Yesterday Evening I Returned...

...from a weekend (Sat.-Mon.) with my sister---while I was in Winston-Salem, my sister took me to the library at Wake Forest University as she had research to do for her lesson plans. While I was there, I stuck my buisness card in three random books: a copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, a copy of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe and The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 1: Heretics, Orthodoxy, the Blatchford Controversies (Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton)---so whoever checks them out will find my Blog.

Anyways, I had one more Halloween related post that I didn't get to post, so here is the gist of it:

Was Dracula a Christian Hero?

Elizabeth Kostova's new best-seller offers readers a Dracula concerned not just with blood, but with the fate of his soul.
BY: Interview by Rebecca Phillips
To fans of the Bram Stoker novel "Dracula" or the dozens of Hollywood adaptations that have followed it, Dracula, the legendary Eastern European vampire, is usually viewed as an enemy of Christianity. But in her new best-selling novel, "The Historian," Elizabeth Kostova offers a surprising look at a Dracula whose choices are often informed by faith. Kostova's Dracula is based partly on the Stoker legend and partly on the 15th century Balkan ruler known as Vlad the Impaler who inspired Stoker's 1897 Dracula tale. Her book tells the story of a father and daughter in search of the real Dracula, taking readers on a journey through contemporary Romania and Bulgaria, Ottoman Turkey, and medieval Christian Europe. Along the way she reveals a great deal about the historical relationship between Christianity and the Dracula legend. Dracula's name, for instance, came from the Order of the Dragon, originally founded to protect Christian Europe from invasion by Muslim Ottomans. In Kostova's book, Dracula helps build monasteries, befriends monks, and ultimately is concerned not with blood or young women, but with his own salvation. Kostova recently spoke with Beliefnet about the Christian leanings of this longtime horror-story favorite.

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Home > Entertainment > Books > Was Dracula a Christian Hero?
Was Dracula a Christian Hero?
Elizabeth Kostova's new best-seller offers readers a Dracula concerned not just with blood, but with the fate of his soul.
BY: Interview by Rebecca Phillips

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Resize - Minus Resize - Plus To fans of the Bram Stoker novel "Dracula" or the dozens of Hollywood adaptations that have followed it, Dracula, the legendary Eastern European vampire, is usually viewed as an enemy of Christianity. But in her new best-selling novel, "The Historian," Elizabeth Kostova offers a surprising look at a Dracula whose choices are often informed by faith. Kostova's Dracula is based partly on the Stoker legend and partly on the 15th century Balkan ruler known as Vlad the Impaler who inspired Stoker's 1897 Dracula tale. Her book tells the story of a father and daughter in search of the real Dracula, taking readers on a journey through contemporary Romania and Bulgaria, Ottoman Turkey, and medieval Christian Europe. Along the way she reveals a great deal about the historical relationship between Christianity and the Dracula legend. Dracula's name, for instance, came from the Order of the Dragon, originally founded to protect Christian Europe from invasion by Muslim Ottomans. In Kostova's book, Dracula helps build monasteries, befriends monks, and ultimately is concerned not with blood or young women, but with his own salvation. Kostova recently spoke with Beliefnet about the Christian leanings of this longtime horror-story favorite.

What attracted you at first to the Dracula story?
I've been drawn to the legend of Dracula since childhood. Like a lot of children, I was intrigued by it, and then kind of forgot about it for many years. Then about 11 years ago when I was writing and publishing short work and just beginning to think about writing a novel, I remembered Dracula tales that my father had told me while I was traveling with my family as a child in Eastern and Western Europe, and how much I had loved these tales, which were loosely based on the Hollywood classic films that he grew up with. I wondered if they would make a good structure for a novel.
Was it the scariness of the stories that drew you in?
Yes, I liked the creepiness of the Dracula legend, as many children do. But I think what really drew me in was that I associated Dracula with travel, and with history and beautiful historic places because of the settings in which I had heard these stories. I also had already spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe, since childhood, and I wanted to find a way to write about that history.

