It seems pretty clear that one reason vampires are so popular in our culture is that they represent a fantasy that you can be young and beautiful and live forever.<\/p>\n
It’s interesting how this acts as a sort of counter-weight to religion. Many organized religions tell us that yes, you need to grow old and die, but it’s ok, because afterward, you are going to move on to a better life in a realm beyond.<\/p>\n
Religions also put a lot of effort into helping bind families together, through shared rituals, traditions and beliefs. This promotes another kind of immortality: I might die, but I will pass on a piece of my identity to my children, which they will pass on in turn to theirs.<\/p>\n
But the vampire fantasy goes for the whole enchilada: I will literally be here forever, and I’m going to look great and have a fabulous time.<\/p>\n
Of course there is a down side, and you can see this down side as a tension between the lure of the vampire and the dictates of prevailing religion. For one thing, they are, in a way, dead. They are also evil, selfish, and an abomination before God (as Catholic priests in vampire movies so often put it). And they don’t tan well.<\/p>\n
It’s interesting to me that there are far fewer examples in popular culture of the immortal who is not dead. <\/p>\n
So we have examples, but they are few and far between, and the gender balance is atrocious. There’s Gregory Widen’s Connor MacLead, Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long, Jerome Bixby’s John Oldman, a handful of characters by Roger Zelazny, and not all that much more.<\/p>\n
Well, not that much when compared with vampires. Our culture is lousy with vampires.<\/p>\n
Why is this so? I suspect one reason might be that the living immortal does not provide a compelling counterpoint to prevailing religion, no built in pretext for a battle between good and evil. There is no cost exacted for cheating death, and no ticket to eternal damnation included in the price tag of immortality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems pretty clear that one reason vampires are so popular in our culture is that they represent a fantasy that you can be young and beautiful and live forever. It’s interesting how this acts as a sort of counter-weight to religion. Many organized religions tell us that yes, you need to grow old and … Continue reading “Do you have to be dead to live forever?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15292"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15293,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15292\/revisions\/15293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}