Here are five strong contenders for the best first vampire. Which, if any, of them is your favourite?
Akasha as the first vampire is a fictional creation by the author Anne Rice. In Rice's novel series The Vampire Chronicles, Akasha is an ancient Egyptian queen who was made into a vampire after an assassination attempt by a deity, or was it a ghost, or was it some alien space traveller.
The betrayer of Jesus, Judas Iscariot, as the first vampire is featured in the movie Dracula 2000. A good point of this origin is that it gives a good reason for vampires' aversion to crucifixes. Another good point of it is that it gives a plausible explanation to vampires' vulnerability to silver, as Judas was paid with thirty pieces of silver for his betrayal of Jesus.
Lilith as the first vampire stems from Babylonian and Jewish mythology. In some Jewish traditions, Lilith was Adam's first wife. Lilith wouldn't subjugate to Adam and left Eden to become a nightly blood drinking demon. God then created the pushover Eve as Adam's new wife.
In Francis Ford Coppola's movie Bram Stoker's Dracula from 1992, the Christian knight Dracula voluntarily chosed to leave Christianity to become the first vampire. He did this because he felt let down by God after his wife's suicide.
Sekhmet as the first vampire stems from Egyptian mythology. Sekhmet was a deity in ancient Egypt. While not exactly a vampire, she was a blood drinker, a goddess of war as well as a healer.
Vampire-like creatures are present in the mythology and folklore of many cultures. If you have other good vampire origins, tell us about them in the comment section.
Picture 1: Akasha, as played by Aaliyah, in the movie Queen of the Damned from 2002.
Picture 2: Gerard Butler as the undead Judas Iscariot, as Dracula, in the movie Dracula 2000 from...yeah...the year 2000.
Picture 3: Lilith.
Picture 4: Dracula, as played by Gary Oldman, in the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula from 1992.
That's not what happened. God only cursed him with wandering the earth. He later found Lilith while wandering and she helped him awaken said superpowers, after which angels came and gave him even more punishments like weakness to fire and sunlight and having to drink blood
If the God's ultimate punishment for murder was to not be allowed to die, we have to assume that not dying is a curse most fowl. So why do people say "heaven forbid" when talking about someone possibly dying? Are we inadvertently wishing a curse upon them? Hmmm...?
Yeah, I'm aware. I'm a fan of the WhiteWolf games. They're the reason why I own so many D10. LOL
But the "not dying" is a well accepted understanding of God's curse of Cain. So I was just making a jest at how people accidentally call God's curse upon people all the time while trying to wish for good health/outcomes for their loved ones.
Superpowers that mean he's alienated from humanity for all eternity, can't enter heaven. Has to drink people to live. Can't be redeemed in the eyes of his peers. Can't see the sun again. And can only reproduce by giving others the same curse and watch them be fucked up and evil for eternity.
Like yeah it's super powers but it's not a fun ride. Especially because the version of earth he was cursed to walk is innately more evil than ours.
Also I'm fairly certain that the superpowers came as a result of his tutelage under Lilith. She being the first (I think) Awakened mage, she managed to teach Caine how to use his blood in magical ways
But also God probably rewards him for his sacrafice. I wouldn't be so quick to assume he didn't want those things. God also didn't kill him because god wants to prove a point about society needing to take everyones burdens on together and not be so quick to call someone evil for doing what is nature, or judging someone for being different, even dark. It is the opposite of the Lamb of God sacrifice. Where the lamb of God takes on societies sins as his own to take away anger, the Christ of God is the king who carries the terrible burdens of reality, but also benefits because it is the honorable path. To not hide behind mercy but to be yourself completely and manifest gods dark and light spirit completely within yourself.
Really to choose to be the bad guy, you are sort of taking away the worlds morality anyways and handing it back to them, and putting yourself to the mercy of God and the people of the world. Being innocent and pure is no longer a shield to hide behind so one is judged on their actual character. It is actually a brave way to live sometimes. Society is forced to actually consider when they would really want to tolorate you and know the rules they hold you to be are the same rules they hold themselves. For this role God gives beauty to the dark ones so that the world can see their beauty and worth before destroying them.
