A Late Halloween Note

Ah-ha! I wasn’t late – I said Monday or Wednesday. Today is Wednesday.

Now, had my brain actually processed the fact that it was Halloween while I was writing last week’s post, I probably would have posted this one to be thematic. However, my brain did not.
Partially because I am still researching my other drafts and partially because I am procrastinating exam study I present to you an observation I made when I was around 11 or 12 on vampires after attending a science talk. See how this would have been fitting last week?

Firstly I shall state that this is my musing on an unrealistic topic – I occasionally like to dissect myths and then consider reconstructing them. Now, setting sparklepires aside, I shall list the "facts" about vampires (the typical ones anyway – not going into every mythology):
• They are undead, a.k.a. they have no pulse and don’t breathe yet can move around and talk and apparently think.
• They never age.
• They can be killed either by a wooden stake to the heart, a rod of hot iron to the heart, or decapitation.
• They drink blood.
• They are typically created by the body of the deceased being possessed by some sort of demon. (This is supported by the belief that warlocks and some murderers would become vampires after death as they were in league with demons.)
•• (Also babies who were born with hair, an extra/missing toe/finger, or teeth were also destined to be vampires.)
••• (So according to folklore I should be a shape-changing vampire. Man do I feel cheated.)

Now, 11 year old me came up with this idea: vampires don’t age because they don’t breathe. Note that we mention nothing of decay – that’s clearly magic. (Or the chemical anomaly that occurs in some bodies causing the body not to decay, like the “Incorruptible Saints” in Catholic religion but does sometimes occur outside of recognized sainthood.)
Back on track! Now, the vampire, being dead, does not breathe nor have a heartbeat. As humans we need to breathe in order for our bodies to absorb oxygen into our blood for our hearts to then pump to our muscles and organs. However, oxygen is both our necessity and our killer – oxygen free radicals (all free radicals) destroy cells. The cell destruction causes us to age.

(For those of you who don’t know what a free radical is, it is a molecule that rips off parts of other cells to complete itself. So eating certain foods "complete" the radical so it won't need your cells. Read up on oxygen free radicals here - it's more scientiffic.)

In short, oxygen free radicals cause us to age, thus breathing causes us to age. It causes us to live, but it also causes us to age. Vampires however don’t need that pesky oxygen in order to “live” so they don’t need to age.

Now, I’ll drag garlic into this – garlic is an anti-oxidant like green tea and coffee. Except vampires don’t hate green tea and coffee. So why we eat garlic because (a) yummy!, (b) we’re Italian, (c) we like to take care of ourselves and eliminate those nasty oxygen free radicals, or (d) we are a male who wants to increase our fertility [which links in nicely with the second half of this post], vampires don’t need to do any of the above. They only drink our blood, they’re probably Romanian (I jest on both this comment and (b) of course), they don’t need to take care of themselves – they’re freaking immortal, and it’s highly unlikely that they want kids in the traditional sense. So, the only reason they would eat garlic is if they wanted bad breath.

Clearly vampires are so vain that even bringing the vile food near them would cause panic. :P
(For all the benefits of garlic see here - it's an awesome food.)


And now, in a surprise twist (not), I reveal that the idea of the Dhamphyr or “half-vampire” has mythological –and not Hollywood-squealing-fangirl- grounds. Now while it is so much fun to make fun of the fact that Edward could never have bedded Bella due to the lack a heartbeat thus no blood flow thus no erection, this idea of vampires going around and bedding people is rooted in mythology. In Slavic mythology was believed that if a man became a vampire, his first act as a member of the undead would be to seek out his wife/girlfriend/love-interest and, well, do the deed. Now, someone funny may insert a rigor mortis joke here but they may actually be on to something.
(The Roma had female vampires instead, I will mention.)

The myths do generally agree that this was the first act a male vampire would perform and rigor mortis sticks around for 24 hours. However this would assume one becomes a vampire immediately after death, and not two or three days later as stated in other myths. We would also be assuming that every other muscle in the body is unaffected. So that’s just dumb – vampires cannot have sex, let alone have children. (Hence it would be pointless for them to eat garlic.)

Not that this logical gem has stopped people from thinking this, and I don’t just mean in fiction.

Now, there are actually documented cases (mainly in Romania) of men tricking/scaring women into going to bed with them by pretending to be a vampire and later getting caught out for it, so (assuming that all these girls weren’t complete idiots) there were cultures that stated that this myth was indeed true. (Like the aforementioned Slavs and Roma.)
The likely cause of this myth were (grieving) widows being “consoled” by male friends and finding themselves in awkward positions when the baby bump presented – saying that one’s vampire husband came back from the cemetery and left them a parting gift is a nice easy solution. It would also explain why the “vampires” don't usually make a return visit in the reports, while in the myths their fidelity varies. It could also be used as an "explanation" for girls losing their virginity before marriage while saving their virtue.

... Hmmmm, I should mention that the sex-education part of my post was a realization I had at 16 rather than 12. Also that I did not intend for it to last that long. And no, I won’t be going into the possible causes of the vampire myth – that’s what Wikipedia is for. I just wanted to point how it made weird sense for a myth that predated that medical discovery.
And so the myth lies dissected, the student too lazy to sew it back up...

And, after that bout of weirdness, I shall disappear again until next week – most likely Wednesday. Perhaps I’ll study in the meantime... or maybe work on the next post. Ah, procrastination, what would I do without you?