While we should keep many spiritual books on our nightstand, there are important books that takes us out of the naivety and shows spiritual warfare. Today's book is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Do you think vampires are just a story? Think again!
Written in the late 19th century, this great book is important for all of us to see the evil and ruthless nature of Dracula and how we can get our vital energy sucked out of us. Blood drinking cults are not a conspiracy theory, they are unfortunately real and vampirism can either be real with blood, or also with our energy, but let’s stick to blood for now. The big question is: why is blood such a big deal?
Only be sure that you do not eat the blood, for the blood is the life, and you shall not eat the life with the flesh. (Deuteronomy 12:23)
Why did Yahuah need to talk about it? Who ever had the idea of drinking blood to begin with? In Genesis 6, 1/3 of the angels of the Creator decided to go to earth and mate with women, because they looked beautiful. These fallen angels mated with human women and they gave birth to giants. The existence of giants is not so well hidden, a short research will show you they are very much real.
The giants were called Nephilim and they ate a lot to keep them going, until they started to eat flesh and drink blood of both animals and humans so chaos broke loose. On top of that, the giants also started mating with humans and even animals and the offspring was what today we call ‘mythology’.
When the Creator saw the abomination that the angels had brought to his creation, he decided to flood the earth and save only Noah’s family, for they still had their DNA pure. Unfortunately we also know from Genesis that the flood could not kill all giants or their seed survived somehow and so have their horrendous practices and fallen angel’s cult.
With this we can easily understand why the Jewish leaders were shocked to hear Yahusha (Jesus) talk about his blood and his flesh, for their self-righteousness made it impossible for them to understand such beautiful message.
Then Yahusha said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. (John 6:53)
Yahusha is talking about spiritual life, eternal life, not the life of the body. After the fall, we are all spiritually dead to the Creator, unless we accept Yahusha to take over our lives.
We know that Yahusha exchanged his physical life for an eternal one and now sits on the right side of the Father. He told us that we can also have eternal life if we allow him to dwell in us, but how is that? If life is in the blood, once we consume it, that life becomes part of us. In this sense, once we accept Yahusha’s blood sacrifice, we ‘drink’ his blood and as he becomes part of our spirit, our flesh is also crucified with our Messiah and our sins forgiven for eternal life. So yes, blood is a big deal!
With the importance of blood in mind, let’s reflect on our culture and the glorification of vampires. The vampire cult has a long history in Hollywood. Since ‘Nosferatu’, which was not romantic at all, the way Hollywood showed vampires started getting more and more ‘acceptable’, to say the least. When I was a teenager, ‘Interview with the Vampire’ was released. It had in the cast the most handsome actors of the 90’s: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater. All girls were secretly wishing a vampire like Brad Pitt could show up in their lives, so hot, right?!
I also remember an older movie with David Bowie called ‘The Hunger’, in which Catherine Deneuve is an experienced vampire with a collection of old lovers who willingly provided her with blood – and even if they could stay with her for a few centuries, since they were not as powerful as their lover, their body started to decay, but they could not die. Because of that, the ‘older’ lovers remained on her attic in a sad body and soul prison. Catherine was beautiful and had the wisdom only several hundreds of years can give and victims easily fell prey to her charms.
The younger generations have now dozens of vampire cult movies to choose from: The vampire diaries, Twilight series and many others, so you get my point. Vampires are always good-looking, have a good nature but are trapped in the curse of being a vampire. They did not want to be turned into a vampire, but one day they were forced to drink the blood of a vampire and now they are condemned to live forever looking beautiful, young and being super rich. At first, they avoid killing people to be fed, they try to drink animal blood, or get blood from donors, because they respect life. There comes a bad vampire who enjoys killing to drink blood and starts killing the people around the 500-year-old nice vamp and now the teenage girl he is interested in is in danger. It’s stupid and repetitive, yet we know that sex sells!
These sexy, glamorous and tormented characters invaded our imagination with a tractor. Now, there is one particular movie which would have the opportunity to show a different side of this trend, but chose not to. It’s an abomination called ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ which gives another meaning to the expression ‘it’s not as good as the book’.