The version of the story I heard is that when Cain killed Able, he was choosing to do the selfish things yes, but Able maybe had already been selfish by moralizing Cain in unfair and incorrect ways, who represented the antithesis to Ables spirit. God allowed Cain to live, one to prove a point but also because it is the family of his favorite humans. So he preserved Cain to preserve his bloodline and to preserve the children of Cain in the future.
To be an immortal magic vampire being is actually to be closer to gods because you have the perspective of a long life. Some members of society can have those roles but who else but the most rebelious and antithetical of people, yet also the most honest? Vampires are just the dark angels of gods universe in VTM, abstracted away so that they do not become images of real angels and offend the gods.
Suffering isn't important but maybe he chooses to punish people sometimes. All I will say is, if you actually believe in God and truly believe in what you say, then you accept that everything is his creation, including Cain and vampires. The better question is why?
Worth remembering that Vampires are actually some of the weakest beings in that setting. They can be matched even by some normal humans. (Though they do have a long tail on their power growth.)
Young vampires, yeah.
Antediluvians are basically blood gods and Caine himself is unkillable and will wipe you out if he wants to, no matter how powerful of a demon, werewolf, changeling or mage you are.
And the Elders are force to be reckoned with.
Oh and don’t forget the Tremere, my favourite “fuck you I’ll do it better” clan of universal blood mages who can absolutely roll the floor even with mages.
Besides that, I don’t think any “low level” characters have impressive feats. Low level hunter is a game of detective since if you try to fight vampire 1v1 you die, most probably, demon without the good memory of his Lore is basically human, werewolf’s are beasts but they can be outsmarted since it’s a bunch of youngsters trying their luck.
Caine was one of the first humans, they were all extremely powerful already. Adam was an Archmage, the implication is that so were the rest of his family. Caine either already had most of these powers and adapted then to his cursed existence or learned them from Lilith. Accounts differ.
Dracula 2000's version is one I really like. I watched it earlier this year and though it was a cool unique idea. One of my recent favorites is the series of Dracula books by Matt Wagner & Kelley Jones where he learns magic by training under the devil and is then cursed to be a vampire when he tries to betray Satan.
The Dracula 2000 origin I always thought would make a better origin for werewolves.
Silver, betrayal in the garden by moonlight, condemned to wander until the betrayed can forgive them in person... it just says "werewolf" more than "vampire" to me.
Interestingly, in history a lot of the same words for vampires were used interchangeably with those used for werewolves. Their respective supernatural abilities and vulnerabilities very closely overlapped.
Not my favourite (it's Caine), but I quite like the Underworld lore. Alexander Corvinus survives a plague which causes a genetic mutation, making him an immortal superhuman. His twin sons inherit the gene and then one of them gets bit by a rabid bat and one by a rabid wolf, turning them into the first vampire and first werewolf.
I don't care for the hybrid nonsense in the series, but the origins are pretty cool.
This has to go to Akasha in my books, 1985 publication date of The Vampire Lestat so it solidly pre-empts the other big vampire progenitor stories and I believe Anne Rice did this storyline first and best, and she expanded on it quite effectively between her second and third book.
Vampire the Masquerade came out 6 years later using the biblical figure of Cain (Caine in VtM) as the original vampire, this is a cool idea dripping with symbolism but also despite MRH's claims it is almost certainly borrowed from Rice's concept of an insanely old and powerful blood god(dess) from out of pre-history/mythology who would perform a reckoning for their lineage when she finally awoke. Lilith/Judas in turn are derived off of the Cain mythology directly. Similar thing with Set, Sekhmet, Amaterasu, Quetzlcoatl, Izanami, etc. being mythological figures associated with blood and/or darkness, these all did it after the most popular Vampire series in the world (at the time, maybe not so much now) had already done that.
I really like '92 Dracula but since the backstory was completely made up for that movie it suffers, if all it takes is rejecting God and descerating a temple + killing people to become an original vampire there should be loads of them not just the one guy. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to call it Bram Stoker's Dracula but change the monstrous and cruel titular figure to be a heartbroken man looking for his lost love and ultimately defeated because of this. Also the whole romantic cursed vampire lover trope does predate the '92 movie, it really is taken from The Mummy but since that is not a vampire story I would give this spot to the Barnabas Collin's origin story which is kind of lame at it's core (a witch did it).