Is the Dracula story still a big part of the culture of Romania?
The Dracula legend was known for centuries in Eastern Europe through folk songs and epic poetry. It was reintroduced in its new supernatural form by Hollywood. Now Romanians are very aware of Dracula because he's become a major export and a tourist attraction. For some Romanians that's a discouraging thing, but for others it's a way to attract western tourists. Many Romanians are proud of Dracula as a national hero. The historical Dracula is a very complicated figure.

The historical Dracula, who most historians think the Stoker novel was based on, was a cruel ruler who tortured thousands of people. It's hard to know about Vlad Dracula's history as a torturer and impaler and reconcile that with thinking of him as a hero.
That's true. One of the things that really interested me in examining Eastern European history for this book is how wildly perspectives on one figure or event vary, according to the ethnic group you ask.

For Romanian Orthodox Christians in the Byzantine tradition, Dracula was a hero who held back the invading Ottoman armies longer than most leaders managed to do. He was a Christian hero, in spite of his sadism toward his own people. Of course for the Ottomans he was a barbarian, who was attacking the fringes of their civilization. It's very interesting to see him from all these points of view.

Your book gets deep into the history of the Christian origins of the Dracula legend. Even his name comes from the Order of the Dragon, which was supposed to protect Christians from the invading Ottomans.
Yes, that's right.

It's pretty clear in your book that the historical Dracula considered himself a pious Christian. Can you tell me anything more about Vlad Dracula's actual beliefs? How much of this part of your book is based on history?
It's very hard to know what the actual beliefs of a medieval figure were, unless that person was a cleric or a religious writer who would be likely to record those beliefs. There are stories about Dracula that were written down by his contemporaries, or diplomats who went to his court, or scribes.

One thing that several different sources report about him is that he did have some doubts about where he was going to end up after he died. He seems to have been aware that his deeds of torture and murder of his own people, at least--and who knows how he felt about torturing and murdering Ottomans, he may have felt very differently about that--caused him some doubt about whether or not he could actually enter heaven, as it was viewed in the traditions of the time. He gave a great deal of money to several monasteries to rebuild them or to enrich them, including the monastery where he's buried, as you saw in the book.

It's hard to tell from the record whether he was genuinely pious, or just a shrewd leader who was worried about what was going to happen to his soul.

So if the inspiration for the Dracula legend was a believing Christian, why did it become traditional for religious people to wear crucifixes to ward off vampires?
Well, that's a completely separate tradition. Nobody believed, in Dracula's lifetime or in many centuries after his lifetime, that he was a vampire. That connection--putting the Dracula name on a vampire--was completely invented by Bram Stoker, in his 1897 novel "Dracula." But there was, and still is in places, this very strong Eastern European belief in vampires. The vampire is an incarnation of evil in East European folklore, and can be opposed only by a mixture of rituals, some of which are Christian and some of which probably pre-date Christianity.

The non-Christian ones include the use of garlic?
Yes, like the garlic. The idea of the vampire appears in world history long before Christianity. Many of the regions of Eastern Europe probably had vampire beliefs that came out of just being agricultural societies, long before they converted to Christianity. So Bram Stoker took all these different elements and conflated them. But actually in life, Vlad Dracula would have been much more likely to have worn a Christian symbol himself.

See also: Vlad III the Impaler.

Also, a thumbs up to Tripp for the great Reformation Day Podcast and the cool Martin Luther pic!

Another Shark "Virgin Birth"

A blacktip shark, like the one pictured here, is the second documented case of a female shark becoming pregnant without the aid of a male shark.


So apparently another shark gave birth to a shark pup without the aid of "genetic material from a male." Here is the full article from AOL News:

Aquarium's 'Virgin' Shark Was Pregnant By STEVE SZKOTAK, AP
posted: 5 HOURS 42 MINUTES AGOcomments: 173filed under: Animal News, Science NewsPrintShareText SizeAAARICHMOND, Va. (Oct. 10) - Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark.
In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.

