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Anyone have a good explanation for vampires being undead? They're not reanimated corpses like zombies. So they're not really dead. They can have sex. Wassup with that?

There are so many theories and legends regarding the nature of a vampire. Some say that they have no souls, which puzzles me because I always thought of zombies as lacking souls. As for sex, I would say that they indeed can, especially since there are legends and folklore involving the offspring of vampires. Some vampire lore speaks of the vampires first act after his/her reawakening is to hunt down and have sex with their former spouse.

There is also the theory that their physical body dies upon creation, and from there they come back to life and never age from that point on.


Folklore from way long ago was that if a person died from, suicide, murder, a horrid illness, well pretty much anything to be honest OR if their body was not handled properly during burial, the spirit could become angry and come out of the grave.... Hence where the legend of the stake through the heart to kill a vampire came from. They believed that if they put a steak through the heart of the vampire and into the ground underneath it they would be stuck to the earth and unable to rise.

Part of it also came from the lack of the technology we have now. Ex: Great Uncle Gary dies, or so they think....... they bury great Uncle Gary..... great uncle Gary wasn't dead at all but merely ill and wakes up buried alive..... Great Uncle literally digs his way out of the ground with his bare hands..... People see Great Uncle Gary walking through town..... BAM instant undead....

Another theory..... not as much heard of..... The theory of Jesus.... resurrected from the dead becoming undead....... at the last supper he asked them to drink of his blood from a chalice..... then he died and came back....

I don't know that I believe they have no soul though... in order to be good, bad, angry, etc..... would one not have to have a "soul" I mean I realize that's not what makes us have our emotions, but I think it ties in there somewhere.

I often wondered if this was linked to the supposed absence of a heartbeat. Not alive, because they don't have a beating heart and apparently don't need to breath - but not dead because they are otherwise fully functioning.


The more I think about it the more and more I realise the 'myths' surrounding vampires are so contradictory and unbelievable.

I am going to have to disagree with the morale code of a "soul" scenerio. The soul is Universal energy concentrated. The soul itself has no feelings, it is a conduit of the Universe.

It is the physical representation that has the morale consciousness for right and wrong. It is up to the individual to follow what ever morale standards he/she chooses to live by.

Therefore, the vampires as being undead in physical form could worry about the morale codes, but why...If it is undead, mayhaps even immortal undead. The question one would need to ask is...When the physical vampire finally passes over for final death, does the karma it recieved throughout its undeath count and be recanted.

As far as the Jesus scenerio, I would not doubt the possibility. A very touchy subject though...

Myths are surrounded in the aspect of the dead walking again. People when medical science was not around and people either buried alive and dug their way out or when exuming the body found that hair and skin was in tact and blood around the mouth.

As for Vampires being th undead and sex this has not to my knowledge come around untill storys and fable came into play.

for if a body is dead than all parts would infact be dead. common falicy of truth of that. so How could a feat come to be?

I don't think they're dead.

They should be dead, but through some Magic in the vampire blood, they are not.

How come no one mentions magic?

Magic like making zombies, probably the most likely could happen, or rituals on which to raise the dead? Possible, yet seldom heard of.

I think many believe that a vampire (boy this is so far out for me to say) may exist, but magic could never happen on any scale like what books or movies potray. I still cannot understand that theory. Different realms of thought behind that I guess.

Because Magic is a state of mind ...which can be transformed into reality. I wouldn't think magic having anything to do with the blood or what would make a vampires blood unique. I blame the aliens. It just makes more sense. xD

I don't think people where that dumb, to actually make up such myths, in base of some of your conclusions of sick people been earth'd alive and then awakened and seemed as a zombie or vampire, 'cause there was actually an invention for this special things, like a little bell connected to the coffin, so if that be the case the person ring it so others know he is alive. Not saying that unicorns are real and we don't know it but somethings are unexplained in the past, to much to blame on diseases and natural things. Some things stay at the scientific community for them to find reasonable explanation for unexplained fossils, artifacts and findings/remainings, some may never come out 'cause they can't find anything coherent to explain such things; so until the advent of further scientific advancement few things remain in boxes and out of the people. They will not jump on "irrational" conclusion like many of the community find in such things/claims, and will not expose it to general public without anything concrete to share.

