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

[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.