Until recently, we didn't know a lot about the history of vampires.
Despite being one of the oldest and most prevalent creatures of world mythology, the origin of vampires has remained unknown for thousands of years. It wasn't until the Scriptures of Delphi were found that we were given a glimpse into the early vampire history.
The first vampire:
Only a vampire can create another vampire, so logic tells us that the
history of vampires begins with a single vampire who created the
others. Much like the chicken-and-the-egg argument, we had little
insight into how the first vampire came about until recently.
Logically, if there was no vampire to make the first vampire, how was
the first vampire made?
The answer lies in the Scriptures of Delphi, specifically in the collection of writings known as "The Vampire Bible".
The first vampire started out as not a vampire at all, but as a human man
named Ambrogio. He was an Italian-born adventurer who fate brought to
Delphi, in Greece. You can read the full story here, but in a nutshell a series of blessings and curses transformed this young man into history's first vampire.
Specifically,
it began with the sun god Apollo (Greek mythology), who in a fit of
rage cursed Ambrogio so that his skin would burn should it ever touch
sunlight again. Ambrogio's bad luck followed when he ended up gambling
away his soul to Hades (Greek mythology), the god of the underworld.
The next curse came via Apollo's sister Artemis (Greek mythology), the
goddess of the moon and hunting, who made it so that Ambrogio's skin
would burn if he touched silver.
The blessings came soon after
when Artemis, taking pity on the poor young man, gave him the gift of
immortality. He would carry his curses - his skin burning by sunlight
or silver, but he would live forever in his current form. Not only
that, but Artemis also gave him the speed and strength to become a
hunter whose skills were second only to her own.
Blood-sucking
(which, by the way, is called "hematophagy" in case you were curious) is
also included in this "blessing". In the vampire origin story, Ambrogio hunts swans and uses their blood as ink to write love poems to his lady Selene.
While this may be considered a little creepy by our standards, it
wasn't all that unusual in ancient Greece to make do with what you
hunted.
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