Untitled by Paul N Khoury

Vampires oh my!

by John M

Vampires have always been popular and are likely to stay popular.
Despite the mistaken image associating attraction to vampires with
immaturity the pull is still there. Underneath the surface image are
real and vital archetypes.

Before I go on I'd like to say that I owe a lot of this knowledge to
Nigel Jackson's book "The Complete Vampyre", which is still in print
and can be ordered from Capall-Bann press in England.

The idea of a vampire is of someone who's beyond the pale, who lives
in desolate places on the edge or just beyond the edge of regular
society and who preys on people who manage to go there themselves,
either knowingly or unknowingly. A person goes to the dark places as
an outcast or a criminal of some sort, separates him or herself from
society, then encounters a being who transforms them from a place of
weakness regarding the rest of society to one of strength. This
parallels the initiatory process, and Jackson regards the original
source of vampires as bands of magick wielding warrior priests
dedicated to a dark god who complemented the god of light. The dark
god stood on the boundary between the spirits and the living, as a
literal link and intermediary between the two, sometimes acting on
behalf of the spirits with regards to the traditions and actions of
the living, restoring harmony between the dark world and the light, on
behalf of the darkness.

Hades is a deity associated with this function, and the travel to the
spirit world was thought to comprise an initiatory experience, with
the person, the shaman to be, going through an actual death while
alive, traveling to the spirit world, and returning as a being who was
half in the realm of spirit and half in the realm of the living, and
who could then communicate with the spirits on behalf or the living.
In certain vampire stories a person bitten by a vampire undergoes a
rapid death before being reborn as a vampire him or her self. Because
he or she has already been to the realm of the dead they are in a
sense beyond death, only in societies that have actual shamans this
was interpreted in a spiritual sense.

The vampire is a sort of concentration of energies from beyond the
pale. What has been suppressed in society partly comes through him or
her, although not everything. The archetype of the wolf or the primal
being takes up different energies from that of the vampire, with
wolves thought to exist on a lower level while vampires were thought
to exist on a higher level of darkness. The vampire represents sex,
death, seduction, sexual and physical power, combined, with secrets of
arcane sciences and strange associations, with odd ways of supporting
themselves. They exist at the crossroads. The erotic attraction of
vampires is an attraction for just these things, for a somewhat
idealized notion of what lays beyond a society that's limiting,
something that could be, that exists somewhere. Freedom, communion
with the secrets of nature, and mind blowing full on erotic enjoyment
in the darkest sense. The vampire represents the devil in the sense of
the person who you go when all avenues are exhausted, the lender of
last resort who extracts a severe price for his services and
transforms the recipient into one of his own. The transformation into
a vampire, then, is not only a choice (sometimes) but a sacrifice of
sorts. By dying and being reborn allied to the spirit world instead of
the dayside world a person in a sense becomes less, has something
taken from them, but in another way becomes more.

They appear in society as fakes, as doubles, without apparent origin,
concealing their true nature until they have a chance to reveal it and
act as either an initiator or as a monster.

The feeding of the vampire Jackson attributes to a development of the
ritual of making offerings of food filled with energy to wrathful
deities and spirits in order to keep them from causing pain and
suffering. The wrathful spirits have a place in the scheme of things
as well, so fear wasn't the sole motivator behind these offerings. It
was part of the way of ensuring that the divine order, in both its
dark and light aspects, was maintained. There was also a duality in
stories of malevolent deities between incidents where the people who
encountered them were disrespectful and so suffered consequences and
those who showed respect and so were spared. "Use all your well earned
qualities or I'll lay your soul to waste", as the Rolling Stones say.
Also, the idea of feeding on blood, which has energy, lots of energy,
just like food and alcohol used as offerings do, may be related to the
notion that since the vampires are outside of normal society they need
something completely different in order to survive, or at least to
keep their dead bodies going. It's not certain that this needs to be
part of the archetype of the vampire in order for it to function
fully, since it doesn't address the issue of vampire as initiator, the
positive aspect, but that of the vampire as the destroyer, which while
it might be necessary for the cosmic order is not
what we're focussing on here.

The pulling power of the vampire is a union of the twin forces of sex
and death, with the seduction of a person into becoming a vampire
being intensely sexual while also involving blood, thereby touching on
the two primal forces inherent in human beings. Sex and death in turn
are linked by a sort of partial return to more primal instincts that
is sometimes enhanced by the practice of BDSM to some degree while
engaging in sexual activity. Both semen and vaginal fluids that have
been charged by orgasm contain vital energy, as does blood that comes
from the literal inner core of a person. By uniting sex and death
through the sacrifice of seminal and vaginal fluid charged with
orgasm, which constitutes a sort of taking that's been called the
little death, and the sacrifice of blood which is life, which also by
being removed weakens life and brings one closer to death, states
buried in the unconscious mind can be accessed and the center of
initiation into the archetype can be approached. Blood, by the way, is
one of the dirtiest fluids around. It contains or can contain HIV,
Hepatitis, infections, disease, viruses, and any chemicals floating
around another person's body. There are ways of accessing blood
without actually ingesting it, and that don't involve too much pain or
permanent suffering on the part of the partner.

But this sort of action, the kind of vampiric experience as
initiation, can't be done equally. One of the parties has to assume
for the purposes of ritual the role of the initiator and the other
person the role of the person seeking initiation, even if the
initiator is acting symbolically by studying the archetype and trying
to assume that archetype in the ritual of initiation
for the other person.
By having the other person represent the forces of darkness and
uniting with them the person being initiated is conducted, hopefully,
to the actual parts of both the world and the psyche where actual dark
forces lie and obtains communion with them.

So begins the quest and task of turning the outcast into the prince,
the piece of lead into the gold serving as a chela to the god of magic
and darkness, who is an intermediary between the spirits and the world
and who rises above the world though he or she started below it. Maybe
going back out into society in a new form completes the cycle.