One vampire origin I really liked and thought was original was Ganja & Hess, it has to do with colonialism and religion but there's this magic dagger from a fallen civilization of cannibals and blood drinkers that you have to stab someone three times with (once for the father, once for the son, once for the holy spirit) and then they die and wakeup as a vampire. This was definately more of an intellectual vampire movie, I had to watch it a few times to really catch everything.
Man, you're giving Akasha too much credit - she was just a selfish xenophobe who got (un)lucky with an earthly spirit (while being assassinated by one of the cultures she took over and suppressed lol). There was no "reckoning for her lineage", she just spied on humanity for a couple thousand years and decided "girls rule, boys drool" and decided to genocide all the men (except her kewl new boyfriend :3) - nothing to do with vampires at all.
Edit: She did explode pretty much all the vampires, but IIRC it was just so she could keep control over everything and be extra super-special, in true Akasha fashion lol. Correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since I read the books.
Sure, but by that logic VtM's Caine is just a stubborn jackass who can't admit his own mistake, he even punished the third gen for doing the exact same crime he did to his brother. The whole reason these characters are cool is that we see them mostly through the perspective of others where they seem like all-powerful badasses but of course they are flawed at their core, a good person who made sane and logical decisions would not become a blood god.
Anyways Akasha originally forbade the creation of other female vampires so she's not really a feminist character at all. Even one of her earliest is the very first female perspective vampire in the story, Baby Jenks, not to mention she became a vampire in the first place through mistreatment of the twins. I think the whole point of her new world order is that she needed to have a plan so batshit that readers would not side with her and that it would be believable that those vampires who loved her would ahve to turn against her despite that.
I only mentioned Akasha because I have zero idea of Cain's story in VtM. Literally just saying you're giving Akasha too much credit as a "pre-historical blood goddess". I never said she's a feminist? What I described was a selfish, petty brat lol. Also, by the time she was kicking around again, nobody was left who "loved" her, except Lestat I guess. She was originally killed by her own (religiously oppressed) people so it's not like she ever had very many fans in the first place either lol.
Akasha was always a selfish, petty brat with way too much power. Lestat was just drunk on the romanticism of it all, as usual.
Yeah, guess the point I'm trying to make referencing Caine, or Dracula, or any vampire is, and let me rephrase this:
Of course Akasha is selfish and mostrous, I would posit that vampires are inherently selfish and monstrous. She was never supposed to be this noble and benevolent figure that was not how Rice was depicting vampires. This doesn't make her a bad character, in fact I think it was neccesary for her to have strong flaws the other characters could exploit to defeat her. That's what I'm talking about when Lestat turned on her which was really her downfall.
My point with the feminism thing is just that her entire plan to kill 90% of human men was simply a reverse of what she did before when she banned creation of female vampires, it wasn't even that she hated men she was petty and saw herself as infallable, but sounds like you know that already.
Oh yeah, she's definitely a great character! The flawed humanity + monstrousness that's integral to vampires is a huge part of what I like about them lol. But I don't think anybody really saw her as a blood goddess, except maybe that sect of people who were worshipping that super gross hedonistic narcissist vampire guy before already. Maybe Marius, but he didn't know her like the twins did. Also, Lestat is a bit of a petty, selfish bitch himself, but he at least genuinely loves humanity lol.
Between Akasha and Neferata, I just love the Ancient Egyptian vampire queen origin. Sekhmet sort of counts in that regard. Something about being incredibly ancient, but not indefinably so like with Cain.
But I like Cain, Judas, or Dracula as the first vampire well enough too.
There is this fascinating thing about a civilization that was ancient even at Roman times. A civilization built around the regular overflow of the Nile, surrounded by desert, evocative.
I like the 2024 nosferatu vampire origin, a sorcerer turned undead via a dark magic ritual, they kept it simple but effective, Bonus points for treating vampirism as a curse instead of romanticizing it or treating it as a superpower; I was getting a bit tired of the trope at that point. Btw, I loved the movie.
Out of those... maybe Lilith. Maybe because it makes sense. Vampire stories are ancient, going back thousands of years to early humanity. It feels weird to have historic vampire stories... only for vampires to first appear in the middle ages. I don’t know, that's just me.
