On Vampires

Historical Vampirism, Vamp Flicks and Vampire Symbolism

When I was young, I developed a fear of Vampires. There was a recurring advertisement for some Vampire movie, where at the end one of the vampires opened his mouth and revealed a bunch of fangs. I was only used to Vampires with fanged incisors, I wasn’t prepared for this. I don’t know why I was so afraid of Vampires, I just didn’t like the idea of being bitten by one. After a while, I got over it, and Vampires rarely crossed my mind. Eventually, though, I developed a fascination for them. I think they liven up pretty much every world they are added to. They’re just extremely interesting creatures, but they are interpreted in many different ways. There are so many different directions you can take with them, the superstitions around them are very particular, and they are one of the most ubiquitous mythological creatures. Vampires are found in folklore all over the world, albeit the term is very loosely defined. The vague definition would be something like “an undead nocturnal humanoid that stalks the night and sucks the life force out of people”. I would say that the most important secondary characteristic is that Vampirism is contagious. A Vampire can create more Vampires, and not through breeding.

The most well-known folkloric Vampire is the one from Eastern and Central European folktales. There was more of an emphasis on the undead elements of the Vampire in folk tradition. Vampires didn’t live in castles, they were the undead bodies of one’s former neighbor waking up at night and roaming around, sucking blood. It was closer to a Zombie or a Revenant, and like the Revenant was potentially symbolic of the plague. When it wasn’t Zombie-like, it was often witch-like, another role associated with the mystery of disease in a world before germ theory. The term Nosferatu has an ambiguous etymology, but is possibly related to the Greek term nosophoros, meaning “bearing disease”. The Vampiric fear of Garlic, and sometimes other aromatic plants, would suggest a connection to how plague was seen in the eyes of Europeans before germ theory. A noxious miasma that infected through smell, and could be repelled through pleasant-smelling plants and herbs. This is how the Vampire is treated in Nosferatu and its remakes. Orlok not only spreads disease to Germany, but he is not clearly distinguishable from the disease. Orlok simultaneously introduces disease to the villagers while also being a symptom of the disease. The most recent Nosferatu remake, Eggers’s Nosferatu, attempts to portray Orlok (who is essentially Dracula, the name was just copyrighted at the time) in the same sort of authentically archaic way that Eggers has done for his past movies. Orlok looks like the actual Vlad Dracula, with a big fur coat and a drooping mustache. He speaks Dacian in the movie. Both Orlok and Dracula were not born Vampires, and did not become Vampires after death, but instead transformed themselves into Vampires using esoteric Romanian black magic. As much as Eggers prides himself on historical authenticity, it is worth noting that the actual Dracula of Stoker’s novel is Hungarian, and descends from Attila. I think this fits better with the Plague theme, and that instead of speaking Dacian, Orlok should speak Magyar or some Altaic language. Maybe even make him a Scythian… These people were known on occasion to drink the blood of their enemies.

Orlok in Nosferatu (2024)

Back to the real-life belief in Vampires, it was reportedly extremely widespread in Eastern and Central Europe. Claims of Vampirism existed from Prussia to Greece, among Christian and Turk, among Catholic and Orthodox, and among Jew and Gentile. It wasn’t like other folktales, people truly and genuinely believed in them even as late as World War I. The typical explanation is that people would dig up dead bodies, and the dead bodies would not appear sufficiently decomposed or would have only certain odd features of decomposition that would set off the peasants, but neither of these are particularly satisfying. Incorrupt bodies had very positive connotations in pre-modern Europe, it was associated with sainthood. The bodies of saints were often said to be unaffected by decay, and even before Christianity it was believed that the god Apollo protected Hector’s corpse from decomposition or mutilation. Rodrick Borgia’s body was said to have been disfigured by decomposition a mere day after his death, on the other hand, owing to his alleged sinfulness in life and his alleged moral failures in the Papal throne. In the Inferno, Dante describes a class of sinners whose souls are in fact already dead and in hell, despite their bodies still living on earth, and it is perhaps for this reason why those of corrupt souls became so quickly physically corrupted as well, as they had chosen death over life so very long ago. When confronted with the Vampire Mania of the mid 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV claimed that Vampirism could not result in a state of supernatural incorruption, as this state only affects the saintly through divine intervention. Those who became Vampires, on the other hand, were believed to become Vampires due to sins. For example, they were born of two generations of bastards, or they died by suicide. In Russia, Vampires were simply known as Heretics, as it was believed they arose from the corpse of a dead heretic.

