Vampires and other physiological monsters

[mongoose]

I've been toying with an idea, role playing it (text based, free form) with one other person, having to do with vampires and faith. The market, I suspect, is saturated with vampire stories, so It would be difficult to make it work, especially as it's hard to do anything even seeming original given the relatively strict parameters set by folklore

(vampires are strong and fast, drink blood, operate mostly at night, live a long time, etc.)

Still, there are questions I haven't seen addressed to my satisfaction. I really enjoyed Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles for a while (Blood and Gold bored me, however) but was disappointed in this: Though all her vampires were exposed to the Church and to people of faith, and they all commented on it, none of them were compelled to make a decision to serve God, or not (as far as I knew from reading most of them. I guess there's one where Lestat has a spiritual experience, but I wasn't clear on whether or not it changed his life) Now, it seems to me that there would have to be something beyond a pseudo-religion set up by a few vampires wherein they try to justify their existence by saying that they serve this or that divine or demonic entity. So how would it be?

How would God interact with vampires, if there were vampires with human souls, as seems to be the case with Rice's vampires?
How could those vampires interact with God?
Could a vampire be "saved?"
If so, would they cease to be a vampire?
Would God's spirit have a possibility of operating in and through a vampire?
If a vampire believed in and confessed Jesus Christ as Lord, raised from the dead, to the Glory of God the father (meeting the requirement for salvation) and prayed and worshiped as much as any Christian, and studied the word (so they abided in Him and His word abided in them) and they prayed, believing without doubting that what they prayed for would be done for them, would God work in power on their behalf?
Could a vampire cast out demons in Jesus name, or would that be a demon casting out a demon (assuming Rice's world, again, wherein a demon posessed Akasha, turning her into the mother of all vampires)?
If a vampire served God, and God worked through him/her, and he/she exorcised another vampire, would the other vampire become a mortal human again?
If vampires have a spell gift whereby they can command weak minded mortals and said mortals are compelled to obey, and if Druids had the word of command, which had a similar effect, and if mortals can pray, believing and not doubting, and it would be done for them, what would happen if a Christian druid vampire used all three in one statement to command something?

So we'll see where this story goes, and what I and the other writer decide about our characters. So far God hasn't done anything noticeable, but both Primary Characters, both vampires, have prayed to Him.

[Divides the Waters]

Wow....

I think I addressed the issue of faith and vampires in another thread, wherein I suggested that the "emblems" that are used to repel vampires should work much like anything in spiritual warfare--useless unless in the hands of a true believer.

Jan 30, 2008 0:38:57 GMT -5 Divides the Waters said:

One of the things that has always bothered me is the notion that vampires can be vanquished or repelled by symbols. To me, symbols are useless unless they are actually representative of something real (I've used a variation of the Passover for BTGA).

Take, for instance, the traditional "vampires repelled by a cross" motif. I think it would be interesting to see a Christian repell a vampire (either with or without a cross) merely by the power and authority of Christ, and then have a non-Christian try the same thing (probably relying on a cross), and be killed by the vampire.

Remember: "Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?"

The notion of demonically-increased longevity has a certain validity, especially in a Christian take on the vampire mythos. Why not simply have a person who has made a Dorian Gray meets Faust sort of bargain ... the cost of his/her youth is the blood of the living?

To address some of the questions in order (with the caviat that this is all simply opinion):

1. Yes, I believe that a "saved" vampire would be redeemed, therefore, no longer a vampire. The vampirism is as much a spiritual curse as it is a physical condition.

2. God's spirit can operate through anyone at any time. To what degree depends upon a number of factors.

3. "Even the demons believe, and shudder." I tend to think (confessing Christ as Lord, etc.) this goes back to the first issue; a saved vampire would probably be a vampire no longer. (The vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula--the movie, not the book--became one because he rejected the God he once served.)

4. Since vampirism can take a number of different forms, I'd say that you're pretty safe in whatever you do with the genre. But I tend to think that the classic vampire would tend to be demonic, and Satan cannot cast out Satan. Only a redeemed (former?) vampire operating under the authority of Christ could cast out a demon.

