Mohra blood in the Barbverse
I think I've finally worked all the bugs out of this. I came up with the basics of this long ago, but it was the S10 comics which gave me the last pieces of the puzzle. Posted mainly for my own reference.
In BtVS/AtS canon, if you dose a vampire with the blood of a Mohra demon, it brings their body to life. If they have a soul, the demon part of them is apparently banished, and they become human.
Canon doesn't explain exactly why the demon is kicked out, rather than remaining in the body like Eyghon. My theory is that it's not a complete demon, only a piece of the founding demon's essence, so it's not like there's a personality in there with its own plans and desires and memories. It's just a mindless animating urge towards bloodshed and destruction. This fits in with the information we got about Archaeus in the BtVS Season 10 comics. I also hypothesize that the ritual exchange of blood which allows the demon essence to bud into a new host body only works if the body in question is right on the verge of death. If, by some chance, the victim didn't die right away (because the vampire failed to drain them sufficiently, or because they were whisked away to an emergency room and had a couple of pints pumped into them) then the 'budding' of the demon essence would fail, and they wouldn't become a vampire.
So when a vampire is dosed with Mohra blood and the human host body comes to life, the body is no longer a welcoming environment for the demon essence, which must flee or be dislodged. It returns to the Old One or demon lord which first created their particular vampire lineage and is reabsorbed, just as it would if a vampire was staked, beheaded, or otherwise dusted. For most vampires, presumably this would be Maloker; for descendants of the Master, it would be Archaeus; it's entirely possible that there are other 'families' of vampires with other demon progenitors.
This is why Darla didn't remember anything between being staked and being resurrected by Wolfram and Hart. Her physical body was dust, and the demon essence which had animated it returned to Archaeus and didn't exist as a discrete entity any longer. When Drusilla re-vamped Darla, Darla got a fresh new 'clone' of the Archaeus-line demon essence.
I have some vampire characters who are dosed with Mohra blood while soulless. My assumption is that while Mohra blood can return a dead body to life, it doesn't call the soul back. There are therefore two possible outcomes when an unsouled vampire gets brought back to life via this route: The first and most common is that when the Mohra blood revives the body, the demon essence is expelled, and what results is a living body which has neither a soul nor an animating demon. It's a sort of flesh robot. It retains all its physical memories, and it can make some rote responses to stimuli, but it has no volition, no will, and no sense of self. It has to be prompted to do everything. In theory, one could still use the Ritual of Restoration to return its soul, but barring that, such a case will quickly degenerate into a vegetative state and die. The Soul Glutton's human victims seem to have died when their souls were eaten, which would support this idea.
There is one instance of a living, functioning, possibly-soulless human in the Buffyverse, the boy Ryan from "I've Got You Under My Skin." (I discount Buffy in "The Roommate" because Buffy didn't lose her soul completely, and as we now know, Slayers also have some demon essence in them too, which could provide an animating principle in the absence of a human soul.) For the purposes of my theory, either there's some difference between having been born without a soul, and losing one in later life, or Ryan does actually have a soul, it's just defective/stunted/inoperative in some fashion.
The second, and far less common, outcome of dosing a soulless vampire with Mohra blood would be the vampire managing to retain a hold on their demon essence long enough for the Mohra blood to forcibly integrate it with the reviving human body. When the human body and demon essence are united, the connection between the vampire and the demon founder of their vampiric lineage is broken. This allows the essence to develop into an independent demon soul/spirit/whatever, equivalent to the sorts of souls that other living demon species have. The end result is a living (rather than undead) vampire. Such vampires retain most of the usual vampire strengths and weaknesses, with some minor modifications. (They still require blood to live, but can digest some solid food, preferentially organ meat related to blood -- heart, liver marrow, etc. They still cannot cross thresholds uninvited. Not being undead, they are not vulnerable to holy water. They still burn in sunlight, but less quickly and severely than a normal vampire. While they still heal quickly, they are now vulnerable to many more forms of physical damage, and can die of many more things than fire, staking, or beheading: they can be poisoned, suffocated, drowned, die of hypothermia or heat stroke, blood loss, major organ failure, infection, illness, etc.) They are mortal, with a more or less human lifespan. They do not dust when they die. Upon death, rather than being reabsorbed into the founding demon, their souls go to some as yet undetermined hell dimension, as (presumably) the souls of other living demons do. Living vampires are no longer subject to the influence or control of the founding demon. As they reproduce biologically, rather than via turning humans, their offspring are born and grow up in the usual way, and there is no equivalent to the sire bond which exists in normal vampires.
It should be noted that the sample size here is exactly three vampires, so caution should be used in drawing conclusions. However, several psychological factors appear to increase the chances that a soulless vampire will be able to hold body and demon together long enough to survive a dose of Mohra blood. The most important one seems simply to be a desire to be alive again; to date, all three vampires who have survived the process have been more or less willing subjects. Other factors appear to relate to the degree to which the human personality and the demon essence are integrated, psychologically speaking, and how well a vampire can control their demonic urges at need.
During the events of POM, when Spike becomes the first soulless vampire to survive Mohra blood, Archaeus is off in some demon dimension or other, doing whatever drama queen demon lords do in their spare time, but sooner or later, he's going to realize that some of his vampiric get are making off with little pieces of his essence, and he will not be happy about it. I just have to figure out what happens then.