Others claim that it is the features of decomposition and not the lack thereof that contributed to the vampire myth. Corpses could appear bloated due to gases, and this could both force blood from the mouth and make it appear as if the dead man had gotten fatter and his skin had become more colored. I still think this is a strange explanation, because the physical description of the Vampire was not consistent and in some circumstances may have been described as something more typical of a decayed corpse. Furthermore, the symptoms of Vampirism often came from the reports of Western doctors and surgeons which came to investigate. These men would have likely been quite similar with the effects of decomposition, and describe things that do not align with this explanation. The military surgeon Johann Flückinger, sent to investigate the Vampire so-called Arnold Paole in life, describes many of his victims having fresh blood running through their bodies and growing new toenails and fingernails that entirely replaced old fallen nails. While the drying of the cadaver can cause nails to appear as if they have grown, this sounds like something different altogether. And keep in mind, these corpses otherwise appear fresh, and have fresh un-coagulated liquid blood running through them.

There are two more reasonable non-supernatural explanations in my opinion. Firstly, people kept getting bit by stuff in the night. Bed bugs, rats, spiders, maybe even bats. The Vampire may have originated as a sort of tongue-in-cheek explanation for these bites, similar to other folk characters, but eventually grew into a paranoia-inducing superstition as often occurs among peasants. This is the view of the most famous DEBOONKER of Vampirism, that it was just a superstition by dumb peasants likely spurred on by those village-dwellers who make up rumors just to escape the boredom of peasant life. Gerard van Swieten, a personal doctor of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, wrote his famous DEBOONKing of Vampires in 1751, where he basically called out belief in ghosts and vampires in that region as nonsense, encouraging Western Europeans to not take them so seriously. However, Western scholars in the preceding years, as well as both Catholic and Orthodox clergymen, were more mixed in their view on Vampires in the preceding years. Voltaire, a firm Vampire denier, lamented over how so many of his educated Western peers entertained the theories of Vampirism during a time of enlightenment:

“What! It's in our eighteenth century and there are vampires! It is after the reign of Locke, of Shaftesbury, of Trenchard, of Collins; it is under the reign of d'Alembert, of Diderot, of Saint-Lambert, of Duclos, that we believe in vampires, and that the Rev. Father Dom Augustin Calmet, priest, Benedictine of the congregation of St. Vannes and St. Hydulphe, abbot of Senones, Abbey with rents of hundred thousand livre, neighbor of two other abbeys of the same income, printed and reprinted the history of vampires, with the approval of the Sorbonne, signed by Marcilli!” —Dictionnaire philosophique

Voltaire’s own good friend the Marquis d’Argens believed the evidence of the Vampires too strong to ignore, nonetheless choosing to rationally explain the deaths from Vampire bites as being a product of “dying of fright” after believing themselves to have been bitten. I don’t know why he chose this explanation, when he could have just gone with saliva-transferred disease causing it. The debate in Germany and France over Vampires was tied in with the religious debate.

I believe, as far as naturalistic explanations go, the most likely cause is that certain people actually believed themselves to be Vampires, or developed some sort of split personality that manifested in Vampiric behavior. I say this because it is a well-recorded phenomenon in ethnography. There are Kamchatkan shamans who suck the life force from the living or the recently deceased in order to be eternally beautiful. There are warriors who adopt the identity of totemic animals in battle from ancient Europe to Mesoamerica. This is the conclusion Julius Evola comes to when discussing Vampires:

“Instead, vampirism could be considered in its psychic character and we could bring attention to the phenomena which often is the issue both in popular belief, and in ethnology. We cannot overlook even whatever there is in the childish fables as the type of the “werewolf” and which in ethnology is designated as lycanthropy. It is about the idea that a human being can in a certain way split in two and that his double can assume an animal appearance and manifest corresponding behaviors. […] Now, we can conceive a human type in which this differentiation was not sufficiently determined. That occurs especially among primitive and savage populations which are at the stage of so-called totemism, the totem being both the progenitor of a given tribe, as well as the god or demon of an animal species, through which the members of that tribe consider themselves, e.g., as leopard-men, wolf-men, bear-men, and so on. […] Naturally, in werewolves and similar creatures, the possible manifestations do not have the erotic setting that certain “dark” literature often likes to attribute to the vampire. Through this setting, we have to move into a rather different domain, that of an essentially psychic vampirism that can be real that is confirmed in more than a few traditions, which sometimes even indicate the technique to actualize it. Moreover, ethnology has recorded the belief that certain shamans have the power to vampirize living beings to the point of reducing them to a type of bare nothingness: they seem to have been left traces of that in the black practices of the Voodoo of Haiti. Regarding properly erotic vampirism it is instead the case when the subtle vital force of a woman is fed with the goal of strengthening one’s own vitality. That seemed to be the case in the Old Testament, with King Solomon [I think he means King David] who lay down with naked young girls, “without knowing them”: all the more that an analogous procedure is likewise attested to both in central Asia and ancient China.” —Vampirism and Vampires

