Vampires, Werewolves and Pyramid Schemes

Vampire television shows, movies, video games, and novels seem to be very popular these days. I've seen Bram Stoker's Dracula and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. I've seen Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys, and all three Blade movies. But don't get the idea that Buffy is something new; before Buffy was knocking off vampires, the Charmed witches were vanqishing demons, and Mulder was chasing monsters in The X Files, a middle aged, low paid reporter in a rumpled suit routinely dealt with monsters in The Night Stalker. And, long before that, the Dark Shadows tv series began airing back in 1966 with vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, leviathans, dopplegangers, witches, warlocks, occultists, satanists, and clairvoyants. The main character, Barnabas Collins was, in fact, a vampire. Nevertheless, book series like the Vampire Chronicles make vampires seem like something original.

There are even people today who are so taken with the notion of vampirism that they dress in black, wear white makeup, sleep during the day in coffins, and even drink human blood. The sad part about these vampire wannabees is that there is actually no historical basis for vampires. Just as the term computer referred to a person who did hand mathematical calculations prior to World War II, a vampire too was something very different until relatively recently. Prior to Bram Stoker in the late 1800's, a vampire was a person who had died and who continued to cause misfortune to the living. If a number of people or even livestock seemed to die mysteriously or a slew of bad luck like crop failures or illness occured, a search could be made of the local graveyard for vampires. Any corpse that didn't seem sufficiently decomposed could be seen as a vampire candidate. The vampire could then be dealt with by placing holy symbols in the coffin or by partly dismembering the corpse. This could include driving a stake through the corpse as well as removing the head and arms and repositioning the body. To be more certain, the head could be buried separately or the entire body could be cremated. This was not an unusual practice into the 1700's. In fact, vampire graves have even been found in the US. Remember though that these original, folklore vampires had nothing at all to do with having fangs or drinking blood by biting the neck of a victim. Bram Stoker created the notion of the vampire from mythologies that had nothing to do with vampires much as the idea of the mummy's curse was invented after the discovery of King Tut's tomb. In fact, Bram borrowed the name, Dracula from Vlad Dracula who was the King of Wallachia in the 1400's. And, although Vlad was well known for using impalement as his favorite form of execution, he was never known to have fangs or drink the blood of anyone.

However, hollywood vampires and werewolves have two big problems: they are both immortal and they multiply. While at first glance this may not seem like such a problem, it is. This is in fact the same problem that pyramid schemes, multi-level marketing, and chain letters run into and why they never succeed. Just as pyramid schemes quickly run out of new people to sign up, so too would vampires and werewolves run out of victims. And, this process occurs much more quickly than someone would guess. Let's say for example, that a typical vampire takes one victim per month and that this victim then turns into a vampire as well. Once a month seems like a fairly leisurely pace but in reality this pace would quickly wipe out the entire planet. The first month, our single vampire takes one victim, but the next month our two vampires will need two victims, and one month later we will have four vampires in need of four victims. This sequence doubles every month. In ten months we will have one thousand vampires; in twenty months we will have 1 Million; and in thirty months we will have 1 Billion. Thus in just three years the entire population of the Earth would be wiped out. However, let's suppose that vampires and werewolves don't always multiply. Let's imagine that the creation of a new member is relatively rare. How about if a new vampire or werewolf is only created once every three years? Again, at first glance this seems sufficiently slow however it isn't. in just 108 years (which some claim is young for vampires) the entire population of the Earth would still be wiped out.

Having read this one might wonder how it is that humans don't wipe out their entire food supply in a similar fashion. Humans have the advantage that large animals like cows reproduce faster than we do and smaller animals reproduce even faster. For example, we currently maintain some 100 Million cows and 60 Million hogs to provide beef and pork in the US. Turkeys and chickens reproduce and grow much faster. For example, after hatching it only takes chickens about a month and a half to grow large enough to eat. We can handle this because we have enough grass for cows to eat and we grow enough corn, oats, soybeans, and other plantfoods to produce cattle, hog, and poultry feed. We also consume a fair amount of fish, mostly tuna, salmon, cod, and whiting but also some farm raised catfish. Vampires on the other hand have never been portrayed to have farms or grow food to feed humans. And, although Jules Verne did suggest that the Morlocks fed the Eloi in The Time Machine, the rate of culling would have had to been very slow to avoid wiping out the small population. It was also true that humans fed on humans in Soylent Green however these were portrayed as individuals who had died naturally, chosen suicide, or been killed in riots on an over populated planet. Unfortunately, it takes very little figuring to discover that humans would make a very poor food source since the rate of conversion of human feed to human meat would be far smaller than for other livestock. I suppose this wouldn't strictly exclude the idea of ghouls feeding on human remains but the number of ghouls would have to be very small in relation to the number of humans. And, naturally, this wouldn't require anything supernatural since wolves, hyenas and vultures would also happily feed on human remains as would smaller creatures like maggots and ants. But we can be completely certain that the fact that humans still exist completely excludes the possibility that we are being fed upon by immortal, self reproducing monsters like vampires and werewolves.