Saragossa The Vampire

The previous sections gave information on the history and personages of the wer-world, ending with Saragossa's family.

Wer-animals
'Wer' simply means 'man', so 'werewolf' means 'manwolf' (or, as it is more familiarly seen 'wolfman'), and 'wer-bat' means what we normally call a 'vampire', or 'batman' as he truly should be. The disease that allows an animal genome to enter into a human's cell (a mutant strain of rabies called Wepwawet's strain or, simply, Wepvirus or Weprabies), has made itself at home around the world, in many cultures and in many animal forms, since all warm-blooded creatures are capable of being infected with rabies. Normally cold-blooded animals cannot carry rabies, but late 20th century science learned how to do this, and, it seems, so did the 'magic'of Egypt of thirty centuries BCE. There is a mental link between a master vampire and his offspring. This is the same mental link that enables magic to work, and it was used on the virus in Ancient Egypt by the master wer-animals (or 'gods' as the Egyptians thought of them – not without justification) to cause the virus to take hold in cold-blooded animals – the crocodile for example.

In any case a wide variety of animals have been blended with the human genome, but the most successful candidates are of approximately the same body mass as a person, since the change must conserve mass. If not all the human cells are needed, they can be sloughed off as a slurry of de-differentiated cells, but the mass of the new wer-animal plus the slurry must equal the mass of the human before the change. If the human's mass is less than the animal into which he is turning (as in wer-bears), the result will be a very small wer-animal, say a one hundred-fifty pound bear. This happens (and the result can be terrifying despite its small size), but by far the most successful wer-animals have been the werewolf (also spelled werewolf) and the wer-jaguar.

Max Schreck Nosferatu - early screen vampire

Wer-bats (vampires)
Perhaps the most famous example has been the wer-bat, the vampire, but it is truly rare, as it takes decades to master the adaptations which make a blueprint designed for a (at most) one ounce animal accommodate one hundred-fifty pounds of human flesh. This only happens when the candidate has a master vampire to coach him, and even then, it usually only happens to a candidate who is already 'wer', and has mastered another form. This is because the bat bones are too fragile to handle a human's weight. They break and the candidate can die from internal bleeding – not to mention the impossibility of flight without serious modification of the wing design. But a wer's bones can be strengthened with time and training, as well as its muscles, and the reward for mastering the bat shape is great – immortality, instead of just the extended life span of the other wer-animals, and......flight. Once the necessary changes are mastered, the glory of unfurling twelve-foot wings, taking a forty-foot leap straight up, and smoothly passing into flight, is unsurpassed – even just to watch this, is almost a religious experience.

Why is it that the bat form endows true immortality? Unlike any other animal, bats can carry the rabies virus asymptomatically. They can have the virus without the disease. The virus, not harming their bodies, is allowed to live indefinitely in their systems. From the point of view of the wer-disease, this is most wonderful. If the immune system does not destroy the virus, the host will not revert to 'normal' and begin aging. Alone among the wer-animals the wer-bat, the vampire, is truly immortal, although the other wer-animals, if their virus is virulent, can be very long lived.

Anubis had come to Mexico, looking for the source of the fountain of youth, immortality. He never realized it, but the vampire bat was the answer to his prayers. Not the original infection which had made Wepwawet a godling, but something even better – a system that hosts the virus without provoking an immune response. Knowing nothing of viruses, Anubis missed this fact and his only chance for true immortality.

Anubis never tried to capture the bat form, although his priests tried repeatedly. They failed because a human's mass has to be conserved and the bat's small size won't accommodate that much weight. However, they finally found success with a man I call Quetzalcoatl. (This was not his Olmec name, but he was the model for the later Aztec god named Quetzalcoatl.) Quetz had a phototoxic disease that caused his skin to blister, making him a true creature of the night, which, in the eyes of the Olmec priesthood, made Quetz a perfect candidate for the bat form. He received the full training for priesthood and Anubis's personal help (including the infection directly from Anubis long before attempting the bat form). He was a spectacular success – the first human to fly on bat wings. But all his wer-children carry the phototoxic genes, and his whole lineage of vampires fear the sunlight.

