The Left Hand Path of Dracula the Barbarian

While reading Gruppo Di Nun’s Revolutionary Demonology I encountered an interesting discussion of the figure of Dracula in the essay “Gothic Insurrection”, which was written by Claudio Kulesko. Here, Dracula figures as a major archetypical expression of the barbarian in popular culture, and it’s this particular context that I feel inspired to explore.

Why would I focus on this, you might wonder? Isn’t it a little early for Halloween? Fool! For some of us every day is Halloween, at least if you mean what I think you mean, but only one day of the year is Samhain! But seriously, I think that Kulesko’s discussion of Dracula in the context of the barbarian presents a fascinating opportunity to explore thematic underpinnings that have frequently found expression in the Left Hand Path and adjacent subcultures. Vampires have never been absent from the archetypal considerations of the Left Hand Path, indeed there are often frequent explorations of the theme of vampirism within modern Satanism, which is perhaps not too surprising when we consider how often that vampires were frequently linked to Satan himself as antitheses to Christianity. And it’s perhaps this combined with the Paganism of Dracula’s “barbarian heritage” in which Dracula emerges as a glorious icon of the intersection so important to my own polycentric project of Satanic Paganism.

But I suppose first of all: what is a barbarian, besides perhaps a loaded term? We can stay on Kulesko’s analysis for this question. The term “barbarian” derives from the Greek word “barbaros”, which in ancient Greece seemed to denote those who spoke in “incomprehensible” non-Greek languages, and therefore referred to foreigners. The barbarian’s linguistic outsideness from Greek (or indeed “Aryan”) civilization led to their consideration as almost non-human, more animal than human, and certainly not subject to the rights that civilization affords its subjects. By the Middle Ages, the term “barbarian” also came to designate non-Christians at large (“pagans”, “heretics”, Muslims, atheists, etc.), and in theological terms those who opposed God because they somehow lacked the light of natural intellect that would allow for some supposed latent intuition of God. Conceptually, the barbarian is always someone who not only sits on the wrong side of civilization but also threatens to cross through the borders and invade that civilization.

The barbarian’s “non-human” animality is reflected in the civilized imaginary via the nightmare of the Berserker, the ecstatic bear-skin warriors who dedicated themselves to the Norse god Odin. These Berserkers would actively negate the cultural boundary between “the human” and “the animal” by not only dressing in animal skins but also by taking on the traits of the animals they sought to emulate. It was even believed that they actually transformed into wild animals, thus completely transgressing the line between “human” and “animal”. For Kulesko the Berserker’s wildness and separation from the word figure strongly into black metal, such as in the case of Bathory with songs like “Baptised in Fire and Ice” and “Blood and Iron“, lyrically narrating a lost time without any clear boundaries between Man and beast and where humans were immersed in the voices of the land. Kulesko actually quite beautifully describes this admittedly nostalgic expression of the Pagan worldview:

The forest spoke in a non-human voice, the gods had not been relegated to an unreachable sky, humans had not been separated from non-humans; nature was one and, at the same time, many things constantly striving to know, relate and interpret each other.

So, without stretching our preamble too much further, how exactly does Dracula figure into all of this? Well, Dracula does share certain characteristics with the barbarian as we have thus far discussed. He along with the archetypical vampire share a sort of becoming-animal with the Berserker. He can turn into a bat or a wolf, and beyond this he could even turn into mist, thus going beyond even animal. The barbarian’s outsideness is also reflected in the way Dracula presents a chaotic and elusive threat in the form of the return of the undead, or of undeath itself, and with it the possibility that humanity could be destroyed by something that seems fundamentally alien to life. Perhaps Dracula inherits a “barbarian” reputation via the cruel reputation of the historical “Dracula”: Vlad III, also known as Vlad Tepes (“The Impaler”), the Voivode of Wallachia (modern day Romania) who became known for his exceptional brutality. The barbarian outsideness of Dracula is also, in Bram Stoker’s novel, given a conspicuous racial subtext, reflective of the anxieties of 19th century eugenicism. In Chapter 3 we find Jonathan Harker recounting his conversation with Dracula, in which Jonathan asks Dracula about the history of Transylvania and then Dracula regales Jonathan with the stories of his people – apparently the Szekelys, a Hungarian subgroup who lived mostly in the Eastern Carpathian Mountains in Romania.

