Twelve Tribes Vampire Panel: Part 1

As part of the Twelve Tribes Summit in Philadelphia, author L.A. Banks took part in a panel discussing the impact of vampire literature and lore on society today and the evolving persona of the vampire in popular culture. Naturally, Pink Raygun was there, MicroMemo in hand to record the event.

The panel was two hours of some of the most intelligent, interesting discussion of vampires I’ve heard. Part one of the transcription is below.

The Panelists:
Leslie Banks: Bestselling author of the Vampire Huntress Legend series
Jonathan Maberry: Bram Stoker Award winning author
Rev. Dr. Wil Gaffney: Associate Professor of Hebrew and Hebrew Bible at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia
Dr. Peter Logan: Professor of English, Temple University
Monique Patterson: Editor, St. Martin’s Press

Moderator: Solomon Jones: Author and journalist

Solomon Jones: Leslie, your books feature a council of vampires who sit around a table in smoke filled, not rooms, but Hell, and make grand decisions on the fate of the world. Given today’s peculiar circumstances, as we ponder the question what role do vampires play in today’s literature and society, I can’t help drawing a parallel between that council and, say, the council of banks, brokerage houses, or whatever old dudes got us in this mess.  Are they the modern vampires and does that imagery translate from what you’re writing to what we’re experiencing today?

LA Banks: I think it absolutely does and in terms of metaphors, my vampire council sat around a table that bled black blood, which was my metaphor for oil. I looked at companies like Haliburton who happened to have a vice president in office at the same time we got into the war in Iraq and they made a profit. Those are the bloodsuckers to me. The people who actually use their office of power for evil-doings and profitability.

SJ: Mr. Maberry, as a Bram Stoker award winner, do you have an opinion on that question?

Jonathan Maberry: I very much agree with that. We’re seeing that with the banking industry right now where in the middle of the crisis, this group feels so protected, so entitled, that they can just award bonuses and smugly smile, essentially saying they’re too powerful to be touched and are going to, well not drink blood, but what is effectively the same, and we’re just going to have to deal with it.  That kind of cabal of people has probably existed in one form or another in every culture. Vampires allow us to take that and make it palatable enough for a story, especially when in some way that can be overthrown. That way we have a sense of closure that we wouldn’t have in real life.

SJ: Dr. Gaffney, he talked about the all powerful cabal. From a spiritual standpoint, what’s your view on the question of these councils sitting around making decisions?

Dr. Gaffney: I start with literature from before the word vampire was even invented. Some of the literature I look at is Babylonian literature and I look at the night stalkers who stole people’s lives, souls and blood in their attacks, usually on the face and neck so you can see the trajectory into modern vampirism. In that ancient near-Eastern world, every good leader worth his or her salt had councils. All the gods had a council. They all met.

But, what’s interesting is that it’s not really until you get into late Persian religion that you get the idea that there was a coalesced force of evil. Ultimately, what you have in the supernatural world, are entities who are very much like human beings. Some are good, some are bad, depends on which day of the week you catch some of them. But you don’t get a notion that this one here is evil and evil all the time and their minions are all evil.

I think in our contemporary age, when we’re looking for political conspiracies, it absolutely makes sense to think in terms of spiritual conspiracies, that there’s sort of a mirror between the world that we see and the world that we don’t see and that there are forces sitting around imaginary tables doing the kind of evils worked out before us that turn into Hell on Earth.

SJ: Dr. Logan, you studied literature from 19th century Great Britain, so from an historical literary standpoint, what’s your take on the question?

Dr. Logan: It’s interesting because there are two questions here. One is the council and the other is the council of vampires. As far as that second part goes, I think what Leslie’s done is right on the money in terms of the history of the literature. Vampire literature starts as a form of gothicism, which begins in 1720s. It’s always coded as a dispute over social or political authority, who’s in charge, and it’s inevitably a bad person who’s in charge. The true person who’s kind and good and should be in charge has been displaced. So there’s always a struggle there. What you’re talking about with this council of vampires fits in very well with that tradition.

As for the council, it’s interesting. Most of the vampire literature in the 19th century, like Dracula, there’s definitely not a council involved. This is one guy. I don’t see him participating in a council or Draculas. That would be a very strange and bloody affair. That raises a whole other question about the council and the nature of leadership today. Back then, they had a queen, they had a monarchy and we don’t. So, a council is a better metaphor.

SJ: Monique, you take all of this history, this intrigue, the blood and the gore, and how do you make it marketable?

Monique Patterson: It’s interesting. I’ll step back a bit and tell the story of how this started. It started with Leslie’s agent and I out at lunch and I said I wanted a black Buffy, but better. He sat back in his chair and said he had something for me. The next day, I was on the phone with Leslie, I had this proposal in front of me and we were having this insane conversation. I say insane just because there were all these wild ideas that Leslie was bringing to the table. And I totally got what she was saying right from the beginning.

The parallels, not just politically, but also within our own neighborhoods. I think individually, these vampires go down to the level of a street thug and how they suck the life out of our communities all the way up to the top levels, oil barons and politics and banking, etc. It made sense for this modern tale that featured vampires to have this kind of council. The thing about a good book is that it has to be able to speak to different people. A lot of the elements and the characters, a lot of people from all walks of life across all different races were able to connect with it. So that’s one of the things when you talk about making something marketable, you have to know what people are looking for. With Leslie’s book, a lot of those elements just kind of came together.

SJ: Dr. Logan, you’re up. When pondering the question of where vampires come from you get a lot of answers, physical answers such as diseases like catalepsy, which can make a person who is alive appear dead, and some historical figures like Vlad the Impaler. But, in your estimation, as an historian, where do vampires come from and what has attracted so many writers to center stories around them?