Whatever form a wer takes, the new head has to accommodate the human brain and brain case, or else the mind is altered, memories lost, human thought processes corrupted. No master wer ever changes completely – he'll at least keep his brain case intact, and usually his mouth and lips are kept capable of speech and his hands capable of grasping. So the final result always looks like a cross between a human and an animal. Of course, newbies without a master to guide them have no control and if somehow, nearly miraculously, they do go through the change, they will almost certainly get lost in their animal form. Then, even if they spontaneously change back, their mind is forever altered. In history, it is only known that two people – Wepwawet and Dracula – ever made the complete change and arrived at mastery without a master to guide them; Wepwawet made the change because of the deep yogi-like training he had undergone; Dracula made it through sheer evil will power, or, it is sometimes said, that he had the help of a Dark Force which had long prepared his family line, culminating in a child named 'Son of the Devil', Dracula himself.

Werewolf concept image by Oleg Danilevski

Werewolves
The next most famous wer-animal is surely the werewolf. 'Werewolf' means 'man-wolf', and the popular alternative 'lycanthrope' (now often abbreviated as 'lycan') means 'wolf-man' (Greek 'lukos' wolf, and 'anthropos' man.) The wer rabid wolf (the animal, not the wolfman) first came into being in Eastern Europe and the Russian Steppes (Steppenwolf) – the homeland of the original infection. (It was also the homeland of the Proto-Indo-European people, the ancestors of Dracula. In other words, the Wepvirus and Dracula's lineage were tailored for each other for perhaps ten thousand years.) It is not known how many people have become werewolves from an infection directly from the blood of a wolf rabid with the Wepvirus. The number is perhaps only two – Wepwawet himself and Dracula, who are both special cases. The rarity is due to a combination of factors – first the wolf's blood (not just his saliva), must enter directly into the blood of the human. Usually if a human is attacked by such a wolf (which I call a Wepwolf for Wepwawet wolf), the human is killed or suffers only bite wounds, but no wolf blood enters the wounds. Or if the human is armed with a gun, the wolf might be killed (Wepwolves have no special powers – this only comes by combining the wolf and human genome), but the human would not suffer wounds that would allow the wolf's blood to enter. (In Wepwawet's case, he was wounded and the wolf was wounded, or even killed, by his well-armed entourage.)

If the human is infected by blood transfer, he will likely die before or during the coma. If he survives, he will likely die during the first change – unless he has had special training or an experienced guide to help him through the change. If he does survive, he will likely be killed by his neighbors. He will have the most virulent form of the virus (directly from a Wepwolf), but no knowledge of how to train himself to take advantage of this. He will not be a master werewolf, but a 'garden variety' werewolf, prey to his own superstitions, ignorance and fear, and to the wild reflexes of the wolf genes, and to the murderous instincts imparted by the Weprabies virus. In short, he will be an undisciplined killer, who will shortly be killed himself, leaving no offspring.

Dracula had the Wepvirus dormant in his genes – the virus can be passed down from mother to child directly through the blood supply. This virus had come from the weakened disease spread around Europe by Quetzalcoatl – in other words it was the vampire form of the Weprabies and not the wolf form. It might have contributed to his wicked temperament, but conferred little special advantage, until it was activated by a direct (and intentional) infection from the primary source – the rabid Wepwolf found in the Carpathian mountains of the Wallachian and Transylvanian regions where Dracula lived.

Dracula himself infected a number of people before he realized the necessity of keeping the virus to himself and his. Thereafter he began killing off the Wepwolf, and reserved the Wepvirus only to people under his direct and total control. But, whether from Dracula or another source, the virus had spread around in France, and was later carried to French Canada. Dracula spent considerable effort in tracking down all the 'wild' (not under his control) pockets of the virus in Europe, but he had less access to Canada. The result is that the greatest surviving pool of werewolfism is in Canada, in Quebec. Up until 1975, Dracula, or his lieutenants, would make search and kill raids, trying to eradicate this source (although quite weakened) of the Wepvirus. Very seldom can there be found a person in whom the virus is strong enough to throw a change, and without a guide the full change is usually fatalep

