Does a dead werewolf become a vampire?

[Philip Harris]

Can't see it happening! The Dogs of Isis and Vie pyres are opposite sides of the same coin. Can't see how one could become the other. They would have to trade places. Like yin becoming yang and vice versa.

[steve12553]

Originally Posted by Philip Harris

Can't see it happening! The Dogs of Isis and Vie pyres are opposite sides of the same coin. Can't see how one could become the other. They would have to trade places. Like yin becoming yang and vice versa.

But isn't that what it's all about. Transformations. Yin becomes yang. Man becomes wolf. Wolf becomes bat. Fantasy does have rules but aren't they evershifting transient things.

[j. d. worthington]

And, despite the scepticism in my early posts on this, the evidence seems to be mounting up that this really is well-grounded in authentic folklore and older, more traditional stories. And here I thought I knew this subject so well.... I love learning new stuff! (even if it's actually old and I was just unaware of it)

[Philip Harris]

Another question to consider is weather or not any such transformation is voluntary.

[j. d. worthington]

In the stories I've been coming across lately, it varies. Some have yes, some no. "The Werewolf of Ponkert" I'd class as a no.

[Jodi]

Have to say I have heard of this somewhere before - but I can't remember where. It wasn't in Frost's book so obviously its not a completely new idea

[creslin_black]

I think I read something about a Medieval belief in that sort of thing. Needless to say, it's just one more example of Medieval imagination at work.

[Teresa Edgerton]

These beliefs are actually quite rational, IF you proceed from the same set of basic assumptions they did.

And once you accepted that a man could transform himself into a wolf, or a dead man rise from the grave, it wouldn't be a big leap to assume that the werewolf becomes a vampire after he dies.

Particularly if you considered the similarities.

[j. d. worthington]

And, as we've seen from both medical and historical research (as well as the blending of the two in pharmacopaleontology and archaeology), there were actually good reasons for believing in many of these things; diseases that we didn't begin to understand until many, many centuries later (vampires date back to at least ancient Babylon, and werewolves to probably roughly the same period, though I think the earliest recorded is around Roman times). Hyperpilosity, certain aspects of porfiria, various types of catalepsy, certain poisons that tend to make it difficult to tell someone's still alive without modern techniques, etc., can easily explain many of the origins of the belief in the beings themselves; the various surrounding tropes are a bit more ambiguous, but many of them we've grown up on are Hollywood material, and not based in traditional folk beliefs. So it wasn't so much medieval imagination (as said, these date back much, much further) as it was the lack of knowledge of physics and anatomy and medicine, biology, things that we've only begun to understand within the last 2-3 centuries (remember how recently it became legal to use cadavers for medical schools, once Christianity became the rule with its taboos against mutilating the dead -- or burning, for that matter, thus preventing "bodily resurrection"; much of what the Greeks and Romans had learned about anatomy had been lost during those intervening ages, kept locked away with so much other knowledge in monasteries that at least preserved the knowledge, even if they didn't always add to it -- though sometimes they did). It was knowledge, not imagination per se, but it was knowledge based in a different understanding of the rules of the universe, one they simply could not possibly have known with the tools at their disposal.

[creslin_black]

Well said.