I think it’s just a matter of timing and development. Europeans had the same or similar legends a thousand years ago. Indigenous cultures here in North America have the same folklore but we are more closer to it than our European friends.
I’m Indigenous Canadian in northern Ontario. My first language is Ojibway/Cree and for the first ten years of my life, I was surrounded by my culture and history from my Elders and other traditional people.
Sure it was all stories of how characters saved humanity, how humanity saved itself and all those saviour / hero type story lines. They were fun stories … but over half of those old tales are just messed up freakish stories of death, destruction, fear and horror. The characters of the land, the water, the sky, the gods, the talking animals, good spirits and bad spirits are portrayed as equally good and equally bad. They are seen as more human and they are capable of doing enormous good or conducting terrible evil.
It’s a lot like Greek mythology or Scandinavian mythology … there is superstition, belief and godlike power to everything … but the beings of other worlds and realms can be as good, holy, wholesome, loving and just as we want them to be … but they are also just as flawed, stupid, jealous, angry, violent and terrible as we are.
I still spend a lot of time alone on the land at my wilderness cottage and as much as I like it out there … there are times when it does scare the shit out of me. A quiet still silent bright summer day alone with no other people around can at times be just as frightening as a lonely dark autumn night. Sometimes when you know you are alone out there … you can’t help but feel like someone is watching you.
That and we are fairly well accostumated to any european cryptid (which is a modern concept) to the point of seeing them as a regular character in tales and legends, games and rpg alike. But, to tell you the truth, the original stories of those creatures were scary. Now we think of witches in a more positive light, a witch in a folk tale is one of the most dangerous entities out there. Werewolves…vampires were not fictional either.
Analysis on the skull discovered with a brick wedged in the mouth revealed that it once belonged to a woman between 61 and 71 years old. Although her exact story is likely never to be known, it was thought that she must have been believed to be a “Shroud Eater,” a type of vampire associated particularly with Germany and related territories.
The Shroud Eater is a different sort of vampire, not found biting the necks of voluptuous victims, but instead found still in their grave. Believed to>!!< be a sort of undead corpse, they were known for making hideous chewing sounds and were thought to cause death and destruction from a distance. There are several theories about how this particular myth came to be, but it seems to be particularly prevalent in times of plague or disease, when one death eventually leads to many more, often of friends and family members.
If you were a regular person in the late 1500’s this would keep yoy awake at night. And it wasn’t fiction than.
But then again we took these old myths and got past their scare fators as they became simple ideas. Vampires are not scary today, they wear fancy clothes and take part of teen dramas. Or just become ancient aztec deities of fitness. Whatever we want them to be. But if you look at the quoted description, well, I wouln’t want that thing. I’d rather fight a rake barehanded.
I think it’s just a matter of timing and development. Europeans had the same or similar legends a thousand years ago. Indigenous cultures here in North America have the same folklore but we are more closer to it than our European friends.
I’m Indigenous Canadian in northern Ontario. My first language is Ojibway/Cree and for the first ten years of my life, I was surrounded by my culture and history from my Elders and other traditional people.
Sure it was all stories of how characters saved humanity, how humanity saved itself and all those saviour / hero type story lines. They were fun stories … but over half of those old tales are just messed up freakish stories of death, destruction, fear and horror. The characters of the land, the water, the sky, the gods, the talking animals, good spirits and bad spirits are portrayed as equally good and equally bad. They are seen as more human and they are capable of doing enormous good or conducting terrible evil.
It’s a lot like Greek mythology or Scandinavian mythology … there is superstition, belief and godlike power to everything … but the beings of other worlds and realms can be as good, holy, wholesome, loving and just as we want them to be … but they are also just as flawed, stupid, jealous, angry, violent and terrible as we are.
I still spend a lot of time alone on the land at my wilderness cottage and as much as I like it out there … there are times when it does scare the shit out of me. A quiet still silent bright summer day alone with no other people around can at times be just as frightening as a lonely dark autumn night. Sometimes when you know you are alone out there … you can’t help but feel like someone is watching you.
That and we are fairly well accostumated to any european cryptid (which is a modern concept) to the point of seeing them as a regular character in tales and legends, games and rpg alike. But, to tell you the truth, the original stories of those creatures were scary. Now we think of witches in a more positive light, a witch in a folk tale is one of the most dangerous entities out there. Werewolves…vampires were not fictional either.
Example:
If you were a regular person in the late 1500’s this would keep yoy awake at night. And it wasn’t fiction than. But then again we took these old myths and got past their scare fators as they became simple ideas. Vampires are not scary today, they wear fancy clothes and take part of teen dramas. Or just become ancient aztec deities of fitness. Whatever we want them to be. But if you look at the quoted description, well, I wouln’t want that thing. I’d rather fight a rake barehanded.
Hell, the word “vampire” came to English with news reports from the early 1700s about people in eastern Europe looking for vampires to kill.