Evola goes on to explain a Taoist ritual for immortality where a wise man would lay with multiple women, but not taking pleasure in it and not even ejaculating at orgasm. By renouncing the pleasure of the sexual encounter the man sucks the vital essences from the women into himself, but she cannot do the same as she is ignorant of the ritual and he has not poured himself (physically, but also metaphorically) into her. It is seemingly quite similar to many Tantric rituals in Vajrayana Buddhism, which similarly describe a seemingly counterproductive process of participating in some sort of hedonistic activity (sex included) while renouncing the pleasure. It’s considered something only the most astute ascetics can productively participate in, as most people will just fall into a state of attachment through it.

But, I’m not entirely convinced Vampirism is a purely physical phenomenon. I think, if you are a materialist, you are completely fair to assume it is. Even for some schools which allow for supernatural events under certain pretexts, Vampirism is impossible because it is a supernatural evil. I know that peasants often believe very dumb things, but it’s pretty crazy how much people believed in Vampires. Not only did many people in that area believe in them, but people claimed descent from them. The entire Nosferatu movie (the original) was inspired by a Serbian farmer the creator met during the war who claimed his father was a vampire. This would make the Serb a Dhampir, a half-Vampire. There were several families in the Balkans who claimed lineage from Dhampirs, and the responsibility of the Dhampir was to hunt Vampires. This is a role often ascribed to Half-Vampires in fiction, a topic I will get to later in the article.

During the 19th century, Vampire paranoia transformed into a Vampire mania, and the conception of the Vampire begins to change to something less monstrous, and more villainous — potentially even tragic. At the end of Lord Byron’s epic poem The Giaour, the main character is prophesied to pay for his murder of the Turk Hassan by transforming into a Vampire after his death, and being forced to prey on his loved ones. Vampire literature continues throughout the century, reaching its zenith at the hit publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. The transition of the Vampire into a more human-like character really began the moment Western Europeans got their hands on him, but it was stoker who cemented the connection between Vampires and aristocrats. Dracula is not described as particularly aristocratic in nature within the novel, but he becomes more stereotypically aristocratic in later renditions of the character.

Many people insist Dracula is a representative of Capitalist greed, but I think that is more reflective of how people reading the book view Capitalists. What the Vampire represents, in my opinion, is those who attempt to achieve immortality purely in this world. They sacrifice their souls, which are immortal in a higher world, to do this. The only way in which they can do this is by sucking the life out of others, and in the end they always learn that there is no immortality in this world. Not for now, at least. So long as there is the possibility of extinguishment, and this possibility is not temporary, death will almost certainly come. Eventually, every star will burn out, every black hole will radiate away, and if this isn’t enough then any item that exists long enough will eventually be blipped out of existence by random quantum fluctuation. Even the most improbable event will become probable given enough time. It is a sort of hubris. By sacrificing its soul, the Vampire is in some sense no longer even alive. It is “undead”, but are undead things truly alive? When the Vampire dies, it will perhaps not even go to hell, but extinguish entirely, because of the degree it has attached itself to this world. The dark magic which Vampires traditionally use fills a similar role. It relies on that which is below, rather than that which is above. The Vampire and the Ghoul are souls so irrevocably attached to this world that they can’t even leave. This is how the Draugr is described in Norse mythology and folklore, but in Skyrim they are much more noble. Every time you kill a Draugr in Skyrim, you are likely freeing the trapped soul of an old Nordic warrior. Sovngarde awaits!

The Vampire also obviously fulfills an erotic role. The victims of Vampires, in their final moments, seem to be seduced by the Vampire in a lot of the Vampire media I’ve watched. They want their blood to be sucked, even if it will kill them. The vampirism of the Taoists is something erotic, but many of the Vampiric folk characters of Northern Europe were also Succubine before the popularization of the Eastern European Vampire. There is an idea that sex releases one’s vital energy, and a succubus is feeding off of your loss of vital energy by seducing you. Semen retention, anyone?

