By Jack Chou
Immortality. What a bittersweet story. Since the dawn of death, the dreams of men have revolved around this tantalizing and utterly unattainable fantasy. Cults and religions have sprung up around empty promises of life beyond destruction. Poetry and paintings have been devoted to immortals in their states of eternal perfection, whether that state be the Holy Heaven or some pagan paradise filled with lotus or ambrosia. And within the heart of every person there resides the desire to leave behind something by which coming generations might learn of our existence, so that some semblance of immortality may yet be purchased. It is safe to say that, for most of us, there is no price too great to pay for a chance to taste the fount of eternity, to live and live and live, and to be young forever. But what if the bargain were your soul? What if to live, you had to kill? Would you still wish to taste the fount of youth if the magical elixir were human blood? Would you still want to live forever, if you had to do so as a vampire? Do not be so hasty to decide on damnation, for there’s more to undeath than sweet life everlasting, and it’s only fair that you should learn all there is to tell. Banish from your mind what preconceptions you may have about the vampire, especially if they involve a count with a cape in a castle with coffins. For while Bram Stoker’s Dracula can certainly be credited with the rise of modern vampire lore, he’s a mere fledgling compared with the history of his species. The legend of these bloodsucking ghouls goes back an entire millennium and across an entire continent, to the snowy reaches of Russia in 1047. There, a certain Russian prince was described bitterly by his subjects as a “Upir Lichy”—that is, a “wicked vampire.” In another hundred years the vampire found its way to England, where it assumed a different name (sanguisuga) but retained the same insatiable thirst for human blood in the Chronicles of William of Newburgh. By this time, the creature had changed into a warlock capable of summoning plagues and manipulating the weather to suit its designs. Village folks passed their nights in terror of waking to find a pale shadow by their bed, yet could not come up with a way to rid their land of this supernatural menace. The vampire’s reign of fear and death had begun. If those early accounts were not enough to carve an uncomfortable pit in the collective European consciousness and bury the vampire superstition deep into it, then the rise to infamy of two members of its royal caste during the Middle Ages certainly did the job. The 15th century saw the birth and ascension of a Romanian prince by the name of Vlad Son of Dracul, or more dramatically, Vlad Dracula. Though he is remembered in historical texts as a stalwart defender of his homeland from invading Turks, Dracula’s cruelty to his own people was legendary as well. His particular brand of sadism involved a form of torture called impaling, where a wooden stake is driven through a person’s anus and into the intestines. The twitching victim was then erected like some hellish Christmas tree so that gravity continued to skewer the body until the stake exited through the mouth. Dracula was fond of decorating the premises of his estate with those brutal banners; he was even fonder of feasting while presiding over the impaling of his latest batch of victims, and it was said that he often dipped his bread in the spilled blood for a taste of the suffering he’d inflicted. It is little wonder that the Impaler, as he was aptly nicknamed by those he terrorized, was the basis for Bram Stoker’s demonic bloodsucker. Following in Dracula’s footsteps a hundred years after his reign was Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, probably the most vampire-like human being in history. Not only did the actions of this Hungarian noblewoman match the Impaler’s for depravity, she coveted blood in a way that could only be accurately described as vampiric. She believed that she could remain young forever if she bathed in the rejuvenating blood of virgin sacrifices, and scoured the countryside on a regular basis so she could fill her tub with the precious, burning liquid each night. Folklore has it that her castle had massive underground dungeons built to hold her doomed, wailing captives, and that the floor of her spacious private chambers was littered with the drained corpses of young girls whose dead eyes stared sightlessly at the countess as she lapped and rubbed their blood over her aging skin. Though Bathory was eventually charged and executed for her crimes, it was only after she had literally emptied the vicinity of her fortress of women. To this day we do not know just how many girls she killed. The glamour of the modern vampire, so different from the horror stories of blood and torture in a time long past, can be attributed to authors such as Anne Rice, who have given the vampire a virtual makeover to better suit them to an age where gods are superstitions and nights are as bright as day. Gone are the dank tombs, the reek of death, and the insurmountable fear of holy symbols. Instead we have a monster that’s merely a man made immortal, a vainglorious creature whose metamorphosis has only quickened its drunken love with its earthly form. That it must kill to live rarely distracts it from its enjoyment of life eternal, and indeed this is but a reflection of the conscience of modern man, or the lack thereof. The modern vampire is an affluent, stylish being that lives for the moment, though it fully intends to live for all time. From a character of gothic horror and damnation the vampire today has become the hero of a sort of escapist fantasy. An escape from mortal futility, a fantasy of perfect immortality. That’s what it all comes down to, in the end. So, have you made your decision? a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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