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What
is it about witches, ghosts, vampires and other supernatural phenomena
that fascinates us so much? How to
explain the claims of departed souls returning to make contact with the
living world,
thus giving us a moving, three
dimensional glimpse of the past? What about witches, and the spiritual
paths that practice
witchcraft and give us a direct
access point to the astral plane? And how about vampires, those
tormented souls who
must survive by feeding on human
blood but that survival means never dying and never reaching salvation?
Each
of them, alive, dead, and undead, seem to be searching life and death
within life for
answers to the big questions, not
just what happens when we die. A ghost has presumably already
demonstrated what happens
- a part of us lives on. A witch
demonstrates a unique ability to concentrate will, to communicate with
spirits and
to command the lesser forces. A
vampire, the most mystical and fascinating of all, is not dead, but not
alive, somewhere
between life and death, but
prevented from peace and eternally wandering and searching.
A
ghost is already dead. A ghost is existing in the realm of the living
but cannot
actively participate in life and
share in the lives of the loved ones he/she left behind. A ghost is on
the sidelines,
at the mercy of whomever chooses to
see and to listen. If a ghost is ignored, so report the sensationalist
experts on
the paranormal, the ghost tries to
draw attention to itself by making ungodly amounts of noise or causing
unexplained disturbances
that skeptics will then be determine
to disprove as paranormal activity. Those who aren't sure will simply
be annoyed
- or scared. And that's where a
ghosts attempts are thwarted because maybe it isn't really the ghost
itself we're afraid
of, but where that ghost might have
come from. What if that ghost is in fact here to take us to another
place we aren't
ready to go and can't come back
from? Or do we watch too many movies?
A
meeting with a vampire, depending on how one defines a vampire, could
mean certain, instantaneous
death. There are as many types of
vampires as there are books and movies about them. Do they look like Fright
Night? Are they The Lost Boys?
Do they look like Bela Lugosi or Gary Oldman? How about Tom
Cruise or Brad Pitt? Are they pure
evil, out to create legions of followers available when they want to
feed, as the
hirsuit, shockingly ugly Count
Dracula informed the band who burst in on him and Mina Harker? Are they
something
to be saved from or are the vampires
themselves the ones who need salvation?
A look at the monsters of Fright Night, The Lost Boys, and previous
versions of Dracula, all
depict vampires as monsters who must be vanquished, destroyed, if
humanity is
to be saved. Vampires are not
tragic figures but evil, associated directly with the Devil himself.
Anne
Rice did something different with
vampires - she made them tragic figures with limitations not often paid
attention to except
as material for pop quizzes in fan
circles, figures who are eternally wandering, capable of feeling and
understanding human
emotion, though they are not human.
Their curse of eternal life and the need for blood as sustenance is
what damns them,
as they are the bringers of death.
They long for human interaction in a human, companionlike manner, yet
they
cannot fully attain it because their
baser need means human death.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Perhaps my favorite vampire movie is Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Though
there have been arguments that it
was badly acted on the parts of Keanu Reeves and even Winona Ryder and
some moviegoers were
not impressed with the fact that the
entire movie was shot on a sound stage, James V. Hart and Francis Ford
Coppola took it
places and brought out things that
made this film closer to the original book than any other version I've
seen.
In
this movie, we see Dracula as more than just the demon monster that
must be destroyed
if Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra are
to achieve salvation at death rather than vampirism and eternal
damnation. Of course,
this aspect of Dracula has not
changed, but his motives have been developed more in relation to the
female protagonist, Mina.
In
history, Vlad the Impaler's wife, the "River Princess", was supposed to
have drowned
herself in the river to avoid the
Turks. Though the acts of Vlad the Impaler were (and still are)
considered to
be extremely diabolical, to say the
least, he is still considered a hero in Romania. It would have been
diabolical to
the sensitivities of Victorian
England in the late 19th century. In the book Dracula, this
aspect of the Count's
"evil" history is used to
demonstrate his lust for power and dominion, to the point where he has
given up salvation in return
for earthly power - something
destined not to last.
In
the movie, Dracula's motives for becoming a vampire, for thirsting for
blood, are a combined
result of battle with the Turks (we
see an impaling scene in the beginning battle sequence) and his wife's
suicide as a result
of her being falsely led to believe
he had been killed. Instead of thirst for power, his becomes a thirst
for revenge,
as if the blood is a salve for a
broken heart.
Dracula
is the enemy who would be destroyed because he has the power to destroy
Mina's immortal
soul; Dracula sees Jonathan Harker
and the rest of the men who destroy him as his enemies because they keep
him from reuniting
with his one true love, his wife
(who is reincarnated through Mina in the film). Only with her love can
his own
soul be restored and indeed, that is
what happens, though he must truly die a human death to achieve the
peace he so needed.
Bram Stoker's Dracula,
though appealing to the vampire fans, Gothic enthusiasts
and MTV culture, actually has a good
deal in common with Anne Rice's concept of the vampire. Lestat
describes Dracula
as "hirsute", which he certainly
was. Lestat himself, the Brat Prince, was from the start the sexy,
alluring vampire
that Dracula is often expected to
be. But both Dracula in the film and Lestat in the books are vampires
who search on
behalf of their own souls and are
motivated by similar losses. Both must drink blood to survive and they
don't always
turn their victims into vampires,
nor do they always kill their victims.
