Vampires: Why a WOODEN stake?

In many cultures, various woods have been considered to be sacred or holy. (Oak to the Irish, for example.) I've assumed that it's tapping into those much older belief systems and using the sacred to destroy the impure.

Before we understood how the human decayed after death, there was the belief that corpses were climbing out of their coffins and feasting on thier relatives. This is where the vampires myth started. One method of keeping the "Vampire" in its coffin was literally staking them into it. It didn't orginally need to be wooden, but wood was easier to come by then steel stakes.

Wooden stakes did not kill a vampire. In many of the vampire legends, if the stake was removed, a vampire could return.

This is why in certain cultures, removing the head was the only sure way to kill a vampire...

I looked around various sites, and it's actually *not* agreed that the stake must be wooden. HowStuffWorks has a great history of Vampires, and describes corpses staked with iron.

I think it's usually wood simply because wood (as the Buffy series so frequently illustrated) can so rapidly be turned into a stake.

In one of Tim Powers' books (can't remember which; sorry. The one with Lord Byron in it), it's linked to electrical conductivity, i.e. wooden stakes and silver bullets--they're both foreign bodies that would mess up an electrical current.

Of course, the "vampires" in that book are not stock vampires.

As DeleyanLee noted, in various cultures, certain trees and their woods are considered to have magical properties. Ash, I believe, is one of the more effective woods against vampires. From a practical point of view, you'd be looking for a very hard wood, since it would have to withstand quite a bit of hammering to make it to a vamp heart.

No matter how easy Buffy makes it look.

But if you want to use something other than wood or a stake, go for it. Just make sure your rationale for the killing method makes sense in the context of your magic/supernatural system.

I don't know much about the history and variety of vampires in legend. They've never been my favorite monsters for some reason. No idea why. But I would think you could tweak the wood thing if you wished. Make it only certain kinds of woods (ones that are considered particularly pure by the culture in question), or maybe only "green wood" that is freshly cut and thus still alive? Or maybe, as others have said, it's the way the stake is used that matters.

Why do you have to put flour in a cake? Because nothing else works the same way. Maybe you can slow down a vampire with a plastic tent stake to the heart, but you can't stop it.

It's a formula. If you could kill a vampire with buckshot or rat poison or a handsaw, it wouldn't be so dangerous. If you could only kill it with the gearshift lever from a 1967 GTO, it would be even more dangerous.

In the end, it's your story. The whole "wood stake through the heart" thing doesn't make sense? Toss it. Just remember that the less vulnerable the monster is, the more powerful (and more scary) it is.

Our current understanding of life is pretty recent. even in medicine you don't have to go back too far to find a very different view of life and health.

Before we understood heart / liver / kidney there were ideas about life force, and energy. These ideas still stick around for people who believe in auras, healing energy of crystals, etc.

Go back a bit further and life in all its form was "an energy". Trees were believed to have protective spirits. Blood had power, eating the heart of an enemy transferred power.

My guess would be it's a throwback to the idea of "lifeforce" and the vampire myth had vampires stealing life (blood) to cheat death but vulnerable to life, sunlight and all things healthy and vital.

So "life" defeats "death"

Plus the peasants didn't have titanium stakes or rocket launchers.

Craig

Isn't garlic meant to kill vampires as well?
Could do that and say all vampire are allergic to garlic maybe, or stick garlic on the wood maybe

I don't have access to the links right now, but there are several recent articles about excavating vamipre graves in Europe. Skeletal remains were buried with rocks in the mouth. Some had heads removed and placed between the feet, and some were staked with iron. I think they were in Archaeology magazine.

Makes me wonder what would happen if you used a particleboard stake.

I've seen the wooden stake requirement logicked out in several novels (I don't recall any of the details). But re the life vs death thing above -- I just had the odd idea that you can temporarily pin 'em to the ground with wooden stakes, but to permanently fix 'em you have to plant something that grows through 'em. If it dies, the vampire escapes.