We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?

The description of Dracula’s lineage as a “whirlpool of European races” serves to emphasize a background that is meant to be seen as both exotic and dangerous. Dracula descends from an ethnic melting pot of peoples, whose diverse admixture is from his perspective a source of unparalleled strength. In Victorian England “whirlpool” was a term reserved for impoverished parts of the East End in London, home to a diversity of immigrant populations, which to Victorian audiences seemed inexorably violent and unruly. This subtext is only exasperated when we remember that part of the plot of Dracula is that Dracula wanted to buy property in England in order to infiltrate English society, especially by seducing English women, to create more vampires.

All of that having been said, the point of my article was to disccuss the intersection involving Paganism, and having established the overall theme of the barbarian in Dracula, we can safely move on. In the same chapter, we see Dracula invoking, or at least recalling, the Norse gods Odin and Thor in the name of his apparent ancestors, the Vikings and the Huns. Kulesko notes this as a conscious choice on Stoker’s part, meant to convey a link between Dracula on the one hand and the polytheistic “barbarians” who were subjugated by Christians on the other hand. Dracula’s conceit is that he and his people derived their strength, their ability to conquer, from the lineage of Attila the Hun as well as the divine inspiration of Norse gods, and to this effect he later credits this influence to the successful repulsion of invasions by various enemies. It’s here that we can get into a theme that interests me.

The idea of evil pagan barbarians worshipping warlike gods and marching against Christian civilization has its own long chain of historical context. For one thing, the pre-Christian Vikings acquired that sort of reputation among Christian Anglo-Saxons, whose accounts described them partaking in ecstatic war dances dedicated to their gods during their campaigns. Before Scandinavian kings started converting to Christianity, the Vikings could be contrasted from other parts of early medieval Europe, and so marauding Vikings were feared as great heathen armies at war with Christendom. The Odin and Thor invoked by Dracula could be seen as “warlike” in their own way, at least in that both of them were warrior deities, though Odin was also more like the magician who directed the course of battle than the frontline fighter that Thor was. But there were also many other gods to some extent connected to war and battle, such as Freyja, Freyr, Tyr, Ullr, or Hodr, and in the end, when Ragnarok comes, all the gods are warriors fighting in the “ultimate” war. But before Christianity there was the Roman Empire, whose imperialist narratives about barbarians are ultimately an urgrund for the later Christian imagination, and ultimately further the imaginary of the construction of whiteness. Consider the Roman campaigns against the Germanic tribes and Britain. Rome, Germania, and Britain, were all polytheistic, but they worshipped different gods (which the Romans often interpreted as actually being their gods) in their own cultural contexts, which have since become (perhaps utterly) lost to time. The Romans frequently depicted their Celtic and Germanic adversaries as practicing gruesome rites such as human sacrifice and contrasted them against the civilization of Roman religion, even as they also cast the gods of their enemies as their own Roman gods.

In the case of Vlad III, we should note that he was probably not a polytheist, and nor for that matter was the Wallachia he ruled over. Wallachia was officially founded in the 14th century long after what we now call Romania had already accepted Christianity as its official religion, and Wallachia was founded as a Christian principality. Still, it could be said in Eastern Europe there were late converts. The Bulgarian Empire, for instance, was officially polytheistic until the year 864, under Tsar Simeon I and his successful campaign to Christianize the empire. Pre-Christian Bulgarians worshipped Tengri alongside the various gods of Slavic polytheism, and in the eyes of Christians they were a warlike society that, initially, did not take well to Christianity. The Principality of Hungary essentially remained polytheistic, or at least continued to be ruled by pagan monarchs, until the year 1000 when Stephen I became King of Hungary after defeating the pagan duke Koppany. The Magyars likely remained pagan for centuries until the 11th century, what few sources remain of their beliefs suggest a prevailing animistic worship of the natural world. Lithuania, known as “the last pagan country in Europe” did not officially adopt Christianity until 1387, prior to which Lithuania continued to practice pre-Christian polytheism and had to fight the Christian crusades against it while expanding as a sovereign power in their own right. But, of course, even under the veneer of official Christianization, in the Slavic countrysides pre-Christian polytheism persisted among the general population, to the point that it took centuries for Christianity to actually integrate. The Kyivan Rus (which consisted of what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russia), for instance, officially became a Christian state in the year 988, after Volodymyr I Sviatoslavych converted to Christianity and renounced polytheism, but most of the population still did not consider themselves Christian for centuries, and in the northern settlements (now corresponding to western Russia) many people continued to practice polytheism and occasionally revolted against Christian rule. Similarly, in Poland, polytheism persisted by the 11th century and there was popular opposition culminating in revolt against Christian rule, and the Catholic Church struggled to eventually suppress it.

