[UA] Edible Clay

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Eric Eves <eeves at erskine.edu> wrote:
> A few more ideas on stuff involving edible clay.
> 
> In a lot of older vampire stories, you've got the
> vampire carrying around
> boxes of the soil of home, and needing to sleep in
> it.  In the bible
> you've got Naaman carting around a load of soil from
> Israel.  Plus you've
> got the whole "the king and the land are one" thing.

You've got a good idea there, but I must nitpick.  In
a lot of Victorian vampire stories, you've got the
bloodsucker toting around a box of Earth.  Older
vampire stories simple have the evil spirit returning
to its grave at cockcrow or sunrise.  It can even get
out of its grave after sunrise, but, for some reason,
doesn't cause as much trouble until nightfall.

IIRC the Romanian tradition (which is very old), along
with most of Eastern Europe, depicts the vampire as
kind of an invisible blood-sucking phantom.  It was
the German proliferation of the Goblin Bridegroom
(through their control of printing) that Polidori and
Stoker eventually seized upon (Stoker also seized upon
the anti-Wallachian propoganda circulated about
Europe's first media superstar, Dracula) to create the
corporeal blood-drinker.  There was an an early
Christian story, from Greece, about a vryloka, a kind
of ghoul that lived in other people's graves, but I
think of that as rather closer to Lovecraftian mythos.

Not very trim, I admit, but I'm working on it.

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

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