Now let’s get this straight: the only thing in the movie which is faithful to the book is the character’s names. All the rest is absurdly different. This movie is turning 30 years next year (feel old yet?) and I watched it again yesterday because I wanted to compare with the book and it got me nauseous.
The movie manages to reduce the complexity of all the best characters and focuses on the Dracula’s drama, showing him as only a poor guy who turned against God after his wife died while he was impaling Turks ‘for Christ’. Grab a tissue, we all feel so sorry for this great guy wronged by God.
And Mina (Jonathan’s fiancée), is Dracula’s wife reincarnated (??), so when poor Dracula sees Mina’s picture, he decides to go to London to find her.
And she obviously falls in love with the monster because ‘she knows him from another life’ even though she knows Dracula
killed her best friend – never mind the fact that she is now married with Jonathan.
Isn't love beautiful?
If all you know about Bram Stoker’s story is the movie, please take this into consideration:
The real Mina is intelligent, energetic and faithful to her husband and even asks Jonathan and Dr. Van Helsing to kill her if she turns into a vampire. There is no ‘seduction’ between Dracula and Mina, she is a victim of a monstrous parasite. The movie shows her as an adulterer who consciously decides to become a vampire to ‘be like her prince’. Give me a break!
Lucy is not the idiotic slut flirting with all men, she is courted by three men as she is coming of age and makes her decision to marry Arthur and is faithful to her fiancée. While there is a subtle animalesque sexual allusion with Dracula, it’s clear she is bewitched and goes to him as in a trance.
Dr. Van Helsing is not the asshole the movie shows. He is respectful and tactful, specially with the women in the story.
Jonathan is not the beta male from the movie, neither the other men who join Van Helsing to kill Dracula.
All characters are complex and interesting, unlike the representation in the movie
Ok, rant is over, now my personal insights from the book:
The vampires of Bram Stoker are not cute nor glamorous. They are monstrous and demonic – and that’s the correct way to show them. There is a sexual element as they use basic sexual instincts to entice their prey. Although the book does not focus on describing sexual advances from the vampires, Stoker shows us how they know our weaknesses very well. Because once we are trapped by sexual lust, we lose rationality. I wonder if it explains why western society is so sexualized currently. The more promiscuous and sexually driven our society gets, the more controllable are our minds.
If blood is life, vampires feed of our lives, our vital energy. We see on one hand Dracula getting younger as he drains the blood of Jonathan while his victim start getting old and loosing touch with reality as his vital energy gets drained.
And if our blood gets a vampire full of our life, what do the victims get when they drink the vampire’s blood? They get eternal spiritual death as they are drinking death itself.
A curiosity I have is why was Dracula averse to mirrors? In Stoker’s book, Dracula had no reflection. I find it always interesting to think about the role of mirrors in books and movies. We see them in Snow White where the witch summons a demon through the mirror, also other countless mirror scenes in movies. In a way Dorian Gray’s portrait is a mirror of what he has become. He could not look at the portrait, otherwise the acknowledgment would make Dorian’s body decay, so he hid his portrait where no one could see. Interestingly enough, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde knew each other. Such a small world…
Mirrors in movies and books can also mean windows to our subconscious and portals to other dimensions and Dracula’s discomfort with the mirror for me is due to the confirmation that he is not a physical presence, that he belongs to darkness, to the underground earth, where Yahuah cast all souls of the dead Nephilim. This is for me the reason Dracula needed earth from his motherland in order to regain strength and even shipped several coffins full of dirt to London.
Earlier in the post I talked about the Nephilim. The judgment from Yahuah was that the angels who mated with women would be cast in a prison until the Apocalypse and their offspring would not live more than 500 years and when they died - because they were not part of the creation - their spirits could not go back to Heaven but would wander on earth and the inner earth until the Apocalypse. They are what we now call ‘demons’.
What do you think about Bram Stoker’s book? What do you think the boxes of dirt and the mirror represent?
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