Relevant also to the context of “barbarian” outsideness would be the nomadic Mongols that eventually came to be dubbed the “Golden Horde”. As they spread across Asia and towards Europe, the Mongols were feared by Christendom for the strength of their armies and the devastation they wrought, and with it the threat they posed to Christian Europe following the invasions of Hungary and the Rus, which by this point happened to be Christian states. Until the institution of Islam as the official state religion in the 14th century, the Mongols maintained the practice of their own autochthonous animistic religion, and although the Mongol empire probably had no particular anti-Christian animus, their being non-Christian while attacking Christian kingdoms led to the church presenting them as basically agents of Satan. Perhaps Christian leaders feared that a successful Mongol conquest of Europe would lead to the dethronement of Christianity, though within Mongol territory Christianity was actually tolerated alongside many other religions.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the context of his ancestral conceits emerges as a reflection of Pagan outsideness within the Christian imaginary. The “whirpool” of Dracula’s origins curiously reflects a cornucopia of antagonisms to Christianity. He claims descent from Attila the Hun, the leader of the Hunnic Empire, which was likely a non-Christian territory worshipping gods like Tengri or “Mars” (probably the Roman identification of a Hunnic god of war) and which led a campaign against Christian Rome, as well as the Norse Vikings, who up until between the 9th-11th centuries would typically have been polytheists. Dracula also claims that the Magyars, whose ancestors he asserted gave rise to the werewolves and the Beserkers (a claim, by the way, that Stoker probably sourced from Max Muller’s work), recognized the Szekelys as their kindred after conquering the Carpathian Basin under Árpád (who was a pagan), and trusted them with their protection from Turkish forces. Transylvania and Wallachia in the time of Vlad III would definitely not have been pagan, but it’s interesting that this context in Dracula swirls here, in the remnants of pagan resistance alongisde another sense of barbarian outsideness. Dracula, as contrasted with the seemingly unproblematic chain of English Christianity (we should at this point keep in mind that England had its own complicated history of Christianization), is presented as emblematic of the legacy of anti-Christian barbarism, positioned as foreign to Christian civilization.

At long last we can focus on the legacy of the warlike gods and spirits, and it is something I rather enjoy reiterating when I get the chance here. I could take any chance, for instance, to repeat the subject of the Mairiia, that purported band of polytheistic ancient Iranian warriors who celebrated orgiastic feasts, had promiscuous sex with women who were termed “jahika” (traditionally understood as promiscuous sorceresses), and worshipped “warlike” deities such as Indra, Rudra, Mithra, Vayu, Anahita, and Θraētaona (or Fereydun), and whose ecstatic cult we are told was proscribed by Zoroaster and banished from Iran as an enemy of the emerging Zoroastrian religion. These Mairiia, in this sense, embody barbarian outsideness in that they were considered enemies of the community within the Avestan context. They may or may not have been echoes of older Indo-European clans of warriors who disguised themselves as wolves, held orgiasitc sacrifices and feasts, and devoted themselves gods that represented “dark forces of life”, or Indo-European bands of warriors who similarly devoted themselves to esoteric worship of gods with strong connections to the realm of the dead. This is what scholars refer to as Koryos, meaning “war band”, or alternatively as Mannerbund, meaning “alliance of men”. The barbarian is well-reflected in them, not just in their resonances with the Berserkers but also in their nomadic outsideness, living outside the boundaries of their society with nothing but their weapons, and going on raids thus always threatening to cross the borders of the community; and also being employed by powers to do the raiding for them, perhaps so that they would not be raided themselves.

