Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [11]
There is a parallel and very ancient and widespread tradition of the sexy vampire, using the term in its broadest sense. In ancient Greece and Rome they had the lamia, a beautiful demoness who seduced men in order to drink their blood, and there was a very similar notion about ghouls in the Middle East. In China they have very similar ideas about vampires — some being shambling, zombie-like monsters and others beautiful temptresses looking to drain their victims’ blood. In Hebrew tradition the daughters of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, took revenge for his rejection of her by seducing his descendants and drinking their blood. So the sexiness of vampires is nothing new and it’s tied up with the mystical significance of blood as the carrier of life in more than a purely physical sense. There is a mystery about blood that cannot quite be pinned down or explained away. It’s tied up also with power in relationships — domination and subservience — much of which is unconscious and equally beyond easy explanation.
Modern vampire stories tap right into this ongoing dream or nightmare and I think the changing nature of the vampire mythos — their not necessarily being still vulnerable to holy water and crucifixes, for example — reflects one of their most basic talents, which is shape-shifting. They adapt to their circumstances and thus present every generation with fresh, queasily seductive terror, at the same time posing awkward questions about morality.
Michelle Belanger (psychic vampire and author of the Psychic Vampire Codex)
The vampire as we know it today has its roots definitively in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and to some extent these vampire beliefs are still in place in rural areas today. The vampires from folklore, on the whole, are not at all what might be expected by people exposed to the pop culture archetype we’ve all come to know. These vampires are risen corpses. They are unlovely creatures, and many of their distinguishing features stand in direct contrast to the svelte and sexy vampires seen on shows like True Blood. One Greek type of vampire, the vrykolakas, gets its name from a word meaning “drum-like,” and this word is applicable to vampires in general because they were believed to batten in their graves on the blood sucked from victims in the night, growing large and swollen in their coffins. The vampires of folklore are also frequently described as being red, not pale, because they were thought to grow flushed and ruddy with that self-same blood.
Despite the many differences between the vampires of folklore and the vampires of pop culture today, there are nevertheless some striking similarities. The main similarity is a connection between the vampire and sex. As unattractive as the vampire of folklore might be, a sexual element is still present in many of the tales. Dead lovers were often said to come back to visit their spouses and paramours, exhausting them with sex from nightfall through morning. While these sexual vampires were believed to suck the blood of their victims, they were also literally believed to love their spouses to death, wearing them away with their nightly exertions until they followed the vampire to the grave. Another sexual element appears in several of the official reports penned on exhumed corpses suspected of being vampires. The corpses of male vampires, in addition to having remained whole and undecayed in the grave, were also described as having immense erections. So sex and death are intertwined in the vampire myth even from its very roots.
Once the vampire was transplanted from the folklore of Eastern Europe to the literature of Western Europe, this theme of sex and death became a leitmotif visited