This little exegesis will assume two somewhat dubious things. It will assume, for the sake of argument, that the White Wolf universe is real, as opposed to a very absorbing and often plausible game. It will also assume that Yahweh (YHVH, I Am That I AM) was the first god, the only real god. I’m rather biased, Christian that I am, but I’m not ethnocentric and I see the latter viewpoint as incredibly ethnocentric. I’m afraid I never understood the point of the commandment, “I am the LORD thy God; thou shalt have none other gods but ME. For I am a jealous god…” How can God be jealous, if there is only one anyway? Silly. However, I have to assume this viewpoint, or my structure of argument falls apart. So. Yahweh was the first and only God, and Caine existed.
Popular belief is strong, at any rate, in White Wolf. Right now there
is a lot of popular belief in the White Wolf universe, which assumes a certain paradigm. Modern vampires
want to believe in the World of Darkness (TM). It might be the conspiracy
theories (everybody loves a conspiracy theory – come on, admit it, you
watch the X Files, don’t you? You want to believe.) It might be the
neat way vampires are packaged into clans, and are then given certain
powers according to clan. People want to belong, and a clan is a surrogate
club and family. Besides, those powers are awfully nice.
Then again, maybe the creators of Vampire: The Masquerade were really on
to something when they took Anne Rice’s theory of vampire creation (first
drain the body, then feed the vampire some vampire blood; make it sensual
if possible, but painful too, to give it a dark sadomasochistic edge) and
then came up with the idea of “Blood Bonding” to graft onto the whole
process. God, that’s romantic. That is so romantic that it oozes. I’m a
vampire; blood attracts me, not so much in a fetishistic way but more in
the way heroin attracts a drug user. If a Blood Bond could exist, that
would fetishize the substance that I already lust after. Be still, my
beating heart. I think I’d be willing to live in a World of Darkness just
to get that sort of delicious rush and sexual torment.
Maybe.
The mythology is a bit of a problem. It’s a little too ethnocentric for
me. Also, I’m not sure it’s even all that accurate.
Be that as it may.
Take a look at it from a White Wolf perspective, rather than from the
perspective of a universalist or, heaven forbid, an atheist. The mythology
does not hold water.
THE BOOK OF NOD
“I loved him, my Brother. He was the brightest. The sweetest. The
strongest. He was the first part of all my joy.” – the words of Cain(e)
from The Book of Nod, copyright 1993 by White Wolf Studios
The author of this particular creation myth has hit upon one truth – that
a sacrifice is meaningless unless one sacrifices that which one loves
dearly. The best parts of any existence are sacrificed to the gods before
the gods decide to grab them away first. A less cynical way of looking at
the sacrificial act would be to note that when one gives up what one loves
the most, one shows that the deity is more important than the person
making the sacrifice. Also that we must all let go that which we love. But
this is tangential to the Caine myth, which is supposed to answer the
question, Who was the first vampire? just as Adam and Eve were the answer
to the question, Who were the first humans?
Perhaps a better question would be to ask, Why Caine?
The King James Bible is rather cryptic about the whole story. The story in
Genesis 4 is short – “And in the process of time it came to pass, that
Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And
Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat
thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering: but unto
Cain and to his offering he had not respect…” Why on earth not? What
could possibly be wrong with being a vegetarian, or offering the fruits
that one loves? Cain’s response seems perfectly justified – “And Cain was
very wroth, and his countenance fell.” Hey, God, can we talk? I did all
this for you; don’t you love me?
God comes across like a person who desperately needs interpersonal skills.
“And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy
countenance fallen?” Hello, God…your clue phone is ringing. You’re
supposed to be omniscient, right? You figure this out…God goes on to
make matters worse by saying, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be
accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. and unto thee
shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. And Cain talked with
Abel his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that
Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” It would be very
tempting to imagine Cain’s frame of mind being, “God wants an offering of
meat, does he? I’ll give him meat!” with a healthy dash of “Abel’s so
popular with God, why not send him straight to Heaven?” However, the Bible
makes no mention of Cain’s emotions or thoughts or other motivations; we
are left to fill in the blank. When people fill in the blanks in the Bible
passages, filling in motivations and emotions and such, the results are
usually quite ethnocentric and biased, so maybe it would be best to not
speculate on what might have been going through poor Cain’s head.