@Sorvena, I'm with you! I Blame the aliens for lots of things. It makes more sense to think they were some otherworldly invasion gone wrong hahah


And LOL @ stake through the heart kills anyone - as embarrassing as this is to admit that is NOT something I had really thought of.

*chuckles*

My above post was simply to point out a few theories I have heard of through the years, not to condone any one theory or another to be fact or law......

I do have an interesting question however.....

If a vampire were indeed undead........ would it actually have a heart? I mean what would its purpose be? Just to take up space within the body? That said it brings up another interesting side note...... we as humans have to have a heart to live, and if you are already dead you would not in theory need a heart to live would you? Hence driving a stake through a dead heart..... would that really kill something undead? I don't know it was just me thinking outside the box a bit I suppose and seemed an interesting question to ask. lol.

A zombie is a person who has lost all higher brain function but can still walk, eat, and can vocalize to a very limited point. There have been times when this has happened but the person very rarely lives very long. When a person is like this, it means their brain is dying but slowly.

~Curse to Darkness~, Maybe there could be and maybe not, I would say they might have a different way of living, maybe they have different anatomy, maybe they do and not the same heartbeating rate, maybe they don't and work differently, maybe they don't need food cause of lack to break it to little pieces, or maybe they are "undead" and don't feel bullets and cuts. =S

Two physicists have published an academic paper where they demonstrate, by virtue of geometric progression, that vampires could not exist, since they would almost immediately deplete their entire food supply (a.k.a, all of us).

If you've ever read Salem's Lot (or seen the lame Starsky and Hutch-era miniseries adaptation starring David Soul), then you know that after a vampire decides to settle in your town, the undead begin to multiply at an alarming rate (he bites two friends, who bite two friends, and so on, and so on…).

Putting aside for a moment the issue of how that would impact neighborhood property values, this phenomenon raises an even more pressing question: If vampires are indeed living (unliving?) among us, then shouldn't we have seen an undead population explosion by now?

Fortunately, our best minds are on the case. Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi's paper "Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality" offers a full explanation.

Efthimiou and Gandhi conduct a thought experiment: Assume that the first vampire appeared on January 1, 1600. At that time, according to data available at the U.S. Census website, the global population was 536,870,911. Efthimiou and Gandhi calculate that, once the Nosferatu feeding frenzy began, the entire human race would have been wiped out by June 1602 (thus forever changing the course of history by preventing the invention of the slide rule eighteen years later).

The physicists note:


Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.

Oooh, snap! But, this gauntlet had been barely thrown down before it invited a rebuttal from mathematician Dino Sejdinovic. In his article, "Mathematics of the Human Vampire Conflict" (Math Horizons, November 2008) Sejdinovic faults Efthimiou and Gandhi's logic, since they have not "accounted for the birth-rate of non-vampires and death-rate of vampires (actually the death-death-rate since they are already dead, but when they die again they should stay dead but stop being living) due to close encounters with stakes, garlic and holy water." Moreover, "vampires are presented exclusively as greedy consumers: a rational strategy of managing their human resources is not considered."

Here, Sejdinovic cites the pioneering research conducted by Austrian mathematicians Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann, who published the landmark 1982 paper, "The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources," later followed up by "Cycles of Fear: Periodic Bloodsucking Rates for Vampires" (Journal of Optimization Theory and Application, December 1992). Hartl and Mehlmann argue that vampires would never be stupid enough to deplete their entire food supply, and by applying the Hopf-Bifurcation Theorem (don't ask), they demonstrate how vampires can adopt an optimal "cyclical bloodsucking strategy."

However, there is a serious flaw in the Hartl and Mehlmann model: The assumption that human beings would be docile prey. Their research provoked an outraged response from economist Dennis Snower, who in his article "Macroeconomic Policy and the Optimal Destruction of Vampires" (The Journal of Political Economy, June 1982), declared:


One wonders what conceivable interest the authors could have had in helping vampires solve their intertemporal consumption problem. The implicit assumption of the Invisible Hand (or Fang)-whereby vampires, in pursuing their own interests, pursue those of human beings as well-is of questionable validity. The study by Hartl and Mehlmann is not concerned with the macroeconomic implications of blood-sucking behavior modes. Nor does it consider the policy instruments whereby human beings can protect themselves from vampires. Instead, humans are modeled as passive receptacles of blood whose cultivation and harvest are left to vampire discretion.

