Free Vampires by Charlotte Montague Page B

all, Bram Stoker’s Dracula . One of the many reasons for the popularity of these stories was that they touched on the connection between sex and death: women who had sexual liaisons with vampires not only risked public shame and humiliation, they also risked being transformed into seductive sirens or dying. In Stoker’s Dracula , the women could also become violent, even murderously so towards babies. To a repressed female readership nurtured on Victorian ideas of chastity, domesticity and selfless womanhood, these possibilities must have seemed horrifying – but in an erotic, exciting way.
    Stoker drew on a deep vein of literature and folklore that conceived of the vampire as, among other incarnations, a beautiful, seductive woman who could suck the lifeblood out of a man, murder little children, and even eat them. These tales expressed deep fears about the power of female sexuality and fertility, and are present in many different cultures around the world. For example, the Ancient Greeks told of the beautiful Libyan Queen Lamia, who turned into a hideous child-eating demon, while the Mesapotamians feared Lilith, a highly seductive, serpentine evil spirit who appeared to men in erotic dreams. In more modern tales of female vampires, the sexual elements of penetration (piercing the skin), and lust (sucking the blood) are clear; thus, these stories resurrect age-old anxieties about woman’s ability to seduce and control men, and the possibility that this power may lead them to abandon their traditional roles as dutiful wives, mothers, and daughters.
    In the same way, stories of lesbian vampires, such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla allowed readers to explore a taboo subject in a fantasy setting, thus circumventing the strict sexual mores of the time. Some critics believe that Le Fanu’s novel was based on the historical figure of Countess Bàthory, who was said to have murdered countless young women, bathing in their blood. However, others believe that the story of Carmilla is more significant as a precursor than Bram Stoker’s male protagonist, Count Dracula.
    Whatever the truth, it seems that historically, the female vampire is a powerful mythical creation, expressing the fear of the sexually alluring woman as a dangerous threat to the patriarchal order.

Chapter 3: Myths and Legends
     

     
    The dictionary definition of the vampire is ‘a corpse that rises nightly from its grave to drink the blood of the living’. The belief in vampires arose in the medieval Slavic ‘old religion’ and then, in the centuries that followed, caught the imagination of writers, artists and film-makers, developing into the suave, sophisticated figure that we know today. Parallel to this European tradition are many other ancient belief systems across the globe that involve similar figures to the vampire: revenants who stalk the living, drinking their blood so as to sustain themselves in the shadowy afterlife.
     

     
The Strix
     
    Ancient Greece, as we know, had a very highly developed belief system, with many complex myths surrounding the pantheon of gods that were worshipped. Among these, we find several tales about female demons, such as the storm demon Lamia, a woman who in life suffered the death of her children and took her revenge by preying on babies, stealing them away to suck their blood and eat their flesh. Allied to this myth is the story of Lilith, which comes from Hebrew mythology. In some ancient versions of this story, Lilith is the first wife of Adam who refuses to obey him, is banished from the Garden of Eden, and then returns in snake form to tempt him. She becomes an evil demon, seducing men and stealing infants away from their mothers, as well as bearing demon children herself who visit humankind and wreak havoc upon it. This myth endured for centuries, and right up until the eighteenth century, Lilith was held responsible for infant deaths, impotence, and infertility. Significantly, both Lamia and