The Vampire, and especially the virtuous Dhampir, on the flipside, must constantly contain their perverse urges of blood-drinking and human consumption, either in order to save face or because they genuinely have a moral objection to the act. Every man must battle with the Vampiric urge within him, but especially those men with sadistic or fetishistic sexual penchants. I don’t know if I should reveal this information, but there have been times where I had been practicing NoFap, and I would see something that would cause me to falter. I would literally get “the shakes” like an alcoholic. My body temperature would plummet and I would feel feverish. My hands especially, would become freezing cold. I say “see something” only figuratively, as often times it was not even a picture but some thought or memory that crossed my mind, like a daemon. Have I mentioned that I have sharp canine teeth? I think it is possible, sadly, that if I was offered the powers of the Vampire in return for my soul I would lack the humility to refuse it, even though I know the Vampire is a misguided and doomed creature.

Miguel Serrano describes the Jews as vampires on multiple occasions, and describes their god Jehovah as the shadow of a Vampiric Demiurge. I am not an expert on Serrano, and Serrano’s work is heavily allegoric in many circumstances, so the fellow substonker

Pope Head

assisted me in this section. The Demiurge, in a gnostic setting, is vampiric insofar as he lives off of the higher spiritual essences he has trapped in his reality. For Serrano, This includes not only human souls, but the souls of elemental gods as well, including eternal time. It’s kind of like the Altmeri view of Lorkhan, or better yet the Mythic Dawn’s view of Lorkhan, where he is another Daedric Prince whose realm entraps and draws from the Aedric elements donated to it in good faith. When Serrano speaks of the “Demiurge”, he is only using the term symbolically. The Demiurge cannot create, and did not create the universe, making the Demiurgic title (literally meaning “craftsman”) a misnomer. Serrano’s Demiurge is less like the Gnostic Demiurge and nothing like the Platonic Demiurge, and more akin to the Buddhist demon Mara, a distorter of what was already there, or the Satan of the Concorezzenses. Likewise, the Jew is not a literal vampire so much as the relationship between Jew and gentile (particularly Aryans) is the most reflective of the relationship between the vampiric demiurge and formal beings such as gods or human souls. The Jews are the dupes of the Demiurge, the monsters to his Frankenstein. The plagiarized mishmashes of previous traditions of the nations, turned into a zombie race. Perhaps it is the case that there is a Vampiric “Demiurge” within all of us, which feeds off of our ignorance and suffering… A hypostasis of our inability to divulge the original knowledge from the palimpsestic world.

The portrayal of Jews as Vampires is not unique to Serrano, many have suspected that Nosferatu was supposed to be a representation of the Jew. The Jews were, after all, historically associated with spreading the plague through well-poisonings and whatnot, and have been accused of blood libels. The jet-black hair and crooked noses of Vampires could also be construed as rather stereotypically Jewish, but you would be hard pressed to find a Vampire with long sideburn locks or a bushy beard. In modern day, the Jewish Vampire connection is strongly displayed in Hotel Transylvania. Adam Sandler plays Dracula, and Mel Brooks plays Dracula’s dad. Two prolific Hollywood Jews. Mel Brooks doesn’t even put on a different accent, he just sounds like a New York Jew the whole movie. I don’t know which movie, but he’s in one of them at least. The movie is obviously a metaphor for Jewish assimilation… Dracula’s Daughter is the Jewish-American Princess who falls for a Sheigetz. The traditional father is upset that Dracula’s daughter is marrying a non-Vampire.

So far, I have only discussed the Vampire-by-choice, but Vampirism is contagious. Vampires can turn other people into Vampires against their will, at least sometimes. Sometimes, the act of actually turning someone into a Vampire, like the act of giving into a Succubus, is a contortion of the will rather than an overriding of it. There is often a hierarchy of Vampires, with the most powerful ones being more akin to demons than to monsters, and having the capability of controlling other Vampires. The most common “good Vampire” type is found in half-Vampires, also known as Dhampirs. I have made it no secret that Vampire Hunter D is one of my favorite movies, and the character of the Dhampir protagonist (who is simply known as D, or Dhampir) is one of the big reasons. What makes the Dhampir such a good portrayal of his role is that he never falters in his self-hatred. He never tries to delude himself, or convince the audience, into thinking Vampirism is anything but a curse. He must roam the world forever as a stranger and a monster, losing everyone he loves and constantly fearing the day he loses control. And yet, it is because he is a Dhampir that he has an obligation to hunt the Vampires. It is the trade he was born for, and it will ensure people won’t have to suffer as he had suffered. We are given the life we deserve, and all we can do is leave with our debts paid. This sense of burden is felt even by the pure Vampire, Meier, who is able to resist his urge to vampirize a woman he loves because he knows in his heart of hearts that it is a curse. The true villain, Carmilla, is a typical Vamp-supremacist who desires to feed off of her human cattle forever and ever.