The rites and gods of these war bands tell us something else. In Greece, adolescent war bands typically dedicated themselves to Apollo, who was often called Lykeios and regarded as the master of wolves that symbolised their fighting style. The mythical battle between Melanthus and Xanthos, the former associated with Dionysus Melanaigis, has also been interpreted as a rite of passage for the ephebes, who wore dark goat skins just as Dionysus did. The Norse Ulfhednar and the Berserkers, of course, were devoted to Odin, the patron of their divine inspiration and madness. The wolf association spreads far and wide; the Langobards of northern Italy who worshipped Godan/Odin and the Vanir were intially called Winnili, meaning “wolves”. In Vedic India, adolescent warriors would be initiated into a band of warriors during a winter solstice ritual where they would go into a trance and then “die” and be reborn as war dogs. The outlaw warriors and their priests had the gods Rudra and Indra as their divine patrons, both linked to the Maruts, the latter believed to be a mythological representation of the Mannerbund. At Krasnosamarskoe, located in the Russian steppes, some people practiced midwinter rituals where they inverted social customs, particularly the taboo against eating dog meat, in order to become like dogs or wolves themselves, thus transforming themselves as a rite of passage. Darkness seems to be a theme for these sorts of ancient warrior bands, in that there may be keen preference for the nocturnal and the mobilization of chthonic forces. The Roman author Tacitus recorded something like this in the Germanic Harii, who he dubbed “savages”, wearing dark dye, brandishing dark shields, and preferring to conduct battle at night, while the Athenian ephebes wore dark black cloaks (or rather chlamys) and both hunted and fought at night. In India, warriors who worshipped the gods Rudra and Indra wore black clothes.

For Amir Ahmadi, writing in The Daēva Cult in the Gāthās, this would all resonate not just with the Mairiia but with the cult of the Daevas at large, with its preference for nocturnal sacrifices and its self-emphasis on a warlike divine centre. The Daeva cult was very chthonic in emphasis, with the daevas being worshipped at night and often underground, while the Mairiia also performed nocturnal sacrfices to their gods. Many of the ancient Koryos or Mannerbunds have their own chthonic link, often more implicit and symbolic by their wearing black or just the association with the wolf, which itself is often symbolically linked with death across culture, but also sometimes more forthrightly in the associations with gods such as Odin or Rudra. Ahmadi tells us that one of the operative points is that the warrior of the Koryos or Mannerbund took up a mystery in which they separated themselves from the herd, both in life and in death, in order to win not only fame in this life but also a place of distinction and honour in the afterlife. One then plunges into the underworld, and across the world sword in hand, to carve one’s own place in the beyond, one that cannot be taken away. But the consistent theme of wolves and bestial transformation also returns us to the subject of Dracula and the vampire.

The vampire, the barbarian, the warlike Mannerbunds that turn into wolves, and to a certain extent the witch (part of the fabled Witches’ Sabbath involves a carnival of shapeshifting into animals), all these share a very similar Deleuzian sense of becoming-animal, and in this sense we can understand that as a unique mode of becoming: freedom from the civilizing perception of the civilized human organism, a subject that is no longer stable but constantly anomalous, inaccessible to definition, and in a certain way irrepressible because of it. The sort of localised chaos, the double negation that elevates individual expression, a kind of abject liminality as subject to desire, that is the tendency of passing through dimensions at will instead of drawing permanent boundaries – thus Kulesko notes of the barbarian. Pagan religious consciousness is resplendent with this latent sense of barbarian liminality and outsideness, even in view of the many boundary-drawing civilization-states of pre-Christian antiquity. The spirits of the netherworld could always cross into our world, and at certain points the borders between worlds could be shattered completely: the divine was seen to be everywhere, always intermingled with the world, and could cross the boundaries of our world anywhere. Kulesko notes the reflection of this consciousness in Quorthon’s modern reassertion of Paganism, in his lamentation for the lost time when “Man and beast was one and the gods of the sky walked the face of the earth”. Per Kadmus Herschel we can be reminded of the way that polytheistic myth echoes the notion of a potentially endlessly transforming form or body. And, of course, we may recall Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s satanic observation of remnant paganism as the latest negativity beneath the Christian order, and its resonances with barbarian outsideness and perhaps the pre/intra/preter/anti-cosmic darkness that Gruppo Di Nun speaks to in their larger body of work.

