or, is drinking blood “dark?” Does drinking blood make you a “dark” person? (What is “dark?”) Are you corrupted forever?
Hmm.
I am an Episcopalian. (I’m also a witch, which is a little odd for a Christian, but I’ve always been odd.) I don’t see myself as being any more “dark” than I was before I had my first taste of blood. I’ve always been a little morbid and gothic, and I think it has less to do with my vampirism than with my intellectual curiosity about all aspects of human nature, including the unpleasant stuff.
I’m definitely moody. I’ve always been moody. Drinking blood actually helps this. It comforts me and gives me something to hold onto when the world seems to be falling apart around me. I do notice more easily when I’m slipping into a bad mood, because the contrast between my well-fed, healthy moods and my hungry, irritable moods is greater. That doesn’t make my hungry moods worse, but it does make them more noticeable and irritating.
The idea that drinking blood “kills all the light inside you” comes straight from White Wolf. There’s a description of the “Embrace” at the beginning of the book, which uses that very phrase. White Wolf is a gaming studio. Vampire: the Masquerade is a game. The characters you play are “Embraced” and become undead - and a different species from human. Most of the game is about trying to adjust to this los of humanity. Real vampirism entails no such transformation, and saying that the act of feeding kills a hopeful, loving part of you is just plain wrong. It implies that feeding is somehow evil.
I feed from Jesus every week at the communion rail, when my priest changes the wine into blood. (Some churches see this as a symbolic reenactment; my church sees the transformation as more of an alchemical magic, although they don’t use that term to describe it - except for maybe some priests, who read up on alchemy to keep up with my conversational tangents…) Is this evil? I certainly hope not. Because that would mean Jesus asked all of his followers to do something evil to remember him. Drinking blood does break kosher, but so do other things that aren’t evil, like eating bacon and having sex with someone of the same gender. Evil isn’t about violating society’s taboos, it’s about willfully causing harm.
My primary donor is my fiance. When I feed from him, it is about love and closeness. I do not force myself on him; I ask, and he gives, and although I take blood, I give back intimacy. there’s nothing evil about that, either.
If you were to drink from an unconsenting donor, that would be rape. That’s definitely evil. I don’t think it would permanently kill the goodness within you, but it would certainly stain your soul and haunt you for the rest of your life and if it became a habit, would make you quite callous and unpleasant and almost sociopathic - which is one way to slowly strangle the goodness in you, I suppose. However, most vampires do not rape people for blood, either once every now and then or habitually. Rape is repugnant. It hurts. A normal person hurts inside at the mere possibility of causing another person that sort of harm. Most of us would rather starve and get unhealthy than cause that kind of damage.
(Note from Sarah, aka grandpoobah, formerly “Mistress” - Sorry for the absence. As some of you know, there was a fracas on my list, real-vampires, a couple of weeks ago. My own list was taken away from me. Well, no, the power to manage my own list was taken from me - the moderating team gave me a list of ultimatums to fulfill if I was to get my list back on probation, one of which was to start taking Prozac, and I told them to stick their ultimata where the sun doesn’t shine and I started my own list again as vda-newcarthage@egroups.com. The moral of this story: never trust people enough to share control of anything that you lead. Anyway, I’ve been very hypersensitive since the incident, and when I was told that my style of editing arksites wasn’t what Sire was looking for, I just hid under a rug for a while out of sheer paranoia. But now I’m back.)