5. On that note, if a vampire could be "exorcised," you've pretty much demonstrated that there are at least two entities in one body; a demonic spirit, and whatever is left of the human who houses it. So in other words, it's not merely a cursed (former) human, but a human whose body bears the consequences of having taken another entity into it.

6. Power of command is strong, but not all-powerful. In my own novels, I make a distinction between a believer being protected and being immune (in terms of spiritual warfare). You can go into battle with armor, but that doesn't guarantee you won't get hurt, or even killed. However, going into battle naked pretty much guarantees (shock factor aside) that you'll be among the first casualties. So yes, those things put together would pack a punch, but then, they might be ineffectual against a righteous man, just as a curse is.

Remember that you don't have to base your vampires strictly on the Anne Rice orthodoxy. I would study some of the old vampire tales and lore to get an idea of how the thing has evolved into the modern day bloodsucker we're familiar with in all our fiction. The original vampires were not so much known for sucking blood as they were for spreading the plague!

Hope this helps.

[Jeff Gerke]

I haven't read Sue Dent's Christian novels about vampires, but she might deal with some of these issues.

I'm also reviewing an unpublished vampire ms. called Perfect Blood, Innocent Blood by Cindy Emmet Smith that deals with a now-reluctant vampire.

Eric Wilson is about to release an undead series, as well.

You said the market is saturated, but I suspect you meant the market for secular vampire stories. In Christian publishing, it's still a pretty new thing. Most CBA publishers (like 99%) won't touch it. So there's lots of room for you to explore.

Jeff

[scintor]

You just need to remember that people like Anne Rice like to glorify vampires. The vampires of legend were not free, beautiful and powerful, like the ones Rice described. They were tortured, depraved and deformed. The beautiful seductive vampires of Bram Stoker were a combination of the legend of the blood drinking spirit and the legend of the succubus.

Most vampires in legend were closer to what we now call the Ghoul. Creatures of halfway between life and death who hungered for living things. They were canibals with little more intelect than an animal who were so corrupt that any pure thing would destroy them (thus the weakness to sunlight, running water and the stake through the heart.)

This is also why they were vulnerable to objects of faith, the purity of faith was the antidote to their corruption.

If you go with Anne Rice's glorified vampires, then you need to look into demonic pacts. The only way to gain such power and gifts that the use is a demonic pact. If a vampire who was the recipient of such a pact were to repent, the most likely outcome would be their immediate destruction as their demonic partner took away all that they had given to the person.

The ravages of time, the mortal wounds that are part of the conversion process and their corrupted diet woud all catch up with them as soon as their demonic parasite was driven from them. For them the only upside would be the chance of redemption rather than the certainty of damnation.

As for the word of command, all of the examples I have seen in folklore act just like a demonic curse. A true christian could easily through prayer and athority, rebuke such a command and release any such compulsion rather than give such compulsions themselves.

Scincerely,

[e-mail]

[Divides the Waters]

I'm not much for "ditto" posts, but ... yeah! What he said!

[mongoose]

Interesting responses concerning vampires. Thanks!

On the Word of Command, I too have seen it mostly practiced, in folklore, by servants of the enemy. A notable exception - These books are worth reading for the many issues they explore from an un-orthadox perspective - was the Christian Druids in Stephen Lawhead's books. In Patrick, both Patrick, and his mentor who is a druid who leads him to Christ, use the Word of Command to save lives (Patrick's, in both cases, incidentally). Later, in the Celtic Crusades Series, the descendants of these original Christian Druids used runes to influence things in the world around them. They all had an obvious faith in Jesus Christ, praying to Him, and the beasts and weather would then obey them. In Lawhead's Paradise Wars series, there is a druid priest who worships a triune God, and seems to use traditional druidic elemental magic. Sacred groves and the like came into play.

I wouldn't say this actually occurred, or that it should have. I really don't know to what extent Lawhead's ideas are based on history versus what he would have liked to have been. But calling upon the Swift Sure Hand to control the weather on behalf of your army, or to silence the pigs while you take back the stolen horses, sounds a lot to me like things done by the prophets, Jesus and the apostles. DOES God honor that, or is it witchcraft? Does anyone have a more historically authoritative source on these things than the fiction novels of Stephen Lawhead?

