LogFAQs > #934583897

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I've always had a major logical problem with vampire and werewolf mythos, and it's this.

Why does silver have such power to hurt them?

In the case of werewolves, it's entirely because a movie came out in the 1940s and the entire world was brainwashed into accepting it as fact. Silver was never a thing in werewolf myth before. Most people would be absolutely astonished to realize just how much of what they think they know about werewolves comes from The Wolf Man (their bite was literally never contagious before then, either, for example). It's the same way sunlight wasn't actually lethal to vampires until Nosferatu came out. Hollywood has seriously distorted our understanding of supernatural folklore.

Though in the modern context, silver hurts werewolves almost entirely because werewolves are now tied so strongly to the moon. Silver is the moon's metal, werewolves are clearly moon-touched, so it's mostly a case of "fighting fire with fire" or turning their own nature against them.

For vampires (the ones who actually had a weakness to silver in traditional folklore)? It's because a lot of folklore involved silver being a particularly "pure" metal (and there are theories that this is because silver actually has demonstrably anti-microbial properties that even pre-scientific cultures would be able to notice). This might also be part of what led to the use of "quicksilver" (aka mercury) in alchemical potions meant to prolong life (ironically doing the opposite).

So the assumption was that something so pure would be anathema to a creature that is by definition unnatural and unholy. Incidentally, the silver thing is also the reason why vampires don't reflect in mirrors - mirrors were originally backed with silver as the reflecting agent, and the pure silver obviously wouldn't reflect the corrupt evil of such a creature. This is also why in some modern interpretations you couldn't photograph vampires either - early photography used plates with silver in them. Which actually means that, logically, modern mirrors shouldn't have a problem reflecting vampires anymore, and film shouldn't have a problem taking their picture - so if you're an aspiring vampire hunter, you'd have to go out of your way to special order custom mirrors or track down antique mirrors if you wanted to use them as a vampire detector.

As for why gold doesn't work (via its connection to the sun), well, there's two reasons against it. First, as I mentioned earlier, the sun was never actually anathema to vampires prior to Nosferatu (Dracula didn't like the sun, and vampires were always nocturnal in general, but the sun wouldn't kill them any more than it would if you took a skunk or bat or owl out in the daytime), so there was never really time for that to work it's way into the mythos (though a modern writer could certainly work that idea into a story if they wanted). But secondly, gold wasn't even the universal metal of the sun anyway - in a number of cultures, silver is more associated with the sun than gold is (Apollo, for example, had a silver bow and silver arrows). Modern pop culture tends to equate gold with the sun (which might stem from Christianity, or might actually be even later via Mayan/Aztec/Incan influence), but people living in the forests of Eastern Europe wouldn't necessarily have immediately made the leap that gold = sun.

Plus, let's be honest, silver is more common/cheaper than gold. If you're looking for anti-monster weapons, you're probably not going to be melting down gold to make bullets or stakes or daggers or whatever unless you're a king. And pure gold is soft - weapons made out of gold would be much more likely to bend or deform than silver ones.

Though there's other alternatives to consider. Vampire myths/fiction that take China/Asia into account tend to allow jade to be an option, as jade is supposed to have the power to purify and prevent rot. And modern versions can incorporate other things that pre-industrial cultures would never have been able to conceive (like the anti-coagulant in Blade) - any rare non-naturally occurring material could potentially be a problem for vampires, and no one ever realized it before because no vampire had ever been exposed to it.
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