Wer-jaguars in Mexico and Brazil
The wer-jaguars were first brought into existence by Anubis around 1200 BCE in Mexico, in the regions of Oaxaca, Tabasco and Veracruz. The very first wer-jaguar was Anubis himself (his likeness being modeled countless times thereafter in Olmec art). The rest were made from his Olmec priests, whom he had trained to survive the change, and, since there was no immunity to the Wepvirus built up in the Indians of Mexico, the Weprabies infection was far more virulent than was the case in Egypt during the thousand years prior to Anubis' voyage to the New World. The priests, 'shamans', made the change completely. Even priests who were infected by other wer-jaguars (not by Anubis himself) made the change. After Anubis died or disappeared, the wer-jaguar cult carried on from its own momentum. It is unknown how long shamans capable of the true change continued to exist. Eventually the Wepvirus weakened or the Olmec immune systems strengthened to the point where the changes were, at most, minimal – facial features, clawed hands, furriness. Later Dracula and his lieutenants came several times to jaguar country to hunt down and kill the remnants of this once feared priesthood. Of course, many of the weaker strains survived, and it has even been reported that there has been a resurgence of jaguar shamans able to make the change in the pantanal region of Brazil. If so, it means that a renewal of the virulent form of the Weprabies has been introduced. By whom and how is not known, but one vague possibility is that Quetzalcoatl was not the only vampire strain created in Oaxaca. Perhaps either he created another wer-bat (which would be a day-shunner), or a master wer-jaguar oversaw the creation of another vampire directly from a vampire bat (which would be a day-walker, not having Quetz's photo toxicity disease). If so, that virus would have remained as strong as it originally was (which would not have been nearly as strong as the 'original source', the Transylvanian rabid wolf.) In which case, this 'hidden master vampire' might be creating relatively powerful wer-jaguars. The situation is unknown even to Sandman, but this thought was his suggestion.

Next is a small section on the vampire bat – not the wer-bat, the 'vampire' brother of the werewolf, but Desmodus rotundus, the tiny nocturnal Central and South American bat, a most unusual and interesting creature whose unique characteristics have allowed the existence of the vampire 'monster' we love and fear.

WepRabies

Also called WepRabies or Wepvirus.

This is the mutant strain of rabies, responsible for all wer phenomenon from vampires to werewolves to wer-jaguars. Its native host is the wolf, but was only naturally found in the area around the Black Sea, although it is thought that there are now no wild wolves harboring the virus, as Dracula made a dedicated effort to destroy them (or perhaps keeping some in kennels).

The following paragraphs are taken from Sandman's comments in Saragossa – The Vampire Legacy.
"Wepwawet's strain differs from common rabies in several respects. For one thing, it usually passes from blood to blood, saliva being a very rare route of infection. (It can also be passed from mother to child via the blood tie in the womb.) The incubation period is normally shorter – one to two weeks. Also, it is much less deadly than common rabies. A person may carry the virus in weakened form without symptoms, and it is not uncommon for an infected person to survive the coma. A pre-scientific peasant, seeing a person rise up from the coma of a disease he knew to be fatal, or especially observing a victim dig himself from his shallow grave, would naturally spread the story of the living dead.

The most important difference, however, is the degree to which Wepwawet's strain brings with it snippets or strands of the DNA of the previous host – normally a wolf. This is the vector by which wolf DNA is introduced into a human. If much of the wolf genome tags along, this results in the new human host having two, more or less, complete genomes – human and wolf."

With the mutant strain the coma comes on in a matter of days, lasts a week or so and is followed by months more after that until the change."

The shores of the Black Sea

The Black Sea has been, in its own way, as key to the history of the Old World as has the Mediterranean. It is surround by six countries and a diverse geography. Turkey in the south boasts the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), which for one thousand years dominated any commerce that wished to pass down from the north along the great rivers (Danube, Dnieper, Dniester and the Don) through the Black Sea and on through the Bosporus straits into the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

On the west are Bulgaria and Romania with its Carpathian Mountains, the eastern wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe, which run a thousand miles along the borders of Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and northern Hungary. They are low and tame compared with the Alps, mostly under 2,500 meters and do not have glaciers. But they have splendid forestation and wild life – not to mention being the home of limitless myths of vampires.

To the north and west lie the Ukraine, Russia and Georgia and the great steppes.

Somewhere around the shoreline of the Black Sea is the likely homeland of the original speakers of what is called Proto-Indo-European, the mother of the languages of perhaps three billion of today's people. The exact location is not terribly important for us, because of the easy mobility around the shore or over the Black Sea itself. It has also been a rewarding homeland for wolves, which can travel from the steppes to the Carpathians unhindered. Here also was a fertile breeding ground for rabies, and, without doubt, the nursery for the mutant strain of rabies called Wepwawet's rabies. Here, somewhat inland, on the northern west shore in or around the land now called Romania, was the homeland since time immemorial for the family of Vlad Dracula, called Vlad the Impaler. (See his tab in the navigation menu.) And here with certainty was the haunts for at least the last ten thousand years of Aarrgh, for no other place offered the confluence of elements he needed to carry out his dual breeding programs of virus (in the wolf host) and human bloodline tailored to host Aarrgh himself in due time. (See the "Aarrgh" tab in the navigation menu.)

