I’ve always loved the night.
Even as a child, I would stay up all hours, reading, writing, listening to music, or haunting the halls of my parent’s house, watching my family sleep when I could not. It didn’t feel natural to me, to sleep at night. I’d much rather be up, watching the moon.
The moon. Another thing I’ve always loved. As a child I called her ‘Mother’. Nevermind that everyone around me spoke about ‘the man in the moon’, our blue satellite was always female to me. In later years, I learned about sleep patterns and chronotypes, about the moon, and orbits and tides. But as a child these things just were a part of me.
As instinctive as breathing.
But I digress. Tonight I want to talk a bit about Vampires. The Myth, The Legend.
And maybe the Truth. Such as it is.
The earliest mention of ‘vampiric’ (beings that drink blood) creatures in written human history comes to us from Ancient Mesopotamia, namely Sumer circa the 3rd millennium BCE. In Sumerian mythology, there is a type of spirit, called the ‘Udug’ or Utukku’, which could be either good or evil, and which sucked the life or blood from the living. One can see this very early myth taking root and giving rise to what later became known as the vampire.
Of course where this myth began, we have neither record, nor idea.
Yet.