Hooyah! Snower argues that the mortal world can manage its resources in a manner that keeps the undead population in check, while simultaneously promoting long-term economic growth:


A transfer of labor services from the widget sector to the stake sector reduces human welfare at present but may raise welfare in the future (since an increase in stake production reduces the vampire population and thereby increases the future labor force whereby future widgets may be produced).

Still, I'm not entirely confident in Snower's conclusions-not least because his complex mathematical proof indicates that the complete destruction of vampires would not be "socially optimal." (And you wonder why economics is known as the dismal science?)

In fact, all of these models rest upon the assumption that vampires are at the top of the undead food chain. Who says that the blood-sucking population is not kept in check by something that preys on vampires? Time to consult the zoology journals.


http://io9.com/5241252/physicists-prove-th...could-not-exist

Revenous, this is so cool. Problem: They're subscribing to the bitten-you're-it model of conversion to vampirinity, whereas I think there has to be a blood exchange. A vampire with bleeding gums could cause carnage.

Also they're assuming a human 3 square meals a day model, and vampires may not need to ingest that much.

ok...ive thought about this for years, and this is my theory. it goes back to the reanimated ghost thing. someone dies, you put them in a coffin and bury them 6ft down. nobody gets out of that, much less gets out then come morning gets back in. at least nothing with a corporal body.

so...the undead vamp is a ghost...a ghost that has the ability to achieve some semblance of solidity. this solidity is achieved by absorbing life energy and perhaps ....blood. perhaps the act of absorbing this energy causes the victim to experience internal bleeding...in which case all the symptoms of blood lose will be there.

this ghost/spirit/whatever continues to return until...what?

the stake was to keep the body in the box...but if the body isnt coming out of the box in the first place, then would the stake actually be effective?

its also my theory that the vampire is immortal because of reincarnation....and they incarnate in a different fashion than non vamps.
vamps stay with a certain group over and over always returning...that is their...our...immortality.

a "mortal" dies and goes to the "light", or perhaps just dies and goes to the worms, rarely returning.

that is just my two cents to examine...agree or disagree is up to you.
~Wolf~

LordWolf I like your theory of reincarnation..... Is something I myself have thought on myself. Care to explain your theory on that a bit more? It would be interesting to see if our theories match. lol.

Bloodmother I agree with you on the blood exchange. I believe they would have the choice of who they turn and don't turn..... that's just my thoughts of course.

I also do not think that all vampires are mean and cruel like MOST films like us to think. I believe they have feelings and emotions (perhaps harder for them to show) just as we do. I believe that they have the ability to choose if they want to be respectful and good people or the bad and murderous individual just as we have the choice.

Anything that were to live among humans and truly do a good job of keeping themselves unknown even in this day and age would have to have more intelligence about them then to go round biting people all the time. If that made sense. Once again just my thoughts, opinions, and theorys....

Interesting LordWolf . . . you've managed to combine haunting and reincarnation in a unique way. I can see how that would work, especially with some heavy leaning on psychic vampirism in order to maintain some solidity for a limited period.

So, as far as the sex goes the vampire/ghost would have to suck blood kinda like popping viagra in order to get it going?

In my view vampires are undead because they are ghosts . I agree alot with lord wolf . I,ve read loads of evidence that in many cultures a vampire is created when a person is improperly buired , or has meet a violent death or died in child birth . Another belief is that a witch or shaman can become a vampire upon death .A vampire is simply a soul that does not want to leave and feeds of the vital enegies of other humans to sustain it,s self. It can learn to effect enegies in very powerful ways . Even to the extent of feeling solid . I do not belive they are actual re-animated corpses that suck blood . I belive blood has become a metaphore for life force , and they infact drain our life force at night when we sleep . My view of the vampire is in fact what many describe as a hag attack .

