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Vampire combat fetish8/30/2023 Perhaps the easiest place to start a history of the vampire is with the differentiation between the folkloric vampire and the fictional vampire. All the while, the vampire was also being referenced throughout a rich psychiatric history of patients (mostly schizophrenics) with various blood fetishes. This was followed by Karl Marx’s and François-Marie Arouet’s ( nom de plume Voltaire) similar co-option of the myth for socio-political reasons. Finally, in 1897, comes Bram Stoker’s famed Dracula (McCully 38). Around the same time as Dracula came the Victorian appropriation of the vampire as a stand-in for class and sexual struggle. Much later came the vampiric texts with which we in the West are familiar, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christobel (1797), Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1791), and John Keats’s Lamia (1819) (McCully 38). In ancient China, vampires were called Ch’ing Shih, and in ancient Mexico, they were called Ciuateteo (“associated with women who had died in their first labor”) (McCully 38). Jungian analyst and professor Robert McCully reports that “the earliest known depiction of a vampire appears on a prehistoric Assyrian bowl and shows a man copulating with a vampire whose head as been severed from her body” ( 38). He continues, describing how the ancient vampire was often associated with the “destructive side of the feminine” and appeared in many cultures throughout the Near and Far East, even popping up in Mexico (50). Specifically, vampire-related phenomena appear within a group of Vajra deities in Tibetan Lamaism and within stories from the Indian Atharva Veda and the Baital-Pachisi (Tales of a Vampire) (McCully 38). However, the vampire has ancient and ubiquitous roots. Most people associate vampires with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. “The phenomenon of the vampire is ancient, ubiquitous, and fascinating…” ( Prins 74) I hope it is as satisfying to read as it was to research. With that in mind, I invite the brave among you to read further. But after I finished it, my librarian-brain was left wanting more - more context! More history! The gaps in my vampire-knowledge led to this post’s publication, the content of which still only grazes the surface of the veritable surfeit of vampire-related research out there. I was inspired to write this blog post after reading a BBC article titled “ The Real-Life Diseases that Spread the Vampire Myth.” Published on October 31, 2016, it was timely for Halloween and made an appropriately-spooky morning read.
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