Lamashtu- The 1st vampire?

Superstition is nothing more than a veiled attempt to give reason to the unexplained; the more primitive and less cultured the civilization, the grandeur the pantheon of fantastical explanations it has amassed. In ancient times there was no super, to the supernatural; ghost, demons, gods, fairies, ghouls, and everything else our minds call myths, were as normal as the wind and rain that spattered the very tangible ground. Aside from the overwhelming mystery that surrounds life after death, and in particularly our ingrain fear, on a biological and instinctual level, of the unknown, fables were also disguised attempts to bring some clarity into clearly, up to that archaic point, obscure parts of our physical world; ways to account for, and decipher, what our dwindling intellect had yet to clarify. One horrible, yet natural illness and occurrence, that planted, in part, the seeds that would flower into the image of our modern day Vampires was: S.I.D.S- or more commonly known nowadays as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome- this was the catalyst, for some historians, behind the story that would give rise to an industry.

Whenever a babe would, without any precedence or predicted medical history, die of unexplained causes, grieving mothers were prone to damn the very deities they worshiped. As such the idea of a demon, or creature, that would come at night while your baby slept and snatch his spirit away, grew exponentially throughout the first settlements. As nomadic people started creating societies and became more than just wandering apparitions, religions and folk tales fueled their imaginations; things started acquiring names; monsters began to have identities.

It is no wonder then, that in a clearly chauvinistic society and period, one of the first creatures to depict vampiric characteristic belonged to the female sex; her name was Lamashtu, the Mesopotamian deity, whose exploits would be become famous in Sumer.

Depending on what side of the bed you woke up, or what religious faction was in power that year, Lamashtu was either a goddess or a demon- although in those ancient times, one facet did not particularly deny the other; the Sumerian’s had a wider view on the concepts that guided good or evil. As fabrications went, this particular ghoul was rife with a pervading dread reserved, in our modern times at least, only for The Devil himself. Lamashtu’s malevolence was not an edict inborn into her very nature, unlike other goddess, she was one of the first, to not only make a conscious choice to be evil, but actually rejoice in her own wickedness; her acts were of her own accord, rather than at a higher deity’s instruction.

Lamashtu’s lore depicted horrendous deeds, among them but not limited to, was the slaughter of children, unborn fetuses, neonates, expecting mothers, eating fathers and by the end of Sumerian society, every crime and illness this mortal world had to offer was laid at her feet. The fear she spawned was so great, that believers were known to chant prayers to a different spirit for protection. Pazuzu - the king of demons to Sumerians-  from "The Exorcist”; the same creature that was the main characer in unfathomable scores of nightmares in the movie goers mind, and possessed little Linda Blair, became the Sumerian’s guardian angel against the mighty Lamashtu; demon against demon; nightmare gashing on nightmare. Their fear blinded them to the dangers of, what they knew, was the lesser of two evils.

So the only two real traits shared in all vampire legends was handed over to one particularly nasty denizen of the night. The need to drink blood and wanton lust for destructive wickedness, became Lamashtu’s attributes; she became the mother of vampires; prime creation of our vile and sorrowful anxieties; the child of our nightmares.

Interestingly, crib death, or cot death, is still, well into the twenty first century, a natural yet completely unexplained phenomenon that claims, in the United States alone, over 2000 children a year. Autopsies, differential diagnosis and genetics have so far not been able to find the elusive reason for such a cruel malady. 

Excerpt: The Wraith of The Obelisk- L.J. Gomez.