Hey Uncle Cecil, couple things: another nice interpretation on the cats smothering babies things…I read somewhere (check yourself if you wish) that it was once believed that if a cat jumped over a corpse it would use a special hair in it’s tail to steal the corpses soul, thus turning him into a vampire.
As far as porphryia(I doubt I spelled that right) causing the vampire myth…I’m surprised it got as far as it did…there are as many variations on the myth as there are cultures. I believe some had fangs, but not many (the only one I can call to mind is a Chinese version, but it also had green fur). They’ve roamed the earth at just about any time of day that you can name, but generally at some specific time (i.e. midnight to noon), and I hate to tell ya Unc, but your probably going to become one when you die. They don’t have to bite you, you can become a vampire by: being born with red hair grown in, teeth out at birth, or…hell anything else that might have been considered abnormal in medieval europe. Scary ain’t it? The vampire is one of the more…fertile(?)…myths I have seen…at least I sincerely hope it’s a myth, but supposedly every myth has at least some basis in fact, but for this one I think the disease people are probably right. It kinda fits, at least for me.
1)The myth has existed in most cutures(that I’ve seen anyway, but my experience is kinda limited).
2)Disease is still all over the place, although before the advent of widespread travel they tended to be pretty localised, excepting of course the occasional epidemic.
3)Somebody drops dead suddenly or slowly wastes away for no discernable reason(that the myth originators of myths could see).
4)AHA! Something must be causing this!
5)In comes a nice curse, wrath of the gods, or a supernatural creepy-crawly…
6)Wa-La. a vampire is born.
7)Other people start to waste away or die, and we have a nice staking, bottling, or other driving out of the bad thing.
life is grand…