How Vampires Happen

How did that vampire with his fangs in your neck right now get to be a vampire? In case he's too busy sucking your blood to give you an answer, here are some traditional explanations:

1. Bit by a vampire
A person who dies after having been bit by a vampire rises as a vampire. The problem with this is that if a vampire feeds every night and kills, say, three times a week, in a year's time you have a vampire population explosion. So either it is only a rare vampire bite that causes vampirism, or vampires typically behead or stake their kills to prevent this.

2. The blood exchange
Vampire drinks from victim, victim is allowed to drink from vampire = new vampire. This seems to be the most common method among modern literary vampires. This limits the number of new vampires created and makes accidental vampire procreation pretty much impossible.

3. Suicide
The person who commits suicide rises as a vampire. We might exclude from this number psychotic persons who are clearly not responsible for their own acts who commit suicide. But a person who is not delusional who rejects God's gift of life by suicide is said to rise as a vampire. In Taliesin: Vampire Dreams, vampires are people who attempted a suicide that would have been successful except for the whole vampire thing intervening.

4. Heresy
Yes, Virginia, Protestantism causes vampires. Or Catholicism, in a Protestant or Eastern Orthodox region. Among the peasants in areas of Europe where the vampire myth is known, a person perceived as being a heretic in life might become a vampire in death. Probably this is because they thought the heretic was intentionally rejecting God's truth, rather than accepting that the heretic was simply honestly mistaken.

5. Sorcery
Sorcery--- evil magic--- can cause vampires in two ways. In traditional peasant culture the person rumored to practice sorcery in life is almost sure to become a vampire or some other troublesome creature after death. Also, a sorcerer might know a spell to cause an enemy to become a vampire. In the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, the witch Angelique, after being shot by her new husband Barnabas on their honeymoon, cast a spell on Barnabas which turned him into a vampire.

6. Improper Burials
In peasant culture failure to carefully observe all the traditional rituals associated with death might lead to the dead person becoming a vampire. This connects also to #3, since a suicide was not buried in hallowed ground, and to #4, since a heretic might not observe the same rituals as the majority community.

7. Born that way
Some vampire authors conceive as vampires as a separate race, like elves or fairies or Vulcans, that are born as vampires, mate with other vampires, and give birth to baby vampires. Very non-traditional, but an interesting notion.

These are the ones I could think of. Have you heard of any others? What implications of the different methods can you see? How do your fictional vampires (if any) come into being?