Of course, then you have your basic Chinese vampire visiting Africa…
This is how it works in the Harry Dresden books. Dresden explains that it’s a person’s belief in the symbol that repels the vampire. He himself uses a pentacle that he carries.
How would a Christian kill a Jinn?
Speaking as a dedicated TTRPGer, we all have plans for encountering real-life aliens, vampires, and zombies. As well as triffids, body snatchers, Old One Cultists, and even the Samurai Cat!
The difference with vampire plans is how many involve being turned (as in becoming a vampire) ASAP, vs destroying said vampires.
I could have phrased it better. What I meant was Muslims don’t have an equivalent of driving a stake through a vampire’s heart, and if faced against a vampire menace wouldn’t do anything different from the way they usually fight. That’s just speculation on my part. Feel free to counter this and explain how they would.
I mean, I guess it’s all just speculation on everybody’s part because vampires aren’t real and aren’t part of specifically Islamic supernatural lore?
But my own speculation would be that if vampires need specific countermeasures in order to kill them, such as stake through the heart, sunlight exposure, etc., then a Muslim fighting a vampire would be just as likely to employ such measures as anybody else fighting a vampire. And if holding up a religious symbol repels a vampire, then unless there’s something in vampire nature that requires the symbol to be specifically Christian, then a Muslim who wanted to repel a vampire would definitely wave an Islamic talisman (such as a bismillah or Qur’anic sura) at it.
Old houses in Europe can have marks scratched into wooden beams and suchforth to ward off evil spirits.
The crisscrossing lines and concentric circles are supposed to confuse any visiting evil spirits and they get caught in an endless loop. Sounds a bit similar to the counting grain distraction technique for vampires.
Yes, The Force is strong with that one…
Since decapitation works just as well as a stake in many vampire variations it is entirely possible to kill them with a sharp edge as well as a sharpened stick.
What might not work is a bullet to the head - that’s a zombie killing method, not for vampires. Very important to know what variety of undead you’re facing.
In fact, as I pointed out a few posts upthread, we actually do know how Muslims would fight vampires. Or, at least, how they would “fight” “vampires”:
Pretty much as @Kimstu speculated, the Muslim Ottomans assimilated Balkan vampire hunting techniques along with the rest of the vampire lore they assimilated. Actual vampire folklore didn’t generally involve hand-to-hand combat. You tried to figure out which grave the vampire was emerging from, exhumed it during the day, and looked for signifiers of vampirism (such as “unnatural” lack of decay, a “flushed” appearance, or being “swollen with blood”), and then “killed” the “vampire”, usually by beheading and/or burning, or sometimes more exotic and ritualized methods.
See here, for example:
https://www.cesnur.org/2009/balkan_vampires.htm
Not so much belief in the symbol as belief in what the symbol represents. Harry turns vampires with his pentagram because he strongly believes in magic as a force for good in the world.
An observation that I have made before: In the novel Dracula, we see a total of five vampires destroyed. Lucy, Dracula’s three vampire brides, and Dracula himself. They are all destroyed in slightly different ways.
Lucy has a stake driven through her heart, her head cut off, and her mouth stuffed with garlic.
The vampire brides are staked, and have their heads cut off. They crumble to dust immediately upon having their heads cut off, so no garlic stuffing is possible.
Dracula is stabbed through the heart with a Bowie knife (not a wooden stake, despite popular belief), and has his head cut off at the same moment. He, too, immediately crumbles to dust.
The only thing that all of the deaths have in common is the severed head. I have long believed that it’s that, not the stake through the heart, which is necessary to destroy a vampire.
Yeah, but those guys are effectively financial vampires anyway. They’d probably just talk shop with the other vampires.
Well, that and something driven through the heart. It seems like for slaying a Stoker vampire, a wooden stake is just a practical item to drive through a heart. If you’ve got a strapping American cowboy adventurer with a Bowie knife who can drive that through the chest and ribcage with one thrust, it’s just as good.
In authentic vampire folklore, there is some support for the idea of a wooden stake, usually of a specific type of wood that has some sort of magical or religous resonance, such as hawthorne, ash, or white oak. In other folklore, the vampire just needs to be pinned into the grave, and other items such as iron spikes are used.
(In the Dracula Dossier table-top roleplaying game supplement, and the annotated Dracula Unredacted that serves as a prop, author Ken Hite takes note of that descrepancy in the way Dracula is dispatched, and hints darkly that Quincey Morris might have intentionally botched the kill - it’s an explicit character note that he spent a lot of time in the natural range of the vampire bat, after all…)
More broadly, magic in the Dresden Files books is very dependent on the practitioner believing it will work, and Harry’s belief in magic is what makes his pentacle work for repelling vampires. It’s what works for Michael & Amoracchius, and so on.
That’s my understanding, as well.
Fascinating! I can also recommend The New Annotated Dracula where questions are also raised about Morris’s motives and role in the story. All in all it’s a very interesting book if you’re a fan.
Totally unrelated but something I just stumbled across: The Icelandic Translation of 'Dracula' Is Actually a Different Book | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine
Joining the side-jack, there is a novel that expands on the subject of Quincey Morris past experience. P. N. Elrod wrote a short story around it, later expanded into a novel. Spoilers because, well, spoilers.
Short version, Quincy had ‘relations’ with a female vampire prior to his encounter with Dracula. After his death from the wounds he received in battle, he awakens in an undead state and finds Dracula is far from dead. Quincy learns a great deal more about how vampires work (and Dracula is certainly an outlier) and later attempts to reconnect with his friends.
Back to other fictional vampires, in most of the better written ones, the reaction to religion (of all faiths) is largely dependent upon the subject’s upbringing. So a vampire of pre-Christian times is likely to have zero concerns of the cross, but may still react to icons representative of their own faith. Which nicely side-steps the ‘one true faith’ issue that modern readers would find uncomfortable.
Or yes, that faith, any faith, that is deeply held, has an effect on vampires, regardless of the exact nature of the symbol. In the Mercedes Thompson series of supernatural novels, she is a Christian of faith (although a very accepting one given that world’s and her own personal circumstances) who finds the image of the cross distasteful (she prefers to focus on the teachings of Jesus rather than his suffering) and has a necklace with a little lamb on it - which works just fine on vampires.
Yeah, Ken Hite also incorporates material from that into The Dracula Dossier and Dracula Unredacted. He makes a pretty good case in his notes that the Icelandic translator may have been working directly from notes provided to him by Bram Stoker, and a lot of the “new” elements, like the Satanic cult, might actually have originally been in an early outline or draft that Stoker trimmed, and are plausibly restorations rather than additions.
Interesting. Thank you!
Which of course raises the problem of fighting a vampire from an extinct faith or a caveman one.
Add vermouth and three olives on a toothpick.