[torainfor]

I have no authoritative answer, just the memory of a snippet of conversation that opened up a path I didn't walk too far down.

If we were made and designed to rule over the animals and subdue the earth, what did that originally look like? Did Jesus walk on water and control the waves because He was fully God or fully man?

[mongoose]

Care for the Earth, and tend it, and rule the animals.

Yeah, it's a difference in translation, but you can see how it would change our approaches to things. The terms used by torainfor, and by some translations, lead Christians to become developers and natural resource extraction people, and to not worry too much about their impact on Creation. The terms I use, and which I read in my Bible, lead me to become a preservationist who will fight to the bitter end to keep wild portions of Creation wild, the better to care for the maximum diversity of wildlife therein.

But I do believe that if we were complete people, as God meant us to be, we'd behave like the kid in Revelation, with similar effect, or like Paul with the snake, or Peter on the Sea, etc.

Back to the vamps. The argument that Rice's vamps were such because of the remnants of a demonic spirit that flowed through them (weaker as it was passed on through the generations), and that, as such, to cast out the demon would be to remove the vampirism, makes sense. So are there other explanations in other stories of the origins of vampires? Is there anything about vampires simply being another physical species, or perhaps infected with a disease that changed them, or victims of a mutation, or something? Something purely physical, and having no connection to anything spiritual, any more than do mortal humans.

For better or worse, I'm really into two concepts:
1. Uber powerful people who are such through no practice of evil, simply as a result of their physiology and
2. The necessity to drink blood beside the conviction that it's wrong to kill humans.

So maybe if I were to write on such a character it would be something original, but I prefer to explore the ideas that have already been explored before striking off on my own.

[Divides the Waters]

I think you'll see that almost every "take" on vampires has already been done, down to a genetically-altering virus. (You could argue that the Resident Evil films did this, and that the resultant creations were vampires, rather than zombies.)

That isn't to discourage you, by any means. Just saying that it may be a challenge to create something that is either completely unique or, at least, not derivative to some degree.

Of course, I recognized after struggling with my writing that there is truly "nothing new under the sun," and used that to my advantage. Mythopoeia is consicously constructing your world in such a way that it incorporates mythic elements. Which is not to say that you don't still have to watch out for cliche. But it does take some of the pressure off when you realize that there are only so many plots in the world.

www.ipl.org.ar/ref/QUE/FARQ/plotFARQ.html

[wilsonwriter]

I agree that most ideas for vampires have been exhausted. I've given it my own twist in my upcoming Jerusalem's Undead Trilogy (first book Field of Blood, in stores in October), but I'll leave it to readers to decide if I've added to the genre.

Thanks to Jeff for his encouragement, advice, and recent interview with me. Never a dull moment Where the Map Ends!

[Divides the Waters]

Welcome to the club. I'm looking forward to seeing what you've done with your series.

I mixed the notion of succubus/vampire with Miltonian fallen angel in my own novel, so I'm hardly working with original themes. Again, it's what you do with something that makes or breaks the concept. I've seen some really awesome concepts with lousy execution, and vice versa.

[Christian Soldier]

I've always felt that Vampirism, as far as modern vampires go, was a form of demonic posession, but that's just me.

[Jeff Gerke]

Eric Wilson (wilsonwriter) speaks! Welcome to the group, Eric.

[wilsonwriter]

Jeff, thanks for the welcome mat.

Christian Soldier, if you scan through half the vampire books on the market today, you'll see that they openly use the word "demon" or "daemon" as an interchangeable word for their creatures. It's become cliche and trite, though based in historical reality.

In my own book, I do play with that same idea, though trying to put an ultra-modern spin on The Screwtape Letters and This Present Darkness. I'm trying to write with spiritual truth in the midst of a good solid story--a difficult thing to do, particularly while trying to work within the confines of the CBA market.

[mongoose]

So pushing the boundaries of the topic out a little to where we're no longer talking only about vampires, do any of you know of any fiction focused on immortal characters, or other uber-powerful-people, who could feasibly be Christians? Where do I find these? And since I have yet to pick up any of Dekker's new works, I may well look into some of y'all's on vampires or angels/demons, whatever. It's like I need my fix or something.