The Mythology of Vampires

Funny that I should decide to do this post this week; the Dead Robots just had a conversation touching on how monsters have changed over the last few decades. (Congrats on 200 episodes, guys!)

One of the fun things about writing is that you get to make your own mythology. There are so many legends and tales, and they’ve been done so many ways over the years, that yes, even sparkly vampires with skin like rock make sense after awhile. (I kinda felt they were more gargoyle-like, but hey. Once you got into it a little bit, it was an interesting take on the mythology.)

When I first started writing about Gabriel and Amanda, I had to decide very quickly what some of the basic tenets of my vampires were going to be. Some things changed over time, and the biology got more and more refined, but there were two basic things that I knew I wanted to define my vampires: no sunlight, and the need to kill.

Long before Twilight, there were stories about vampires that could go out in the day. Some, like My Best Friend is a Vampire (and, more recently, the Kim Harrison novels), differentiated between “living” vampires and “dead” or “undead” vampires. Other authors went for a special talisman approach (LJ Smith’s Vampire Diaries) or a special condition, such as being able to be in sunlight if the vampire had fed recently (Kindred: The Embraced).

While I enjoyed all of those versions (yes, even Kindred: the Embarrassed), I decided it made things too easy. Vampires can be hugely powerful. The thing that keeps them in check more than anything else is the problem with sunlight. It’s also instant conflict. Things getting boring? Just add sunlight! (Fortunately, I’ve never had to fall back on that one yet.)

There were also a lot of stories where vampires didn’t have to kill, or even feed on humans (again, long before Twilight). Heck, I used to roleplay a vegetarian Gangrel. (Yes, White Wolf used vegetarian for animal-only vampires long before Twilight did.) But I wanted my vampires to be monsters. Even back then (daydreamer that I am) I had intellectual property aspirations, and I wanted to make sure that no one playing in my universe later on could pussify my vampires. So not only do my vampires have to drink human blood, they have to kill. In fact, they have to kill a lot. Every night for the first ten years or so, and they usually don’t learn enough control to feed without killing the human until they’ve been a vampire for close to fifty years.

After that, it got down to the details. Hypnosis? Heck yeah, it’s too much fun to leave out. But then I decided I needed a foil for the charismatic vamps, which is where the skinshifters’ psychic immunity came from. (And then I needed to explain it, but I’ll get to that in another post.) Mirrors? Not having a reflection struck me as very silly, although it’s been done well (the Vampire Files spring to mind), and I couldn’t think of a good reason that made sense physics-wise, so my vampires have reflections. Ditto for garlic and running water, although I could certainly see a river spirit refusing to let a vampire pass, for some reason. (Running water is still good for screwing up a scent trail, and my vamps are big on scent.)

Originally, my vampires could change shape. I eventually did away with that, as it was too convenient, and I couldn’t see why, mythologically and physically speaking, they should have that ability. (Note: Empusa is not a vampire. She’s what the vampires were modeled after.)

To me, retractable fangs make sense. My vampires are supposed to be able to live among humans. This is also why they aren’t preternaturally beautiful. They have abilities which allow them to charm and attract and fascinate, but they also want to be able to not attract attention. Especially once I decided they were territorial, it made huge amounts of sense for them to blend in as much as possible, because otherwise people will start wondering why that gorgeous hunk they keep seeing around town never seems to get older.

The territorial thing was a later addition. As I started thinking beyond Gabriel to vampires in general, I had to decide whether they had communities. Was there structure, government, laws and consequences? If so, what kept the vampires from taking over Lumley-like? If not, then why not?

I eventually decided against organized vampires. I hate politics, and it was another way to put limits on creatures that were already pretty darn powerful. I took some lessons from nature: predators who marked out a territory, protected their food sources, and only allowed interlopers for reproductive purposes--in this case, keeping the young around long enough that they can learn to take care of themselves. And then I had to explain why and how, and got caught up in world-builder's disease again. (I'm going to assume no one but me cares about the cellular biology of vampires.)

What are your favorite bits of vampire lore? What conventions do you hate? Which version of vampires is your favorite? Leave a comment and let me know!

What is Aether Vitalis?

Aether Vitalis is the series name for my stories wherein the rules of the universe work in specific ways. You'll see the name attached to stories as the stories become available as single titles. The series does not, as a whole, follow any particular character or set of characters, although some characters will recur frequently.

A lot of my stories have paranormal elements, but not all of them do. Truthfully, any story set in the reality we're all used to could be an Aether Vitalis story, but the stories marked as Aether Vitalis are stories where the there is a definite touch of the paranormal consistent with the rules of the Aether Vitalis universe.

And just what are the rules?

