visits of the vampire.
In China, the Chiang-shih may appear as a corpselike being covered in green or white hair. Taking the lives of individuals traveling at night is the Chiang-shih’s only motivation in its wretched existence. The creature is equipped with long, sharp claws, jagged fangs, and glowing red eyes.
The Chiang-shih may also possess a human body so that it can appear as a seductive woman or a handsome man to its unsuspecting victim. In some instances, the entity reanimates a recently deceased corpse, especially that of someone who committed suicide.
In Chapter One I mentioned the seductive, blood-sucking Rakshasas of the Hindus, but this beautiful night stalker is not alone in Indian tradition. Throughout the centuries Mother India has endured a wide variety of vampiric night stalkers.
The Bhuta haunts the wilderness and the wastelands and often signals its presence by an eerie display of glowing lights. Because these hideous beings feed on rotting corpses, the bite of the Bhuta brings illness and sometimes fatal disease.
Vlad III the Impaler, a fifteenth-century Romanian prince, was the historical character upon whom Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula was based. The prince had a reputation for torturing his enemies in unspeakable ways.
The rapacious Brahmaparush is said to seize its victims by the head and drink their blood through a hole that it punctures in their skulls. Once it has had its fill of blood, the Brahmaparush eats the brains of those who have fallen into its clutches. When the gory feast has been completed, the vampire engages in a bizarre dance of triumph around the corpse.
According to ancient tradition, the vampire must return to his crypt, coffin, or hiding place before sunrise or the Sun’s rays will destroy him (illustration by Bill Oliver).
The Churel certainly extinguish the beautiful, seductive image that has been established by so many female vampires around the world. The Churel are nightmarishly ugly with wild strands of hair, sagging breasts, black tongues, and thick, rough lips. Since luring a handsome man to accompany them into the shadows is definitely out of the realm of possibility, the Churel throw seduction aside and viciously attack young men.
The aboriginal people of Australia speak of the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who, a nasty shadow dweller who uses the suckers on the ends of his fingers and toes to feast on the blood of its victims.
The Ashanti people of southern Ghana fear the Asasabonsam, vampiric entities that favor luring people into the deep forests. The Asasabonsam appear as regular humans—until they suddenly sprout hook-like legs and savage teeth to drink their victim’s blood.
Another vampiric being that bothers the tribes of Africa’s Gold Coast is the Obayifo. This creature might be explained as the spirit form of a male or female practitioner of the Dark Arts that leaves the host body at night and goes in search of human blood. Sometimes the being appears as a glowing ball of light before it rematerializes as a vampire and claims its victim.
After Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) became a popular stage play—and, in 1931, a classic horror film with Bela Lugosi portraying the Count as a sophisticated aristocrat—the image of the vampire as a hideous demon began to transform in the popular consciousness into that of an attractive stranger who possesses a bite that, while fatal, also promises eternal life.
In the decades that followed Lugosi’s iconic appearance as a sophisticated, seductive, hypnotic member of the undead, the vampire of legend—a demonic presence, wrapped in a rotting burial shroud, intent only on sating its bloodlust—gradually became replaced by beguilingly romantic figures.
Anne Rice, who has certainly contributed greatly to the literary rebirth of the vampire as a romantic figure in such novels as Interview with the Vampire, has said that the vampire is an “enthralling” figure. She perceives the vampire’s image to be that of a “person who never dies … [who] takes a blood sacrifice in order to love, and exerts a charm over people.” In her view, the vampire is “a handsome, alluring, seductive person who captivates us, then drains the life out of us so that he or she can live. We long to be one of them, and the idea of being sacrificed to them becomes rather romantic.”
It seems that in the great majority of the current cinematic and literary portrayals of the undead, attractive, buff male vampires and beautiful, seductive female night stalkers drink human blood only from hospital storage units or get along by feasting on animal blood. In certain contemporary variations of the classic tales, the vampires have developed a synthetic bloodlike formula that enables them to avoid the taking of human vital fluid. A number of popular television series have even portrayed conscientious vampires in the roles of police officers or private detectives who defend human society from vicious fanged mavericks who still seek human victims.
The sexual metaphors to be found in the cinematic and literary portrayals of the vampire’s seductive bite are many, and Anne Rice has touched a responsive, atavistic chord in her many enthusiastic readers. In the view of Rice and other authors and screenwriters who have popularized the mythical vampire, the vampire’s overall goals may be incomprehensible to a human being’s limited point of view, but to the undead, human value judgments do not apply to them.
The moment one begins seriously to discuss the possibility that the ancient multidimensional spirit-parasites may truly be responsible for predatory acts of the real vampires that have stalked humankind since pre-history, one may receive a raised eyebrow and the accusation that one is attempting to push the study of mental illness and antisocial behavior back into the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, there are a growing number of medical doctors, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and members of the clergy who are becoming open-minded enough to suggest that we might reconsider certain areas of mental health and particular categories of abnormal psychic states to be demonic possession by spirit parasites rather than mental illness.
Christopher Lee’s Dracula (left) emphasized even more than Lugosi that the vampire was both sensual and seductive, while Bela Lugosi’s iconic interpretation of Count Dracula as a sophisticated aristocrat in the 1931 motion picture version of Bram Stoker’s novel changed the image of the vampire in film from hideous demon to an attractive stranger that promises immortality in his bite (illustrations by Ricardo Pustanio).
In recent years, a growing number of parapsychologists and other researchers have been investigating the possibility that mental slavery to a spirit parasite may be rather commonplace. Humankind has progressed to a plateau of enlightenment where we condemn the slavery of one human being to another. Soul slavery is more sinister, however, because the phenomenon remains largely unrecognized and undetected.
Many researchers believe that the spirit parasite can seize the controlling mechanism of the host body and direct the enslaved human to perform horrible, atrocious deeds. The spirit parasite might implant murderous thoughts in a host’s mind, such as the desire to taste human blood, to slash a victim’s throat, even to eat some of the person’s flesh. After the crime