I would invite the consideration of another theme as well: how the death of Dracula figures into the magical art of the Left Hand Path.

Consider Kulesko’s telling of the novel’s end, from the lens of a Marxist critique of neoreaction and its interpretation of catastrophic time (the bold/italic emphasis is my own):

In the last pages, Dracula is cornered and stabbed in the heart, whereupon he turns to dust – but not before, for a brief moment, an expression of peace crosses his face. The narrator interprets this expression in a moral sense, attributing it to relief at being freed from his tormented existence, consisting of crime and eternal damnation. However, the Marxian analysis, and what we have said so far here, would seem to indicate that a different interpretation is more appropriate: the vampire has returned to his place of origin, the atmospheric-inorganic world, only to be reincarnated in the complex cybernetic system of machines and monetary flows that shapes Capital, waiting to once again unleash his annihilating fury. The Anthropocene, the age of ecological catastrophe, is the era through which the cybergothic age winds like a snake.

When I read that passage, the first thing I immediately thought of was Hellsing, both the manga and the Hellsing Ultimate series. Why? Because it felt a lot like how Alucard “died” in the end.

For one thing, Hellsing’s Alucard is supposed to be none other than Dracula himself. The name Alucard is obviously the name Dracula in reverse, and prior to Hellsing it was used as the name of the son of Dracula, the first version of which was Count Alucard in the 1943 movie Son of Dracula. Here, though, Alucard is not the son of Dracula, but rather is Dracula himself. Based on the narrative of Bram Stoker’s novel, he was Vlad III, Voivode of Wallachia, who in turn came to be known as Count Dracula. Dracula was defeated by Abraham van Hellsing, and then for some reason Abraham decided to, instead of killing him, bind him with sorcery and turn him into his servant, and from then on he became the servant of the Hellsing Organisation deployed in its battles against various occult adversaries.

Now, as regards Alucard’s “death”. The Millennium Organisation, a Nazi paramilitary group, created artificial vampires from the blood of an old vampire (referred to simply as “She”) and then sent a whole army of them, dubbed “the Last Battalion”, to invade London and destroy the Hellsing Organisation. These artificially-produced Nazi vampires do battle with the forces of Hellsing and the Vatican, and with Alucard himself. As Alucard slaughters all of his enemies, including his comrade-turned-traitor Walter Dornez, he absorbs the blood of all those who were slain in London, and with it their souls, gaining their knowledge and memories – in a sense their very lives – within himself in turn. That ability is what allows him to learn about the continued existence of Millennium after their presumed destruction during World War 2. Then, amidst Alucard’s protracted blood feast, Schrodinger, the Millennium Oberscharführer, cuts off his own head with a knife, and then falls into the ocean of blood in order to also be absorbed by Alucard. This results in Alucard vanishing into thin air, disappearing and “absorbing into himself” as Schrodinger’s power being absorbed along with millions of souls causes Alucard to no longer perceive himself. The flipside of this, however, is that while Alucard seemingly accepts his defeat and “dies”, he is also not really dead. For 30 years he persisted in an inert corpse-like state, in which he had to kill the millions of souls he had already absorbed to control Schrodinger’s power, and upon succeeding, he could then seemingly reincarnate into the whole body of existence. Somehow he became both everywhere and nowhere.

