Chapter II
The Generation of the Vampire
It may now be asked how a human being becomes or is transformed into a vampire, and it will be well here to tabulate the causes which are generally believed to predispose persons to this demoniacal condition. It may be premised that as the tradition is so largely Slavonic and Greek many of these causes which are very commonly assigned and accredited in Eastern Europe will not be found to prevail elsewhere.
The Vampire is one who has led a life of more than ordinary immorality and unbridled wickedness; a man of foul, gross and selfish passions, of evil ambitions, delighting in cruelty and blood. Arthur Machen has very shrewdly pointed out that “Sorcery and sanctity are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.” The spiritual world cannot be confined to the supremely good, “but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The ordinary man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate unimportant … the saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall … it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words[1]; it is, above all, the “sorcerers” who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this; our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.”[2]
Huysmans has said in Là Bas: “Comme il est très difficile d’être un saint, il reste à devenir un santanique. C’est un
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