So in lore, vampires have this trait that I’ve almost never seen used, and that’s the fact that vampires are OBSESSED with counting things. Like, the Count on Sesame Street was almost certainly created specifically as a vampire because of this piece of lore.
Like, I read this vampire book years and years ago that explained that a surefire way to protect yourself from vampires getting into your house was to spread a ton of seeds on your doorstep–poppy and mustard seeds were particularly recommended for the purpose. Basically, if you suspected someone to be a vampire, all you had to do was drop a sackful of seeds on the ground in front of them.
If they didn’t immediately start counting them, they were not a vampire. However, if they WERE a vampire, they’d be seized with the urge to count all the seeds and they would not budge from that spot until they knew how many seeds there were in total. The point was to keep them there until the sun came up and killed them, because if they hadn’t counted all the seeds by sunrise they wouldn’t be able to leave. Presumably you could just go about the rest of your evening as normal, though no word on whether it’s possible to make them lose count and start over.
Having remembered this piece of lore, I want fewer stories about brooding tortured Edward Cullen-esque vampires. I want to start seeing more stories about math nerd vampires.
Vampire accountants who are an honest company’s best asset and a corrupt company’s bane because they are frighteningly accurate with the accounts and will not hesitate to blow the whistle on a CEO scamming money because fuck you for making the numbers wrong.
Vampire cashiers that don’t need to look at the register screen because they already mentally calculated your total. 10-items-or-less vampires who know goddamn well you have 20 items in that basket and NO, you cannot just slip in with the rest.
Vampire math tutors who are constantly in high demand and have to hold lotteries to see who gets to be tutored by them.
MATH NERD VAMPIRES
If anyone would like the term for this, it’s arithmomania.
“But sir, he’s a vampire!!!”
“Vampire or not, he’s the best damn accountant we have here, and i’d let him drink my blood before i fire him!”
“still less of a leech than Matt in legal. Fuck matt”
Okay but also, vampires as drug dealers- a profession that requires extremely quick, extremely accurate counting. “You’re 5 dollars short.” “There’s 50,000 dollars in there at least, how the fuck did you count that fast-” “Pay up or I will drink you like a slurpee.”
I’ll tell you what’s ferocious. Freddie’s comeback to Sid calling him “Freddie Platinum” when they were recording down the hall from each other at London’s Wessex Studios (Queen for News of the World, Pistols for Bollocks).
Sid Vicious made the mistake one day of bursting into Queen’s control room and antagonizing their frontman. “Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses, then?” he sneered. “Oh, yes, Simon Ferocious,” Mercury replied. “We’re trying our best, dear.”
Then, according to Queen biographer Daniel Nester, Freddie rose from his chair and began to playfully flick the safety pins displayed on the front of Sid’s leather jacket. “Tell me,” he asked, “did you arrange these pins just so?” When Sid stepped forward in an attempt to intimidate Freddie, the singer simply pushed him backwards and inquired, “What are you going to do about it?” Sid immediately backed down. [x]
assuming vampires breathe, and are therefore alive, what do they do
If they’re alive and they need it to survive, it’s permitted (provided they don’t kill people in so doing).
If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.
Either way, there is no reasonable halachic restriction on a vampire drinking blood.
but would it need to be from a kosher animal can they drink, like, dolphin blood
Okay now that gets interesting and I would want to actually ask a rabbi whether that would be a thing. like, if one must consume the blood of living things to survive, does it make a difference whether one limits it to the blood of kosher animals or not. I could see it being ruled either way. (I would think if there is only one type of blood one can metabolize or if only one type of blood is available, one can consume it regardless.)
I remember learning that human blood (not sure about animal blood) is permissible to consume if it has not been “poresh” (”separated”) from the body (in the context of “if you cut your lip or your finger and immediately and instinctively put it in your mouth, you don’t have to spit out the blood”).
So
Drinking blood out of a goblet or vacuum-sealed bag would be assur, but sinking your teeth into someone and drinking directly (so that the blood never touches the air or is in a vessel) would be okay.
I know that applies to one’s own blood, but I don’t know if the principle applies to someone else’s. But it may count as a possible precedent!
Okay, so I asked my rabbi about this (… yes, my actual rabbi). Short answer, @fenrisesque, is that the ideal situation is for the vampire to intravenously ingestblood that was donated by a human in order to stay alive, assuming that donation doesn’t kill the person. If homemade intravenously doesn’t work, then storeboughtoral ingestion is fine too. This applies whether or not the vampire can drink animal blood. Long answer, which I find fascinating but is long so under a cut:
THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL please thank your rabbi for me
(also, consuming blood from a live person who will not be harmed by the loss of blood is completely different from killing and eating a person – because it is forbidden to derive material gain from a corpse, which includes using it for food, separately from any kosher/nonkosher issues.)
This post is literally the one that made me decide I wanted to convert to Judaism.
Because in the church I grew up in, even the thought of vampires would be cause for screams of blasphemy, but here’s a bunch of Jews who just whipped out their repsonsa and got to work figuring out the practical application of a question that’s actually completely impossible.
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