A Sanguinarian Treatise: An Argument For Partition From The Vampire Community
By CJ!
As the long-awaited (by all nine of you) sequel to “A Sanguinarian Treatise” is now in review stage, I felt it was appropriate to repost and reintroduce the original for those to reconsider after a few years of life experience as well for those who have yet to read it. “A Sanguinarian Treatise” was written in late 2009 and made public in 2011. I hope to see respectful debate and lively…
Apparently the ankh is the symbol for the vampire community, I love Egyptian culture and I know why our symbol is the ankh, so I can't complain, like/reblog if you're a vampirekin, sanguinarian, or anything in between
When I was five years old, my parents left us with our grandparents for two weeks, and left to a conference in Canada. From there, they came and got us, and we traveled out of state and left behind our life. They trained for months at their new job, then it was off to the far corners of the Earth. What was their new job? Missionaries. They endeavored to reach as many people as possible and make people abandon whatever old beliefs they might have had, to adopt the version of Christianity sanctioned by my parents' employer. This proselytization is a practice I have come to loathe, but at that time, I thought my parents were the next best thing to superheroes. I've lived in Cyprus, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, and several other countries for smaller amounts of time, all of which amounts to 12 years of my life. Years in which I barely ever saw my country of origin, my relatives, or any of my old friends.
Early in my teenage years, I became certain that "enhanced abilities" were real. Not superhuman, not supernatural, because those implied that something was beyond human ability or outside of what is natural, and I thought these powers were totally within human ability and natural function -- just not something the public believed existed. It was my mission to prove that they existed, and catalog what they could do. Understandably, my efforts were pretty frustrated, and I ended up leaving that pursuit behind before I ever went to college. What happened instead...is I met a "vampire."
This new friend of mine used to be part of a group in her home country, who claimed to be either sanguine vampires or psychic vampires (drinkers of blood vs. absorbers of prana), and who taught her how to sense spiritual "energy," manipulate it, and use other abilities. She turned me from my old pursuit of what was basically superpowers, onto a more noble and spiritual pursuit. One I initially tried to marry with my Christian faith, though that didn't last. In future encounters, we would learn that there was much more to her than just 'vampire,' but that is for another time. She gave me the basics I needed to get started on my own, but when we became separated by circumstance, I had to adapt with no teacher. I have since read what many different people have had to say, ranging from self-proclaimed 'masters' to more amateur witches. I give them all the same chance, and expand my search based on how reliable their information appears. I have not pursued a college education on matters of the occult, or religion, but I don't personally see that as necessary given my diligence and the breadth of information available to me. Also, my fortune for drawing in people of magic, and the "Weird" in general.
While in college for graphic design, I met a new friend who had a rather impressive (if hard to back up) history with the so-called "supernatural." Unlike my experiences thus far, they claimed to have met things like Harpies, and even engaged them in a direct fight. They had friends who were supposedly Werewolves, and friends who allegedly could control elemental air in a physical sense. None of this was I able to verify. However, while I learned about this new friend and their old group, which included yet another vampire coven, my new friend also had the opportunity to learn about me. Realizing I had quite a few features and experiences that were odd, they reported these findings to an old mentor. He contacted me himself, and we talked at length about his perspective.
Ultimately, I would not come to accept his point of view (that I was an angel in human form), but the truth would end up being not too far off. More on that in another post. Multiple posts, likely. I also spoke at length with a friend of a friend, who claimed to be a/the Lord of "Hell," and to have great power over the demonic world. Once more, never found any verification for this. But this "lord" did have quite a few pointers for me that turned out to be rather useful. Foremost among them, how to find the "door" to someone's mind and enter/observe their "Mindscape," as he called it. A valuable skill I have maintained to this day. After him, I have not consulted any 'master' for their information directly, though I remain open to the possibility.
In the past few decades, people who feed on blood have formed their own community, largely thanks to the pop-culture popularity of their fictional counterparts.
Today, there is a worldwide community of human vampires, or “real vampires,” as scholars typically call them. Real vampires are not undead, nor immortal, nor can they be weakened by garlic or vanquished by silver. In fact, they’re biologically typical in almost all ways, except in how they get part of their nourishment: from human and animal blood (vampires of this type call themselves “sanguinarians”), or by draining psychic energy (“psychic vampires” or “psi-vamps”), or both (hybrids).
For its participants, real vampirism isn’t a fad to be adopted one day and discarded the next (and those who treat it as such dismissed as mere “lifestylers” by the community). They feed out of what they are convinced is a biological need, one that generally appears during or just after puberty. Without their monthly, weekly, or sometimes daily feeding rituals, vampires claim, it becomes difficult for them to function—if they go too long without blood or “energy,” they can become weak, developing a host of physical and emotional symptoms that only a feeding can soothe.
In the two years I spent studying the vampires of New Orleans for my dissertation, I found that apart from their need for blood or its psychic equivalent, there were more genuine differences among them than commonalities. The people I met were equally men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 50. They were self-described atheists, monotheists, and polytheists; they were single, married, and divorced; and their sexual orientations were diverse. In fact, the only thing that truly united them all was the obvious exception to their otherwise “normal” existence: the impulse to take in blood or energy.