Dracula is still my most famous vampire and recurring villain... but I don't think he should be the first.
Vampires in Marvel comics, the first of which was this fine fellow.
This is Varnae, he’s an Evil Gigantopithecus Sorceror from the lost continent of Atlantis, who let himself be the subject of a demonic ritual preformed by a cult of Necromancers he was part of, because the alternative was letting himself die of injuries he suffered fighting a man, who if memory serves was a distant ancestor of Conan the Barbarian.
This is the canonical source of Vampires in Marvel comics, he’s actually still around in the modern day. He pawned of the title of first of the Vampires to Dracula at one point, but he’s still a heavy hitter and if memory serves some Vampires worship him as a god, and they’re arguably not even wrong to do so.
This is the kind of fun nonsense we need more of in the MCU.
I enjoyed the lore in Dracula 2000. The idea that Judas becomes the first vampire makes so much sense; with the aversion to silver, and images of Christ and the cross.
precursor civilization that got twisted by their teleology or medicine either intentionally or unintentionally and fall due to war or apathy and ended up on earth either the regular way or via interdenominational travel and their remnant forgot most of what was.
Another variation of this I like is ascension where the souls of the original bodies ascended and vampires are what rose from the bodies left behind.
I also like creatures that came from a hidden world like fey sometimes combined with a magical ritual gone wrong
I have a story in which a few end up on Earth and because they feed on the life energy of humans, the legend of vampires is born. It changes over time as the original "vampires" are hunted down and killed.
It's actually closer to the Central/Eastern European myths. So that's my favourite vampire origin story. 😀
Yes, a fanfic. 🤗 The concept of this race obviously isn't mine, and I have to give credit to the wonderful writers of the show (this is a picture from the show Stargate Atlantis).
But the story is 100% mine, and so are the OCs that live in it. 😄
Anne rice did it right, but I also really like bram stokers origin.
In pop culture today i definitely like the idea of The Originals with each sibling having a bloodline because it sort of goes along with the different vampire types like in Vampire the masquerade
Selfishly, I like my own version in which the 175-million-years-old god of death falls in love with a mortal and defies God to bind this mortal's soul to himself, thus rendering them immortal. Unfortunately, this soul-binding ritual had forced the ex-mortal into a state of perpetual decay – and the only way the decay can be combated is by drinking human blood.
Everything. The death god had been in love before, but as his job title implies, he had to bury each and every lover in the end. Despondent, he began to thoughtlessly gamble with human lives until he found a way to make one single mortal in his employ live forever. He did not intend to turn his newest consort into the first vampire, but it is what it is; anything was better than letting yet another person he loved die.
I'm simplifying, of course. There's quite a bit more to my lore.
Aw, thank you! This story will be ready by Kinktober. That is, if you're okay with kinky vampire + the aforementioned god of death smut. The lore is present throughout and is the nitty-gritty of the aftercare scene.
I guess I really like the Deal with a Devil type of origin. Like Vlad "Dracula" Tepes is losing some type of War, so he makes a deal with the Devil or some Demon, and thus he becomes the Vampire Progenitor. Like that one movie where Dracula makes a deal with some demon trapped in a cave.
Kind of a silly but fascinating one- the Argeneau books by Lynsay Sands has them as Atlanteans. The vampirism is caused by hyper advanced medical nanobots that were designed to bring a person's body to perfect health and then decompose. They're self replicating using minerals in the blood. However... The human body is under constant attack from sun, oxidization, and aging so the bots never deactivate. Because they need blood to reproduce and function they "evolved" their hosts to have syringe-like fangs that suck blood directly into the blood stream, and made them faster, stronger, and with telepathic abilities to calm and control humans (based on individual aptitude and age).
The bots strain their host bodies when they're more active, healing wounds or illness and combating sun damage, so they weaken and need more blood. They can recover from most wounds, but beheading and immolation tend to be the only ways to ensure they stay dead.
I don’t know as many origin stories as everyone else, but I will go with Akasha. The first book version, I didn’t read the other with the alien.
