Atlanta Vampire Alliance [AVA]

[Merticus]

http://www.true-ghost-story.com/readarticle.php?article_id=65

Vampires: Fact or Fiction?

Vampires. The word itself conjures up different meanings for different people. For some it's the fictional characters that grace the novels of Anne Rice and for others it's the parasitic, blood thirsty creation of Hollywood. They are perceived as entertaining at best and frightening at worst. But what are they really? Join us today as we interview Zero and Merticus. They are both with Suscitatio Enterprises, LLC and the Atlanta Vampire Alliance. Zero and Merticus will help us understand the defining characteristics of the modern day vampire and the role of their organization within the vampire community itself.

Atlanta Vampire Alliance [AVA]
www.atlantavampirealliance.com
Suscitatio Enterprises, LLC
www.suscitatio.com


There are many misconceptions with regards to vampires and vampirism. How would you define a modern-day vampire?

Most of those misconceptions derive from the fact that the modern-day Vampire Community is using the word "vampire" in a metaphorical sense, and from the tendency of outsiders to ignore the context of this use. When a member of this community describes themselves as a "vampire," they are not trying to tell you that they think they're a fictional character with supernatural powers, that they have trouble distinguishing between a role-playing game and reality, or that they hope you're gullible enough to believe that they're hundreds of years old and live in a castle. They're not even claiming kinship with the folkloric monster that frightened the people of Central Europe, and has them performing vampire-banishing rituals to this day.

Many casual treatments of the Vampire Community by the press and pop media gleefully ignore the metaphoric use of the word "vampire" and leap to cinematic conclusions about those who identify themselves as vampires. Of course, they never really firmly establish what a "vampire" is, much less the details of the vampire delusion. This is because members of the Vampire Community don't really "think they are vampires." The label has been taken as a statement of identification, not with myth or fiction, but with one another, and the experiences that real vampires seem to share. This use of yellow journalism contributes not only to the misconception that modern vampires identify with fictional vampires, but also to the misconception that members of this community are an extreme manifestation of another subculture - role-playing gamers, vampire fiction enthusiasts, Goths, or even body modification or blood fetishists. These diverse subcultures have all been erroneously referenced as recruiting grounds for the modern vampire subculture.

This goes as well for the misconception that modern-day vampires constitute a religious movement. While understanding the modern vampire phenomenon often requires a discussion about "belief," the belief in question is in psychic phenomena. Vampires often perceive their experiences in psychic and energetic terms, which can't currently be scientifically measured. So while there is often a belief element involved in discussing the vampire community, it's really just the fact that many in the community are willing to accept paranormal and ESP events as a possible framework to understand their experiences. If vampires are going to be classified as a new religious movement based on their acceptance of the paranormal as a possibility, the entire paranormal research community would also be members of that same religion.

Other misconceptions about members of the Vampire Community come from an entirely different direction - while pop media tends to treat self-described vampires as ordinary people with strange, and necessarily false, self-perceptions, the occult literature believes, but doesn't approve. Most of what has been written about vampirism in occult, Neopagan, and New Age literature has been negative, based on the understanding of vampirism as a real psychic event, but characterizing the vampire as predatory and destructive; the vampiric person of occult literature takes energy unethically and selfishly, and leaves behind him a trail of ruined lives and relationships. This portrayal has led to a widespread prejudice against the vampire community among other occult and Neopagan subcultures. It's important to understand that much of the source material for this understanding of vamprism comes from the 1920-30's books of Dion Fortune, written long before vampires were a self-aware community. Whether Fortune encountered a few unscrupulous individuals, or she dealt with vampires who weren't even aware of their vampirism, her description doesn't hold much water in the modern Vampire Community, where vampires trade tips on responsible behaviour and discuss ethics like it's a national pastime. One of the things we hope to accomplish by distributing data from the Vampirism & Energy Work Research Study is to put some of that old prejudice to rest by allowing vampires speak for themselves about their own personal ethics, beliefs and practices. Contrary to this common misconception, vampires are highly concerned with the effect their actions have on the people around them. The community has collectively put a lot of effort into the discussion of how to be a balanced and positive presence rather than parasitic.

Real vampires are neither delusional nor are they predatory, psychically or otherwise. They don't style themselves after fictional characters, and 60% of our survey respondents said they didn't even consider themselves Goth. And vampires have sent back surveys to us identifying themselves as Christian, Buddhist, Left-Hand-Path, Wiccan, and Daoist, among many, many others. It seems that vampires have religions, they don't comprise a religion in and of themselves.

So if vampires aren't any of these things, how can we define a vampire? The fact is, we tend not to. Vampires have an emerging identity that's built from the experience of being as they are - vampires use introspection, self-awareness and the sharing of their experiences with others to create a collectively-discovered picture of what it means to be a vampire. This is entirely a process of discovery, so rather than there being some central vampiric ideal that we're aspiring to, we think of what a vampire is by thinking of what we know to be true of ourselves, and of the similarities in experience that others like us share. Furthermore, that discovery process is ongoing - we still don't know exactly what makes a person a vampire, or how vampires get to be the way they are. The only common ground that vampires generally agree upon is that vampires share a need to feed on either blood or psychic energy in order to sustain their well-being. The need to feed, and the associated blood hunger or energy deficit are the only things that the Vampire Community can agree on that we know set us apart from other people. There are other experiences that may go along with being a vampire, which will get discussed below, but they aren't well-understood or universal enough to provide us with a definition of vampirism. Taken collectively, however, these experiences are what make our lives similar to one another's and different from the average, ordinary life, and they are what form our understanding of ourselves as vampires.


