Vampires And Cannibals: The Connection
Vampires and Cannibals: The Connection
“I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings do to other real human beings.” Walter Jon Williams once said, and rightly so. What if all these monsters were created by humans to take away from the horrific acts that human beings did to one another, or even out of fear of the unknown and death itself? Take for instance vampires and cannibals, at first glance there are no real correlation, but if you take a deeper look into the subject you can find an abundance of connections between the two ranging from the simple fact that both vampires and cannibals in some way consume their own kind, to even the time frame and extent that the two have been recorded …show more content…
Lamastu was often depicted with bird like wings and talons who would prey on unborn infants as well as grown men by sucking the blood from their bodies. Since that initial report by ancient Babylonians there have been accounts of vampires that extend around the globe and all the way up to the present day. From Bram Stoker’s classily cloaked European depiction of vampires in Dracula to the Chinese Jiangshi documented by scholar Ji Xiaolan of the Qing Dynasty to the modern day societies of vampires that exist alongside the rest of the population in various countries throughout the world. Similar to tales of vampires, cannibalism is as old as civilization itself, with modern day evidence showing it dates back as far as 800,000 years when Neanderthals walked the Earth. This makes cannibalism an ancient practice, yet as the modern day example of Jeffrey Dahmer shows it is still happening in the modern day as well. Cannibalism is more often that not, only done as a last resort when it was necessary to survive such as when the Donner Party was stuck in the Sierra Nevada’s for four months and forced to eat their dead party members when they ran out of all other means of nutrients. However, there are places in the world such as Papa New Guinea where the indigenous people, the Fore, are known to consume deceased humans in a mortuary feast. No matter the circumstances of cannibalism, it is something that the majority of the human populous will still recoil at the thought
“I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings do to other real human beings.” Walter Jon Williams once said, and rightly so. What if all these monsters were created by humans to take away from the horrific acts that human beings did to one another, or even out of fear of the unknown and death itself? Take for instance vampires and cannibals, at first glance there are no real correlation, but if you take a deeper look into the subject you can find an abundance of connections between the two ranging from the simple fact that both vampires and cannibals in some way consume their own kind, to even the time frame and extent that the two have been recorded …show more content…
Lamastu was often depicted with bird like wings and talons who would prey on unborn infants as well as grown men by sucking the blood from their bodies. Since that initial report by ancient Babylonians there have been accounts of vampires that extend around the globe and all the way up to the present day. From Bram Stoker’s classily cloaked European depiction of vampires in Dracula to the Chinese Jiangshi documented by scholar Ji Xiaolan of the Qing Dynasty to the modern day societies of vampires that exist alongside the rest of the population in various countries throughout the world. Similar to tales of vampires, cannibalism is as old as civilization itself, with modern day evidence showing it dates back as far as 800,000 years when Neanderthals walked the Earth. This makes cannibalism an ancient practice, yet as the modern day example of Jeffrey Dahmer shows it is still happening in the modern day as well. Cannibalism is more often that not, only done as a last resort when it was necessary to survive such as when the Donner Party was stuck in the Sierra Nevada’s for four months and forced to eat their dead party members when they ran out of all other means of nutrients. However, there are places in the world such as Papa New Guinea where the indigenous people, the Fore, are known to consume deceased humans in a mortuary feast. No matter the circumstances of cannibalism, it is something that the majority of the human populous will still recoil at the thought