When I started figuring all this stuff out, I decided I wanted a story universe that explained the real world. I tried to reason out exactly how (insert supernatural thingie here) would work in the real universe, assuming things like conservation of energy and mass, and postulating additional factors like aether (think dark matter, or neutrinos) and vitality (life). I won't go into the minutiae here, mostly because I suffer from world-builder's disease and I doubt many of you care about how quantum physics relates to my fiction. (Although eventually I will have a webpage for stuff like that.) Instead, here are some things that you can count on from an Aether Vitalis story:

Vampires kill people. A lot. In fact, they have to, especially when they're young. There are no vampires who feed on animals, or through blood banks, or on fake blood. Vampires are a very specialized predator/parasite, and need not only blood but human energy in order to survive. They are also territorial, so you don't get big bunches of them hanging out together and plotting how to take over the world, although a few can coexist in the same city if it's a very large city and the vampires are all hunting different demographics. (And for you folklore fans, they do have reflections, but the sun sets them on fire. Also, no soulmates. I promise.)

The most common type of shapeshifter (though certainly not the only kind) are the skinshifters. (Although they're called pookhas in Britain and other names in other places.) The skinshifters are a type of faerie, whose ancestors broke away from the control of the gentry, the faerie ruling class. Unfortunately, as part of the breaking away, the skinshifters became mortal. Their forms were also limited. Before, they were purely aethereal-bodied creatures and could be anything. Now, most skinshifters are born with two skins, and the rest have to be "acquired." While they still have their aethereal form, it's rare for a skinshifter to spend much time in it, as they become ridiculously susceptible to magic while out of their skins. On the upside, they handle metal and technology better than most of the other fae.

Speaking of magic, there are a lot of different kinds of magic. (Magic being the generic term for the act of using purely energical means to influence matter, energy, vitality, or probability, regardless of method.) The generic term for a magic-user is mage. Beyond that, it depends on where you get the energy from, and what you do with it, and how you do it: sorcery, necromancy, theurgy, witchery, demonology, voodoo, shamanism...

Separate from magic (especially if you ask the mages) is psionics. Psionics are human psychic gifts, and they come in three main flavors: Extrapathy – energy influencing other energy or vitality (ie the mind or the soul); Extracognition – energy gathering information (not from vitality); and Extrakinesis – energy influencing matter or probability. Of course, I have the lexicon; the characters don't, so they are often less precise with their terminology. Extrapathic gifts are the most common, and extrakinetic gifts the most rare, based purely on genetics.

And there are gods. There are the gods that we would call gods, and then there are the gods that our gods call gods.

Of course, there's lots that I haven't touched on yet (especially in Faerie!) but this should give you some idea of the kinds of creatures and forces you might encounter in an Aether Vitalis story.

Contest! Post Me a Book

Times are definitely too interesting for my taste, as they have involved trips to the ER for both The Husband and The Bulldog, as well as several things around the house breaking. On the upside, Write by the Lake is next week (OMG!) and I and my fellow attendees are busy reading and critiquing our first assignments in preparation. I can't wait!

In the meantime, I've broken out The Cheerleader by Caroline B Cooney, a novel I read back in eighth or ninth grade. Something like that. I can't remember. It's reminiscent of The Picture of Dorian Gray or Faust, but in high school. With a vampire. And cheerleaders. Um.

The reason I took up this particular tale after so many years is that it's one of the few I can recall where the main character is more or less corrupted by the end. Yes, she does eventually "redeem" herself, but loses everything she corrupted herself to gain. And she doesn't redeem herself because she's realized how selfish she's been (she's known that all along) but because she realizes that she's turned into nothing but a junkie looking for her next fix, the vampire's little puppet.

It's as close as I could ever find to a vampire book where the bad guy wins. And I soooo wanted to find one.

I'm sure there are some out there by now, but I haven't had much luck. What I wanted was a book where, instead of freeing the unicorn, Lily succumbed to Darkness. A book where, instead of choosing Stefan, Elena chose Damon. Where Christine chose Erik instead of Raul. In fact, preferably without the love triangle. I want a novel where someone is obsessed, seduced, and corrupted, and is either completely destroyed by it while the seducer lives on to charm another day, or just rolls with it and joins the dark side.

Anyone know of books like that? (Adult or YA, either works. Heck. I'll even allow short fiction.) If so, leave them in the comments! The person who posts the book or story I like best by June 18th, 2011 will get a short story written in their honor. You get to pick the subject, have one of the characters named after you, whatever tickles your fancy. (Excluded from the contest: Phantom by Susan Kay, 'cause she still ends up with Raul at the end, any book mentioned in this post, any Anne Rice books (because I don't want to read them again to try and remember if they fit, I obviously wasn't impressed the first time, although I could see someone making an argument for The Witching Hour) and anything I've written.)

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net