Psychic vampyrism, which is a known technique of white and black magickians alike, is the practice of feeding upon the spiritual energy of other persons, and sanguine vampyrism is the act of drinking human blood for sustenance. Most people who practice sanguine vampyrism consider drinking blood to be nothing more than a particularly potent way of taking someone else’s spiritual energy.
While most black magickians see vampyrism as little more than an optional practice which they may or may not adopt, some authorities amongst modern systems of vampyric magick believe that some humans are born with anomalies of the spiritual body which require them to feed upon exogenous spiritual energy instead of recycling nature’s prana like the majority of people do. Initiates of the Black Lodge who practice vampyrism tend to doubt the reality of born vampyres, but vampyres external to the “Left Hand Path” insist on self-identifying as born vampyres.
I initially adopted the practice of vampyrism as nothing more than another spiritual exercise to improve my magickal talents in preparation for all the demon-summoning I dreamed of doing. I’ve practiced vampyrism about as long as I’ve practiced Satanism, and after leading a Hecatean-Qliphothic coven of psychic vampyres for a year, I’m confident in my self-identification as a born vampyre.
For the black magickians in my audience who don’t believe in born vampyres, I’d recommend the books The Ethical Psychic Vampire by Raven Kaldera and The Psychic Vampire Codex by Michelle Bellenger– two self-identified born vampyres. Once you’ve read those two books, or even just Bellenger’s, you’ll see all treatises on the practice of psychic vampyrism arising from Satanists, Luciferians, Niners, etc. as completely useless. In short, Bellenger believed in born vampyres, and there is no fucking way she would get that wrong– let alone her and Kaldera both. Not only did Bellenger write a better manual of vampyric magick than anybody in any of the religions that influence me, she wrote the best encyclopedia-style text on demonology I’ve ever read– and that’s only a portion of her immense literary corpus.
After reading Vampires: Burial and Death, The Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, The Vampire Encyclopedia, and more, I have reached a conclusion: vampyre myths come about from rumors about real vampyre– both vampyres who didn’t know what they were and antiquity’s underground black magickians.
The overwhelming majority of vampyres described in world mythology fall into one or more of four categories: animated corpses, living human witches, the shades of deceased humans, and predatory species of evil spirits. Mixtures like a human corpse inhabited by a demon or the predatory ghost of human witch (compare that to the Undead Gods) exemplify the grey areas between the four mythological demographics.
Many mythological vampyres, including some therianthropic species, were considered to be either the astral doubles or familiar spirits of living human black magickians. In some cultures, the community’s benevolent practitioners of therionick magick, which were like any other magickians living in and trusted by our ancestors’ civilizations, would protect the villagers from vampyric practitioners of therionick magick in regular astral combat– at least, that’s what the people believed (this will be relevant later).
Generally speaking, mythological vampyres most often shapeshifted into stereotypically diabolic animals like pigs, serpents, cats, etc. rather than wolves. Werewolf trials and vampyre trials are lesser-known phenomena under the umbrella of the witch hunt phenomenon, with vampyre hunters being a strange fringe amongst the witchhunters who justified their belief in vampyres with arguments taken from Malleus Maleficarum. Werewolf myths are also believed to have some origin in the Pagan practice wherein warriors adorned themselves in wolf pelts and engendered altered states of consciousness.
While some mythological vampyres fed on the spiritual energy of humans, most of them drank human blood, including notable instances of living human witches drinking blood for magickal power. Needless to say, drinking human blood is pretty fucking conspicuous, so the fact that the preponderance of vampyres in world mythology drank human blood instead of feeding on spiritual energy makes perfect sense if these myths did arise from real predation by real spirits and witches. After all, how many people are psychic enough to know that a sorcerer took their prana?
Several variants of mythological vampyres arise from or are influenced by the incremental degradation of human flesh engendered after death– for example, the existence of necrophages that glow like fireflies brought about a lot of misconceptions. When a series of suspicious and unexplained incidents of the kind(s) considered symptomatic of vampyric activity would occur in close sequence, our ancestors would dig up whichever corpse resulted from the most stigmatized or “suspicious” person amongst the recently dead.
Normal phenomena of corpse decay would have produced fluids around the mouth, which our ancestors would interpret as resulting from the corpse’s blood-drinking habit. A villager stabs the corpse, and the crowd gasps as the deceased emits a hideous moan. Of course, we know today this moan was the sound of the corpse deflating, but our ancestors were not so enlightened. What if a vampyric witch were amongst our ancestors’ midst? The villagers just keep checking the local burial place for moans or luminescence. As the uninitiated conjure wild stories of the time they survived the perfidies of the undead, the heir to a hidden generational Craft or the elected worshiper of some darksome divinity continues her witchcraft unsuspected.
Do you know how S. Conolly, the magickian who coined the term “Demonolatry,” came to venerate the Devil? Probably not, considering how many learned Occultists still think she’s man. According to one of the entries to her YouTube channel (OFS Adrianna), Stephany Reisner Conolly once prayed to Satan in childlike ignorance after the Abrahamic deity failed to answer her prayers by helping her find her toy. Satan obliged the girl, terrifying her. This experience stuck with Conolly, and eventually, it got her thinking, and boom, one of the most influential black magickians in the West was born.