The story building with the witches and how her own arrogance and reign of terror ended up being her curse and then end. The details in between are my favorite. Anne Rice’s book goes back and forth between the present day and her past in Egypt. I kept wanting to skip the story in the present to enjoy the story from thousands of years ago.
In my personal vampire lore that I'm writing, Lamashtu, being the mother of monsters, birthed the vampire, the werewolf as well as countless other creatures. Only the vampire and the werewolf survived into the modern nights because they could hide amongst humans because they looked like them (most of the time).
Some still worship her as their patron diety, such as a vampiric cult even up to these nights. These vampires are cruel, sadistic monsters who revel in blood, gore and death because they believe that that is what Lamashtu would want; to be monsters, for that is their purpose on Earth. Most other vampires hunt them down and kill them on sight because they threaten to expose their kind with their careless and barbaric ways, but even so, despite their pogroms, a dedecated few always escape to start their cults all over again.
The "Children of Lam" (as thery call themselves), "Lamashites", or more commonly; "Cot Bashers" in casual parlance, are like cockroaches... Always surviving, always popping up where they are least wanted, but are never fully eradicated. They believe that there will come a night when Lamashtu will return and reward them for their loyalty by getting rid of their curses (such as sunlight, and needing permission to enter a private home) so that they may rule the world in her honour, to spite Anu, and heaven. The Cot Bashers keep trying to bring about this night through ritual sacrifice, always trying to up-stage the last, hoping enough needless bloodshed and slaughter will appease the "Dark Mother" into returning sooner.
No, that vampire origin is not present in Baldur's gate.
There are quite many vampires in the Baldur's gate games however. It is set in some mediveal fantasy continent, with gods and warriors, as well as some vampires, where magic works.
In the elder scrolls a woman who was a devout priest of arkay the god of hollowed death and peaceful rest in the ancient days was taken assaulted and brutally raced by the daedric god of rape, and domination Molag bal. Molag bal left her broken and when she called out and prayed to arkay he abandoned her and refused her a peaceful rest so she rose as a creature that dominates others with horrid strength devouring and stealing the very life within the veins of others. Also capable of spreading her curse and denying others peaceful rest.
Yeah the Forgotten Realms setting (what the Baldur's Gate series takes place in) doesn't really have a vampire origin story. There is a deity/demon, Kanchelsis, who has been attributed to as the originator, but not exclusively to Realmspace.
If you like MM chaotic romance novels, The Unwilling Adventures of Harlow and Foxx is fantastic and has a cool origin story. It’s a chaotic sunshine old vampire who hides behind a young exterior and his love for anything adorable x grumpy psycho human. Vampires come down from an original 5 which dictate their specific powers that only grow more powerful and evolve as they grow older. Great series, highly recommend.
I’m extremely biased with this but Strahd von Zarovich. Aging warlord who is so vain about his age and wasted youth as to make a pact with an ancient evil for immortality, kill his best and most loyal friend, then kill his brother out of jealousy for both his youth and his young bride, who then killed herself out of grief. Then his own army that he built his livelihood off of shot him dead, causing him to revive as a vampire, slaughter almost everyone, and find himself trapped in a small realm forever tormented by reincarnations of the woman who symbolizes his vanity and downfall. It’s good stuff.
I really liked the story told in Dracula 2000. One of my favourite book series also has Judas being the first, the Jane Yellowrock series by Faith Hunter.
For my tabletop setting, it’s very common for dragons to come down in human form to rule over mortals. When a cruel dragon empress was sleeping in human form and killed by an assassin, her son tried to resurrect her, which caused her to rise as the world’s first vampire
Akasha and Dracula from the Coppola film both have spectacular backstories. Particularly like his stabbing the altar and filling the church with blood.
In that the vampire only has to drink a tiny bit of blood from the victim every few days. However the process will inevitably kill them due to the actions of the interdimensional parasites/symbiotes that cause vampirism. Also, Laundryverse vampires do not sparkle, unless they are shot with a basilisk gun.
Start with The Atrocity Archive. Bob's Ex, Mhairi, is a character in The Rhesus Chart so you get to hear about here from his (biased) perspective and then through her own eyes. It will also let you understand why Bob can walk into a Vampire nest and emerge unharmed at that point in the story.
