Vampires

We all hate cannibals, but for some inexplicable reason, everybody loves a vampire.

OK, maybe it's explicable. Vampires have a lot going for them. The eternal life thing is a big plus. And the wardrobe kicks ass. Super-powers, sleeping in, pointy teeth, sex appeal... Vampirism is a sexy thing, and the dismemberment of victims is strictly optional. Who wouldn't love it?

Now granted, it's not all fun and games. You lose out on sunlight and silver jewellery. People have a tendency to try to impale you with wooden stakes, cut off your head and burn you to bits. And the currently documented number of vampires proven to have eternal life is zero, so you could be drinking all that blood for nothing.

The practice of drinking blood goes back to the first time someone bled around someone else, with notable archaeological records supporting the notion found in Mexico, China and the Middle East, as well as more recent and documented practices in Africa and the South Pacific.

Drinking blood almost always had a ritual or magical component attached to it (as opposed to cannibalism, which was often simply a dietary strategy in prehistoric times)? There's just something about blood which speaks to the innermost human condition. Long before the days of DNA typing, blood was understood to be something very integral to identity.

But the blood-rites of ancient religions aren't vampirism. The historical record suggests that the concept of the vampire as recreational blood-drinker/supernatural being dates back to around the time of Jesus Christ, who fuelled the growth of such stories in very specific ways that people don't like to talk about.

After all, two particularly notable aspects of the Jesus story are present in the vampire legend ? the concept of rising from one's grave, and the concept of drinking human blood in order to have eternal life:

"He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink! He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, dwells in me, and I in him."

Nothing ambiguous about that. The vampire as supernatural creature lingered for some time at the fringes of civilized consciousness, but it didn't emerge as a full-fledged category of its own until much later.

There were two threads of thought that combined into the modern conception of the vampire around the time of the Middle Ages. The first was the idea of the magical/healing properties of blood. Blood was thought to contain the magical essence of life, and it was widely used in various medical and occult practices.

The second thread was the emergence of legends and rumours about the undead, soulless and unbaptized abominations that clawed their way from the grave to wreak havoc on the living.

Around the same time, some of the first really gory documented tales of psychotic killers began to arise, such as the case of Sawney Bean, the leader of an incestuous cannibal tribe in Scotland, and the extremely lurid tale of Gilles de Rais, one of the first serial killers to immortalized in excruciating detail, who was convicted of Witchcraft, summoning Satan and other crimes.

Later observers, such as Aleister Crowley, would conclude that de Rais was the victim of a politically motivated frame-up, however the list of charges and the content of the French nobleman's confession are so astonishing in their detail that it's hard to imagine there wasn't some grain of truth. According to the Inquisition, de Rais used the blood of the hundreds of children he had allegedly killed for alchemical experiments.

The real legend of the vampire was born about the same time, over in good old Transylvania. Vlad Tepes, or as he is famously known, Vlad the Impaler, was a bloodthirsty prince of Transylvania in the 15th century. His father and grandfather were members of a se