What I realized was that for my purposes, the conversion to vampire has got to be an alternate type of transsubstantiation -- what once was human undergoes substantial change to become a vampire, and that new substance is not a soul that has a collection of carnal accidents (there's a phrase for you), but rather another sort of immaterial non-soul that projects the outward appearance of many of the same accidents that the former human had. Vampires have no souls not because their souls went elsewhere but because their souls transmuted into something else altogether. Moreover, the rules for killing them are different because there is no actual flesh that the vampire spirit inhabits and depends on for incarnation -- for a vampire flesh and spirit is all one thing. Likewise, it's trickier to kill demons, angels, and gods than to kill men, because immortals have not flesh to discorporate from, merely the appearance of flesh. This also accounts for why the gods disappear after they die. They are translated to the afterlife in toto. "Eureka!" says I.
I have no idea how much of this will actually show up overtly in the book, but it helps me enormously to understand how this all works.
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Date: 2008-07-03 05:23 pm (UTC)What I realized was that for my purposes, the conversion to vampire has got to be an alternate type of transsubstantiation -- what once was human undergoes substantial change to become a vampire, and that new substance is not a soul that has a collection of carnal accidents (there's a phrase for you), but rather another sort of immaterial non-soul that projects the outward appearance of many of the same accidents that the former human had. Vampires have no souls not because their souls went elsewhere but because their souls transmuted into something else altogether. Moreover, the rules for killing them are different because there is no actual flesh that the vampire spirit inhabits and depends on for incarnation -- for a vampire flesh and spirit is all one thing. Likewise, it's trickier to kill demons, angels, and gods than to kill men, because immortals have not flesh to discorporate from, merely the appearance of flesh. This also accounts for why the gods disappear after they die. They are translated to the afterlife in toto. "Eureka!" says I.
I have no idea how much of this will actually show up overtly in the book, but it helps me enormously to understand how this all works.