It wouldn’t take a generational witchcraft tradition to make one of our ancestors take up vampyrism and the Craft. Sometimes, it takes as little as a single action born of childhood naivety to create a lifetime adherent to the Infernal Divine, as we see with S. Conolly. The guiding spirits of hidden historical witches could have instructed their adherent in the practice of vampyrism, and would have been particularly inclined to do so if their adherent was a born vampyre. Perhaps another vampyre is born when an underground witch asks her guiding spirits about the local stories of blood-drinking corpses.
According to The Psychic Vampire Codex by Michelle Bellenger, if a born vampyre goes too long without feeding, she’ll astrally project in her sleep and drink a bitch. The vampyre might not remember the act– especially if she’s uninitiated, but the victim often experiences something pretty jarring– a vivid nightmare in the least.
Persons born with the vampyric attribute of soul are subconsciously inclined to engage in various behavior-traits to regularly enable involuntarily vampyric nourishment. Circumstances wherein the uninitiated vampyres amongst our ancestors couldn’t pursue mundane methods of subconscious vampyrism would result in their astral double predating upon someone else in the community. This would have engendered more of the folktales that conceptualized what we call mythological vampyres, and the presence of myths about vampyres in a given community, many of which myths originate from predatory spirits, make it more likely for a local witch to take up vampyrism.
If a vampyre wears silver, it’s very, very difficult for them to feed (copper does the opposite). Even today, self-identified born vampyres who wear silver all the time can think that they just naturally suck at feeding on distant victims for years, even if they have multiple other vampyres to talk to it about in person.
All it would have taken is to start vivid and widely attested vampyre myths in a particular community is one uninitiated vampyre with a silver piece of sentimentally-valuable jewelry– her times of accidental energetic self-starvation would engender regular instances of preternatural attack that would spread amongst the locals. Perhaps a witch hidden amongst the crowd takes interest in the stories, and if she’s the heir to a generational tradition of witchcraft, vampyrism could become a family tradition, or at least part of what the generational heirs are taught such that some become vampyres and others do not. Shit, the Christians would blame the vampyric attacks on the Infernal Divine the same way they do with poltergeists.
The conclusion to be drawn from this essay should be simple: vampyrism is not a trend. It’s one of the most legendary and long-lived forms of magick and paranormal activity there is. When a practitioner of psychic vampyrism self-identifies as a vampyre, they aren’t roleplaying: they’re drawing the inevitable conclusion that they are the very type of sorcerer which has terrified humanity for ages in its predatory and uninitiated instantiations. The legends come from us. It’s not the other way around.
This is something that the modern vampyric community has forgotten in its unyielding pursuit of self-humiliation. The Gotham Halo, being a vampyric community native to New York, borrows its organizational structure from a computer game and integrates the worst company it can as if it were their aim to degrade the name of vampyrism as thoroughly as possible.
The Gotham Halo was founded by legitimate Occultists, many if not most of whom venerate and commune with the Undead Gods. Vampyres who aren’t in one of the Occult lodges most popular in the vampyric community will often pretend to be. The first groups to self-identify as vampyres were Post-Satanic magickal lodges dedicated to the pursuit of magickal immortality. But the vampyric community has strayed from what makes it commendable. They’ve made their Occult movement synonymous with the fandom of a video game. They’ve lumped a magickal paradigm in with a pseudoscientific health problem. Additionally, psychic vampyres have become somewhat lumped in with otherkin, which is a very different thing.
Among the vampyric community are persons who identify as medical sanguine vampyres. Rather than viewing the consumption of blood as a good way to acquire exogenous human prana, “medsangs” believe they have an undiscovered clinical affliction which necessitates the consumption of human blood.
Now, let’s say the medsangs are right. Let’s say they do need human blood– for all I know, they really do. Debunking pseudoscience is not what my blog is about, and frankly, I wouldn’t tell someone that they’re making something like that up on principle alone. With that said, medsangs have lumped what they say is a clinical disease in desperate need of scientific research together with a magickal paradigm and a videogame fandom. If they aren’t full of shit, they have made the worst decision they possibly could have.
So what the fuck does a Christian who self-medicates with human blood have in common with a vampyric magickian? How can those two demographics even stand being around one another in the first place? The answer is fashion, roleplay, and BDSM.
But the worst is the otherkin. While the existence of transpeople has been proven with neurology (and only lost its perceived credibility because of sociology), otherkin think that their self-identification with animals is somehow justified by this science. While transwomen just want to live like any other women, otherkin have no intention whatsoever of going back to the wild they claim they belong to. If otherkin weren’t full of shit, I wouldn’t know what otherkin were. They’d be doing animal shit and I’d confuse them for feral children or something. Instead, they’ve sought refuge in a world of self-medication and roleplaying.
Let’s say medsangs and otherkin both exist: an unclassified clinical affliction and the world’s smallest minority are now bound to each other, and all hope for either demographic to be scientifically researched like they should be is lost. The scientific community has condemned the Occult ideologies which the medsangs and otherkin have lumped themselves in with. The most embarrassing part is that the existence of movie franchises like Underworld has legitimately put the otherkin and vampyres at odds with one another due to the roleplay element. As long as the vampyric community exists the way it does, everyone involved with it is doomed.
-V.K. Jehannum
Agios Octinomos-Drakosophia
Above: Two Original Sigils of Shalicu by an Anonymous Contributor
V.K. Jehannum 