Handbook of the Vampire: ‘Beyond Humanity’: An Expedition Charting Non-Human Identities

Written for Handbook of the Vampire by Adam Owsinki the Chapter Page can be found here.

This was always going to be a tough one for me to look at objectively as it examines those folks who claim to really be vampires. Now, I am cool with people being who they want to be, and I will say it is well written by the author, but my honest opinion is that such folk may have a belief that they are vampires (though some clearly are role players) but the reality is that they are creating a construct and they do not physically need blood. The author ties them in to the general “Otherkin” heading – which involves claims of all sorts of internal identities and, at least, addresses the point that claims within such communities are more often driven by media than by folklore and there is an inherent tendency to adopt things that were simply invented by an artist when plying their craft.

The author breaks down several types of vampires, namely psychic, sanguine, false sanguine, vegetarian, hybrid and lifestylers. The latter, of course, are role playing, they are creating an aesthetic drawn from favourite media vehicles. I was interested to see the author trace psychic vampires, or the use of the name at least, to Anton LeVay but what he described, as the author concedes, were not actual energy sucking vampires. I think it safe to say LeVay could have replaced "psychic vampire" for "narcissist". Although she (Dion Fortune) didn’t use the phrase "psychic vampire", I think Owsinki would have been better reaching as far back as Dion Fortune and her Psychic Self-Defence volume, which speaks of a belief in actual energy feeders.

When it comes to sanguine and false sanguine vampires, then the distinction the author draws is that false sanguine vampires are the so-called vampire killers. Sometimes dubbed vampires in the press, sometimes modelling themselves on vampires, the actual cases do go much further back than touched on – certainly one cannot forget such killers as Peter Kürten and Fritz Haarmann in the 1920s or the 19th century, press-dubbed, Vampire of Montparnasse Sergeant François Bertrand. His crimes included corpse mutilation and necrophilia. That these are “false” vampires is a bias in argument that sees the positive in ethical sanguine vampires equating to a truth, where arguably those who display unethical and criminal activity are closer to some versions of the folkloric vampire. Having mentioned Bertrand it would be remiss not to mention that this chapter does not touch on sexuality as a driver for building a vampire identity, yet those who associate blood consumption and sexuality have been reported on, for an early instance we could look to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) though the word vampire is not conflated with the phenomena in that volume.

Of all of them, the term vegetarian vampire is perhaps the strangest and the author mentions the fact that consumption of animal blood (rather than human) is starkly out with actual vegetarianism. I have used the term myself, describing fictional vampires with ethical concerns about their feeding, of course.

As mentioned, this was well written and for those with a genuine interest in the phenomena it is a good primer that maintains a sympathetic view to non-human identification. Having tried, in the past, to be open to people self-identifying as vampires, I find I do struggle as it feels like a mental construct patched together from films but it appears that the construct does good for the individual concerned, and so long as dangerous activities are ethical and consensual, who am I to judge?