is basically paralyzed in the day time (not light) but is unharmed by sunlight.

Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaption of Dracula released in 1922 and was the first time I'm aware of this weakness appearing. So I was wrong before as the official Dracula movie was released in 1931.

[K]

Based on a documentary I watched once, stakes were not so much to kill the vampire, but to keep it nailed to the ground. Apparently, premature burials were common enough that people would wake up in their graves after being in a coma or something and freak people out, so anyone they thought would become a vampire they'd nail into their coffin. (In more civilized nations, they sometimes would construct a bell and pulley system so the buried person could ring it if he had been mistakenly buried.)

Also, the combo of cold temperature and lack of preservation means that sometimes a corpse would be exhumed and found with blood coming out of its mouth as a result of decomposition. That fueled the legend that vampires leave their graves at night and drink blood.

[RobbyPants]

Also, the combo of cold temperature and lack of preservation means that sometimes a corpse would be exhumed and found with blood coming out of its mouth as a result of decomposition. That fueled the legend that vampires leave their graves at night and drink blood.

I didn't know about the blood. What I'd read was that the skin would shrink back, giving the illusion of nails and hair continuing to grow after death, making them think they were still alive.

[K]

Also, the combo of cold temperature and lack of preservation means that sometimes a corpse would be exhumed and found with blood coming out of its mouth as a result of decomposition. That fueled the legend that vampires leave their graves at night and drink blood.

I didn't know about the blood. What I'd read was that the skin would shrink back, giving the illusion of nails and hair continuing to grow after death, making them think they were still alive.

Here's a bit from the wiki on decompsition, and one can imagine the potential results and how they might be interpreted.

"Odor, color changes, and bloating of the body during decomposition are the results of putrefaction.... A formation of gases enters the abdomen which forces liquids and feces out of the body. The gases also enter the neck and face, causing swelling of the mouth, lips, and tongue."

Combine with internal bleeding, and "swelling" and "forcing liquids out" goes straight to "vomiting blood".

[Judging__Eagle]

I don't know why but you gave me another source of the reflection thing Robby.

Thinking about using light to test for a vampire, some would use mirrors.

Gorgons, if you recall could turn men to stone with a look, and mirrors were used to see them such as Perseus did with Medusa.

The myth about the mirror could have something to do with gorgon myths as a gorgon did not LIKE to look at their own reflection. Something I was trying to think of earlier, but couldn't place it for the other post until you said using "sunlight to test" for a vampire, and using mirror to see a gorgon hit me.

Actually, the majority of the Gorgons were made of brass (or bronze) and had invincible skin, and massive tusks; and breathed poisonous fumes (in some accounts).

Only medusa actually looked remotely human-like. Her two sisters were out and out monsters. Brass/Bronze skin, tusks, wings; the whole deal.

Remember, D&D fucks up almost everything in mythology.

Mostly because the majority of the people writing, don't do any research on anything, from use of a weapon, to how encumbering armour is, to what monsters they are going to use in the game. The rest is because most of the people playing don't know any better.

---

On people being buried alive.

Embalming fluid was actually meant to help with this. Embalming fluid is meant more to drain blood, and replace it with something useless to the body; killing the person for sure; than it was meant to 'preserve' the body.

Honestly, if you want to preserve a body, pack it in salt, oil, alcohol or honey.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Honey doesn't do donkey dick. It can indefinitely preserve small pieces of meat, but it's just not viscous enough to get down in the meat.

[Judging__Eagle]

What if the innards of the body are filled with honey as well? Intestinal cavity, intestines, lungs, throat, mouth, nasal cavity, and even into the cranial cavity.

That might work, right?