The Hunt - A vampire hunting blog: Sunlight and Crucifixes

Here's a question from 6the1circle6, another mod from the monstrous.com forums.

In your blog you knock the new "sexy" and "kind-at-heart" literary Vampire, but also claim that relatively new beliefs about Vampires, such as the effectiveness of sunlight and Christian holy items are true...Please explain and reconcile these seeming contradictions.

Vampires are more active at night. That much is a simple fact. I have never seen a vampire out in the day, but that doesn't necessarily mean they get hurt by the sun. There could be vampires walking around in the daylight every day and I suppose you'd probably never know. Generally, though, Rule 10 is to never let your guard down until the sun comes up.

As for the effectiveness of crucifixes, that dates back to the middle ages and I wouldn't bring it up if I hadn't seen the effectiveness of it myself. There's really two explanations here:

First is the metaphysical and religious one, which is best phrased by S.T. Joshi in his book Encyclopedia of the Vampire, that the Christian Church purported that "Just as a vampire takes a sinner's very spirit into itself by drinking his blood, so also can a righteous Christian by drinking Christ's blood take the divine spirit into himself."

The second, more scientific explanation, is that the vampires' reaction is psychological: vampires' reaction to holy items is simply the product of conditioning through vampire fiction; in other words, vampires expect religious items and holy water to have an effect on them, so they flee.

I'm not going to try and figure out which one of these is the correct one. Crucifixes work and I'm happy to just accept that.

-Tao

Monday, July 2, 2012

Sunlight and Crucifixes

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