Some vampires, but not all, also choose to adopt the trappings of vampiric fashion, like Gothic dress and prosthetic fangs (some buy them stock, and others have custom acrylic dental prosthetics made from molds). These things are common, but they’re not at the core of the vampire identity—rather, they serve as external markers of the vampires’ internal state. Just as same-sex desire is distinct from the socio-cultural practices of the gay community, so being vampire is first a bodily need, then a set of personal and social practices for expressing it.
In general, vampires keep the trappings of their vampirism hidden during the day—it’s rare for one to show up to work in the morning wearing fangs, for example. But, when the lights go down, when the shops close up for the night and the moon rises overhead, the fangs go in and the vampires come out.
Feeding is governed by The Donor Bill of Rights, a pact between donor and vampire to promote safety and well-being, both physical and social. Real vampires perform the blood-letting ritual only with willing donors—friends, family members, significant others, or members of donor networks—and usually only after both the vampire and the donor have their blood tested. Some vampires use sterile single-use thermoplastic medical tubing to extrude blood into small receptacles for drinking on the spot, or for later storage; others may use sterile blades to make small incisions on the donor, and drink directly from the wound before cleaning and bandaging it. The Bill of Rights also applies to psychic vampires, who must refrain from “feeding” unethically—that is, taking energy from donors without their knowledge and consent.
Real vampires do not always feed. They socialize as well, especially with others of their own kind. Older, more experienced vampires (known as “elders”) will often form “houses” or “covens” to counsel younger, less experienced vampires on how to live with their condition. For psychic vampires, this guidance may also include instruction on the various methods of feeding—“contact feeding” through physically touching the donor; “ambient feeding” by taking excess energy that is naturally generated in high-traffic public places; or even “tantric feeding” through sexual encounters.
The use of terms and practices like these across the vampire community has been crucial to unifying it, helping its members construct a narrative about themselves. In popular culture, vampirism is associated with psychopathology, excess, and a general sense of social disconnection. But in reality, vampires say, they’re just a community like any other, one made of like-minded people who share rules and traditions.
A true sense of community among vampires began to emerge in the 1970s, as people who consumed blood or drained energy for nourishment began attending themed social gatherings—Dark Shadows conventions, events for blood fetishists, and bondage and S&M conventions—that allowed them to network with potential donors, and often to find others who shared their condition in the process.
In the early 1970s, some of the first organizations dedicated to studying vampires were also taking shape. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club (now The Vampire Empire) in 1965, originally as an organization dedicated to Dracula and vampire fiction and film. But between 1970 and 1972, Youngson began receiving letters from people who self-identified as vampires. By 1974, after meeting with some of her vampire-fans, she extended the group’s purview to include real vampirism, demonstrating some of the first intellectual interest in the topic.
Around the same time, the paranormal investigator Stephen Kaplan formed the Vampire Research Center, the first organization dedicated entirely to the study of real vampirism. Through it, Kaplan supervised a “vampire hotline,” where anonymous callers could phone in to tell Kaplan and his staff about their vampiric behavior.
By the 1980s, ethnographers began to identify sub-sections of the vampire community, including people who experience sexual gratification through blood-letting rituals. The community grew in the 1990s, but real vampires still existed mostly in isolation or in small groups, relying on nearby fan conventions, low-circulation newsletters, and print correspondence.
Then, all at once, a confluence of cultural trends facilitated the rapid growth of the real-vampire community.
The first was the rise of Anne Rice conventions. Rice had begun writing her gothic fiction in the 1970s, but the 1994 film adaptation of her book Interview with the Vampire ushered in a new era of mainstream interest in vampires. The conventions quickly became meccas for vampires as well as vampire fans, doing for the community what Dark Shadows gatherings had done to a lesser degree a few decades earlier. Just as before, they provided closeted real vampires with opportunities to meet others like them, as well as people willing to satisfy their appetites.
The second was the publication of the 1991 role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. Essentially Dungeons & Dragons with vampires, the role-playing game introduced a social space within which real vampires could congregate and network openly. It also helped to provide a lexicon of terms, protocols, and identifiers that the real vampire community could adopt for its own needs. And finally, by the end of the decade, the Internet had begun to dissolve geographic limitations, helping the niche community to grow through chat rooms and online forums.
But through its growth, at least one thing has stayed the same for the real vampires community: the stigma. Even in an era that has embraced previously fringe identities at face value, a taste for human blood remains a difficult practice to accept, especially because almost no one has found any real basis for the condition. But in fact, vampires are a proud, living critique of normalcy—which is, perhaps, the thing about them that frightens people the most.
for future reference, keeping a penny in your mouth while drinking warm pomegranate juice with dark chocolate, cloves, and a little bit of salt, ALMOST soothes intense blood cravings, just in case any other vamps out there need that
the rag mag Metro published a sensationalist “expose” on Sanguarians titled “The disturbing world of real life vampires”. It’s the usual crap of random razor blade attacks in night clubs and public heath scares laced with thinly veiled illusions to cults and satanism.