Could be something mystical tied into the fact that the wood also used to be alive but is now dead? Except it hasn't rotted and continues to function, etc.

No idea -- but there's room for you to make use of any of the numerous neat ideas in here.

I've got a couple of books on the history of vampire lore somewhere in my garage; what I recall offhand is that there wasn't a single idea of "vampire", nor a single method of killing them (and as someone upthread mentioned, it wasn't so much killing them as making sure the dead person didn't come alive again; usually the potential vampires were suicides or murder victims: people who were considered to have reasons why they might not automatically go on to their heavenly reward or whatever was expected of souls). And because people don't like the idea of being powerless against the undead -- if you're going to have the idea that dead people crawl out of their graves, you might as well have the idea that you can deal with that -- there were various tricks to prevent this from happening. Bury the dead person face-down, bury the dead person at a crossroads (apparently they'd get confused about which way to go...and then just stand there blankly until they got run over by a carriage or something, I guess), cut off the head (and maybe even bury it separately), put a stake through the heart...

Most of the legends come from a time when people generally stayed in the same town their whole lives, so they'd have to use what was around them. So as to why a wooden stake in particular, my personal guess is that, for European vampires, wood was always available.

I think you can do what you like with vamps these days - in the TV series Supernatural they kill vamps by beheading them, not by staking.

It used to be a given that fire killed vamps, but why don't you ever see hunters with flamethrowers? I like flamethrowers!

As others have previously mentioned, stakes were originally used to impale bodies into their coffins so they wouldn't rise again. I'm guessing wood was easiet to come by.

Your book could reference this 'myth' in order to not confuse readers who expect the usual stake fare. If you have rules for killing vampires then I think you need to establish what can and can't kill vampires.

Beheading or fire are good ways to kill anything, vampire or not.

As for a wooden stake to the heart, to paraphrase Buffy, you'd be suprised how many things that will kill.

The original concept of vampires is that they were the epitome of uncleanliness, just pure evil. So anything regarded as 'pure' or 'good' harmed them. Running water, silver mirrors, religious symbols, holy water, roses, sunlight, and green wood were all repellant to vampires. (I'm not sure where the allergy to garlic came from. )

RemusShepherd said:

The original concept of vampires is that they were the epitome of uncleanliness, just pure evil. So anything regarded as 'pure' or 'good' harmed them. Running water, silver mirrors, religious symbols, holy water, roses, sunlight, and green wood were all repellant to vampires. (I'm not sure where the allergy to garlic came from. )

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Because good hummus is as close to pure heaven as you can get. Om nom nom!

Paramite Pie said:

As for a wooden stake to the heart, to paraphrase Buffy, you'd be suprised how many things that will kill.

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Yeah but Buffy got to the point where you could poke a vamp in the breastbone with a pencil and it would explode. Holding it down and hammering in a bloody great stake I can buy, but pencil-poking? Not so much.

PeteMC said:

Yeah but Buffy got to the point where you could poke a vamp in the breastbone with a pencil and it would explode. Holding it down and hammering in a bloody great stake I can buy, but pencil-poking? Not so much.

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Buffy was satire. I laughed at that like it was part of the joke of the whole series.

If I had to invent an explanation, I'd say that the wooden stake has to be made from the same wood the coffin was made of. Or even better, from the same tree. The reason would be that the coffin acts as a sealing box, and the blessing by a priest at the funeral makes it capable of resisting the necromantic forces from entering or leaving.

Most of the "rules" were NOT devised by Hollywood. Universal DIDNT create the vampire. They, and the rules that govern them, come from myths, legends, and superstitions. Sorry, but that comment really irks me. It's like saying wizards started with Harry Potter. Really?

Anyway, I forgot where I read it, possibly Bram Stoker's novel (and he borrowed heavily from myths), but it wasn't just any old stake. It was a monster-sized thing three feet long, and as others pointed out, it merely kept the vampire pinned to the coffin like a butterfly. You still had to severe the head to do a thorough job.