Revenant

A lot of meaty stuff on this week´s Magic Monday! This is just a small sample...

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Not Gandalf:

I've actually thought that the idea of the vampire is an anti-adept. Adepts have an essentially immortal vehicle they use (the Glorious Body or the Mental Body, or the Resurrection Body), whereas vampires have to continue to use the physical body they lived and died in; adepts are sustained by a direct connection with the living light life force of the universe, vampires have to sustain themselves by syphoning off the life force of the living. Stoker had friends in the Golden Dawn, if he wasn't a member himself, so I wonder if he was getting at that in "Dracula".

And it also strikes me as a real sign of the trouble we are in as a species that we have adapted the view that vampires are romantic characters, and we would all choose to be one if only we could. That's some bad thinking and visualization.
IMHO

JMG:

Excellent! Yes, that's a very useful way to think of it. The rites of vampirism came about among depraved occultists who weren't able or willing to achieve the states of consciousness that make the Mental Body an option, but wanted to dodge the Second Death anyway. Once the funerary cults of Egypt shut down and you couldn't count on having a priest make offerings to your ka every single day to keep you safe from the Second Death, preying on the living was the only available option.

And you're right about the fad for vampires. That said, given the way that our civilization is busy preying on the future to keep its own lifestyle going, vampirism isn't a bad metaphor.

For what it's worth, I plan on having a vampire feature in a future Ariel Moravec novel. Vampire fans will not be pleased.

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