Thursday, January 30, 2025

A Biblical Parallel in Dracula?

 I've been re-reading Dracula, the original novel by Bram Stoker, which unleased the unkillable Count on an endless spree through literature, cinema, theatre, and every other form of culture imaginable.

I'm rather excited to notice a Biblical parallel which has, I think, eluded everyone so far. (At least, I can't find any reference to it on the internet, and surely everything is on the internet.)

In this passage, Professor Van Helsing is beginning to suggest to his protegé and fellow Man of Science, Dr. John Seward, that something vampiric may be at work in the strange events they have experienced.

He subjects Dr. Seward to a series of rhetorical questions:

There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”

“Good God, Professor!” I said, starting up. “Do you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?” He waved his hand for silence, and went on:—

“Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint? Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and women who cannot die? We all know—because science has vouched for the fact—that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”

This, to me, seems clearly inspired by the Book of...

Well, reader, what do you think? Which Book?

(I've just discovered that I'm not, alas, the first to notice this parallel. Well, it was too good to be true. It's still interesting, though.)

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