Possession

What is possession? The several months of work which I have just spent creating a video of my own version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave me time enough to ponder this question while I was occupied with this project. To be clear: I do not mean ‘possession’ in the exorcist casting-out-devils sense, which I regard as a separate issue. I mean: the will to possess another, to gain mastery over someone else’s independence, even over that person’s life.

Lucy Westenra: the ghostly pallor of a life unnaturally sustained beyond death itself.

In Stoker’s classic tale of the struggle against evil, despite the heroic efforts of the Dutch vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing to prevent the encounter, the notorious Count stalks and finally overcomes the hapless Lucy Westenra, and she wastes away and dies. Van Helsing and his associates visit the place of her interment only to discover that her coffin lies empty. Having been bitten by Dracula, Lucy has herself become one of the ‘Un-Dead’: has herself become a vampire, neither alive nor truly dead.

Dracula's letter of welcome to Jonathan Harker containing instructions for his journey to the Count's castle - instructions that Harker would come to regret acting upon.

Dracula, the supreme vampire, is also the supreme possessor. In contemporary profiler terms, he is a pathological control freak. He is ‘evil’ in the context of the story’s classic Gothic theme, but (again in contemporary terms) his pathological nature leaves him merely indifferent to the sufferings which he causes to others, including the loved ones of his victims, who are left to cope with the loss of their dear departed who become stranded in a terrible no-man’s-land between life and death.

In my video, Transylvania, while initially being an actual place on the map to which the characters journey, becomes ultimately, not so much a geographical location as a state of mind. ‘Transylvania’ is where you find yourself as a victim of a predator, and it is a frightening place to be. And if you are in that place, two choices lie open to you: the first is to remain aware of your situation, and attempt an escape (as the story’s young realty agent Jonathan Harker actually does). The second choice is to succumb, to (again in contemporary terms) go over to the dark side: to surrender your own will to that of your possessor.

The grim edifice of Dracula's "...vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light."

Does all this talk about vampires and Transylvania seem rather remote from the usual themes which my posts here address? Think about the many religious and quasi-religious cults and the ways in which they manipulate and control their followers. Cult leaders often-enough have a ‘Dracula’ profile: they can be intensely [1]charismatic, and that charisma at times can have a sexual tint. Cult leaders (almost invariably male) may demand – and receive – sexual favours from their female followers, whether or not those followers have partners. And the news will at times carry stories of the openly pedophile activities of such leaders. It’s not really about sex. It’s about feeding off the energy of one’s victims during such encounters, and perhaps also about cementing their loyalty and drug-like dependence upon the leader. And when true and sincere love finds no place in the act, the transfer of bodily fluids becomes vampiric, an expression of mere brute mastery and power. Ask any victim of rape or sexual abuse.

Transylvania as a place on the map. Using maps of the story's 19th-century period in tandem with Stoker's text, it was possible for me to plot Dracula's overland route to the Black Sea port of Varna, and thence by schooner to the English harbour town of Whitby. For the Count, as for voyagers of today, the Bay of Biscay was a place of storms.

It is typical of cults that the leaders will encourage or even insist upon their followers severing contacts with their past lives, including with their families. This is usually demanded under the pretext that the cult is their new ‘family’, and the leader is their new father and mother rolled into one. The true reason, as the cult leader well knows, is that any such contacts, were they to be sustained, would undermine the new ‘reality’ which the leader has constructed. But all this manipulation need not be confined to religious cults.

‘Transylvania’ also can exist within an individual relationship. A person with a particularly possessive nature might move to ensure that a partner’s family contacts are damaged or even destroyed. The means to accomplish this might vary, but the result is the same: that partner (perhaps out of a misguided love) will become isolated from his/her own family or parents, and become encased within the new ‘reality’ – and dependent upon the possessive partner – in the way that such a possessive relationship demands. To more-aware others, such a relationship might have the outward appearance of a cult, and itself might actually function using the manipulative emotional mechanisms similar to a cult – but with one [2]leader and one member. It is possible that you might even know of someone in such a situation.

Once on English soil the Count uses his shapeshifting abilities to transform into both a wolf and a bat: metaphors for the subtle and not-so-subtle masks of human predators in our own reality.

It is likely that at some time you have had on your doorstep the members of one or other church denomination who proselytize from door-to-door in the hopes of making a new conversion. Such proselytizing activity might actually be a requirement of one’s faith, as it is for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as the Mormons), or for Jehovah’s Witnesses. But is trying to persuade someone (in such cases, a complete stranger) to believe the same things in which you believe an act of conversion, or an act of possession? We find it reassuring when someone else believes the same things that we do, simply because it provides us with a confirmation that what we believe must be ‘right’, and gives us a sense of communal belonging. But however well-intentioned it might be, such persuasive attempted conversion by its very nature and intent is also spiritually predatory – and doubly so when forced conversion is involved, as it has been both in [3]history and in our [4]present-day world.

The eyes of a predator mirror the same intentions, whether that predator is animal or human.

Transylvania, it seems, is far from being just a place on the map. As a state of mind it can be anywhere and everywhere, and is real enough. If ever we find ourselves in that terrible place, like Stoker’s young hero Jonathan Harker we need to resist the easy option to succumb and instead struggle to stay awake and alert, and escape if we can to seize our own life back – although we might need the help of loyal friends and loved ones on the 'outside' to accomplish this. And they might not always have fangs and wear swirling black cloaks, but vampires as well are real enough.

