Quote:
Originally Posted by solemnclockwork
The whole vampire mythos was based on count Vlad. Now that he ruled Constantine and prevented most of the Arabs from invading Europe. BUT in doing so showed such brutality to earn the nickname Dracula (which is based on part of his name).
The whole nowadays vampire is based on Bram Stoker "Dracula". Now back to past (before the book was written) vampires where not known by that name but by strigoi. The point to to make here though was that they where commonly known to be "witches". capitalize
So logically it matters little if you drink blood to get a specific vitamin, emino acid, and whatnots when you could go after something else that has what you need.
read it.
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Quite right; it's impossible for anyone to survive on blood alone. Even in the Masai, infamous for a diet of cow's milk and blood, they still eat various other things such as meal grains and vegetables. I doubt highly there is anything that causes an actual need for a person to consume blood to survive, and porphyria sufferers usually don't crave blood either- It's simply that uninformed people came across sufferers and used that idea as an explanation for the discolouration. I suspect that any instance of a person drinking blood other than for cultural reasons is bought on by mental delusions which tell them they are craving blood, when in actuality it's a figment of the mind alone. Ironically, it could well be these myths that drive mentally vulnerable people to acting out behaviors associated with them.
Vlad the impaler!
Interesting guy, but there's signs that vampire myths go back even older, though as you say, probably without that name. I think there were various neolithic bog mummies and so on dug up with signs of ritual practices on the corpses, assumedly designed to stop the creature coming back from the dead. There's even been a skeleton of a woman found in Italy a couple of months back, really old, with a brick jammed in it's mouth- an old practice to stop the deceased becoming a vampire. Old Bram Sto' took that and sexed it up; and it's been going on since then.
Basically these myths are the product of some biological oddities combined with some pretty basic social psychology.
