Another reposted comment; about vampires

[xiphias]

So, over on weirdjews, someone asked the perennial question, "Do crosses work on Jewish vampires?"

Of course, several people pointed to Roman Polanski's movie, "The Fearless Vampire Killers", but after thinking about it, I came up with another answer:

On a slightly more serious note:

The vampire mythology as we currently have it, largely from Bram Stoker, is strongly Christaniocentric. The idea is that a vampire is someone who has sold their portion in Heavenly Life Everlasting for earthly life everlasting.

The vampire mythology is a mishmosh of various traditions, which, in general, take the "vampire" to be a being who has, in some way or another, given itself over to pure evil, trading its reward in the afterlife for power in the temporal world.

And all the things which defeat vampires are things which, in some tradition or another, are considered holy.

You can defeat a vampire with:
Sunlight
Crucifixes
Running Water
Crossroads
Garlic
Rowan Leaves or Branches


All of these things are things which are considered holy in some tradition or another.

You can also use burning and decapitation, but those are just general good things to try for anything -- those work against, y'know, people, too.

As good Anglicans, the characters in Bram Stoker's Dracula do not believe in the inherent holiness of the crucifix -- they believe that veneration of the crucifix as an inherently holy object is a form of idolatry. Nonetheless, the crucifix works for them.

So, a more serious answer:

It seems that, since the holy symbols of multiple traditions work, even for people who don't share that tradition, anything which has inherent sanctity would work. A mogen david does not have inherent holiness.

However, tefilin would work, and a vampire would likely be unable to pass a mezzuzah, even if he was invited into the house (again, the holy traditions of hospitality and guest-law in various traditions are in play there.)

The actual belief structure of the vampire would not come into play. A vampire is not Jewish. The person whose body the vampire inhabits may have been Jewish, but the vampire itself has no family ties, cultural ties, or religious ties -- it is outside the society and culture, and cannot be considered to have any religious life of its own. It has given all that up for temporal power.
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Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Good answer!

After discussing it a lot for the Vampire campaign I was running, it was decided that the symbol matters to the wielder, not to the vampire, so as long as you believe in your symbol, it works... This doesn't cover sunlight, running water, and garlic like your scheme, though. (Garlic, we decided, didn't work, unless you were part of some mad Savoury Cooking Sect...)

Then The Mummy came out, with Benny cycling through holy symbols, and we could never talk straight about it again...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

See, I like the idea of objects having intrinsic characteristics.

I see two major ways of looking at things: the first is that things are symbols, in which case, any power they have comes from the mind, belief, and will of a person -- they are conduits for Will, but are otherwise unremarkable.

If your athame is a bread knife, it works because you use it as an athame -- it also works perfectly well for cutting bread. You can use a deck of cards to tell the future, or play poker. Either way is fine. Consecrating a specific item helps you focus your will through it, because the ceremony of consecration is a way that you change how you think of the object: it makes no change in the object itself, only in your experience of it.

That's the first option, and the one that, I think, is more natural to modern Pagans and magicians and spiritualists. And if you're going by this theory, your only question is, "does the Will have to come from the person using the symbol, or can it come from the person the symbol is used upon?" Either works, and you can make perfectly good vampire motifs using either version of this theory.

But the other way to think of it is that objects have some sort of qualities that are intrinsic to them, and do not depend on belief or relationship. They simply are what they are, and, if they have a characteristic of sanctity that is inimical to demons, that characteristic does not depend on any quality of the user.

And I like where that theory takes you. Because, to me, objects can have inherent holiness. And other objects can have reflected holiness because they are copies of even holier objects. For instance, a Torah scroll has inherent holiness. That's independent of any human belief or attitude towards the Torah. It has to be manufactured in a specific way, with holy intention, but, once it's manufactured, its holiness is inherent. It doesn't change in its holiness because it's around people who believe in it or not.

A chumash, the same words as in the Torah, but in book form, has reflected holiness from the Torah. It's not its own holiness, but, again, it is intrinsic to what it is -- it is a copy of the Torah, so it intrinsically has that reflected holiness.

