For awhile now this has bugged me, why are vampires considered undead? You don't die when you get bitten by one and as far as TES goes theres been no real evidence of a person dying while not being infected with the virus and coming back to life besides the first vampire Lamae Bal but even so we still don't know if she was dead or put in a death like coma by Molag Bal.

My reasoning for seeing Vampirism as a disease rather then a form of undead is fairly simple and was made through various observations of it in games and books.

For one the disease requires blood, thus for my reasoning its a blood disease which attacks a infected person's blood cells before eventually attacking skin cells thus requiring vampires to feed on the blood of non-infected in order to combat the disease so they can blend in with society, forgo the feedings and the vampires will turn stronger by the disease trying to stay alive but also causing the disease to attack skin cells thus causing what appears to be rapid aging, discoloration of the eyes, teeth growing larger and causing one's skin to become hypersensitive to sunlight and causing a burning like sensation which causes the virus to panic and attack the person's body.

As for the immortality I believe its just the virus delaying aging so it can continue living, truth be told we don't actually know if vampires can die of old age or not since theres no record of a vampire living passed 300-500 years, maybe one day they can actually die from old age but it would take a long time and finally the Vampire Lords, I just see this as a more advanced form of the virus which eventually leads to a bat humanoid state where said vampires begin to become powerful through feeding and gain bat like abilities and cause addition transformations.

Just a theory I'm working.

Yeah, the "dead" and "undead" labels are a bit of a toughie. Even in real world history, the line drawn between "dead" and "not dead" has moved quite a bit. Is it when you stop breathing? Not anymore. Is it when your heart stops? I don't think so (I consider death irreversible in real world). Right now it seems that "brain dead" is the new determining factor for deciding what is dead and what isn't (yet this has been contested recently, and there are other living organisms that don't have brains at all).

I like to think vampirism is a disease that gives the person the appearance of undeath. The fact that there is a cure kind of backs this up; as I said, I consider death irreversible.

And I think the difference between "undead" and "alive" is that the undead are artificially animated dead bodies. As far as liches go, I need to ponder it out some more I suppose

Just an update to people seeing it before I edited it, the first time when I posted I accidentally hit enter, the full theory is now up.


I agree completely, I see undead and vampires as two separate things.

Its complicated. For all intents and purposes, they walk the line between life and death while sticking out their tongues and going nanananabooboo at Arkay. They're the walking not-dead unliving.

Lol well the whole thing was because Molag Bal was angry at Arkay after what I assume was a debate on immortality in the mortal races and decided to mock his whole station and wheel with vampirism, but this just also further proves my theory, Molag Bal is the daedra of corruption and sometimes diseases are seen as a corruption of one's body, thus a form of corruption.

I always thought the drinking of blood was to consume some life-essence that the undead being craves, and that's what makes them look more normal after they've had some.

In Daggerfall you died. You got buried in the closest graveyard and lost all your guild memberships and everything. I'd say the reason you don't in later games is largely because of gameplay. Daggerfall was huge with a lot of randomly generated content. "Starting over" in your new unlife wasn't as big of a problem because you didn't really miss out on anything (with one or two exceptions), so you could just rejoin and go right back into it. But it would be a bit more jarring if that were to happen in the later games because of how scaled down the world was and how the guild quest lines were structured.

Also, in Skyrim vampires don't show up with the Detect Life spell, but they do with Detect Dead.

A person can come back from the dead in Mundus, too. You did in Oblivion and a priest of Boethiah did in Skyrim (incidentally, both were because of Molag Bal). Potema the Wolf Queen almost did in Skyrim. The lycanthropy cure quest in Bloodmoon also involved an innocent woman being killed and being brought back to life.

Count Hassildor ruled Skingrad as a vampire for "many generations", to the point where his people thought he was a powerful wizard for being able to live so long. His wife was able to survive as a vampire for just as long without feeding, albeit in a coma. http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Jakben, is also a vampire that survived for at least 300 years -- he passed himself off as a descendent of a famous thief that died 300 years ago, and during a quest it's revealed that (spoiler!) he is that thief. The only reason he died is because you killed him.

Interestingly, http://uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Diary_of_Springheel_Jak contains this passage:
"I have become one of the children of the night, a son to mother wolf and brother to the bat. I am nosferatu, a vampyre. Tonight is the first night of the rest of eternity."
So there is precedence linking vampirism and bats in TES.

They are undead because they have forsaken their oath to Arkay.

It may be a form of corruption but dont forget diseases are Peryite's realm and so vampires wouldve been Peryite's creation not Molag Bal's. Also, Molag Bal was angered at Arkay's pride as being in control of death as no other Divine does so MB wanted to hurt his ego a bit.

They are undead because in order to cure themselves they have to give themselves a "new life" to fill their lifeless bodies by way of a black soul gem. I believe that people do "die" when they become a vampire but never appear to because by the time their life has left completely their body the disease (kind of a combination of a disease and a daedric curse) has already replaced the life and keeps the body intact so it doesn't rot.

Well, first of all, Liches rip their own souls out, kinda hard to reverse that. But on the same note, vampires are for all intents and purposes, dead. Some people here on have already mentioned the "detect dead" for instance. What I find interesting, is that you need a filled black soul gem to cure yourself. I wonder if this means that one of the ways to cure vampirism is to replace your soul? What would this mean for the purgeblood salts from deepscorn hollow? Does it destroy the illness itself?

Everything so far seems to insinuate that lichdom is permanent, and it doesn't seem like anything could cure it. The reason I bring this up is that if liches rip their souls out, why couldn't they just use a filled black soul gem? This probably means the soul gem doesn't just replace a soul, so maybe its something like using the elements of a soul to redevelop the original soul.

Oh man I wish I understood this.

Yeah, this kind of ties in with the recent thread about Mortal Souls. How does a lich retain selfhood/identity if that kind of qualitative information is bound up within a soul? And TES:O throws us a curve when the main protagonists have no soul (taken by Molag Bal).

For using a soul to cure vampirism, I can't really imagine the vampire acquires it for itself, but rather uses is as divine energy (see Ingenium).

Having a soul obviously has nothing to do with life, otherwise we could not capture souls from skeletons (could be explained by white vs black souls).

And I'm willing to believe that the "detect dead" spell is for gameplay purposes rather than a statement about reality.

The feeling I got fromt his most recent cure vampirism quest was that you traded. Your soul for the soul of the person in the soul gem. At least that's how it appeared to me.

Following this hypothesis, where does identity reside in a person? If not the soul, where does a characters selfness emerge from? Is it simply neurological/biological? And what does this also mean for afterlives in daedric realms?

Is the loss of a soul the way we define "undead"? What about the protagonists in the upcoming TES:O? What is the difference between men with souls and men without?

A lich retains their soul. It's just temporarily stored/merged in a phylactery as the body is put through some kind of ritual, then put back in afterward. The body decomposes, but the soul remains with it.

Is it said anywhere that you don't have a soul in TES:O? I know Molag Bal owns it, but that doesn't mean you don't have one.. just that he has say over it.

Can't offer much insight to the black soul gem for the cure, but in Oblivion you needed a couple grand soul gems, along with some other ingredients and the blood of an Argonian. If it even has anything to do with the cure, I'd agree that it's for the energy and not for some kind of soul swapping, particularly since it can be filled with a vampire's soul.

Not sure about that. Bethesda had to go out of their way to be able to mark specific NPCs as undead, since in previous games they couldn't. Having vampires show up with Detect Dead was something they did on purpose. I can't think of any reason for them to make vampires show under Detect Dead unless they wanted to say vampires are (un)dead.