Dracula (as depicted in the film) and Lestat (as he is in the books) could be described
as monsters who have lost their souls when they weren't intending to.
Ghosts
like Lasher are lost souls in a way. They are clearly the remnants -
they are
dead. Yet, they have somehow become
earthbound and unable to pass on to wherever it is souls go when people
die.
So they linger on, unable to
interact, unable to rest, and at the mercy of the reactions of the
living.
Witches
as lost souls is debatable. If we mean a witch is a lost soul due to
past
persecution of supposed witches or
being called charlatans, that depends on what they were doing and why.
Then there
is the debate of what a witch is and
what a witch does. Are they Satanists? No. Are they perverts?
No. Are they evil? No. That is,
depending on your definition of evil in this world. Can they be lost?
I'm sure they can. There is one
thing that keeps them rooted here and not lost though - witches are
still living.
Isn't that the difference between
vampires and ghosts as tortured souls and witches as the living people
who can identify
them, communicate with them and
understand what they are?
But
what if a witch is born with her or his power? A witch's soul can be
lost if being
a witch is defined in similar terms
as the Mayfair Witches. If a witch is confused by and does not
understand that power,
they can surely be tormented.
Consider Rowan Mayfair, whose power to kill through directed rage was
incomprehensible
to her, made her feel dirty like a
murderer so much so that she used her talent and intelligence to go into
medicine
to make up for the lives she knew
she had taken, but did not understand how, why, or where this ability
came from
Claiming
her family has a great deal of meaning for Rowan since she is not only
claiming
a life she had been kept from; she
is claiming her witch heritage and clear answers as to how she came to
have this power,
along with mind reading and
affecting living, organic matter like cellular structure.
We
become lost souls in life and in death if we are simply not
understood. What we
don't know is scary to us. What is
most precious to us, life, is even more precious if we have lost it and
must watch
others continue in life. We want
what we cannot have. Lasher thought life was so much more precious than
eternity
that he went to great lengths over a
period of 300 years to come back in the flesh. He paid a terrible
price for that
hunger by dying so soon after his
rebirth. Revenants - Western Europe's Version of the
Vampire
Lately,
I have been researching revenants - a combination of ghost
and undead. Revenants are a tradition from Western
Europe, whereas vampires originated in the mythology of Eastern Europe.
Regardless of location, revenants and vampires have
much in common.
Like
vampires, revenants are literally "the walking dead." They
arise from their graves to suck life - the blood - out
of living humans, thus killing them. Once finished, they return
to their graves by day. Unlike vampires, revenants
often attack people they had known in life, usually out of a diabolical
desire for revenge. Revenants were often identified
as people who had led "unholy" lives, sinners of the worst sort.
Like
their Eastern European counterparts, people in villages under
attack by a revenant congregate to reopen a revenant's
grave and dispatch the revenant by staking the heart and decapitating
the corpse. What was also similar to the myth of
vampires was the state of the corpse when exhumed. Corpses were
found to appear as if they were merely sleeping and
not dead, their flesh had a rosy flush to it and the corpse was bloated,
engorged with blood and leaking blood through the
ears, nose and mouth. This was supposed to be the ultimate proof that
the person in the grave was in fact a revenant that
must be destroyed in order for the village to be returned to peace.
It
is the corpse's appearance at this stage that is the original idea
of what a vampire actually looked like. Certainly, a
bloated, bloody corpse was not a figurehead of preternatural sexuality.
People
in villages of Eastern Europe had the same findings in their
attempts to dispatch vampires in the same fashion.
What people of the middle ages did not know was that bloating, blood
leakage and flushing were stages of decomposition.
Rates of decomposition vary according to several factors - temperature,
burial containers, presence of water, condition of the
soil, cause of death, and later embalming being among the primary
factors.
Revenants
differ from traditional ghosts because they use a corporeal
body to move about. They also have a very specific
purpose in returning from the grave, whereas a classic ghost's reasons
are anybody's guess.
Lasher
was assumed by many to be a ghost, even more to be a demon,
but no one ever referred to him as a revenant. Though
he does turn out to be the spirit of a 16th century Taltos, he
claimed that wanting to be in the flesh again was not
directly an act of revenge, but of reclaiming what he had lost when
the villagers of Donnelaith murdered him. In a way,
his return could be said to be revenge against a God who turned
out not to exist for him by echoing the birth of
Christ.
Whether
revenants actually intend to harm their victims or not, Lasher's
destruction certainly had that effect upon the
Mayfairs, the women in particular. This destruction is what motivated
Michael Curry to destroy Lasher in much the same way
the villagers of Europe dispatched revenants and vampires. The
only difference was that Michael killed Lasher by
blows to the head rather than by piercing the heart. He did, however,
remove the head in keeping with the mythology of
revenants and vampires.
Take a look at Wikipedia's listing for revenants by clicking the link
below. There are also links to some fascinating documents from earlier centuries about revenants. What is a Witch?
What is a Ghost?
Merrick and Mayfair Religion
Anne Rice's Religious Writing
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