Erythropoietic Porphyria

http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic145.htm

"Background: Erythropoietic porphyria (EP) is a rare inborn error of porphyrin-heme synthesis inherited that is as an autosomal recessive trait. The inheritance of 2 mutant alleles for the gene encoding the enzyme uroporphyrinogen III synthase leads to accumulation of porphyrins of the isomer I type that are biologically useless but cause cutaneous photosensitivity characterized by blisters, erosions, and scarring of light-exposed skin.

Clinical manifestations can range from mild to severe. Chronic damage of skin, cartilage, and bones can cause mutilation. Hypertrichosis, erythrodontia, and reddish-colored urine are often present. Hemolytic anemia can be mild or severe, with resultant splenomegaly and osseous fragility. EP is reported in diverse populations. The total number of cases reported worldwide is less than 200. The teeth have a reddish color."

Note: 'hypertrichosis' means an excessive hairiness (as in werewolf syndrome), and the 'erythrodontia' means red teeth (from blood seeping into the teeth). The same thing happens to the eyes, and the nails of the hands and feet.

The disease is severely aggravated by (potentiates with) interaction with the wepvirus. That is to say, the apoptosis reflex, which is normally turned off, is magnified, and the skin blisters, boils, and necroses. Ears, lips, the nose, fingers etc. can all quickly fall off, and the damage will continue to spread for hours after the sunlight is removed. Death could be expected from a full body exposure for as little as ten minutes.

[Insert photo here: Porphyria.jpg]

I have photos of what can happen to people who don't have the virus. (I don't know the status of the copyright on this photo and would be very happy to give the appropriate credit, if I knew it.) The hands are extremely burnt and parts of the fingers have fallen off. It is much, much worse for the heirs of Quetzalcoatl, including Dracula and all his wer-children.

See also Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria

Quotes taken from the Wikipedia article:
"The erythropoietic porphyrias primarily affect the skin, causing photosensitivity (photodermatitis), blisters, necrosis of the skin and gums, itching, and swelling, and increased hair growth on areas such as the forehead.

Heme precursors may also accumulate in the teeth and fingernails, giving them a reddish appearance."

Wer

The root meaning of 'wer' is 'man', so that werwolf means manwolf or wolfman. (I know you usually see it spelled 'werewolf'. Both spellings are correct.)

'Wer' can be combined with the name of any animal to mean a human/animal combination – wer-jaguar; wer-bear; even wer-crocodile. Wer-bat is, of course, just another name for what we usually call a vampire – a human/bat combination.

The word 'wer' can be used by itself to mean a person who is a wer-animal of some sort, or it can mean the wer-animal phenomenon in general. We can write, for instance, 'a master wer' to mean a master werewolf, or a master vampire etc. Or we can write, 'It is almost impossible for wer to spread by accident. The wer virus is not very contagious. Wer must be intentionally inflicted by the sharing of blood, and then carefully nursed to fruition.'

All the wer-animals represent the same phenomenon – a human into whose chromosomes a second genome – an animal's genetic blueprint – has intruded via a viral vector. The virus comes from a mutant strain of rabies called Wepwawet rabies, or simply Wep-rabies (See the navigation tab "The Wer Disease"). The natural host for this virus is the wolf. The wolf which carries this virus is in no way special except that it carries the virus (and therefore has the usual rabies issues, including a heightened killing impulse). This wolf is called a wepwolf (for Wepwawet wolf). This wolf is NOT a werewolf. It is only when the genes from this wolf are transferred, via the virus it hosts, into a human that the human becomes a werewolf.

The word 'wer' does not refer to the animal species which contributes its genome (wolf, bat, jaguar etc). This animal species is referred to as a totem animal (or in the case of the wolf, as a Wepwolf). Wer refers to the combination of the animal genes with human genes.

See also the the navigation bar tab, "The Wer Disease".

Shamanism and Totem Animals

Totem Animals

A totem in magic is something which takes on a specific power by association with something else. (See the "Links" tab in the navigation menu.) In wer-animal lore it means the animal species which is chosen to be infected with Weprabies, in order to harvest its genome and create a wer-animal, ie a human-animal cross. (See the "Wer Disease" tab in the navigation menu.) For example, the bat is the totem animal of the vampire. The jaguar is the totem animal of the wer-jaguar. But the wolf is sometimes considered not to be the totem animal of the werewolf, for the simple reason that it is the original and natural source of the infection, and therefore was never chosen to be infected for the purpose of creating a wer-animal.