I'm curious to know where our thoughts would end if not for books or movies depicting the endless variety of vampires and their general funtions. How would we explain away our lust for the bite, or the taste for blood that some ppl have. Without folklore, which I believe is just story telling for the amusement from the mundane, how do we come to terms with our urges that fall under the vampiric. I've read here a lot of good theory...but most based off of what we have been programmed to understand as who they are...what if it's just as simple as people were describing their own devices, not knowing what THEY were or what to make of their own feelings, not then having the public forum that we enjoy today. This isnt to discount anything, I just believe that WE may be the true vampires of lore....abilities lost over the ages due to the ever lessoning need for them..

I do not believe they are dead or reanimate corpses, they are in my opinion, living breathing spirits and souls, who are immortal and have an extreme need and thirst for blood. To refer to them as undead, is to allow what movies and books and the sort, and whats the perception in them to influence our own perception of them. I have never viewed them as the undead or reanimated corpses. If they are infact cold to the touch, that still wouldn't convince me. I am sure there will be some who dissagree with me. I am just going by what I believe and thats again, that they are living, breathing souls and spirits not the undead.

I agree with the one above, i dont think is ghost, and that they can have children.. then they are not ghost in a body, as for ~bloodmother~ sex issue, 'talking in lore point' I believe if they were to be fast as in abilities, stronger, stay young by simple exchange of vital energy (blood) then why wouldn't they have the sexual points more sensitive and strong? As why if they use the energy of blood to pump other muscles and jump, be strong, and fast at the moment of disappearing then they have blood for down below as well =) haha

In a way we are all undead vamp and human ...
think of it some of us don't believe in a creator therefor we are alive but there is no life in us...

Some believe in reincarnation so if we are to be reincarnated as an animal when we die then we had to be undead because if we were alive then we would have a soul and could not go into an animal they don't have souls some would like to think they do but think if they did then would that not mean we have undead dogs cats bats, like that's possible i don't think so...

the undead if you believe it or not are dead but cant die or go to the spiritual realm like a ghost but can be seen...felt and tasted you see a ghost cant be seen like me or you but we feel they're there so our mind makes up or fills in the blank...
just like our eyes you get a picture upside down and the mind or back of the eye turns it right side up.

same with seeing a ghost you feel the ghost and your mind says somethings there but no picture at least not by the eye but by something else your inner person or spirit sees the ghost as is and takes that to mind and says yes there is look again and the eye has a picture made up.

Its real though just not in the way you see things.
You are undead because you don't leave here. we are stuck unless we believe in a higher being like God or Devil then we go to were they are .
But for now we are undead.

There is so much theroy about vampires and what they are and or supposed to be Vampires are among us and alive today , There are so many different types of vampires it is so hard to explain

Viral theories, ghost theories, soulful/soulless theories, but the essential aspect is immortality.

IMMORTALITY is the Undead part. That is, the human is drained to near the point of death, but is not yet dead, when it receives an infusion of blood from a vampire.

There is something in the blood of the vampire that transforms the human. Hence, the viral theories which abound in modern novels.

Anne Rice postulated a Demon in the blood, which takes us right back to magic.

Bloodmother,

It is a good question that you have and as always, there will be many and myriad suggestions, explanations, proofs for and against.

I'd like to add one more thought to this, expanding a little on a couple of previous posts regarding the soul and reincarnation, based on the general principles of 'psychic', or energy vampires.

Part of this theory might lend more to debunking another previous post that 'proves' that vampires cannot exist by means of reverse 'anthropic principle' based on 'geometric progression'.

Leaving aside what the Hollywood likes to set in front of us, and also, discarding books clearly intended as fictional, we are left with Myth and, in the absence of hard physical evidence, logical deduction leading to opinion.

From this, people will tend to build up their own hypothesis, which if they bind to a set of myths, philosophies, or religious ideas, they can begin to build workable theorem.

The axioms they tend to use are often self-witnessing, or hypnotic regressions into past incarnations of the same soul, as well as reinforcement of their self-discovery by others who claim the same state.

Not to forget, they will utilise the necessary characterisations from the oldest and most popular myths- those which they find that their physical form and demeanor can reasonably match.