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] Eastern faiths will caution novices about the dangers of becoming beguiled by and ‘stuck’ in the charismatic stage of spiritual development, which is recognized for what it truly is: a mere doorway to further spiritual progress. In the West there are no such cautionary restraints, and you can see the results on any evangelical television network: many such preachers become enamoured of their own charismatic powers, and so stay at that stage rather than moving on into calmer and more humble spiritual waters.

[2] Such a pathologically possessive partner can be a consummate actor. A casual contact with such a type might well leave you concluding that the person is friendly and sincere. I have even seen an interview with an experienced psychiatrist who admitted that, had he not previously read his patient's unnerving case file, he would have been totally fooled into concluding that the man was entirely compliant and normal. If you have seen the film, think of Clarice Starling's first meeting with the courteous and considerate Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Anthony Hopkins' performance was accurate to type - and the more chilling for being so.  

[3] The occupying Roman forces in the Near East and Europe famously executed those locals (either Christians or pagans) who refused to make an offering to their gods. In later centuries, during the Christianization of Europe, the dubious favour was returned by such Christian rulers as Charlemagne, who had 4,500 pagans who refused to convert to the faith beheaded in a single afternoon, after which he retired to attend mass. During the Papal-instigated Albigensian crusade, Christian Cathars were given the choice either to convert to Catholicism or be burned alive. Many chose for the flames.

[4] The recent terrible case of the kidnapping of 200 Nigerian Christian schoolgirls by Muslim radicals carries the news by those radicals that, not only had the schoolgirls ‘embraced’ Islam, but they had ‘decided’ to take Muslim husbands. The girls' whereabouts are still unknown.

Sources:

All images are the copyright of the © David Bergen Studio, and are taken from my video which can now be seen on YouTube here: Dracula: Darkness Rising.

Profiling a Psychopath

Here is a profile: the subject is petulant, petty-minded and vengeful: someone who demands attention, and becomes darkly jealous as soon as he thinks that anyone else is getting more attention than he is. He also lays down impossible demands which he insists that others follow, but does not follow them himself. Oh, yes: I should also mention that this man is a mass murderer responsible for thousands of deaths. Who is he? Some despotic Idi Amin-style tyrant? Some brutal Pol Pot dictator ruling through fear? No, this dangerously psychotic individual is of course the god of the Old Testament described in human terms. I can now add that this god also appreciates blood sacrifices made in his name (as the [1]Cain and Abel story dramatically underscores), up to and including [2]human sacrifice.

Any and all of the above character traits and actions can be read in [3]scripture. This god even describes himself as a [4]jealous god. He is an appropriately primitive Bronze Age deity with all-too-human emotions and failings. Although surely being ‘God’ excuses all of these things, right? I mean, being God means you get to make up the rules as you go along, doesn’t it? Being God means that everything you do must be inherently ‘right’, because, well… you’re God, after all. And if you’re God, then everything you do apparently can be excused on the grounds that you have this inscrutable and mystical thing called a ‘plan’.

No, not in my book. Following such a god means that you have lowered the bar of your own moral values down to those of this petulant and jealous dictator god. This god who demands that ‘thou shalt not kill’, and then proceeds to lay down a hatfull of transgressions for which the punishment is cruel and bloody death, either by [5]stoning or by being [6]burned alive. Not to mention that he decides to rub out his entire creation (with the exception of a single extended family and the animals they take on board), apparently for no better reason than that [7]‘the wickedness of man was great in the earth’ – as if things are any different now.

Of course, being omniscient as well as omnipotent, God would have known that he’d be destroying his creation a little way down the road even at the time that he brought it into existence. But trying to plot the twisted logic of a psychopath is a dangerous road to tread. Or to paraphrase what [8]Clarise Starling’s FBI boss advised her prior to her interview with the intellectually brilliant but barkingly psychotic Hannibal Lecter: inside this god’s head is not a place that you want to be.

I remember once remarking to someone who bought into all this that if the scriptural God were a person, he would be incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane. That was several years ago. I dearly wish that I could write here that I have changed my mind, that I now have come round to seeing things in a different light, and that I now understand the god of scripture more. But I cannot. And I do not. Because scripture has that writ-in-stone immutability, and what is in there cannot be changed or spun in some other more acceptable way. It is as it is. And the actions of God are as they are described there, as anyone who doubts me can check for themselves through my chapter-and-verse citations below. 

Faith is not something that you can cherry-pick. If for you it governs your moral compass and the very fabric of your life, then it’s way too important for that. Unless, of course, you view your faith on an only-choose-the-nice-bits basis. In which case it must be something other than the faith which you claim it to be. Because with true faith, it’s all in, or all out. And when all’s said and done, a Bronze Age god is and remains a Bronze Age god. 

But what is a Bronze Age god doing in the 21st-century?

Hawkwood

From Ken Russell's Altered States

PLEASE NOTE:

I am aware that I have not even touched on the God of the New Testament, where the concepts of Heaven and Hell hold sway. A New Testament god who actually uses such savagely crude reward-and-punishment mind games to keep things in line, who subjects any souls who refuse to bend a knee to him to agonizing torments which last for all eternity with neither hope nor possibility of any reprieve or relief, lays claim to being….... ...a god of love?

Notes:
[1] Genesis 4:1-5

[2] Judges 11:29-40.

[3] Please see my post Frontier Justice in the Promised Land.

[4] Exodus 20:5, and Deuteronomy 4:24. 

[5] Deuteronomy 21:18-21 and numerous other instances.

[6] Leviticus 20:14.

[7] Genesis 6:5.

[8] In Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs – of course!


Sources:
Images of Anthony Hopkins in the role of Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs, from the novel by Thomas Harris, distributed by Orion Pictures Corporation.