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The concept of a vampire predates Bram Stoker’s tales of Count Dracula — probably by several centuries. But did vampires ever really exist?

In 1819, 80 years before the publication of Dracula, John Polidori, an Anglo-Italian physician, published a novel called The Vampire. Stoker’s novel, however, became the benchmark for our descriptions of vampires. But how and where did this concept develop? It appears that the folklore surrounding the vampire phenomenon originated in that Balkan area where Stoker located his tale of Count Dracula.

Stoker never traveled to Transylvania or any other part of Eastern Europe. (The lands held by the fictional count would be in modern-day Romania and Hungary.)

The writer was born and brought up in Dublin. He was a friend to Oscar Wilde and William Gladstone. He was both a Liberal and a home-ruler — in favor of home rule for Ireland. He turned to theatre, and became business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. It was his friendship with Armin Vambery, a Hungarian writer, that led to his fascination with vampire folklore. He consulted Vambery in the writing of Dracula, whose main character was loosely fashioned on Vlad the Impaler, a bloodthirsty prince born in Transylvania in 1431.

Medical source of the myth — But where did the myth of vampires come from? Like many myths, it is based partly in fact. A blood disorder called porphyria, which has has been with us for millennia, became prevalent among the nobility and royalty of Eastern Europe. Porphyria is an inherited blood disorder that causes the body to produce less heme — a critical component of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body tissues. It seems likely that this disorder is the origin of the vampire myth. In fact, porphyria is sometimes referred to as the “vampyre disease.”

Consider the symptoms of patients with porphyria:

Sensitivity to sunlight: Extreme sensitivity to sunlight, leading to facial disfigurement, blackened skin and hair growth.

Fangs: In addition to facial disfigurement, repeated attacks of the disease causes the gums to recede, exposing the teeth, which then look like fangs.

Blood drinking: Because the urine of persons with porphyria is dark red, folklore surmised that they were drinking blood. In fact, some physicians had recommended that these patients drink blood to compensate for the defect in their red blood cells — but this recommendation was for animal blood. It is more likely that these patients, who only went out after dark, were judged to be looking for blood, and their fangs led to folk tales about vampires.

Aversion to garlic: The sulfur content of garlic could lead to an attack of porphyria, leading to very acute pain. Thus, the aversion to garlic.

Reflections not seen in mirrors: In the mythology, a vampire is not able to look in a mirror, or cannot see its reflection. The facial disfigurement caused by porphyria becomes worse with time. Poor oxygenation leads to destruction of facial tissues, and collapse of the facial structure. Patients understandably avoided mirrors.

Fear of the crucifix: During the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834), 600 “vampires” were reportedly burned at the stake. Some of these accused vampires were innocent sufferers of porphyria. Porphyria patients had good reason to fear the Christian faith and Christian symbols.

Acute attacks of the disease are associated with considerable pain, and both mental and physical disturbance. This condition has been ascribed to the English King George III, although subsequent analysis has shed some doubt on porphyria as the cause of his “madness.”

Porphyria — Nowadays, with our scientific knowledge of porphyria, instead of fearing these folks, we can love and care for them. Porphyria remains incurable, and treatment is mainly supportive: pain control, fluids and avoidance of drugs and chemicals that provoke acute attacks. Some success has been achieved with stem cell transplants.

Could Stoker have known of the existence of porphyria, and/or its link to vampire folklore? It was only in 1911, eight years before Stoker’s book appeared, that the diseases of porphyria (there are several types) were classified by H. Gunther. However, physician, researcher and author George Harley had described a patient with porphyria a few years earlier.

Through his gothic novel, Stoker surely wins the prize for the best example of myth entangled with medicine!

This story is an edited excerpt from the book Of Plagues and Vampires: Believable Myths and Unbelievable Facts from Medical Practice by Michael Hefferon.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Michael Hefferon at Queen's University, Ontario. Read the original article here.

Source: Inverse
https://www.inverse.com/culture/vampire-myths-originated-with-a-real-blood-disorder

Isaac Newton's belief in spirits and alchemy may have been essential to achieving his towering scientific achievement.

Hot on the heels of Isaac Newton's apple appearing at the Paralympics comes a new celebration of his life and achievements. The Gravity Fields Festival begins on Friday in Grantham, Lincolnshire. For eight days, Newton's life and times will be commemorated by more than 100 events around the town, during what could become a biennial event.