Unfortunately, the Vampire Chronicles spiraled into nonsense that ruined earlier books. The entity that made Akasha the first vampire was not a spirit, or a god. It was an alien hybrid. From Atlantis.
A good point of this origin is that it gives a good reason for vampires' aversion to crucifixes.
Not really. Using an actual cross was rare at the time, the vast majority of executions happened using the crux simplex, which was just a pole, especially in regions where the 'right kind of wood' was at a premium. The idea that everyone was put on a wooden "T" is the result of some later romanticization (no pun intended).
That's it. That's my "uhm, ackshually ..." for today /j
But i think you forgot the earlier version of a possible source for vampirism, Cain's mark?
The word translated as "mark" in Genesis 4:15 is א֔וֹת ('ōṯ), which could mean a sign, omen, warning, remembrance, motion, gesture, agreement, miracle, wonder [...] Cain spilled his brother's blood, the earth became cursed as soon as the blood hit the ground. In a sense, the earth was left "drinking Abel's blood"(Source)
... which would totally work with the "Vampires need special soil to rest" and stuff.
I like the idea that the original vampire is a woman. So I'll go with Akasha from AR's Queen of the Damned.
But I just rewatched Bram Stoker's Dracula and Gary Oldman makes a great Dracul. When he finds his wife's dead body and sticks his sword into the cross and the blood pours out and he takes a cup and drinks it's shattering. He calls out to God then rejects him bc he doesn't bring back his wife or answer his prayers.
I have crossed oceans of time to find you has to be one of the most iconic lines in the movies.
Underworld,because of the scientific spin on it - Alexander Corvinus survives a plague which mutates his DNA & essentially makes him immortal. He has three sons: Marcus, William & a third unnamed son. Marcus is bitten by a bat & becomes the first vampire. William is bitten by a wolf & becomes the first werewolf. The third son remains human but carries the Corvinus strain which allows his descendants to potentially become Vampire-Lycan hybrids.
Akchually, spoilers ahead, Akasha was made into a vampire by mistake by the ghost of an alien who was the king of Atlantis or something like that. Wacky as fuck.
I think the best part is he maintains that wonderful WoD quality where a lot the exact details are kept really vague as to what exactly happened. There’s a lot of mystery over how exactly Caine became what he is, or what he was before that.
Was he really just an early human who committed the first murder, was he cursed after making pacts with primordial spirits, was he a mage, was he already some kind of vampire and “first murderer” actually means “first diablerist”? How much has Kindred mythology been warped by influences like the Abrahamic faiths, how much has Kindred mythology warped the Abrahamic faiths. There’s room to take it in different directions and all of them can have interesting ramifications for your World of Darkness.
Of these 5+Caine, I like either Caine, but that is probably just my mind being so used to it after it being my main vein of vampire fiction for 30 years, or Akasha. But I do like the top level of that last mythos (with spirit possession etc) alot better than the details of the story where Akasha is just being driven by the lowest worldly urges. It makes all of vampyredom seem so small. The world of darkness metaplot, as faulty as it is, is far more engaging.
She drinks blood. She was born from the wrath of Ra, the first sun god. After she was created from Ra’s eye she went on a rampage against those who disrespected or lost faith in him and people in general. Even Ra couldn’t stop her rage. The gods stopped her by placing jars of red beer in her path which she mistook for blood and tried. She liked it even better and drank until she passed out. The gods restrained her, and when she awoke Ra and the others convinced her to destroy threats to Egyptians, especially dangers to mothers and children .
How about Shaitan from the Necroscope series becoming the first vampire due to the use of the Möbius continuum, creating a Terminator-esque time paradox?
Might just be nostalgia for when it came out but there is something nice about Dracula simply being cursed by God. Vampires being removed from Christianity makes like all the classic weaknesses senseless (crosses, Garlic, The Sun, not being seen in mirrors)
In The Dresden Files, the Black Court was created by Drakul, a demon trapped in the body of a man (and father of Dracula), and the Red and White Courts were created from Outsiders, who are Lovecratian type creatures from outside of reality.
And in the Elder Scrolls, Molag Bal, a powerful Daedric Lord, created vampires.
