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Vampires have been a subject of study for hundreds of years. Some of these studies have become must-reads for amateur vampire enthusiasts. Here's what some of the professionals have to say...
...on Origins of the Vampire Myth
"Vampirism was one of the most demonic outbreaks of mass hysteria ever to sweep the world. Its origins are rooted at the beginning of time and almost all of them are founded on superstition."
- Anthony Masters, author of The Natural History of The Vampire
"The origins of the vampire myth lie in the mystery cults of oriental civilizations...the Nepalese Lord of Death, the Tibetan Devil, and the Mongolian God of Time."
- Devendra P. Varma, author of The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature
"The concept of the vampire is not only firmly rooted in legends and folk-myths of antiquity, but also established by facts of history and eye-witness accounts."
- Devendra P. Varma, author of The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature
"[T]he vampire (or its structural equivalent) was a universal figure in human culture, which emerged in the natural course of life. That is to say, the vampire probably emerged independently at many points in human culture. There is little evidence to suggest that the vampire emerged at one time and place, and then diffused around the world from that primal source."
- J. Gordon Melton, author of The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead
...on Qualities of the Vampire
"Can the Devil endow a vampire with the qualities of subtlety, rarification, increase, and diminishing, so that it may pass through doors and windows? I answer that there is no doubt the Demon can do this."
- Montague Summers, author of The Vampire: His Kith and Kin
"Vampyres issue forth from their graves in the night, attack people sleeping quietly in their beds, suck out all the blood from their bodies and destroy them... Those under the vampyres' fatal influence complain of suffocation and a total weakness of spirit, soon after which they die. Some who, when at the point of death, are asked if they can tell what is causing their debility, reply that some person who recently died has arisen from the tomb to torment them. And when that person is exhumed...it appears in all parts fresh and full of blood...without corruption."
- Johannes Heinrich Zopfius, author of Dissertation on Serbian Vampyres (1773)
"The vrykolakas [Greek for vampire] is the body of an evil and wicked man, often one who has been excommunicated. Such bodies do not, like other corpses, decompose after burial, but having a very tough skin, become swollen and distended..."
- Leo Allatius, author of On the Current Opinions of Certain Greeks (1645)
"[F]or about the last sixty years, we have been witnesses of new extraordinary incidents in Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, Poland. In those places, we are told, men dead for several months return from the tomb, speak, walk about in hamlets and villages, and injure men and beasts, whose blood they drain, causing illness and death. The only cure for these horrible attacks is to dig up the corpses, drive a sharp stake through the bodies, cut off the heads, tear out the hearts, or burn the bodies to ashes. The name of these ghosts is Oupires or Vampires, which in the Slavonic language means bloodsuckers. The details of the actual cases are so well-attested and legally documented that it seems impossible not to accept them."
- Dom August Calmet, author of A Treatise on Apparitions, Spirits and Vampires (1746)
...on the Psychology behind the Vampire Myth
"The vampire is the night-prowling symbol of man's hunger for - and fear of - everlasting life...The mixture of attraction and repulsion...is the essence of the vampire concept."
- Margaret Carter, author of the preface to Varney the Vampire
"There are reasons for talking mummies and roaming vampires - psychological ones. Psychologists tell us that nearly every one of us has a hidden fear of being buried alive."
-Thomas Aylesworth, author of Vampires and Other Ghosts
"Whether we read books and watch films about vampires for psychological reasons or simply for entertainment, each of us keeps the vampire myth alive. While we may be able to understand rationally that vampires do not exist, who among us does not start at the shadow at the window, the squeak in the dark?"
- Daniel C. Scavone, author of Vampires
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