The demonic origin of Vampires

Bela Lagosi as Dracula

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The Vampire Diaries. True Blood. Twilight. Vampire Wars on Facebook. What is going on? Why all this fascination with vampires?

Every generation of teens wants to believe they have the latest, coolest thing. It’s particularly titillating if their parents don’t know about it, or better yet, know about it and disapprove. When my parents were teens, it was jive and jazz. When I was a teen, it was rock, hippies, and drugs. Now it seems to be vampires.

So here comes a rant by another over-the-hill, out of touch oldster who’s going to tell teens that what they are getting involved in is going to rot their brain, or worse, right?

Well… yeah.

Do you remember Kevin Spacey’s great line from The Usual Suspects? “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” There’s a lot of truth there. 

The problem is the medium by which that truth was delivered… a movie.

Back in 1973 (when I was practically still a teen) Satan came up with a brilliant piece of reverse psychology, when Hollywood came out with The Exorcist. While it scared the pants off everyone, creating psychiatric – if not demonic – problems for thousands, it pulled off a very clever deception: It allowed people to believe that demon-possession, beds shaking and things going bump in the night, and even the devil himself, were mere constructs of a Hollywood writer’s imagination. After all, these were the same folks that convinced us to clap our hands to save Tinker Bell’s life; the same folks that told us that God was merely a “Force” and Satan nothing more than “the dark side of The Force.”

Now Satan is doing it again. His latest trick is to make young people believe that vampires are cool. 

Different schools of thought hold that vampire belief goes back to Eastern Europe, Egypt, or Babylon. One such belief system, called House Kheperu, holds that vampirism can trace its origins all the way back to pre-flood days. “Those groups of vampires who do not look to Egypt for the origin of their kind often fall back upon the Bible,” says their website.

The Bible passage to which this site refers is Genesis chapter 6. In the world before the Flood, “The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took wives for themselves from those who were pleasing to them, all that they chose… and they gave birth to children: these were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.”

This passage becomes clearer by comparing it with other parts of the Bible. The bible book of Job helps us understand that “sons of God” refers to angels: “Now it happened on the day when the sons of God came to present themselves before Yahweh, that Satan also came among them.” Later, God asks Job, “Where were you when I founded the earth? … When all the sons of God shouted for joy.”

The apostle Peter, describing that pre-flood world specifically calls them angels: “For if God didn't spare angels when they sinned… and spared not the ancient world, but preserved Noah with seven others…” And the book of Jude in the Bible explains what the sin was: “The angels… did not keep the position originally assigned to them, but deserted their own proper abode…”

Taken together, we can paint a picture of angels looking down from ‘the position originally assigned to them’ and becoming infatuated with human females. Since “the position” of the angels was considerably higher than humans, this perversion was akin to that of some people who have allowed themselves to fall into perverted attractions to farm animals. These angels apparently created bodies for themselves that had all the parts necessary to eat, breathe, and procreate.

The language of the brief passage tells us more. They ‘took’ wives, which could be innocent enough, except for the additive, “all that they chose.” This sounds at best greedy, at worst, violent.

But what does any of this have to do with vampires? Keep reading.

Feel free to leave a polite comment. 

 

Bill K. Underwood is a freelance columnist and author of several books, including three novels - The Minotaur Medallion, and the best-sellers Resurrection Day and Unbroken. His latest book is 99 ways to Fire Your Boss. All are available at Amazon.com.