I’m just starting to watch Buffy on DVD. We’re only through the first four episodes of Season Two, so please please please don’t spoil the rest of the show.
But I have a question: The vampires react to crosses (crucifixes?) with fear or hatred. Holy water burns them. The character Ms. Callender (sorry if I’m butchering the spelling) is a “techno-pagan.”
But wouldn’t you be convinced by the, well, rightness of Christianity if you saw the effects of crosses and holy water on vampires?
Is that a really strange question? I rather fear it is. Sorry!
Some Vampire myths and legends state that it isn’t the power of the holy symbol that hurts a vampire, it’s the power of the weilder’s faith.
Beyond that, I wouldn’t call Jenny Calendar a pagan in the religious sense. There’s never any reference to her worshipping any sort of god at all. She’s into magic and the occult, given, but I don’t think it’s part of her “faith.”
There was a huge discussion of this before, but that was full of spoilers.
In the end, this is Joss Whedon we’re talking about. He takes the elements of the vampire myth he thinks are cool, and he keeps them, and works them into his own myth. WHo the hell knows what’s going on in his head? It’s really hard to talk about religion though without spoiling the show because there are certain events that can lead you to believe one way or the other whether or not the Christian god even exists…
Without spoiling anything, one theory in the older thread was that the effect of crosses on vampires may be totally independent of Christianity (i.e. vampires are repelled by crosses, later crosses are adopted as the symbol of Christianity, crosses still repel vampires but don’t have anything to do with Christianity).
On the other hand, If you’re up to ep 4 of season 2, you’ll recall Spike and another vampire referencing the crucifiction (although from their banter it’s unclear if it even happened), so there really might be some sort of Christian aspect of the cross repelling vamps.
jsgoddess, stay the hell away from the Buffy threads – they’re constantly full of spoilers and the show does an excellent job of shocking you out of your complacency on a fairly regular basis – if you don’t already know what’s going to happen.
As to your OP, Whedon has said that with Buffy, the point is not on the history of vampirism or demonism but rather on his characters and their growth. Therefore he can just use whatever aspects of these myths might help him and discard others, but that he never really needs to focus on how or why anything happens this way – it just does, and the interesting thing is how the characters deal with it and how it effects them.
I’ve always thought that the cross or crucifix, more than any other religious symbol, is a symbol of resurrection through grace. Vampires are resurrected through damnation, so they don’t like crosses and are burned by contact with them. OK, so it’s not an explanation I’ve heard anywhere from anyone official, but it works for me.
I’m going to be vague, to avoid spoilers for future seasons, but there are a whole lot of other non-Christian elements (artifacts, characters, etc.) that have equally dramatic effects. So there’s as much evidence for, say, many pagan religions as there is for Christianity.