A set of tefilin which has been handed down from father to son for six generations, and has been owned and used by the holiest of devout men has no more or less inherent holiness than one that was written and sold yesterday. The holiness is in what it is, not in its history, not in "accumulation of belief" over the centuries.

And that way works interestingly.

[theclamsman.livejournal.com]

Welllllllll, not all vampires willingly give everything up willingly. Some are just made, like Claudia (IWTV). She had no choice in the matter. And Louis (again, IWTV) was a vampire with a human heart/soul, so...he didn't like suckin' on people to begin with. Of course, that's the Anne Rice vampire, and not the traditional Bram Stoker Dracula, which was loosely based on Vlad Dracul but also based on Elizabeth Bathory.

Speaking of a Jewish vampire, I would think that he (or she) would be something like Louis, but worse. I mean...how do you know who's kosher? wouldn't a Jewish vampire be able to only feed on Orhtodox Jews? Or would it depend on whether or not the Jewish vampire was kosher to begin with. Hmm...I dunno. I can imagine what a Jewish vampire's mother would be like, though.

"Oy, do you really think you can actually feed on that one? It's so skinny! Don't put it in your mouth, you don't know where it's been!"

That ought to be a cartoon/drawing. XD

[theclamsman.livejournal.com]

* - 1 "willingly" in that first sentence. >____>.

[goljerp]

Well, Kosher Jewish vampires would have a problem: blood is inherently non-kosher. Animal blood, Human blood, whatever. So the question arises: does a vampire need blood to live (or whatever), or is it just a craving? If blood is needed to, um, exist, would animal blood do? If so, then that would be preferable to human blood. If human blood is needed to exist, a kosher Jewish vampire is really in a bind...

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

If blood is needed to exist, it becomes essential medicine. Preserving life is more important than the kosher laws, so it's not a problem at all. (Vampires would have an obligation to take a small amount from each donor, so as not to risk killing the donor...preserving life is not more important than the commandment against murder. And the ethics of consent could get very interesting.) Laura Antoniou does some interesting things with the idea of blood and kashrut in "Shayna Maidel."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That includes a number of assumptions.

First: do vampires have nefesh? If they don't, then would pikuach nefesh apply?

Vampires, according to some mythologies, don't breathe, which means that they don't have ruach. And since nefesh is a higher form of soul than ruach, and builds upon that soul, then you could argue that they can't have nefesh. And therefore, they aren't subject to the rules on pikuach nefesh.

If a vampire is dead, then how can it use the rules on preserving life?

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Tangentially, the question brings to mind "Why Is This Night Different?" by Janni Lee Simner. I have it in the anthology Sisters in Fantasy 2; I don't know if it's been published elsewhere.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

How about a dollar bill for an Objectivist vampire?

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

Would a dollar bill work, or would it have to be a gold dollar coin? (Maybe those older bills, the silver certificate ones...)

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

In my story "Lifeblood" (New Voices in Science Fiction, edited by Mike Resnick, DAW Books, December 2003) I dealt with this very issue. I chose to set it up that you needed to have faith in the symbol you were using, no matter what the faith of the vampire.

[badmagic.livejournal.com]

The question last night was whether a vampire would be repelled by one of those little statuettes of a pair of hands clasped in prayer (You plug them in. They glow.) The general consensus was yes. Vampire below a certain taste threshold would recognize them as a holy object. Those with certain standards would be repelled because, well, wouldn't you?

[(Anonymous)]

a vampire would likely be unable to pass a mezzuzah, even if he was invited into the house

That's why a well-prepared vampire will plan on bursting through windows after having been invited in, and will bring along a sledge hammer to go through the walls. On the plus side for the people in the house, if the walls are lath and plaster, the bits of lath might be useful as improvised crosses, which is ironic, but any port in a storm.

Personally, while 'Day of the Jewish Vampire (Which Starts at Sundown)' might be interesting, I'd rather see the other half of the double feature: 'Frankenstein's Monster vs. the Golem.'