Think of vampires and you either think of Count Dacula, from the novel by Bram Stoker, or Lestat, Anne Rice’s creation in ‘The Vampire Chronicles.’ Both vampires have been represented in film - Dracula many times - so we have created a picture of what we think your friendly neighbourhood vampire represents. However, we’ve built our impressions around fictional characters, invented to tell a story and engage our interest. 

Fictional vampires are good looking, with a certain vulnerability to engage our sympathy as well as our revulsion. They are constructed around the mythology of vampires, who symbolise evil, blood, sexuality and the night.

There’s nothing Hollywood about the vampires of legend. Let’s think about how these symbols came to be associated with our blood drinking friends.

Almost all civilisations have legends of blood drinking creatures, which is of course considered evil. In South-Eastern Europe, it was believed that witches, suicides and other people who were considered evil in life became vampires and thus immortal, because true evil couldn’t be killed.  

In Russia, people who spoke out against the church in life were believed to become vampires after death. Vampires were blamed for deaths of cattle and other animals, and basically everything that went wrong, so it’s easy to see how vampires came to symbolise evil.

Primitive man believed that blood equalled life, and the fact that someone died after significant blood loss proved this. So far so good - we know this to be true. But our forefathers also believed that, as blood was so essential to life, and one died from loss of blood, the soul must be located in the blood.

Therefore, blood drinking creatures such as vampires took possession of the souls of others. Blood gave life to the undead, which was why vampire corpses never decomposed after burial.

The sexual symbolism of vampires originated with the myths of Lamia and Lilith. Lamia bore a child to the god Zeus, but Hera, his wife, was jealous and killed the child.

Distraught, Lamia then roamed at night, killing babies and killing young men by either loving them to death - literally - or drinking their blood.

Lilith was the second wife of Adam and refused to be subservient to him, as she was created from the same clay and therefore his equal. As a punishment, the angels said all her children would die.

Lilith later became the wife of Satan, and also sought out and killed young men. Lamia and Lilith were part of vampire folklore and were often represented as serpents.

Serpents have always been associated with sexuality, from the Garden of Eden and even before then, so by connecting these two feisty, fallen, blood drinking women with serpents, we connect the vampire with sexuality.

There is also a school of thought that says we transfer what we fear in ourselves to the vampire - greed, lust, power - because we have a conscience and they, as evil beings, have none.

Therefore it’s safer to take our faults and hand them over to an evil incarnation such as a vampire. No, I don’t buy that one either, but it’s part of the symbolism, and this is what this article’s about.

Modern psychoanalysts also link the blood sucking and bodily fluid draining activities of the vampire to sexuality through the connection to semen, and that, connected with the ancient belief that when the vampire drunk someones life blood he gained all the attributes of humanity, including the ability to impregnate women, adds to the sexual symbolism of the vampire.

The connection of the vampire with the night derives from the days when travel at night, away from human settlement, was fraught with dangers. Many evils could beset the unwary traveller, and the vampire was just one of them. Of course, the vampire only has the power of life during the night, and can only be active at night, so he is seen as a creature of the night.

Vampires cannot go about their business in the light of day, and some see this as symbolic of their evil nature. They have been cast into the darkness by an angry, vengeful God.

The mythology of the vampire is as replete with symbolism as the vampire is with the blood of his victims, and I have only scratched the surface here. (Pun intended!) However, I consider these to be the primary symbols of this fascinating creature of folklore.

The vampire legend is built on many centuries of beliefs, fears and superstitions from every culture in the world. The more we learn about vampires, the more we learn about our ancestors. Be careful out there!