Grantham lies close to Newton's birthplace, Woolsthorpe Manor, and contains the King's School, which the young Isaac attended. On Saturday at 3pm a blue plaque in his honour will be unveiled by the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees.

Often wrongly portrayed as a cold rationalist, Isaac Newton is one of history's most compelling figures. It is true that he was capable of the most precise and logical thought it is possible for a human to achieve: his three years of obsessive work that gave birth to the Principia, containing his theory of gravity, stand as the greatest achievement in science.

Just as certainly, though, he was also consumed with what we would now view as completely unscientific pursuits: alchemy and biblical prophesy.

Alchemy was a major passion of Newton's. In a footnote on page 21 of Richard Westfall's meticulous biography, Never at Rest, the author states: "My modes of thought are so far removed from those of alchemy that I am constantly uneasy in writing on the subject … [Nevertheless] my personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear."

Historian and novelist Rebecca Stott wrote in her novel Ghostwalk that with those words, "Westfall admitted to wishing that he could make those million words disappear." That may be stretching it somewhat but clearly Newton's alchemy is a bit of an embarrassment to modern scholars.

Then there was Newton's biblical prophesy. In almost the same years that he was working on the Principia, he also wrote a treatise on Revelation in which he talked about souls burning in lakes of fire. With talk like that, he could have been the lyricist for Iron Maiden. (He had the hair too.)

Tempting as it is to dismiss all of this as somehow removed from Newton's science, his belief in spirits and what the alchemists called active principles almost certainly allowed him to conceive gravity in the mathematical form that we still use today.

In Newton's time, the natural philosophers had turned their backs on astrology and with it, the idea that influences could simply leap across empty space. Instead impulses had to be transmitted through things touching one another. So, if there was a force coming from the Sun that moved the planets, then it had to do so through a medium.

Perhaps it was a fluid, driven to circulate by the rotation of the sun, which carried the planets around. This was the thinking of French philosopher René Descartes.

Yet Newton could not make the mechanical solution of Descartes work. The vortices simply could not reproduce the changes in speed of the planets as they approached the sun.

Alchemy offered a way out by having as a philosophical underpinning that non-material influences – spirits – existed. These needed no physical contact and could induce transformations or movement through the triggering of "active principles" within an object.

Primed to believe in these ideas, Newton discovered a simple, elegant mathematical equation that described the behaviour of gravity without the need for an intervening fluid. Gravity apparently worked across empty space. He called this principle "action at a distance" and instead of "spirit" began using the word "force" to better reflect its mathematical character.

His equation also reveals the "active principle" that governs an object's response to gravity. It is mass. With such direct analogies to spirits and active principles, Newton must surely have felt some sort of vindication for his alchemical beliefs.

The theory of gravity was so successful that it became one of the triggers for the Age of Enlightenment. Although hardly anyone now believes in the concept of alchemy, we do still believe that gravity can exert an influence across empty space. Engineers still use Newton's maths to launch satellites and send spacecraft to distant planets.

So was Sir Isaac a scientist or a sorcerer? In truth, he was a bit of both. And that was why he could succeed where others had failed.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/across-the-universe/2012/sep/21/isaac-newton
-scientist-sorcerer

On May 28, 1993, a remote and dusty thicket of the Australian outback shook for hundreds of miles around. Deep reverberating explosions could be heard far and wide, the night sky illuminated by sporadic flashes of unexplained light—all this allegedly witnessed by heavy goods drivers, gold prospectors and nomads traipsing the bush. Three truckers even spoke to an Australian geologist about the lights, claiming that they’d seen a “moon-sized fireball” which flew “from south to north with the speed of a jet plane.” They said “it was yellow-orange in colour and had a small blue-white tail, which lit up the sky as it headed immediately west for Banjawarn station.”

The strange event registered just shy of 4.0 on the Richter scale. Its blast could be heard over a radius of 90 square miles. The Australian government later dismissed the mysterious temblor as “probably being natural in origin”. IRIS, the U.S. federal seismology agency, said that the Earth-shaking detonation was “170 times larger than the largest mining explosion ever recorded in that Australian region” and was proven to have the force of a nuclear bomb.

Some scientists speculated that it could’ve been a meteorite. But authorities found no signs of a crater as they searched for one via helicopter. Despite the fact that the epicentre of the ominous blast pointed in all directions to a remote research facility manned by Aum Shinrikyo, the notorious Japanese death-cult noted for its attempts at mining uranium and its grim obsession with alternative weapons technology, the whole event was eventually shrugged off and forgotten about.