In Hellsing’s Alucard, Dracula’s “death” manages to take on a new and elevated significance. Dracula per Kulesko is a being of pure gothic time: that is to say, an “inorganic” or “eternal and motionless time, suspended below the veil of the present, ready to seize those human beings naive enough to go snooping around in the dark recesses where evil hides”. This makes him both Vlad III and not Vlad III, and both Dracula and not Dracula, and his thirst for blood is a desire for atmospheric dissolution that emerges from exactly his origin in the otherworld of gothic time. Alucard naturally shares this sense of gothic time, and the obscure essence of the vampire, with it double negation of individual unity, is magnified by his ability to contain countless souls in himself, as well as the way this eventually causes him to “disappear” into everything by absorbing Schrodinger. Alucard has simultaneously returned to his origin in gothic time and weaved his power into the whole world. He is and is not Alucard, because he is and is not everything, and this allows him to appear and disappear like a shadow at any time and any place. Moreover, perhaps even Alucuard’s thirst for battle can be interpreted on these terms in that it draws him to the conclusion of awesome cosmic dissolution and reincarnation. For this reason, Alucard could never be satisfied by any battle that would not draw him towards this conclusion: only the Battle of London, an apocalyptic confrontation with Millennium, could bring about this end, and that’s why, to the shock of everyone, he welcomes the Major’s declaration of war with such maniacal joy.

It is not sufficient for the Left Hand Path individual to exist as an eternal temple, gnawing away at everything in the name of its absolutism and sovereignty. No, there must be a different point to the cultivation of will, to divine identification. The Left Hand Path adept would rather strive to be reborn in the whole body of the endlessly becoming universe through their will. A will capable of imprinting itself and being absorbed into the world, as if becoming part of an endless stream of blood, or entering into the whole of things from the soul’s origin. Thus, we go to the bottom of the earth. Some aspect of this feels like I’m talking about Thelema, except there’s no surrender involved. It’s more like the blood thirst, or more appropriately as though you’re plunging into the world, and thus still penetrating it as the Left Hand Path practitioner might. In an endless chain of becoming, we will dictate the horizons of our own becoming, and gain the power to thrust open the doors of divine reality that we may enter the world itself, and join the company of the gods.

Actually, that whole analogy is very suitably barbarian. If you’ll forgive the flaws in this initial comparison, remember that the barbarian is recognised as one who not only dwells outside the borders of civilization but also seeks to cross into them, invade them even. Barbarian outsideness invites the consideration of our own relative position. If there is a realm outside us perhaps we are just as surely outside of it. While Gruppo Di Nun speak of an outer that threatens to penetrate our own world at every turn, it could also be said that we stand outside another world or plane: one that stands beyond our perception, and (or) one that is as well inner to us. In a way, I suppose we can lend on a distinct interpretation of what Kulesko and Rhettt have called “stepping out of our present condition into an alien state of absolute Outsideness and community with the Unknown”. Humans, indeed all living things, are born into a world that they wake into without understanding it, as they then reach out to each other. The esoteric barbarian of the Left Hand Path will descend and penetrate the world, going down to open the doors that others will not, and into the unknown, and by doing so surpass the condition of other humans: perhaps, even, of humanity. The idea of storming heaven to steal the fire carries with it a similar meaning. Stirner’s notion of heaven-storming is also somewhat relevant, in that for Stirner the real storming of heaven consists in the total destruction of the heavenly boundary between the Unique and the world: that, after all, is the point of transgression, to destroy the boundaries that alienate our consciousness.

The theme of barbarian outsideness also inevitably connects us to the demonic, in the sense of demonic outsideness. The demonic, for Kulesko at least, is connected not only to un-being and becoming but also outsideness, in that demons represent a dimension that is both external to the order of humans and capable of breaking into it: that, of course, is the spectre of demonic possession. We may find that Bernard Faure’s analysis of the demonic in Japanese Buddhism, per Rage and Ravage, more or less aligns with this idea, with the addition that it represents a reality that not only subverts and overflows structure but also acts as the negative source of movement and life itself. Kulesko would probably nod to that to some extent, in that he locates a demonical presence in even the most mundane actions. In some contexts, such as in Egyptian magic, demons exists at the margins between this world and the otherworld, protecting the afterlife from intruders, and could be invoked, thus entailing the demonic as representative of a liminal space, or an interstice between life and death. And, of course, none other than The Devil himself brings together the demonic and barbarian outsideness. In the medieval imagination, The Devil, or Satan, was frequently positioned in the wilderness, outside the borders of the Christian community, but also constantly threatening to infiltrate this community. That sense is part of the root of the fears and superstitions around witchcraft, and with it the medieval mass panic that was the witch hunts. This idea also has its resonances with the Biblical conception of the wilderness, or rather particularly the desert, as the home of demonkind, not to mention Satan’s appearance in the wilderness as the attempted tempter of Jesus, and with the wild men or woodwoses that also preoccupied the medieval imagination and may themselves have also been identified as demons. In medieval Scandinavian folklore the Devil is allied to nature spirits and nymphs that were perhaps previously honoured or venerated before the dominance of Christianity, and in this setting the wilderness is pictured as an inverted world, as gateway to demonic powers. Outlaws would be believed to step in and out of this inverted world, making pacts with the Devil as their patron god and having sex with nymphs in order to gain magical knowledge and powers. Medieval devil-worshipping Swedish outlaws, such as Tideman Hemmingsson, Hakan Jonsson, or Mickel Kalkstrom, can here be pictured as stepping out into a realm of outsideness, into the unknown community, precisely so as to elevate themselves.

