Yes, Anton Lavey is responsible for a lot of this rubbish. Seems a popular sport for the afore mentioned eye liner covered pains in the arse, but also for a lot of angsty moody brats who get the wrong side of Thelema and generally make a bother of themselves to the local magical community by trying to prey on younger angstier goths.
In defense of them though, someone very close to me was damaged by one of these, and for many years was a close to the real thing as they get. Neither angsty nor gothy, she simply had to feed form the energy of others every now and then or she would grow physically ill and start to waste away. I've seen it happen when she's tried to go "cold turkey" with it. As a result, she tried everything she could to fix it, becoming quite impressively trained and skilled in the arts in the process. No luck. She had a trusted few who knew and took care of her, and tried to help her correct whatever imbalance was the cause of it. I got pretty deep into her head, and know a hell a lot more about the subject now than I was ever interested in, and can say that the cause was indeed a deep psychological trauma manifested in a mystical manner due to her being so strongly tied to magic. It had to do with not really wanting to live, and in a very real psychological way, existing in a depressed undead limbo disconnected from the world and living. I really wish I was making this shit up, but its true. She was a real a vampire as anyone can get without growing fangs. She was an otherwise very sensible and talented person who was damaged on a deep level. Her spirit was broken, and this is was how she coped. It wasn't glamourous, it wasn't romantic, it wasn't fun. It was painful, depressing, and scary, as dealing with anyone mentally or spiritually ill can be.
She's finally cured now, by the way. It took years of help, support and fighting. Then finally she found something to live for, forgot her traumas, got deeply involved in voodoo and the lwa rewrote her from the ground up and that patched it up right. It was pretty amazing, she had to go through a complete rebirth into a new life to get away from it.
So as a result, I don't take too kindly to kiddies playing at being vampires, and have smacked sense into more than one of the local youngsters to get off that path before it really does become an addiction, and then a problem that may take years to correct.
[ 18-02-2002: Message edited by: cusm ] |
