The suave and biting Count Dracula did not just magically appear fully formed in Bram Stoker's imagination. The myth of the vampire has been around for as long as man had the need to place his fears into a concrete image.

The first Vampire was Lilith, also the first wife of Adam that she eventually left for Lucifer. In short, the bone of the quarrel was that Lilith would prefer to stand over Adam but God wanted the man to rule. Lilith is also the Queen of Death and Demons. She was and is still adored in almost all religions by magicians, sorcecers and witches.

No discussion of vampires is even thinkable without talking about bats. They are integral to the modern day concept of the vampire, but this was not always the case.

Many cultures have various myths about bats. In South America, Camazotz was a bat god of the caves living in the Bathouse of the Underworld. In Europe, bats and owls were long associated with the supernatural, mainly because they were night creatures. On the other hand, the Gypsies thought them lucky - they wore charms made of bat bones. And in England the Wakefield crest and those of some others have bats on them.

So how did bats end up becoming associated with vampires? There are only three species of vampires bats in the entire world, all of which occur in Central and South America. During the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors first came into contact with them and recognized the similarity between the feeding habits of the bats and those of their mythical vampires. It wasn't long before they began to associate bats with their vampire legends.

Over the following centuries the association became stronger and was used by various people, including James Malcom Rhymer who wrote "Varney the Vampyre" in the 1840's. Stoker cemented the linkage of bats and vampires in the minds of the general public.

Western scholars seriously considered the existence of vampires for the first time rather than just brushing them off as superstition. It all started with an outbreak of vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Austro-Hungarian empire from 1725-1734.

Two famous cases involved Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. Plogojowitz died at the age of 62, but came back a couple of times after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the next day. Soon Plogojowitz returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood.

In the other famous case Arnold Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who had been attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After death people began to die and it was believed by everyone that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbours.

These two incidents were extremely well documented. Government officials examined the cases and the bodies, wrote them up in reports, and books were published afterwards of the Paole case and distributed around Europe. The controversy raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural people having an epidemic of vampire attacks and digging up bodies all over the place. Many scholars said vampires didn't exist - they attributed reports to premature burial, or rabies which causes thirst.

However, Dom Augustine Calmet, a well respected French theologian and scholar, put together a carefully thought out treatise in 1746 which said vampires did exist. This had considerable influence on other scholars at the time.

Eventually, Austrian Empress Marie Theresa sent her personal physician to investigate. He said vampires didn't exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies. This was the end of the vampire epidemics. But by then everyone knew about vampires and it was only a matter of time before authors would preserve and mould the vampire into something new and much more accessible to the general public.

With all of these interpretations of the vampire, it is clear that the image is much less threatening today than it was in Slavic society. As a result, associations are freely made with it and are much more diverse, and leave us hanging with the question of what its social role is.

Many explanations have been offered, and these are well supported under the context in which they are presented. Some are scholarly and deal with it at a subliminal level, while others are openly acknowledged by vampire fans themselves. But to take any one of these and assign it as the unifying social function of the vampire, which is often done or implied, would be a mistake. Although their validity may have been proven in certain contexts, it must be remembered that these contexts are not shared by all, or even a majority of the population.

Since the image, and not its associations, is what we receive today through television and the rest of the media, the context of the vampire is determined by the psyche it enters, and thus varies from individual to individual. This accounts for its diversity of interpretation that we witness today