How widespread is this phenomenon?

There is no way to tell how many vampires there are in the world, partly because individuals are solely responsible for their own self-identification. The standard wisdom from the community is that only you can decide whether or not you are a vampire, after serious self-aware introspection. The Vampire Community online and in the real world has definitely been growing in membership, but that's due to many factors. First, not everyone who participates in the Vampire Community, whether online or offline, is actually a vampire. Some just like the community atmosphere, and the Vampire Community rarely turns away anyone who wants to engage in healthy socialization. Second, the increase in widespread communication means that more interested individuals can find the community today, whereas we can only assume that in the past, real vampires may have gone their entire lives without discovering that there were others like themselves. Today, after receiving completed VEWRS/AVEWRS surveys from dozens of countries, and having received requests to translate the text of the survey into multiple languages, we know for certain that there are self-identifying vampires all over the world, that this is not just an American, or an English-speaking, or even a Western-Hemisphere phenomenon. We have heard from vampires in Asia, Europe, South America, and North America. However, we have nothing like a vampire head-count, and no foolproof vampire test to tell whether everyone claiming to be a vampire actually is one. We can say the Vampire Community has been growing in participation and visibility, but there's no way to tell what percentage of the population might be vampiric.


What are the defining characteristics of a vampire?

There is now a visible and vibrant community of people who are using the label to describe themselves, but to this day there is no functioning definition of a real vampire. This is primarily because no one knows what the cause of the phenomenon actually is, and the community has coalesced around a set of loosely shared perceptions and symptoms rather than a central organizing principle. Therefore, we can describe some common experiences involved in being a vampire, but these shouldn't be taken as a definitive vampire checklist. There are no known necessary and sufficient conditions to be met before you can be a vampire. Likewise, there's no single definitive sign that someone is not a real vampire.

That said, the most common experience vampires share is the need to take in life energy or blood, from sources outside themselves, to maintain spiritual, psychic, and physical health. Blood-drinking, or sanguinarian, vampires have to consume small, polite amounts of human blood from willing donors. The majority of respondents to the survey reported taking only an ounce or less at a time; usually no more than once a week. Feeding is absolutely a health necessity; vampires have reported many negative physical symptoms when trying to ignore this need to feed. Psychic vampires, or psivamps, feed on psychic energy. Some psivamps enter into relationships with donors in the same way that sanguinarian vampires do, while others consciously train themselves away from human energy altogether, either for convenience or as a result of personal ethics. Some psivamps report a natural affinity for feeding on natural sources such as elemental or ambient natural energy. Others cultivate techniques for absorbing ambient energy from crowds and public places, so as not to take from any one source.

Many vampires are nocturnal and have difficulty with school and day shift work. Many are visually photosensitive and get physically ill from sun exposure. Others will mention having unusual sensory perceptions, from the basic five senses, like light and smell sensitivity, to more esoteric extrasensory experiences. Many vampires reported seeing ghosts, having psychic dreams, or perceiving spirits, but some vampires have never had any ESP or PRE experiences. At this time, there is no scientific theory explaining why vampires need to feed, or why they tend to do so in very particular ways. It's at the center of the vampiric identity, intensely experienced, and yet to this day unexplainable. We hope that one day this need will be better understood and that our study will serve as a catalyst for increasing scientific and medical interest in future research into this phenomenon.


What does your organization offer to the field?

Our major contribution at this time is our inaugural research project, the Vampirism & Energy Work Research Study. We released the Vampire & Energy Work Research Survey (VEWRS) in March 2006 and the Advanced Vampirism & Energy Work Research Survey (AVEWRS) in August 2006. Combined, these surveys ask over 988 questions, which were answered by over 650 individuals from all corners of the Vampire Community. The questions covered many topics of interest to not only ourselves and fellow vampires, but to outside researchers as well. We hope that the completed study will offer two very useful contributions, both to vampires and to people who want to know about vampires.

First, we will provide organization and quantification to the information that vampires have been informally passing amongst themselves for years, to give the community a chance to tell itself about itself. Much of what we asked were questions we had been asking ourselves, on Internet message boards, chatrooms, and other informal meeting places. Vampires want to know what's "normal" for being a vampire, how much of what they're experiencing is shared by others.

And second, we'll be able to address the academic research that is starting to be done with this community. At the point when we started the project, there was no real body of data against which research could be judged, and most outside analysis was openly hostile, ranging from the sensationalist to the alarmist. There didn't seem to be a standard of proof needed to make armchair analyses of the community based on poorly conducted website research, and these analyses always painted some lurid picture of a youth delusion, or worse, a "vampire cult" that would engage in occult practices, ritualistic sacrifice, or even cannibalism. We intend for the body of data we are gathering to show what this community looks like when someone conducts responsible research, and to raise the standard of proof that researchers will need to meet in order to make claims about this community and its members.


How can people contact you?

Our primary e-mail address is research@suscitatio.com. We are updating the community on our progress and future research initiatives at http://www.suscitatio.com


How do people take part in your study?

After almost two years of survey submissions, the deadline has finally passed (October 31, 2007). You may still view the surveys at our website along with all associated charts, graphs, and other statistical analysis. As of November 2007 we are currently engaged in the data-entry phase of this research study.


Do you have any upcoming educational events or related events that you either produce or you endorse?

In the past we've had community-based events hosted everywhere from Georgia to Ohio to California where we have presented our research and preliminary findings to members of the community. We have several events we are either organizing or plan to attend in 2008 and the details will be posted via our web site at: http://www.suscitatio.com