The Historical Authenticity of Vampyric Magic as a Spiritual Practice

[peymanzkp]

Is vampyric magic a legitimate spiritual practice, given that it does not appear to have any clear historical basis in the PGM or in medieval Islamic and Christian magical traditions?

 

[Morell]

A legitimate practice is one that brings results, right? Does Vampiric Magic has practitioners with results? Yes.

 

[Wintruz]

Is vampyric magic a legitimate spiritual practice, given that it does not appear to have any clear historical basis in the PGM or in medieval Islamic and Christian magical traditions?

Even in the ancient world, the PGM wasn't regarded as an arbiter of magical legitimacy. Often, it was regarded with revulsion. When you mention Christianity and Islam, I presume that you mean grimoires? Grimoires form only one part of the magic of both the Christian and Muslim worlds. In any case, holding the grimoire tradition ("tradition" here is a bit misplaced actually, there's often deep logical contradiction within the same grimoire, let alone across texts) as the final judge of legitimacy is every bit as much an arbitrary decision as that of selecting an archetype and working with it to unlock inner potential.

As religions, especially in their mystical forms, I would argue that parts of both Christianity and Islam actually do remanifest in figure of the Vampyre. In some ways, the Vampyre represents tradition as seen through the prism of post-Enlightenment, anti-tradition discourse. Communion is the obvious example but so too attitudes towards aristocracy in an age of Rousseau, affinity with animals in a time of Kant's attempt to separate man as much as possible from the animal world, etc. Because Islam resisted Westernisation, the figure of the Vampyre didn't occur quite so much in the Muslim world (Anatolia is an exception) but it's extremely easy to read something like the Dervish's eternal longing in the archetype as it has evolved alongside the Islamic world's tension with the West.

 

[peymanzkp]

Even in the ancient world, the PGM wasn't regarded as an arbiter of magical legitimacy. Often, it was regarded with revulsion. When you mention Christianity and Islam, I presume that you mean grimoires? Grimoires form only one part of the magic of both the Christian and Muslim worlds. In any case, holding the grimoire tradition ("tradition" here is a bit misplaced actually, there's often deep logical contradiction within the same grimoire, let alone across texts) as the final judge of legitimacy is every bit as much an arbitrary decision as that of selecting an archetype and working with it to unlock inner potential.

As religions, especially in their mystical forms, I would argue that parts of both Christianity and Islam actually do remanifest in figure of the Vampyre. In some ways, the Vampyre represents tradition as seen through the prism of post-Enlightenment, anti-tradition discourse. Communion is the obvious example but so too attitudes towards aristocracy in an age of Rousseau, affinity with animals in a time of Kant's attempt to separate man as much as possible from the animal world, etc. Because Islam resisted Westernisation, the figure of the Vampyre didn't occur quite so much in the Muslim world (Anatolia is an exception) but it's extremely easy to read something like the Dervish's eternal longing in the archetype as it has evolved alongside the Islamic world's tension with the West.

Of course, by “legitimacy,” I mean something that has been repeated across different periods and among different peoples, producing essentially the same result. I think that the Greek, Islamic, and Christian traditions ultimately share the same underlying spiritual structures and practices, even if this may not appear so at first glance. Of course, I am speaking here strictly in the context of the occult sciences.

As for your view of vampyrism as a kind of reaction against the traditional world, I am not entirely convinced. First of all, I think this is a very broad and expansive interpretation of the concept. This is, in my view, a problem that is quite common in Vampyric Magick. There is a tendency to expand or redefine the concept in such a way that it becomes associated with things like pranayama or the absorption of planetary energies, and so on, which are essentially meaningless in this context.

Secondly, I don't think that such a sweeping approach to history, with broad generalizations being drawn from it, is particularly sound. The modern world may, at first glance, appear vampyric because of its colonial character, but I would ask: did the ancient Persians and Greeks not also engage in forms of colonialism and domination throughout their history? And what about the laws concerning jizya, which were associated with the Islamic conquests? Of course they did. Yet, at that time—or at least in the texts that have survived to us—we do not find an archetype comparable to the Vampyre.

So, I would be rather cautious about projecting the Vampyre archetype onto broad historical processes simply because we can identify superficial similarities between them.

 

[Wintruz]

Of course, by “legitimacy,” I mean something that has been repeated across different periods and among different peoples, producing essentially the same result.

I should take a moment to say that a large part of historical scholarship was the conclusion that magic as set out in grimoires was tried and found ineffective. Borchardt wrote that trying grimoires and finding they didn't work was “as much a part of the story of the magician as any other moment in the magical journey”.

Secondly, I don't think that such a sweeping approach to history, with broad generalizations being drawn from it, is particularly sound. The modern world may, at first glance, appear vampyric because of its colonial character, but I would ask: did the ancient Persians and Greeks not also engage in forms of colonialism and domination throughout their history? And what about the laws concerning jizya, which were associated with the Islamic conquests? Of course they did. Yet, at that time—or at least in the texts that have survived to us—we do not find an archetype comparable to the Vampyre.

There is a misunderstanding of my position here. I am talking about the vampire as a discrete European cultural response to the collapse of the Ancien Régime. The figure emerges from Romanticism (it's very strongly associated with Byron) and Romanticism was largely animated by hostility to the modernisation attempts of the Enlightenment. That reactionary quality then appears in counter-criticism as the vampire. This is the point in texts like Dracula, the title character is not just a predator, he's a predator from a different age and that age is being seen through modern eyes, the juxtaposition of Dracula's talking about hereditary alongside Van Helsing talking about new science, etc. It wouldn't be seen in older cultures in that way (though there are vampire-like beings in mythology of course) because there never was a secularisation attempt as enormous or successful as the Enlightenment before the eighteenth century. Obviously the vampire is only one of thousands of cultural responses to that attempt. I wrote a bit about the process here. I don't think colonialism as much to do with it (the Enlightenment was/is a colonial project) as Romanticism. For me, Vampyrism is essentially Romanticism turned into a initiatory system of self-knowledge and beauty-making.

First of all, I think this is a very broad and expansive interpretation of the concept. This is, in my view, a problem that is quite common in Vampyric Magick. There is a tendency to expand or redefine the concept in such a way that it becomes associated with things like pranayama or the absorption of planetary energies, and so on, which are essentially meaningless in this context.

I agree with this. Working with an archetype in this way must be personal but there are often attempts to shoehorn in concepts which are not only alien to the archetype but actively hostile to it. That being said, mixing things together which have no cultural or logical relationship to each other has been endemic in occultism since the Golden Dawn.