The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Not to be confused with Pistachio. Seriously.

Recently some Peruvians were arrested for trafficking in human adipose tissue, that's your muffin top, dude, love handles, fat. Supposedly they killed people to get the fat, and got paid as much as $15,000 a liter for it.

Many suspect the fat was taken for use in magicks.

Here is the mythological from Wikipedia:

A Pishtaco is a fantasy figure, a boogeyman, in the Andes region of South America, in particular in Peru. According to folklore, it is an evil vampire-like man, often a stranger and often a white man, who seeks out unsuspecting Indians, to kill them and abuse their bodies in disgusting ways, for instance by cutting them up and selling their flesh as fried chicharrones.

Spanish missionaries were feared as Pishtacos by the Andean aboriginals, who believed they were killing people for fat with which to oil their churchbells.

Similar beliefs held that human fat was needed to grease the machinery of sugar mills. In modern times it was claimed grain sent from the United States as famine relief was intended to fatten children, beause jet aircraft engines could not be started without a squirt of human fat.

Survey geologists and other Europeans working on the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano have been attacked and killed by natives in the belief that they were Pishtacos.

Pishtaco is derived from the local language quechua word: "pishtay" which mean to "behead, cut the throat or cut into slices"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pishtaco


Does anyone know if there are spells that use human fat?

Secondly, what other international vampiric myths and folklore do you know?

Do any of them have the same sort of "class" and "racial" overtones as the pishtaco tale?

Any tissue can be used for spells, yet it depends on the type of spell you are casting.

My grandmother practiced Mexican magic for 60 some odd years. I had the priveledge of studying under her for 17 years. I don't recall the use of human fat. Blood yes but not fat. Ewwww. Maybe it's a south American thing?

It is disturbing, is it not, to find the lengths to which the world at large (no... not blaming you at all for this, BloodMother) will sometimes go to portray almost any and every "boogeyman" myth as a type of vampire. From hook-clawed, feetless, tree-hanging beasties who barely resemble the Human form to ... in this latest case ... men who supposedly go around beheading victims, mutilating their bodies and taking their fat (?!), all are lumped in as types of "vampires."

This only further evidences the fact that who and what the actual historical vampire was and still is... is still not understood, much less defined, by those so defining them.

As sanginarius.org points out so very well:

"These writers, and others, established the notion that 'every culture has a form of vampire belief', that 'vampires' were a universal, even archetypal human superstition, and that they were found world- and history-wide, buried in every body of myth, hidden in every holy book, lurking behind every fairy-tale.

"And of course, they were quite wrong!!! The folklorists managed this feat by taking each separate element of the vampire metaphor and using it to qualify as a 'type of vampire' absolutely anything whatsoever that fitted even one aspect of the definition. Was it a supernatural being that drank blood? Then it's a 'type of vampire'! Was it something that came back from the grave? Then it's a 'type of vampire'! Was it an entity or revenant that was 'hungry' or that pestered the living for sex? Then it's a 'type of vampire'! Never mind that the individual cultures concerned had complex histories and belief systems to which these 'types of vampire' really belonged. They all got lumped together, and suddenly the word 'vampire' included at least half of the myths, legends, and folklore ever known on the planet."

- http://www.sanguinarius.org/articles/vampdef.shtml


- Upir'

Ah rational charming Upir, muy bien!