Vampires and Souls

Do vampires have souls? Does lacking souls make them inherently evil? Does becoming a vampire mean giving up ones soul? And then, at heart, what is a soul anyway? To begin to answer these questions we have to separate the parts of the Trinity of body, mind, spirit/soul into their component parts.

Perhaps it is time to remember that my site discusses literature as opposed to reality. And yes, there is a difference. Yet it is pretty unusual for the vampires of literature to possess souls post-turning (after death). It is as though the soul vacates the body automatically upon death, at least in the minds of the authors, and it doesn’t come back when the body continues walking around. What remains are the mind and the body. Without the possession of the soul, it is an uphill battle to remain kind and gentle and pro-human.

What is the soul? Philosophers have been arguing this question for a very long time in part because souls can’t be handled (or proven to exist or not) with any of the five senses. I think of souls this way. My body is like a car, and my mind is the driver making it turn hither and yon to meet my desires. My soul is the eternal part trapped inside the driver part, unable to make the driver turn the car without some sort of aid, usually provided by affiliation to a deity. My mind is logical, my soul is emotional. My mind says that what I want, and where I want to go, is more important than any other input. My soul tries to put the needs of others before my own needs and wants. This is a thing that is hard for humans to do. Is it any wonder that the vampires have trouble attaining this?

If the vampire’s soul is lost upon death and all that remains is the mind and body, is it yet human? I guess that depends upon your definition of human. There are many people who argue that humans don’t really have souls since souls can’t be weighed or measured. They argue that we are just the mind/body combo, and that all emotions are caused by various types of stimuli upon the brain (mind). To them, obviously the vampire is still equal to a human, although few of them would believe in life after death even as the walking-dead.

Without a soul the vampire loses all ability to connect with God since God seems to prefer talking to souls instead of minds. Certainly the vampires of the movie Thirty Days of Night are distanced from God. They are so distanced that they believe there is “no God” in the words of their leader.

It is only really us moderns, those of us writing vampire stories since the Nineteen-Seventies who wrestle with the ideas that a vampire might still hang on to its humanity by retaining some of the attributes of being souled. Prior to that, vampires mainly just did what parasites do. They preyed upon living humans without any soul-searching. Arguably it is the modern reliance and belief in science, and the concomitant disbelief in things spiritual, that creates the atmosphere which enables a writer to create a secular vampire, one capable of behaving humanly even without a soul. These are rare vampires who embrace the idea of living peaceably with, coexisting with their potential victims, ala Twilight. And mostly they present such charm and sexuality, that their victims embrace them willingly, having a soul or not.