Rants Talk to me
In BtVS/AtS canon, if you dose a vampire with the blood of a Mohra demon, it brings their body to life. If they have a soul, the demon part of them is apparently banished, and they become human.
Canon doesn't explain exactly why the demon is kicked out, rather than remaining in the body like Eyghon. My theory is that it's not a complete demon, only a piece of the founding demon's essence, so it's not like there's a personality in there with its own plans and desires and memories. It's just a mindless animating urge towards bloodshed and destruction. This fits in with the information we got about Archaeus in the BtVS Season 10 comics. I also hypothesize that the ritual exchange of blood which allows the demon essence to bud into a new host body only works if the body in question is right on the verge of death. If, by some chance, the victim didn't die right away (because the vampire failed to drain them sufficiently, or because they were whisked away to an emergency room and had a couple of pints pumped into them) then the 'budding' of the demon essence would fail, and they wouldn't become a vampire.
So when a vampire is dosed with Mohra blood and the human host body comes to life, the body is no longer a welcoming environment for the demon essence, which must flee or be dislodged. It returns to the Old One or demon lord which first created their particular vampire lineage and is reabsorbed, just as it would if a vampire was staked, beheaded, or otherwise dusted. For most vampires, presumably this would be Maloker; for descendants of the Master, it would be Archaeus; it's entirely possible that there are other 'families' of vampires with other demon progenitors.
This is why Darla didn't remember anything between being staked and being resurrected by Wolfram and Hart. Her physical body was dust, and the demon essence which had animated it returned to Archaeus and didn't exist as a discrete entity any longer. When Drusilla re-vamped Darla, Darla got a fresh new 'clone' of the Archaeus-line demon essence.
I have some vampire characters who are dosed with Mohra blood while soulless. My assumption is that while Mohra blood can return a dead body to life, it doesn't call the soul back. There are therefore two possible outcomes when an unsouled vampire gets brought back to life via this route: The first and most common is that when the Mohra blood revives the body, the demon essence is expelled, and what results is a living body which has neither a soul nor an animating demon. It's a sort of flesh robot. It retains all its physical memories, and it can make some rote responses to stimuli, but it has no volition, no will, and no sense of self. It has to be prompted to do everything. In theory, one could still use the Ritual of Restoration to return its soul, but barring that, such a case will quickly degenerate into a vegetative state and die. The Soul Glutton's human victims seem to have died when their souls were eaten, which would support this idea.
There is one instance of a living, functioning, possibly-soulless human in the Buffyverse, the boy Ryan from "I've Got You Under My Skin." (I discount Buffy in "The Roommate" because Buffy didn't lose her soul completely, and as we now know, Slayers also have some demon essence in them too, which could provide an animating principle in the absence of a human soul.) For the purposes of my theory, either there's some difference between having been born without a soul, and losing one in later life, or Ryan does actually have a soul, it's just defective/stunted/inoperative in some fashion.
The second, and far less common, outcome of dosing a soulless vampire with Mohra blood would be the vampire managing to retain a hold on their demon essence long enough for the Mohra blood to forcibly integrate it with the reviving human body. When the human body and demon essence are united, the connection between the vampire and the demon founder of their vampiric lineage is broken. This allows the essence to develop into an independent demon soul/spirit/whatever, equivalent to the sorts of souls that other living demon species have. The end result is a living (rather than undead) vampire. Such vampires retain most of the usual vampire strengths and weaknesses, with some minor modifications. (They still require blood to live, but can digest some solid food, preferentially organ meat related to blood -- heart, liver marrow, etc. They still cannot cross thresholds uninvited. Not being undead, they are not vulnerable to holy water. They still burn in sunlight, but less quickly and severely than a normal vampire. While they still heal quickly, they are now vulnerable to many more forms of physical damage, and can die of many more things than fire, staking, or beheading: they can be poisoned, suffocated, drowned, die of hypothermia or heat stroke, blood loss, major organ failure, infection, illness, etc.) They are mortal, with a more or less human lifespan. They do not dust when they die. Upon death, rather than being reabsorbed into the founding demon, their souls go to some as yet undetermined hell dimension, as (presumably) the souls of other living demons do. Living vampires are no longer subject to the influence or control of the founding demon. As they reproduce biologically, rather than via turning humans, their offspring are born and grow up in the usual way, and there is no equivalent to the sire bond which exists in normal vampires.
It should be noted that the sample size here is exactly three vampires, so caution should be used in drawing conclusions. However, several psychological factors appear to increase the chances that a soulless vampire will be able to hold body and demon together long enough to survive a dose of Mohra blood. The most important one seems simply to be a desire to be alive again; to date, all three vampires who have survived the process have been more or less willing subjects. Other factors appear to relate to the degree to which the human personality and the demon essence are integrated, psychologically speaking, and how well a vampire can control their demonic urges at need.
During the events of POM, when Spike becomes the first soulless vampire to survive Mohra blood, Archaeus is off in some demon dimension or other, doing whatever drama queen demon lords do in their spare time, but sooner or later, he's going to realize that some of his vampiric get are making off with little pieces of his essence, and he will not be happy about it. I just have to figure out what happens then.
Rants Talk to me