That is until two years later, when Aum waged its most brutal and notorious attack to date.

On March 20, 1995, deadly sarin nerve gas was released on the subways of Tokyo via five trains. The stunt killed 13 people and harmed over 5,000 others in what is considered the worst act of terrorism in Japanese history. The caustic gas – a Nazi invention used to kill Jews – was pumped into plastic bags and dispersed by five men who pierced the sacks with their umbrellas while shuffling out of the tube. These men were all members of Aum, whose ideology centers around preparing for a final nuclear skirmish with “The Powers That Be” as the end of days approach.

Those behind the gassing weren’t your average brainwashed cultists, though. These men all held professional qualifications that would hang prestigiously on any office wall. Among their ranks were a senior medical doctor and four graduated physicists—one of whom even finished with honors and a Master’s degree. They had the whole thing planned to a T, with getaway drivers and maps detailing their poisoning route. Most of the accused were eventually caught and hung for their crimes.

But the oddball leader of the cult, Shoko Asahara, seems to have slipped through the cracks. Asahara was likewise condemned to being hanged, only the guy has mysteriously vanished within the Japanese prison system. There’s no clear evidence confirming he’s ever kicked the gallows, or not, because Japanese authorities say he’s alive. Yet his execution date past eight years ago. What’s certain, though, is that Asahara founded the cult in 1984 on a mixed bag of beliefs, which he deemed “The Supreme Truth”. He also believed he was a reincarnation of the Hindu god Shiva. And as commander of the sarin gas attacks, his aim was to throw authorities into chaos, hoping it’d hinder their snowballing investigations into the cult.

The group, now known as Aleph, is said to have over 50,000 members worldwide. They’ve kidnapped and murdered an anti-cult lawyer and his family for speaking out against them. They even have a lavish commune at the base of Mount Fuji. In 1990, members of the cult were convicted of murder after injecting toxins into the neck of an escapee’s brother at the mountainside compound.

The ruthless Aum Shinrikyo was back in the news in January when a senior member turned himself in on New Year’s Eve. He’d been on the run for 17 years. And so there he sat, guilty in the dock, trying to prove he wasn’t too deeply involved with this insane cult by making strange faces and growling noises at the jury. By June, two more at-large Aum members were arrested – then one more, believed to have been a driver in the tube attacks and reportedly the “last remaining Aum member”, was caught. Now, rumors are circulating on the dark web that diehard Aum Shinrikyo followers are reforming to fight off whatever evil is headed our way come late December.

We’ll see about that. These are rumors, after all. I’m not saying the world isn’t visibly slipping into a state of imminent collapse, but I don’t think an all out head on collision will erupt by the time December 21 rolls around, and the prospect of Aum Shinrikyo starting a nuclear war to combat the apocalypse is even less likely.

Even so, just given the group’s previous history—they’ve been “investigated by the CIA” for trying to buy nuclear warheads, and it’s even said that they had at one point infiltrated the Kremlin—you’d be hardpressed to wholly ignore what could’ve been the Aum’s biggest and most terrifying accomplishment to date: a Tesla death ray potentially capable of causing ground shaking knells not unlike a severe earthquake. It sounds a bit ridiculous, sure. But that brings us back to the 3.9 Richter-scale explosion out in the Australia outback.

The bizarre cult came to be after the almost blind Shoko Asahara took a trip to the Himalayan Mountains and found “enlightenment” at high altitude. The doctrine for Aum Shinrikyo followed: an amalgamation of Hindu and Buddhist spirituality beliefs, Bible scriptures and Nostradamus-like endtimes predictions. Asahara claimed he could save his followers when the end of the world strikes, and that he could teach them the art of levitation. He even offered up his blood and bathwater for them to drink—for a price, of course. Somehow, the cult gained a huge following and earned itself a cut-throat reputation after its ranks began murdering anyone who attempted to leave or argued with their beliefs.

As Aum’s following intensified, so did their plundered finances. And shortly after a failed attempt at dispersing botulinum bacteria (the most powerful neurotoxin on earth, which is injected regularly into the faces of rich housewives in the form of botox) from their main offices in Japan in 1993, they decided to pack up and head for Australia.