Cain makes a bit of a mistake at this point. If you have read the story of
Adam and Eve, you already know that it’s not a good idea to try and
obfuscate before Yahweh. Saying, “My wife made me do it” after trying in
an amateur way to hide in the garden isn’t going to get you anywhere. Cain
isn’t much brighter than his father – when Yahweh asks him, “Where is Abel
thy brother?” Cain said “I know not: am I my brother’s keeper?” Stupid
answer. Had I been in his shoes, I would have said, “I sacrificed him. Was
just following your suggestion. Are you happy now?” But I’m not Cain.
Yahweh’s response is predictable – “And he said, What hast thou done? the
voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now thou
art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy
brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not
henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt
thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is
greater than I can bear.” Ouch. Still, this is par for the course if we’re
dealing with a vindictive father-deity. What Yahweh does next is
completely inexplicable, though: Cain quite reasonably protests, “Behold,
thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy
face shall I be hid (ed: hah! that’s what he thinks!) and I shall be a
fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that
everyone that findeth me shall slay me.” Well, wasn’t that God’s original
idea? Apparently not. “And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever
slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set
a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” Uhhh. God? What
in hell are you doing?
IT WASN’T GOD’S IDEA
At least not according to The Book of Nod. (Which was written, for the
record, by Sam Chupp and Andrew Greenberg, two very mortal if not
necessarily normal authors. It’s an incredible piece of speculative poetry, and it has a good scholarly pastiche at the end. What a masterpiece! But it’s not an ancient text, any more than the Necronomicon is an ancient text.) Listen to this. “I cried tears of love as I,
with sharp things, sacrificed that which was the first part of my joy, my
brother. And the blood of Abel covered the altar and smelled sweet as it
burned. But my Father said, Cursed are you, Caine, who killed your
brother. As I was cast out so shall you be. And he exiled me to wander in
Darkness, the Land of Nod.” Stop the presses! Who’s doing the exiling,
here? No, it’s not God’s idea to toss Caine out of the only home he knows.
It’s Daddy’s fault. Adam’s. (Given that Caine killed another of Adam’s
children, Adam’s reaction is not all that incomprehensible. Disownment has
happened over lesser sins.)
WAS IT ADAM AND EVE?
Maybe Adam and Eve weren’t quite so mortal as we had been led to believe.
first of all, the book of Genesis gives two creation myths. The first is
the one where the world was created in seven days; which puts the knickers
of evolutionists everywhere into a dreadful twist. At one point, the sixth
day to be exact, God creates life. “And God said, Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth over the earth. So God
created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and
female he created them.” Adam and Eve are not mentioned until the next
chapter. AFTER the seventh day (the day of rest which our lovely weekend
is based on). This ought to be a massive continuity error – unless Adam
and Eve were not the first normal humans, but the first vampires.
There’s that whole stink over the Tree, and the Fruit of the Tree. That
fruit wasn’t an apple, although artists have portrayed it as such for
centuries. Apples weren’t exactly indigenous to the area, anyway – they’re
a fruit for more temperate climates, such as those found in Northern
Europe. That aside, what if the “fruit” wasn’t fruit at all – but blood?
Children are referred to as fruit in the Bible many times. It’s a common
poetic device, just like calling sperm seed. The Forbidden Fruit might
very well be humanity.
Genesis says, “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden
of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man,
saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the
day that thou eateast thereof thou shalt surely die.” What could be so
deadly about knowledge, hmmm? Unless it’s not final death Yahweh is
talking about, maybe, but mortal death? (By the way, this is the part
where God creates Eve out of Adam’s rib, to be a “helpmeet.” After
humanity has long been told to be fruitful and multiply. This is how we
know that we’re dealing with two different creation myths.)
After Adam and Eve eat (by the way, who was that serpent who tempted Eve,
anyway? I’m sure White Wolf could fit in a Settite here, but Genesis
rather antedates White Wolf by several thousand years. The historical
Satan did not become a tempter and an embodiment of evil until almost the
birth of Jesus. Satan does not even appear as the one who does God’s dirty
work until the Book of Job, which was written well after Genesis – come
on, you don’t think these books were all written at once, by the same
author, do you? So who was that masked serpent? Enquiring minds want to
know…) they get thrown out of the garden. Rather like losing one’s
mortality and being told to walk the earth forever until you get killed or
meet a sunrise, isn’t it? “The Fall” is a universal myth. Few things
embody “The Fall” better than the vampire. Becoming a vampire is like
making the transition from child to adult in twenty four hours. Do you
remember adolescence? It’s bad enough when it’s stretched out over an
entire decade. Sudden losses of innocence, as for example what happens on
the battlefield, tend to be very traumatic. Eden dies. The rest of life is
a quest to somehow regain or rebuild that essential innocence.