In some of the more well-defined ideas, the essential core of being undead, is that not only the soul is inherited from a past life, the life of a person who first existed thousands of years ago, but also that the identity, subsumed in the non-concious part of the self, the 'id' is brought forward to overcome the current inhabitant of the physical form.

From the Wikipedia entry;
"It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."
[Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)]

This identity is a specific individual who became and has been through every incarnation, a vampiric being. And in their terms, the vampire aspect is one of a need to obtain external energy sources in order to maintain and even, to increase their own energy reserves.

There are several propositions as to why the need is there, but most focus around some form of an alteration of the body's own system of energy flows, known as 'Meridians' in the Chinese, or 'Chakra' in the South Asian, among many other descriptions.

One of the many implications of this state, is potentially and supposedly, a disconnection from the universal flow of energy, or 'God' in some respects. The seperation creates a concept of death of the soul, an 'unlife' and the awakening of the sub-personality within the individual creates the 'undeath' of the older aspect of the being, which then proceeds to sustain itself with the energy taken from others.

Since there are only a limited number of beings who undertook this transformation in the beginning, and very few who could acheive it in the present or over time, then the numbers of these beings would be vastly restricted in comparison to the general populace, not withstanding that the process of becoming a vampiric being is extremely difficult, if at all possible any longer.

There is a lot of conjecture here, obviously, but there is also a sizeable quantity of supporting information that I haven't gone into for the sake of length and relevance to the thread.

One last further point, is to highlight that the mind, body and soul are all intertwined, so when a being is vampire in soul, it will also become so in mind and body, at some point, in theory.

Fascinating. Let me see if I understand correctly.

What you have set forth is a way to understand Undead in the Vampire context (in real life and fictionally) through an interconnection of reincarnation and soul which evidences itself through the unconscious.

The unconscious manifests in dreams, in neurosis, and quite possibly in the psychic/blood needs of the Undead (". . . the vampire aspect is one of a need to obtain external energy sources in order to maintain and even, to increase their own energy reserves.)

Reincarnation and Soul both require a set a rules ostensibly created by a being with the power to set up such rules. For simplicity, let's go with God.

A disruption in the flow of energy from the source, or a disconnection (we're talking energy transference here over time so anything could happen) creates the Undeath, which is not the death of a human life form, but really the death of the soul which is really the original holder of the life and the genuine original soul, which you indicate was vampiric.

This is the point where I bog down since if I accept the antecedents, reincarnation, soul and god, and the all important Disconnect, then I can understand the Undeadness part.

But not if we're talking reincarnation of vampire to vampire, which just doesn't seem right. Reincarnation is a crap shoot. If there are definite lines of transference then the odds are totally with the House.

Frankly - I think a lot of the view on this subject comes down to your definition of 'undeath'. Or perhaps to your definitions of 'life' and 'death'.

I look at it this way - if life and death were two sides of a coin, undeath would be represented by the coin standing on it's edge.

As such, anything that SHOULD be dead but isn't (vampires, zombies, Amy Winehouse) is undead. Or perhaps the PC term should be 'death-challenged'.

So in those terms - a vampire is either undead (ie: a person who has died and risen up as a vampire), or they are in fact living (ie: a person who has been brought near to death, and then rejuvinated through blood, magic, [insert your method of choice here], or reincarnated (as reincarnation, by definition, is linked to life) ), albeit it with superhuman/supernatural abilities.

And yet who would associate vampires with life?

Food for thought...

Lifes hermit, like your deduction on the undead version of your thoughts. But puzzling thoughts on the near dead and brought to life, yet this in some cases now would mean alot of undead souls walking around with the advances in medicine. Or am I miss interpiting your thoughts.

Bloodmother,

Yes, I think that's a pretty reasonable grasp of the concepts.

I would like to add a caveat here in the terms of using 'God' as a reference point. While some of these groups who advocate the ideas described would claim to pre-date Monotheism, the ostensibly Polytheistic Pantheons of the likes of Egypt do still have at their origination a single one-ness from which all 'Gods' came forth.