In shamanism there are magical implications to the choice of the totem animal. The relationship between shaman and totem animal far ante-dates the arrival of Anubis in Mexico. (See the "Anubis & Egypt" tab in the navigation menu.) The jaguar had long been considered an extremely desirable nagual or nahual, that is spirit companion to protect the shaman during his trips between the worlds as he acted in his function as intermediary between the natural and spiritual world.

[See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism]

Therefore, when Anubis introduced wer-jaguars, it was natural for the totem animal concept to simply incorporate the extra step of the nahual entering the shaman's body and manifesting in a physical transformation of the shaman into the nahual. In a way, the Olmecs were as pre-conditioned for the wer-animal phenomenon as were the Egyptians with their animal-god pantheon.

The follow quote from Wikipedia is interesting with respect to the jaguar as nahual:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguars_in_Mesoamerican_culture]

"The jaguar is also important for shamans who often associate the jaguar as a spirit companion or nagual, which will protect the shaman from evil spirits and when they move between the earth and the spirit realm. In order for the shaman to combat whatever evil forces may be maligning him, or those who rely on the shaman for protection, it is necessary for the shaman to transform himself and crossover to the spirit realm. The jaguar is often chosen as a nagual because of its strength, for it is necessary that the shaman "dominate the spirits, in the same way as a predator dominates its prey" (Saunders 1998:30). The jaguar is said to possess the transient ability of moving between worlds because of its comfort in the trees and the water, their ability to hunt as well in the nighttime as in the daytime, and their habit of sleeping in caves, places often associated with the deceased ancestors. The concept of the transformation of the shaman is well documented in Mesoamerica and South America, and is demonstrated in the context of the Olmec through the prominence of the were-jaguar, and other sculpture illustrating jaguar transformation."

Anubis was at one time the lover of Osiris in Egypt and in all probability the lover of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. Although there is no evidence to suggest that he ever much expressed any hidden feminine side (assuming such to exist in all men), there are hints that he respected 'two-souled' individuals, who would now days be called transvestites. (Hapi, the god of the Nile, was ambi-sexual.) The following quote from Wikipedia is of interest along these lines with respect to 'two-souled' men and magic, especially shamanism. This quote is from the same Wikipedia article on shamanism.

"Most shamans are men, but there are societies in which women may be shamans. In some societies, shamans exhibit a two-spirited identity, assuming the dress and attributes of the opposite sex from a young age, for example, a man taking on the role of a wife in an otherwise ordinary marriage. [Meaning a man married to another man, who functions as a wife. – Webmaster's comment] This practice is common..... Indeed, these two-spirited shamans were so widespread as to suggest a very ancient origin of the practice. See, for example, [Joseph Campbell's map in his The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: Vol I: The Way of the Animal Powers: Part 2: pg 174] Such two-spirited shamans are thought to be especially powerful, and Shamanism so important to ancestral populations that it may have contributed to the maintenance of genes for transgendered individuals in breeding populations over evolutionary time through the mechanism of "kin selection." [see final chapter of E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis] They are highly respected and sought out in their tribes, as they will bring high status to their mates.

The Wepwolf

Wepwolf is simply a shortened form for Wepwawet wolf, meaning a wolf harboring the most virulent strain of the Wepwawet virus (Wepvirus), which causes WepRabies (Wepwawet rabies), the mutant strain of rabies that engenders all the wer-animal changes – werewolves, vampires (wer-bats), wer-jaguars and whatever. Wepwolf does not mean werewolf; it means a wolf which appears in all ways as a normal rabid wolf (having no special strengths), but whose rabies is actually WepRabies, and is therefore capable of passing on (from its blood directly into the bloodstream of a victim) the curse/blessing of being a werewolf. In a sense, Wepwolf is to wolf, as 'totem' is to other animals. Note: normal rabies is a much tamer version of rabies than the WepRabies, which almost seems to have been selected for the virulency of the rabidity it induces. That is, WepRabies intensifies the urge to attack and kill – but not the urge to wound and allow to live. There is no urge at all to spread werewolfism – contrary to what seems to be presented in the Hollywood mystique. This is why the distinction between 'master werewolf' and 'garden variety werewolf' is so important. The master werewolf can control the killing urge (he feels it, but does not obey it). The garden variety is the victim of his own disease and gives rein to any instincts that possess him.