John Whitehead's Commentary
The Vampire Walks Among Us
"The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him."Halloween is associated with many strange creatures, but none more so than the vampire. To us moderns, the vampire is nothing more than a myth, an image popularized in movies, television, books and so on. Yet the vampire is no mere Hollywood creation, and it may be much more than a figment of someone's imagination.
--Dr. Abraham Van Helsing
The vampire legend is universal. Stories about this bloodsucking fiend have been told throughout the world for centuries, perhaps as long as tales have been told. The villagers of Uganda, Haiti, Indonesia and the Upper Amazon all have their local variety of vampire. The Native American tribes, Arctic Eskimos and many Arabian tribes know the vampire well. Many of the stories are obviously myth, but some no doubt have their roots in reality.
The so-called instances involving actual vampires have been chronicled by monks, ministers and virtually every form of writer. In fact, the highly respected 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: "If there ever was in the world a warranted and proven history, it is that of vampires; nothing is lacking, official reports, testimonials of persons of standing, of surgeons, of clergymen, of judges; the judicial evidence is all-embracing."
Even at the dawn of the scientific age, scholars and members of the clergy were convinced of the vampire's existence. This was no doubt due to the numerous publicized instances of vampirism. Many of these are chronicled in Montague Summer's classic book The Vampire (1928), which argues for the actual existence of vampires.
When we begin to examine the elements of truth behind the legend of the vampire, we soon discover that the myth disguises a very real and morbid reality. "Today," writes author Brad Steiger, "medical science recognizes a vampire psychosis wherein troubled individuals may become convinced that their life depends upon drawing fresh blood from human victims. The persons suffering from such a psychosis may, in extreme cases, actually believe themselves to be dead."
Then there are the increasing numbers of actual cases of vampires that continue to surface. For example, take the case of 17-year-old Rod Ferrell, a self-professed vampire who was the leader of a coven of vampires. Ferrell, who pled guilty to the murders of Richard and Naomi Ruth Wendorf on November 25, 1996, said he had initiated the Wendorfs' daughter into the cult with a blood-drinking ritual in a graveyard. Ferrell's mother was also a member of a vampire cult and pled guilty in 1997 to attempting to seduce a 14-year-old boy as part of a vampire ritual.
In appearance, the traditional vampire is a grotesque, demonic presence. In other words, it is a monster. However, as Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897) became popular and was successfully translated to theater and film, the image of the vampire changed. He went from being a hideous demon to a suave, sophisticated, handsome, well-dressed man who would fit in anywhere there was a social event or a party. Today, the vampire, along with his beautiful, sensuous sisters of the night, is primarily portrayed as an attractive, seductive presence--an emissary, so to speak, of the alluring dark side.
Much of the legend surrounding vampires encompasses the figure of Dracula who was a historic individual. Vlad Dracul, the ruler of Wallachia in Transylvania, lived in the mid-1400s. The Romanian word "dracul" means dragon. Thus, he was called little dragon.
Dracula impaled thousands of his own countrymen (some have put the number as high as 100,000). He also impaled and roasted alive many more of his arch-enemy Turks. Later captured, released to domesticity and finally having his head severed in battle, Vlad Dracula served, with other tales of gore, as a model of sorts for Stoker's Dracula.
Because of the influence of the Catholic Church, dracul (that is, dragon) later became synonymous with the Devil, the fallen Satan. In Christian tradition, Satan is often represented as a dragon.
Thus, myth, legend, fact and Christian theology have intermixed to give us our modern conception of the vampire. Over time, as inherited from eastern European thinking, the vampire was either Satan or Satan's demonic forces. The suggestion of a vampire's connection to Satan is even found in Stoker's Dracula. There Stoker has his spokesperson, Dr. Van Helsing, recognize Dracula's connection to "the Evil One."
This helps to explain the use of the cross and holy water to repel vampires. In fact, a focus of Roman Catholic piety is the crucifix, which is seen not merely as a symbol of the sacred but as the bearer of the sacred (and, thus, its effectiveness against those of the dark). Moreover, Satan, like the vampire, was a deceiver and one who seeks to steal the soul--one who creeps about in dark places waiting to prey on the innocent.
However, as humanity has slid into more secular times, the way in which we view evil and confront its manifestations--that is, vampires--has changed. In fact, as the Church has lost its dominance, the challenge to the effectiveness of Christian relics in some modern vampire novels and films symbolizes a larger challenge to the role of the supernatural in modern life. "It also includes a protest," writes author J. Gordon Melton, "against the authority of any particular religion and its claims of truth in a religiously pluralistic world."
The Hollywood, theater and literature mills have all nevertheless adopted many of the older practices and have added sex, fear, danger and gore to weave an irresistible symbol of the underdog vampire who fights and fights again but can never win against the forces of God and men. And now the vampire, in a sense, is so tightly interwoven into our cultural matrix that it seems at times as if the vampire's torn and ripped spirit is one with modern culture. Today, he is both predator and victim in an atmosphere of New Ageism, recovery programs and cloudy morality.
Indeed, vampires are special, in part, because of something in their character that is reflective of us all. The image of the vampire is forever shifting and changing, reflecting not himself but our own fears and secret longings. The vampire casts no reflection in the mirror. He doesn't have to--it's our faces we see when we gaze into the vampire's eyes.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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