It may have been misleading of me, or not well communicated in regards to the origin of the vampire nature. The claims made do not specifically identify that the soul itself has always been vampiric since the beginning of existence, but that at some point, an event occured within the term of a lifetime of an individual which brought about the vampire state.

As best I can understand that myself, it would appear that a high stationed caste, of priests perhaps, came upon an idea to modify themselves through their systems of energy, for reasons unknown. As a result of this modification, they inadvertantly created the need for outside energy sources.

The reincarnation principles are, as you say, a 'crap shoot', but we could consider them in the terms of reference of Egyptian Mythology.

A (very) quick summary of Osiris has it said that he was dismembered and spread over the world, but that he came together again through Isis, where he effectively was reincarnated/resurrected and became ruler of The Dead.

The parallel of the the psychic vampire theory then becomes one of re-assembling the self in one being existing in the present.

We have to take liberty and assume that the host would need to be a genetic descendant of one of those first number, that when the hidden mind of the host is examined and explored, there exists enough of the personality of that original within the unconcious to take control. Perhaps in a ritualistic setting, others may lend their conciousness and any pieces which they also hold to aid in reforming the whole.

I don't care much for this, but metaphysics is largely a guessing game, and who is to say what is and isn't real in the places beyond the physical universe.

Cadrewolf... The comments re: being near death and brought back reflect earlier comments that were posted in the conversation, whereby some thoughts on the - shall we call it transformation? - of a person to a vampire is based on the idea that a person is drained of their own blood supply to near death, then effectively transfused with the vampires own blood. Does that help to make it clearer?

I don't believe in all cases was blood drained from the body centuries ago for burial purposes. Having spent years with metaphysical churches and just people who are spiritualists, a cord is mentioned that keeps the soul attached to the body, when this cord is severed at what we call death, the soul is released. This of course is a belief but of a huge number of people. Suppose for the sake of theory the person dies but the cord does not break, what would they then be? LOL Possibly just another NDE.

Folklore is handed down and people would like to think that some that is written is accurate and some just superstition but what I notice most of the time is people have fictional beliefs from books and screenplays mixed together with folklore. Yes, they did have cemeteries that staked their corpses upon burial but mostly it was in unconsecrated ground where suicides and criminals who had been executed were buried. They thought these people would come back because they were evil and because they believed the heart was the seat of the soul they staked them through the heart. There was a cemetery like this in Dublin during the time and before that Stoker lived there.

Some people have been labeled vampires but there is no actual proof and many don't drink blood. Most don't but capture either lifeforce energy or sometimes they say the soul. There were some but it was writings in more modern times, except for a few in certain cultures. I would have to say outside of Eastern Europe and mostly the Roma throughout Europe.

As for the last supper it was wine that they drank that was representative of his blood just as the bread was representative of the body and I have read a really intriguing article someone wrote on the net about connecting Jesus to vampirism. If nothing else it was thought provoking.

The wake was contrived to make sure the person did not reawaken and were actually dead. They would set the casket up on the table and leave it there for three days. Later different groups had their own ways of displaying the casket but in the beginning they just stuck them up on the table and ate their meals right there. Supposedly the idea of bells and all that according to sources when I did research on this for an article said that was all urban legend. It came from an historical group, I believe connected to a cemetery. They gave reasons why that would not work due to how far down they were buried and other things.

Just because people will refer to someone as a vampire doesn't make it so. Sometimes that term was attached to someone who bled his peasantry or contituents whatever the case may be, dry. It was figurative as is the case of the noble way back that some cite often. On closer look they just mean he was corrupt basically. There is no way of knowing why writers have the so-called undead able to have children but in some cases they say they are sterile. It depends on whose folklore or story.

Azure Dark well stated.....

But remeber that lore has given the idea of the Undead and not the science of in fact if this could be plasible. The only certain aspect I have read is zombies pertaining to Voodoo Practices. and this is still questionable.

LifesHermit~ I do understand the myth of draining the blood and vampire blood to be given for the transformation to take place. This is a myth, ok.

Bio-engenering would be a vital institute on possible undead things. Studies as stated before have been going on since the early 1500's on trying to reanimate tissue and body movement. But as far as i have seen or read this is still far off from the concept of resident evil or dawn of the dead series.