Monthly Archives: May 2024

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (13) Vampires & Vampirism

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Santanico Pandemonium poster art Season 2, From Dusk Till Dawn TV series – one of my favorite female vampires. Yes – it’s not Salma Hayek from that scene in the film but Eiza Gonzalez is more vamped up in the poster here

 

 

(13) VAMPIRES &VAMPIRISM

 

And now we get to the hungrier folklore of the dead, albeit not so much in archetypal ghostly incorporeal form, but back from the dead as revenants. They came back wrong. Not much good comes out of coming back from the dead as a rule. It usually involves preying upon life to sustain one’s unnatural, undead being – treading water, but in blood, as it were.

There is a whole host of vampiric or ‘vampire adjacent’ beings or creatures in folklore and mythology, worthy of their own top ten, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond.

But when it comes to vampire folklore, despite all the vampiric predecessors and variants, we’re talking “the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” that “originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe” – and its progeny in modern fantasy or horror, mostly from the archetype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which arguably overshadow their precessors in folklore.

And the elements of vampires in folklore are also worthy of their own top ten. There are many variants, lacking a single definitive type, although there are a elements common to a number of European vampire folklore legends. Like witchcraft, which to some degree it overlaps and resembles, vampirism evolved into a mythos with remarkable complexity and depth – even down to a similar frenzy of vampire sightings (and stakings) in the eighteenth century.

There are the various attributes or traits of vampires, although a surprising number of those identified with vampires in modern popular culture originate not from traditional folklore but modern fantasy – as they do for the creation or origin of vampires, which tends to be more haphazard in folklore (such as by a cat jumping over a corpse) than the viral version of vampirism in modern fantasy.

There’s also the various means of preventing vampires (as in the various means of preventing a corpse from becoming a vampire, or at least causing too much trouble as one), identifying vampire, and most importantly of all, protecting against or destroying them. A personal favorite from folklore you don’t see too much (if at all) in modern fantasy is their weird obsessive-compulsion – if you left a bag or sack of grain or seeds in its path, it had to count every single grain or seed, usually detaining it all night. Except perhaps the Count in Sesame Street, which I’d like to think is an esoteric survival of this element of folklore.

And then there are the historical explanations for vampires and vampirism – anomalies in the natural process of decomposition (for elements identifying corpses as vampires), premature burial or grave robbery, various diseases (with porphyria and rabies being the most notable), and psychological or political explanations.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (13) Philip Jenkins – The Next Christendom

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Oxford University Press, 3rd edition

 

(13) PHILIP JENKINS – THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM: THE COMING OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

 

This book was – dare I say it? – a revelation.

That is not to say it was positive or negative, given the word revelation is often used to imply the former, but it was a dramatic paradigm shift for me. Previously, I had assumed that the world was slowly but steadily becoming more secular, with religion inexorably on the wane – perhaps with Islam as something of an outlier but particularly for Christianity, such that the world might be seen as increasingly post-Christian.

As I like to quip, I live in a Nietzschean world with a Freudian mind, so it was all too easy for my own assumption to follow the influence of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God is dead, with increasingly fewer people showing up to the wake.

So did the revelation of this book prove that assumption to be true or false? Well…yes and no, but mostly yes.

The assumption is by and large true for the West, with some outliers – notably the United States, where there is substantial resistance to the more advanced secularization in Europe.

However, it is not true elsewhere and this book’s essential thesis is that, due to demography, the West is an increasingly smaller part of the world as a whole – waning in population in proportion to the so-called global South, certainly in relative terms and potentially even in absolute terms. And the assumption definitely does not hold for the South, where religion is booming – which looks to remain the case for the foreseeable future, until at least later in this century.

Not all religion mind you, as the book identifies three predominant religious currents booming in the global South – conservative Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism and Islam. The first two of course are currents within the religion of Christianity, which is the book’s primary focus. To sum up the book’s thesis in a nutshell, while Christianity West is waning, Christianity South is booming. (One was tempted to say Christianity East as well as Christianity South, particularly to connote Christianity in Asia as well as the symmetry in opposition with Christianity West, but that risked confusion with Orthodoxy).

Two interesting points stick most in my mind from this book. The first and more substantial point was that this was not some radical redirection of history, but in many ways history turning full circle to Christianity’s origin – where, for the first centuries of its existence, Christianity was predominantly an Asian and African religion, not a European one.

The second point, less substantial but more amusing as irony, is its reference to a work of SF satire, in which a future Christian Africa sends missionaries to a non-Christian Europe – a work that, as the book points out, may resemble satire less and less in the foreseeable future.

The book’s author Philip Jenkins is an American historian of religion with a focus on Christianity and has written a number of books on it, both for its future (as here) and its past. This is the only book of his that I have read so far, but hope to read more in the expectation that they prove to be as engaging as this one.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)