UNIVERSAL MOTHER
Another good candidate for First Vampire is Lilith. First of all, she
isn’t originally Hebrew – she was a demoness from the Sumerian culture who
made a brief cameo appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Lilith doesn’t
take on vampiric qualities until she is imported to the Israelites,
however. Once she is assimilated into the culture, she becomes the
arcetypal succubus. You can read a good version of the myth in Neil
Gaiman’s Sandman series. A short version is as follows: Adam was given
Lilith as his first wife, but she was too independent and strong willed,
so he rejected her and drove her out of Eden. Lilith decided to mate with
lots of demons. Her offspring started to cause havoc, especially among the
mortals. An angel was sent to her to tell her that her children would be
destroyed. Lilith told the angel that she would kill three mortal children
for every one of her children that died. and so she did: sucking the life
out of sleeping infants, killing women in childbirth when she could…Her
children, the Lilitu, were allowed to proliferate, and they follow in
lilith’s footsteps, killing infants and feeding on the lifeblood of
mothers in labour. They also sit on men’s chests in the middle of the
night, copulate with them, and give them erotic nightmares. This follows
the stryx pattern of vampirism: the witch who gives love and death.
Lilith has a prominent place in The Book of Nod, too: She gives Caine
his first drink of blood, after Caine has resisted all of Yahweh’s
attempts to forgive and forget. (Why? Caines’ problem is with Adam, isn’t
it? Assuming Adam is the real father…) White Wolf has arbitrarily placed
Lilith in its world mythology as being the first Mage, a Verbena; I think
it is far more likely that Lilith was a vampire. Who but a vampire would
know to give a starving vampire a drink? If Lilith antedates Eve, was
driven out of Eden before Adam and Eve, then perhaps she was the first
vampire; perhaps vampirism was the punishment for her independence.
Vampires have always been as independent as alley cats, and often as
scapegoated and reviled (it wasn’t so long ago that people used to kill
cats out of superstition. It happened as late as the French Revolution.)
Of course, it could also be possible that Lilith was a vampire all along
(makes sense if Adam was a vampire, too, doesn’t it?)
WHODUNNIT?
I’m going to skip ahead to an incident in Genesis where Yahweh tells
Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn son, Isaac, the fruit of his old age
and his pride and joy. Actually, no, he didn’t command it. In the words of
the King James Bible, Genesis, Chapter 22, “And it came to pass after
these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Behold, here
I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a
burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.”
Yes, it’s God who is doing the tempting. It’s still early in the myths of
the Israelites; Satan hasn’t yet been recruited to do God’s dirty work.
Why the hell is God tempting Abraham to slay Isaac?
THERE IS ONLY ONE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE…
It isn’t because God is testing Abraham’s faith. I think it’s because
Yahweh is hungry.
In most religions, sacrifices are burnt to the heavens to be received by
the gods who dwell therein (or occaisionally to the gods who dwell in the
earth, but Yahweh is a sky deity). The best parts of the animal are saved
for the gods: the tenderest meat from the most beautiful part of the herd.
The blood. All is burnt so that the gods might feast, and be appeased.
When Jesus (yes, this is jumping ahead about three thousand years) tells
his disciples, “This is my blood, drink this in remembrance of me,” he
isn’t just suggesting something profoundly intimate – he is suggesting
sacriledge. Blood is reserved for God – drinking the blood of a
slaughtered beast, especially a sacrifice, is completely against kosher
laws. Jesus is the sacrifice, the lamb that is to be killed instead of
Isaac (the Isaac myth is often cited by christians as a precursor to the
crucifixion story). Or humanity. And yet he’s telling mere mortals to
drink his holy, reserved blood? Why?
And why would he have to be sacrificed at all?
Because Yahweh is hungry.
This is really the only answer that makes sense. Yahweh in the Bible,
especially the Old Testament, is not the most emotionally stable of
deities, or the most merciful. Certainly not the most humane. He’s pretty
bloodthirsty, when it comes down to it – always backing the Israelites in
wars where entire rival tribes get slaughtered in a genocidal holocaust (I
know this is a touchy subject, but let’s just say that humans have been
engaging in murder-with-extreme-prejudice since the dawn of time, and
leave it at that). If he is hungry, war and the atrocities of war are a
very efficient way to feed.
