Free Vampires by Charlotte Montague Page A

mockery of the Christian idea of ‘eternal life’ by conjuring up this monstrous being that could not die, yet lived a miserable half-life, preying on its victims at night and draining their lifeblood away from them as they slept.

     
Drinking the blood of Christ
     
    The idea of drinking blood to attain eternal life is also at the heart of Christian ritual, in the celebration of mass. In the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as it is also known, Christians who have been baptized and confirmed come up to the altar to take the bread and wine, which is conceived of as the body and blood of Christ. The priest first takes a chalice, holds it up and says: ‘Drink ye all of this; for this is my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins; Do this, as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me.’ Each communicant is then given a wafer of bread and a sip of wine from the same chalice.
    Today, there is some controversy over the ritual of the Eucharist within the Christian church over the issue of what is called ‘transubstantiation’. Some sects argue that the ritual is purely symbolic, an act of faith, remembrance, and gratitude for Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross; others, including the Roman Catholic church, maintain that during the service, the wine and the bread actually turn into Christ’s blood and body, and that communicants therefore drink his blood and eat his flesh.

     
The quest for immortality
     
    Whatever the status of these beliefs, it is clear that human beings through the centuries have always shown an immense urge to overcome death through belief in an afterlife, and through various ritualistic practices, many of which have included the drinking of blood. The early vampire myth, with its roots in the Slavic ‘old religion’ of ‘undead’ spirits and demons, is part of that quest. The nineteenth century vampire, which was the start of a nobly born, wealthy individual, has other cultural references (not least, as some political commentators have pointed out, a critique of the nobility, whose decadent, privileged lifestyle ‘leeches’ the morals of society, and the lifeblood of the lower orders). However, what seems to bind them all together is the common quest for immortality.
    In the twentieth and twenty-first century, the image of the vampire as a seeker of immortality – whether visualized as a horrifying monster from the grave or a well-groomed aristocrat – has tended to be obscured. The camp horror elements of the legend have attracted many talented film-makers and fiction writers, who have created tremendously entertaining fantasies for a popular market, so much so that the more serious aspects of the stories have been somewhat overlooked. However, in more recent years, building on the important themes of human sexuality, death, and the quest for immortality that have been present in fictional accounts of vampirism since the days of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , there has been a revival of the myth; one recent example is Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance series Twilight , aimed at a teenage market. Once again, the vampire legend shows itself able to accommodate a discussion of emotional issues that appeal to contemporary youth: for example, the feelings that many teenagers experience as they hit adolescence; that they are ‘different’ from others, ‘weird’, ‘looking in from the outside’, and so on. In addition, Meyer’s books address the teenager’s perennial preoccupation with the ‘big questions’, such as love, sex, death, and the aspiration to live for ever.

     
The female vampire
     
    As we have noted, the medieval European image of the vampire as a mouldering corpse was a far from sexually attractive one. It is only during the Regency period, with John Polidori’s The Vampyre , that we encounter the seductive vampire, in the person of Lord Ruthven, and then again in the Victorian period with the most famous vampire of them