Dracula, of course, ultimately connects back to the realm of the Devil in some way, even at the level of his namesake. The name comes from the fact that Vlad III was called Dracul, which means “dragon”. It was originally inherited from his father, Vlad II, who gained this moniker from his service in the Order of the Dragon. But the word “dracul” in modern Romanian also came to mean “devil”. Perhaps this is shaped by the reputation of Vlad III, or equally by the long-standing link in Christian symbolism between the Devil and dragons, solidified in the Book of Revelation by the reference to Satan as “the great dragon” who “deceives the whole world”. In some versions of the Dracula story, Vlad III became Dracula by renouncing God and making a pact with the Devil for eternal life. A short story by Bram Stoker, titled Dracula’s Guest, seemingly links Dracula to Walpurgis Night, and to ideas about how it marks the arrival of the Devil in the world, along with the attendant uprising of the dead. It is even sometimes suggested that Dracula himself is a like a modern symbol of the Devil, from the Christian standpoint of course, emphasizing the idea of the Devil as the intractable adversary of humanity, struggling bitterly and insidiously against humans, to corrupt or destroy us.

In the end there’s much to be said for the crossing of boundaries as regarding the Left Hand Path. I remember a few years ago encountering certain ideas about, in Roger Caillois’s terms, the “left side of the sacred” in relevance to Paganism. This aspect of “the Sacred” (a term that I now accept as fairly insufficient as a descriptor as a descriptor of divine reality) concerns itself with the transgression of the “normal” boundaries that are attached to life, can be defined by a relationship with death and the powers of the underworld, and emphasizes the power of the sacred to disrupt and penetrate the day-to-day order that we live in. I remember Finnchuill relating this to certain practices of the pre-Christian world, such as Dionysian rites and the worship of chthonic gods such as Hecate in Greece, dealings with the dwellers of the sidhe mounds in Ireland, the invocation of chthonic deities by Gaulish sorcerers, and the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld. He also used Bataille’s image of the Akephalos, the headless demon, to convey “the left sacred” in terms of the death of the monarch, the destruction of hierarchy, and the resulting disruption of the social order (Bataille’s Acephale was likely intended to symbolize the radical rejection of fascist spirituality in favour of anti-authoritarian mythology and ritual). For Paganism, this means the core matter is the trangression and dissolution of the boundaries between humans and “the Sacred”, which would come a resulting fixation on chthonicism, as contrasted with the “right sacred” which sought to preserve boundaries between Man and “the Sacred”, to prevent “the Sacred” from constantly pouring into the world. Disinhibition is central to this outlook: this meant flagrant defiance of the prevailing social customs as a means to access divine consciousness or community in ways that could be acheived within the boundaries of the civic order.

Dracula, that dragon containing within himself the wild negativity of demonic and pagan outsideness, the vampire lord who invokes the warlike gods and the Devil and can turn himself wolves, bats, and mist, the barbarian who thirsts for blood and so invades Christendom, is an emblem of the gothic time that shines upon and in the Left Hand Path. Here lies an interesting nexus of intersection that can be cultivated between Satanism and Paganism, and a darkly radiant ethos for the Left Hand Path. Thirsting, devouring, battling one’s way into the world, living forever in the black atmosphere of everything, becoming without end.