This is the total opposite of the feeling I get watching the blasphemous shit-show that is Netflix’s Castlevania. In this series, the burden of Vampirism is not highlighted. The Vampires are simultaneously much more progressive and scientifically advanced than the primitive humans, and also always in league with other Vampires, basically taking the role of decadent hedonistic aristocrats. Dracula is not a “bad guy”, he just doesn’t like Humans because of “bigotry” and the ebil Christians who burned his wife at the stake. He just wanted to “chill” and they killed his wife. Dracula is even portrayed as happy in hell, because he gets to be with his wife. Very different from the Castlevania games, where the Church is a fairly good force and Dracula is more or less equivalent to Lucifer. It is because Dracula is demonically powerful that his good Dhampir son Alucard is able to fulfill an angelic role. He has the power of a fallen angel, but did not participate in the rebellion. In the show, they take a giant dump on the original character by basically having a scene where Alucard gets in an orgy with his two Japanese students who then almost kill him.

They do other very cringeworthy things in the show. It’s very difficult for the authors to conceal their burning hatred for organized religion. The Church is pretty much always, without exception, portrayed as evil. Crosses do not hurt Vampires because they are holy items, but because Vampires exist in extra dimensions, and perpendicularity messes with their depth perception. Yeah, I’m not joking. It’s that dumb. It’s like if touching an optical illusion caused your hands to burn. It is completely and utterly inaccurate to the source material. I’m not a Christian, and even I get annoyed at this.

I think Japanese Vamp media does a much better job with the religious elements than the West because of what I’ve begun to call “Occidentalism”. It’s the Japanese equivalent of our “Orientalism”. I have surely talked about this before, but in the West we (until recently) mystified Eastern religiosity because it was foreign to us. Today, it’s more frowned upon, the east has been defogged of the cloud of mystique due to the internet, Cold War politics, and mass migration. In Japan, it’s the opposite. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto are just part of life. Christian mysticism, or Western Esotericism in general, is something exotic and closer in otherworldliness to the Vampire. So we get stories like Castlevania, or we get Hellsing where both the leading Vampire-hunting organizations (the Hellsing Organization and Iscariot) are tied to their respective churches (Anglican and Catholic). The show is told from the perspective of the Anglican Hellsing Organization, so it’s definitely a little anti-Catholic, but within the HO it comes off as something very conservative today — Pro-Queen, pro-God. At least, that’s how it goes down in the original show. If the Ultimate series is cringe then mea culpa. Certainly, there are many Anime which end up having a very anti-religious message.

Then there are Vampires in the middle of these two extremes. The Vampires of the Elder Scrolls are ultimately doomed to suffer in Molag Bal’s Coldharbour, and pure Vampires are quite literally ritually raped by Molag Bal just as the first ever Vampire was. There is no reward for surrendering yourself to the Prince of Rape, he ultimately seeks to dominate and enslave all life other than himself. And yet, many of them believe themselves superior to man, and believe they are entitled to rule Tamriel. They have certainly come close a few times, but when the Dovahkiin shouts the flesh off of their face they will hopefully realize it was a terrible mistake. Despite this, there are several likeable and good-aligned Vampires in the series. There are people who were infected with Vampirism against their will, and most famously Serana, who the player engages in a sort of courtly love with throughout the dawngard quest. She is by far the closest female character to the Dovahkiin, but tragically such a relationship would end only in tragedy. Her life is a lonely one, it is one that she was pushed into by her aristocratic Vampire parents. She had to endure her humiliation by Molag Bal, and her soul is doomed. Despite this, even “good” Vampires like Serana and Count Skingrad have some kinship with other Vampires. You can’t change what you are, after all. Well, you can be cured, but for a pure-blooded Vampire it would be a mutation of character.

I’ve said enough about this curious folk creature. I am feeling weak, my skin is growing pale, and I have found a rather odd bite on my neck that I do not know the origins of. The ceiling light is bothering me, and the sun was too bright today. I am having some very strange cravings too…