With a collective fortune then reported to be around $1 billion, Aum Shinrikyo used some spare change to purchase 500,000 acres of land in a desolate part of Western Australia called Banjawan. So now, with a totally isolated plot the size of London situated in the wild outback of Oz to play around with, the doomsday cult members began transporting hulking gear into the country. The imported items included a JCB mechanical digger, mining equipment, an underground excavating machine, huge electric generators, gas masks, respiratory devices and manual quarrying equipment. The self-proclaimed alchemists also attempted to import lethal chemicals—substances like hydrochloric acid, sodium sulphate and ammonium water. Some of these were labelled falsely as harmless liquids and confiscated by Australian Customs on the way in.

The Australian police filed a report at the time stating that the travelling cult members as a collective paid $20,000 in extra fees for their lethal baggage. But despite the would-be tip off, Aum members were allowed to move into Banjawan, where they set up a “research facility”. Staff at this nerve-gas producing, uranium-mining laboratory are said to have not only represented highly educated and unhinged cult members, but also included two recently resigned Soviet nuclear scientists.

To say that a 50,000-strong Japanese doomsday cult bent on stockpiling weapons for the Four Horsemen’s arrival; with privately-owned land the size of a major city; hundreds of millions of dollars; a pair of Soviet scientists in tow; an unrelenting desire to spur death and destruction; and what would become a deep understanding of Tesla weaponry, worked with Soviet professors on their rural Australian experiments, may at first sound like something spouted from lips of the lizard-fearing David Icke. But sure enough, in 1992 Asahara was pictured rubbing shoulders with Oleg Lobov. Lobov was one of Boris Yeltsin’s closest confidantes, and the chairman of the Russia-Japan College.

This hardly proves the theory. But the cult’s trip to the Yugosphere before their Australian outing flags up some interesting information—as does the fact that the CIA later discovered they’d been trying to buy nuclear warheads from the Russians.

It was reported by the New York Times in 1997 that a collective of Aum Shinrikyo members were sent to former Yugoslavia in 1992 to study the life and works of the seismic weapons expert, AC-current discoverer, scientist and lightning provocateur, Nikola Tesla. The cult members poured over Tesla’s thesis and researched many of his electromagnetic weapon theories, possibly with the aim to learn how to create them and stockpile them for their own armoury.

Their interest in plasma, earthquake and weather altering weaponry became so serious that the U.S. Senate and Air Force slyly launched an investigation into the cult. As a representative of the International Tesla Society told the investigators: “Aum’s interest focused on Tesla’s experiments with resonating frequencies, in connection with artificially creating earthquakes.” They also tried to get hold of patents to some of Tesla’s inventions, contraptions that the man himself stated could “split the world in two”.

After this, of course, the U.S. Senate and the CIA properly delved into the group’s Australian antics. A full investigation was launched, the true evidence of which will probably never see the light of day unless someone like Wikileaks manages to unearth the secret documents. The whole thing then just conveniently drifted into the grey areas of tinfoil-hatted folklore.

So for now, at least, we’re left with more questions than answers. Is Shoko Asahara still alive? Did his singular cult in fact create (and test!) something akin to Tesla’s notorious death ray at an abandoned sheep station in the Australian outback? I don’t know. But you just cannot make this stuff up. Join the dots with an open mind and, well, the whole awful thing is plausible. There is a distinct possibility that Aum Shinrikyo were the first, and so far the only people to have ever created and tested a non-government-sanctioned nuclear weapon.

Think about it. They have tens of thousands of members worldwide. They’ve had university trained physicists pop what were essentially giant nerve-agent balloons on Tokyo subways, killing more than a dozen and harming untold thousands of others, all to roadblock the hounds. They have around $1 billion in their bank account and have evident links with a once despotic government. If there was ever the perfect recipe for a cult procuring killer, earthquaking Tesla weaponry, this was surely it.

Here’s hoping Japan’s most notorious cult of fringe-science-loving terrorists don’t follow through on sketchily-lain threats to wage battle against Mayan doomsday prophecies. Who knows, by the holidays Mt. Fuji, the site of one known Aum/Aleph commune, will maybe have blown its lava-dome to high Hell. And that goes for any chance of Shoko Asahara rising from the depths to wage war again as well, because no amount of doomsday prepping will protect anyone from a makeshift Tesla tractor beam tearing through your apocalypse shelter.

Source: Motherboard
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/10/18/from-tesla-to-asahara-one-japanese-death-
cult-s-insane-attempt-to-split-the-world-in-two