The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Neb., zoo.
"This first case was no fluke," Demian Chapman, a shark scientist and lead author of the second study, said in a statement. "It is quite possible that this is something female sharks of many species can do on occasion."
The aquarium sharks that reproduced without mates each carried only one pup, while some shark species can produce litters numbering in the dozen or more. The scientists cautioned that the rare asexual births should not be viewed as a possible solution to declining global shark populations.
"It is very unlikely that a small number of female survivors could build their numbers up very quickly by undergoing virgin birth," Chapman said.
The medical mystery began 16 months ago after the death of the Atlantic blacktip shark named Tidbit at the Virginia Beach aquarium. No male blacktip sharks were present during her eight years at the aquarium.
In May 2007, the 5-foot, 94-pound shark died of stress-related complications related to her unknown pregnancy after undergoing a yearly checkup. The 10-inch shark pup was found during a necropsy of Tidbit, surprising aquarium officials. They initially thought the embryonic pup was either a product of a virgin birth or a cross between the blacktip and a male of another shark species — which has never been documented, Chapman said.
Tidbit's pup was nearly full term, and likely would have been quickly eaten by "really big sand tiger sharks" that were in the tank, Chapman said in a telephone interview from Florida.

That is what happened to the tiny hammerhead pup in the Omaha case.
"By the time they could realize what they were looking at, something munched the baby," he said of aquarium workers. The remains of the pup were used for the DNA testing.
Virgin birth has been proven in some bony fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, and has been suspected among sharks in the wild. The scientists who studied the Virginia and Nebraska sharks said the newly formed pups acquired one set of chromosomes when the mother's chromosomes split during egg development, then united anew.
Absent the chromosomes present in the male sperm, the offspring of an asexual conception have reduced genetic diversity and, the scientists said, may be at a disadvantage for surviving in the wild. A pup, for instance, can be more susceptible to congenital disorders and diseases.
The scientists said their findings offer "intriguing questions" about how frequently automictic parthenogenesis occurs in the wild.
"It is possible that parthenogenesis could become more common in these sharks if population densities become so low that females have trouble finding mates," said Mahmood Shivji, one of the scientists and director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida.
The DNA fingerprinting techniques used by the scientists are identical to those used in human paternity testing.
Chapman, who is with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook, was assisted in the study by Beth Firchau of the Virginia Aquarium.
Chapman and Shivji were on the team that made the first discovery of virgin birth involving the Nebraska shark.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2008-10-10 00:01:59

Based on these scientific findings, here is my satire of a Fundamentalist/Bible Literalist shark's reaction to the event:

Shark Press: "So Mr. Sharkingswell what are your feelings about Virginia Mary Blacktip's virgin birth?

Sharky Sharkingswell: "It was a literal event, of course, for it was described in Sharkysaiah 7:14. And as we know Joseph Blacktip didn't "know" Mary, so of course we should believe the Holy Shark Bible says what it means and that the only way for Shark Jesus to be born is for Mary to literally be a virgin in the sense of sexual abstinence."

Shark Press: "But isn't the Sharkebrew word in Sharkysaiah used, almah, which literally means "young woman" and isn't the original context of the word virgin---"general purity?"

Sharky Sharkingswell: "I don't care about that or what Shark-bible scholars say. The Shark-bible is clear and says that Joseph was shocked about Virgina Mary's pregnancy and that's what the Institutionalized Shark-church teaches."

Shark Press: "But don't you find it fishy that Joseph and Mary were traveling/living together before marriage which was/is considered sinful?"

Sharky Sharkingswell: "No that's just foolish rebellious teenage talk everyone knows to doubt the Shark-made dogmas of the institutionalized shark-church and expose their origins and the misinterpretations of the shark-bible for what they are is to doubt Great White, our Shark-God. You should read G. K. Sharkerton's Orthosharky or Ravi Sharkarias' Can Sharks Live Without Great White? for they know what they are talking about."

Shark Press: "So there you have it, Mr. Sharky Sharkswell's take on the birth of our Shark-Messiah, Shark-Jesus, Son Of Virginia Mary and Joseph and Son Of Great White, our Shark-God."