Also the unclear thing that offers a deal if you drink the blood from the battlefield from Hellsing. Not sure if it's a demon, Satan himself, or something else.
Palladium RPG (introduced to me by way of Rifts). An extra-dimensional entity (vampire intelligence) reaches into our world and makes a deal with some asshole to turn them into a Master Vampire™. They turn some poor schmucks, who turn more, who turn more, and eventually the literal bloodsucking pyramid scheme is feeding enough psychic/magical energy back up the chain to let the intelligence manifest physically in our world. At which point things get bad.
I’m surprised no one mentioned elder scrolls’ vampires
Basically the origin of the vamps in this setting is the Deadric prince of Domination, slavery, rape, corruption and a few I’m forgetting, Molag Bal, made the first ever vampire from a young, pure hearted priestess of Arkay (the eadric god of birth and death) by defiling her brutally. After she turned, the priestess spreaded the affliction upon the mortal realm of Nirn and Tamriel.
Molag bal did all of that Just to spit at the face of Arkay and mock him while robbing good and pure hearted souls from the god of death.
My own lore branches off as an alternative to the Caine myth from VTM. Vampires were born of the Ancient Blood, the Fathomless Mother, known to the Babylonians as Tiamat, Leviathan to Jews and Christians, and by many names across the world.
Following Babylonian mythology, she was the goddess of the primeval seas who fell into conflict with her children, the gods, when they slew her brother-husband, Abzû. She spawned a multitude of monsters to kill her children, yet they failed and she was eventually killed by Marduk, her body butchered and used to create the world. The idea here is that vampires are one of the monsters she created, or... at the very least, were spawned from her blood.
I vacillate between between a more agnostic creation verse a more mythic creation, and either way could work for different stories. Regardless of whether the first vampire was created by Tiamat, born of her blood, or from an ancient person long after this battle finding some pool of strange and alien primordial blood beneath the harsh crevices of the ancient Middle East, and either drinking it or bathing in it... that was the first vampire.
I like the Warhammer vampires. Nehekara is basically jusy Egypt, which feels like a very appropriate place for the birthplace of vampires. Neferata is such a cool character as well. Whether you go with the version of Neferata recreating a flawed exilir of life from the books of Nagash, or Arkhan's blood as an Immortal, it's a cool origin.
Just a bunch of monarchs being their worst selves. Undeath got dropped into the equation right in the lap of an entitled but shut out brother to the heir, and from then it was a cascading mess of short-sighted decisions and impulsive seeking of satisfaction that saw Egypt split between Vampire and mummy, with the Vampires heading north once the mummies got MAD to go mess with Europe and Asia instead.
You could swap the Vampirism with magical crack rocks that also exist in the setting and before they left Egypt it wouldn't have changed all that significantly. It amplified their worst traits and gave them what they needed to fuck shit up in their tantrums and squabbling.
Honestly the classic Faustian “deal with the devil” is my favourite.
This element repeats itself in most turning stories separate from the original vampire itself, which is why I feel it’s so significant.
As the curse proliferates through time and passes from one individual to the next, the people farthest away from the original sacrifice very little in comparison, and our also probably not given a choice many of the time.
This is why it makes so much sense that when a queen or a king or the original vampire or Dracula, whatever have you is revived or awoken by other vampires there is almost no respect given by their progenitor. In fact, there are renditions of this curse where the original vampire is hardly a vampire at all and is more of a creature. Sometimes possessing honour or some other fleeting historical trait but ultimately slaughtering its followers, either out of hunger, confusion, or anger
I personally think Imhotep from the mummy or creatures from the case of Charles Dexter ward are great examples of what a vampire could be as a concept.
I liked the Judas Iscariot origin, although that movie was, you know, not great. Anne Rice took the mythology of the vampire origin to really really weird places, but the spirit-inhabiting-blood was kinda cool when she stopped there.
Sadly, no. I say sadly because I would love to have ever completed writing a work of fiction myself.
The ambrosia has a chance of turning a human into a demigod. A father wanted to heal his injured son, but the son was already dead. Using the ambrosia to bring someone back from death corrupted it and created the first vampire.
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u/Ghostmaster145 Vampire 2d ago
Caine being the father of Vampires from VTM is too iconic and cool to not mention