Dr. Logan: Thank you for that wonderfully simple question! There’s two different threads that come together and both happened in the 1700s in Europe. One of the threads is the one that leads to the Gothic, which we’ve talked about a little already. The Gothic doesn’t really have to do with vampires. The other thread, the one that does have to do with vampires, there are a lot of early mentions of it. But, the current lineage of vampires in literature and contemporary culture actually starts with a bunch of Austrian military troops in 1732 and they are in a certain part of Serbia which is now called Romania. They’re there because the locals are complaining that there are vampires in the area. They investigate, they didn’t believe it but the locals are so upset that they wrote back to their officers.

That story got picked up and in the early 1800s a person named John Polidory, he was a physician to Lord Byron, who had also written a little vampire clip based on the same material, but had never finished it. Polidory did finish it. In his story, the vampire instead of basically terrorizing peasants, he was an aristocrat who was looking for female companionship. In terms of his victims, he always preyed on women and prided himself on his ability to seduce them. That’s the version that circulates and get picked up by Bram Stoker, who wrote a similar aristocratic figure preying on ordinary people. There you have class warfare. The difference with him is that he’s not looking for intimacy. He’s a definite loner all the way.

So the question is why is it such a useful format today. I would just say that it was a legend that captured people’s imaginations, it has a lot of possible uses as a metaphor for evil. And it’s very flexible. What happens later on is you get the Anne Rice version of the vampire, where he’s not really evil. He’s a conflicted guy. Lestat has feelings about all this stuff. That was a very conflicted time, it was the middle of the Vietnam War when that book came out and people weren’t sure what was right and what was wrong and Lestat is a perfect embodiment of that kind of conflict. I don’t know if he’s evil or not, nobody knows.

SJ: OK, I’m going to stop you there.

Dr. Logan: Oh, I can keep going!

SJ: I know and that’s why I’m stopping you there! Let’s go to Monique. He mentioned a few aspects of it, the class warfare aspect, the good and evil aspect, then he mentioned the sex aspect. How important is the sex aspect?

Monique Patterson: Clearly, we’re seeing that this area has become highly popular. I think it’s a little bit of the beauty and the beast kind of thing going on. There’s a certain kind of sensuality that developed. You have your 30 Days of Night kind of vampire where they rip the neck open, blood is spewing. Then you have another kind of vampire biting her on the neck, basically becoming an act of sex. And it also has that tint of the forbidden. So it has all of the perfect elements to appeal in that regard. There’s also this idea of possibly saving this person from this darker side, that they want to be saved from this darker side. So there is something emotionally appealing about that.

SJ: Dr. Gaffney, is that something that is common in all the threads that you’ve seen? I know you’ve talked about it from a Babylonian standpoint and you study some Eastern religions. Is this something that is a common thread through all of them?

Dr. Gaffney: Not through all of them, but it certainly is present in the Babylonian literature where you have not a single night stalker, but a community of three called the Lilitu. We have Lilith, and another entity called the Ardat Lili. She’s also looking for companionship, she’s actually looking for a man, looking to get married specifically to have intercourse and produce a child. Her attacks, you might even call them attempted rapes, don’t go very well and she winds up eating them or drinking their blood or doing some other damage to her male victims. She has such a desire to have a family that she is known to cause still birth and to attack pregnant women.

That serves a function in that society as to explain why there was such a high infant mortality rate and high death rate of pregnant women in the ancient Near East. But, there was very much this notion of an attempt of sexual intimacy. The third member of the group, Lillu, was a male and he kind of tagged along with the two women and didn’t really do much.

Then you go to a different culture like India which has a history of this kind of mythology going back five or six thousand years. You look at when Shiva takes on vampire characteristics, it’s to defeat demons, so he borrows from the dark side. That’s a tool he uses in order to re-establish order in the universe. He has no interest himself in drinking blood. There’s no sexuality or sensuality in that. So it depends on which set of texts you’re looking at.

LA Banks: Jonathan said there were 293 different kinds of vampires from little things that look like cute cherubs and then they jump on you to really bizarre looking things. Going back to what Dr. Gaffney said, Carlos is the Shiva who borrows from the dark side, grows the fangs, does the damage, but is not trying to drink blood. But, he is also very sensually written. What I did was make a gumbo when putting this together. It was hard to just go through one school. Even Lilith is built that way. She has a very male side to her in her game and a very female side in that she’s a seductress. And she is very much trying to create an heir. My approach was to take the lore of the major religions as well as trying to create my own.

SJ: Mr. Maberry, having looked at all of the different types of vampires, is sex a theme that runs through?

Jonathan Maberry: Actually, no. Taking is a theme through all of them. Vampire beliefs under hundreds of different names have occurred in every culture and has throughout history. There’s a belief that there is some force out there that will take something, whether it’s blood or flesh, sexual essence, breath, life force. There’s something out there that takes. And that is the most common theme. Sometimes it is sexual, sometimes it’s definitely not. Often it’s more loss or violation.

A lot of the vampire beliefs really come from an attempt to understand and balance our own role in our personal view of the universe. This is probably why some vampire beliefs were created. Take something like SIDS. A couple four or five hundred years ago puts a healthy child to bed at night and in the morning, the child is dead. There are no bites, nothing there to show a predator or an attack, but the child is dead. They can’t accept that God would do this because God wouldn’t hurt a child. They can’t accept a world in which something happened that was out of their belief system. So, it’s easier for them to imagine a monster preying on children. Vampires are an arm of that.

There are vampires that prey on fidelity, there’s a vampire in Islam that preys on faith. These are things that are against the order of their universe, but the vampire belief explains it and puts a balance to it. The belief in vampires is really an attempt to explain and balance our personal universe and it’s worked very well across the board in every culture.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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