Why did Yahweh drive Adam and Eve out of the garden, they who he had
created in his (vampiric) image? Because they wanted to be “as the gods,”
as the serpent had promised. They wanted, quite naturally, being made in
God’s image, to be God’s equals. They wanted gnosis, and subsequent
apotheosis. Yahweh, jealous god that he was, didn’t want that; so he sent
the serpent to tempt Eve (who of course would succumb to curiosity – who
wouldn’t? “Here’s this tree. You can eat of any fruit from any tree but
this one. It represents wisdom.” Come on!) Remember, this is before Satan
– Yahweh does his own dirty work.
And so, with a bit of subterfuge, Yahweh prevented Adam and Eve from
getting to the Tree of (eternal) Life, which would have been the next
thing they reached for (funny, he hadn’t mentioned that when he talked
about the tree of knowledge). And Adam and Eve were cursed with mortality.
Still vampiric, though.
That does not resolve the matter of who the first immortal vampire was –
I’m holding out for Lilith, myself, it would have been just like her to
have snuck a bite from the Tree of life before she had her first quarrel
with Adam. That would conveniently square with the White Wolf mythos as
well (which has made all sorts of pagan deities into Antediluvians, but
has carefully ignored Yahweh, perhaps because White Wolf wants to avoid
lawsuits). If there are immortals. If the Judeo-Christian myths should be
accepted as the first/most real myths, which I am not sure I want to buy
into.
(By the way, this theory of creation myths certainly points to vampiric
qualities in Jesus, as well, if one follows the Catholic doctrine of three
in one and one in three – which would explain certain miraculous things
like the Resurrection, also gnomic statements like “The blood is the
life.” I’m all for making Jesus a vampire deity for vampires to worship; I
think Jesus is a pretty hip role model, especially as he is painted in the
Gospels as opposed to the oral legends of the Christian denominations.
However, I realize that not everybody will agree with me, and most
Christians would be disgusted by this train of thought. Hey, guys, I’m
just following a philosophical argument to its logical conclusion.)
WHAT IS THE MORAL?
Beware of creation myths that come from cultures that wanted to explain
why herding was better than farming, patriarchy was better than
cooperation, war was better than peace, and my god is bigger than yours,
nyah nyah?
Seriously – what is to learn? A lot. Vampirism is the process of nature
itself – quite contrary to the view which sees vampires as undead,
unnatural things, vampirism is an embodiment of life’s essential
symbiosis. Vampires represent the eternal circle, the cycle of being. They
take life, as all hunters do, when they hunt to kill (and tigers are
certainly part of the web of being; why not vampires?) They live off of
the life of others, symbolizing that no matter how independent we all
think we are, none of us can live without others. To eat, one must be
connected to the world; it is dangerous to be too detached from one’s
food, because once one forgets where that food comes from, one eventually
forgets how to feed. On a more human level, the level of day to day
vampiris, one can also see the cycle of symbiosis in blood feeding and
energy feeding; it is by feeding that we solitary, lonely people remember
that we must be connected with others, have relationships, normal lives,
humanity. We cannot escape the circle, the symbiosis. We are a part of it.
We embody it. We surrender to it. And what is Deity, if not life itself,
that circle of being which encompasses all things on earth?
I suppose the Christian view would be to call this everything-ness the
Holy spirit, but I’ve never been one for dogma, so I won’t even
try to explore that option.
It doesn’t matter if you are an atheist or a deist. What matters is that
you are a vampire, and that you are alive. Heart beating, blood pulsing,
mouth dry with hunger, nerves burning with desire. Embrace the world. Be a
vampire, be proud of yourself, choose what myths make you happy since it
is you who must ultimately shape your own life. (Yes, even if the myths
are those made by White Wolf, which put out its games in 1992. Wicca was
once a young religion/lifestyle too, and look how much it’s grown in the
past few decades since it was invented. People might think you are a flake
for believing obviously fabricated myths, but so what, if they make you
happy?) Just do not deny the force within you. Do not deny the Will that
itches to get out of its prison. Do not deny life. There are few worse
sins than to bottle up life in a jar.
Mistress