self-righteous individuals who were in power condemned men and women as monsters who must be slaughtered in order to establish a triumph of God, faith, and conformity.
Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside also expands its vistas to include a number of non-vampires who present eerie manifestations of mystery and wonder. Could careless dabbling in the occult bring forth parasitic entities who subsist on the psychic energy of their victims? Could entities from UFOs who claim to come from other worlds, and strange teenagers with haunting black eyes who beg your permission to enter your home, really be vampires in less familiar guises?
While this book focuses on the supernatural, the multidimensional, and the paraphysical beings who have interacted with our species since prehistoric times, I shall also visit the vampire community living among us today. I do not suggest for one moment that these men and women are murderers, sociopaths, or supernatural beings. They present a subgroup within our society of individuals who are perhaps unusual and unique, but are not after the blood of those who choose to leave their interaction with vampires to motion pictures, television, and books.
Far more than a book that contains a number of frightening true accounts and a collection of truly magnificent original art, what I hope to accomplish with Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside is expand the definition of the vampire—the most popular monster in the world—to include the more complete definition of “parasitic entities that enter our reality from the far reaches of the multidimensional universe to possess their victims and to feed upon their life essence and their very soul.”
—Brad Steiger
The Sons and Daughters of Lilith
The plural form of “Lilith” in Hebrew is “lilim,” which is found in Talmudic and Kabbalistic literature as a term for spirits of the night. Lilith is most often depicted as a beautiful woman with long, unkempt hair and large, bat-like wings. According to the Midrash, Lilith preys not only on males as they lie sleeping, but also upon mothers who have just given birth, as well as their newborn babes.
Lilith quite likely was first feared in ancient Babylon as Lilitu, who, together with Ekimmu, wandered the night world in search of victims for their insatiable blood lust. In Hebrew folklore, Lilith was Adam’s wife before the creation of Eve, the true chosen mother of humankind. The terrible night creatures known as the incubi and the succubi were the children of Adam and Lilith. The incubi materialize before human women as handsome men, hypnotically seducing them and withdrawing from them their life force. Succubi appear to human men as lovely, sensual women, tempting and promising, disguising their thirst for human blood.
While those human males who consort with a succubus often meet an untimely end, drained of their life forces, on occasion their interactions with these entities brings about a horde of demonic children, who will one day gather at the deathbeds of their human fathers, hail them as their sires, then scatter to capture as many human souls as possible.
The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, translated by MacGregor Mathers from a manuscript written in French in the eighteenth century, is dated 1458 and claims to be translated originally from Hebrew. The text states that the universe is teeming with hordes of angels and demons that interact with human beings on many levels. Humans are somewhere between the angelic and the demonic intelligences on the spiritual scale, and each human entity has both a guardian angel and a malevolent demon hovering near him or her from birth until death.
Venerable traditions state that such entities as Lilith and her spawn first manifested on Earth at a time when the gods were said to walk freely among humankind. To these godlike creatures of darkness, the primitive humans who regarded them with such awe and reverence were property, chattel from which to gain energy and sustenance.
The apocryphal Book of Enoch tells of the order of angels called “Watchers,” or “The Sleepless Ones.” The leader of the Watchers was called Semjaza or Shemhazai (in other places, Azazel, the name of one of the Hebrews’ principal demons), who led 200 Watchers down to Earth to take wives from among the daughters of men. It was from such a union that the Nephilim were born. The Nephilim are said in the Old Testament to have been the progeny of the “sons of god,” whose union with Earth women produced “giants … men of great renown.” Although often translated as “giants,” the word Nephilim actually means “the fallen ones.”
Since the Watchers manifested on Earth as angels, the Watchers were beings of spirit essence, rather than of flesh and blood. What these fallen ones invading Earth needed from humans was their blood and their flesh so that they might become corporeal beings. The Watchers and the Nephilim were the first real vampires to exploit humankind, and they continue today to feed on the life force of humans—both their blood and their spirit.
Real vampires are those vulnerable humans who have been possessed by the spawn of ancient entities such as Lilith, the seductive fallen angel (illustration by Ricardo Pustanio).
Once in physical bodies, the fallen angels taught their human wives to cast various spells and to practice the arts of enchantment. They imparted to the women the lore of plants and the properties of certain roots. Semjaza did not neglect human men, teaching them how to manufacture weapons and tools of destruction.
In many ways, Semjaza is synonymous with the Serpent who tempted Eve and Adam with the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Nearly every known Earth culture has its legends of wise Serpent People who ruled the planet in prehistoric times and assisted humankind in rising in status from hairless apes to the lords of the planet. Many of these Serpent People were said to come from the sky to promulgate the beneficent and civilizing rule of the Sons of the Sun, or the Sons of Heaven, upon Earth. Quetzacoatl, the “feathered serpent” and culture-bearer of the Aztecs, was said to have descended from Heaven in a silver egg. Ciuacoatl, the Great Mother of the Gods for the ancient people of Mexico, was represented as a serpent woman. Among many African tribes, it is Aido Hwendo, the Rainbow Serpent, that supports the Earth.
The Babylonian priest-historian Berossus chronicled the legend of Oannes, an entity described as a serpent-like half-man, half-fish, who surfaced from the Persian Gulf to instruct the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia in the arts of civilization. Before the advent of the serpent master Oannes, Berossus stated, the Sumerians were savages, living like the beasts with no order or rule.
Like so many accounts of the Serpent People, Oannes appeared to be some kind of amphibious Master Teacher endowed with superior intelligence, but possessing an appearance that was frightening to behold. Oannes had the body of a fishlike serpent with humanlike feet and a head that combined the features of fish and human. Berossus explained that the creature walked about on land during the day, counseling and teaching the Sumerians, but returned to the ocean each evening. The amphibious master gave the once primitive Sumerians insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the Earth and showed them how to harvest fruits. In short, Oannes instructed them in everything that could tend to soften the manners of and civilize humankind.
The ancient texts tell of the Watchers, the Nephilim, the fallen ones who were the first real vampires to exploit humankind (illustration by Ricardo Pustanio).
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