In Master Eckhart’s terms, the Divine Will is the Father observing His own nature in the Son, this play (of adoration, as Rūmī tells us) in which the two delight Themselves being the Holy Spirit; in this “play” of love, the audience and the actors identify with each other. Creation, as an image of Divinity, can also be conceived as a play of God, — “[…] as the spider weaves its thread from its own mouth, plays with it and then withdraws it again into itself, the Lord [...] develops the whole universe from Himself, plays with it and withdraws it again into Himself” (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 11:3). It is in this sense that Shakespeare refers to the world as a stage, whose figures need to be known in their imagetic terms rather than in their causal terms — it matters little in practice, for example, the causal chain that leads to a particular Saturnine event in relation to the knowledge of its image, which, in alchemical terms, corresponds to lead, and can therefore only be “transmuted” by man into Jupiterine tin, the next phase of the Lesse Work. This apprehension of the “images” of the world’s stage is nothing less than the acquisition of the grammar according to which the Creator arranged Creation; we should remember the saying attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas: man speaks in words, but God speaks in words and things.
If this is the case, however, given the immensity of reality’s possibilities, it is impossible for an individual to understand the “grammar of the Real” based solely on their direct individual experience — at least after the Fall of Adam, one of the reasons why, incidentally, they were assigned to work the earth so that it would bear fruit. Culture consists precisely of the fruits of the earth, given to man and his descendants. Truth, goodness, and beauty, for example, are properly cultural goods, and also spiritual ones, as indispensable to human life, insofar as man possesses spirit (disregarding how inappropriate it is to say that one can “possess” spirit) as air, water, and food are indispensable to its body.
As Saint Bonaventure says, there is an “itinerary of the mind to God”, and this itinerary passes through culture — through the symbolism of stones, the assimilation of language, the apprehension of classical poetry and the reading of great works of literature. It is as impossible to pass from the state of provincial ignorance to the debate of high metaphysics as it is to transmute lead into gold without passing through silver; silver is the perfect container for gold, as the Moon is for the Sun, but not lead, whose lunar mirror is buried under the cross of matter. But the Christ said: “[…] the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8); in Jean-Marc Allemand’s terms, “the current mess is both a sinister farce and a great parody”, — and consciously so, driven to such an extent by the “children of this world”, who know the “images” of things not for Realisation, but for anti-traditional work. These “children of this world” are what is known in the Islamic religion as “awliyā al-Shaiṭān”, the “saints of Satan”; in René Guénon’s terms, they are the counter-initiation that has led history with a certain predominance since around the time of the fall of the Templar Order.
Interestingly, the fateful date of 13 October 1307, a Friday, on which the Order of the Temple fell, can be associated with a numerologically linked passage from the Apocalypse of Saint John, as Julio Peradejordi has well demonstrated: “And it was given unto him [the Beast] to make war with the saints, and to overcome them” (Revelation 13:7). It wouldn’t be unreasonable to understand the saints as the Templars and the Beast as the conspiracy formed by Pope Clement V and King Philip the Fair, counseled by William of Nogaret — a child of this world very aware of his anti-traditional and satanic role, having been excommunicated for his slander and violence against Pope Boniface VIII.
René Guénon, in a review of “Adventures in Arabia”, by W. S. Seabrook, was able to talk about the centres of projection of satanic influences scattered around the world, using elements of culture to draw a conceptual circle pointing to the reality of the “children of this world”, functional successors of the race of the giants of the blood of Tubalcain, who, in the terms of Blessed Anna Katharina Emmerick, “practised sorcery and all kinds of evil”.
Among the Seven Towers of the Devil of which Guénon speaks, it is worth mentioning one located in Sudan, where, to quote him in his Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps: “According to reliable witnesses […] there is an entire lycanthropic tribe of at least twenty thousand individuals. In other regions of Africa there are also secret organisations, such as the well-known Leopard Society, in which certain forms of lycanthropy play a predominant role”. The biblical case of Nebuchadnezzar II could also be cited (sicut the Book of Daniel 4:30–33), as well as that of his successor, Nabonidus.
In Greece, the Deluge itself is associated with the counter-initiatic action of lycanthropes, as evidenced by the case of King Lycaon, who, receiving a visit from Zeus in disguise, offered the god the remains of a child to feed on; faced with the monstrosity, he was punished with lycanthropy. In the words of Ovid, in his Metamorphoses: “Lycaon [...] has become a wolf, but he still retains traces of his first form; the same colour of grey hair, the same fury in his features, the same shining eyes; he remains the living image of ferocity”. Through the hubris of King Lycaon, the Deluge descended from Olympus to Earth, putting an end to the Bronze Age — but not to the counter-initiation, which has continued to play its anti-traditional role to this day.
As René Guénon took the opportunity of reviewing a work by Seabrook to talk about these realities, we can also take the opportunity of reading another literary work to do the same. “Dracula”, by Bram Stoker, comes to mind both because of the presence of lycanthropy in the figure of the antagonist who gives the work its title and because of vampirism, less understood than the state of wolf-men, and the possible association of this antagonist with Prince Vlad Dracula of Wallachia, called “Dracula”, “Drăculea”, "Son of the Dragon”, due to his father’s association with the Order of the Dragon, an initiatory chivalric society whose symbol was a dragon resting its head on its tail, with a cross on its back — a clear reference to the alchemical marriage between sulphur and mercury and to the four elements of sensible manifestation.
Also of interest in Bram Stoker’s work is the reference to the Eve of Saint George’s Feast, on which it is said that “when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world have full dominion”; that this should be the case on the eve of the day of a saint associated precisely with the victory of the Christ over Satan (and of Saint Michael over Lucifer) corresponds perfectly to the traditional idea that Ianua Cæli is like the belly of the sea monster that swallowed the Prophet Jonah, — it is where the Sun is shrouded in darkness to the maximum, but at the same time the point from which it begins to ascend. In this sense, it is traditionally said that the Christ (Solis Iustitiæ) was born on the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere — the darkest night of the year.
In Western Europe, Saint George’s Feast is on April 23, but taking into account the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, it falls on 6 May in the Middle East and part of Eastern Europe, coinciding, rather suggestively, with the Day of Khiḍir and Elijah, the Hıdırellez, the day on which both characters meet on Earth every year.
Geocosmically, May 6 is the midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, the second half of the ascent of light towards the fullness of the Summer Solstice; alchemically, we can say that Hıdırellez, as the second moment of the Sun’s ascent towards the solstice, corresponds to the second stage of the Greater Work, associated with Venus, whose green colour relates very easily to the figures of Saint George, al-Khiḍr, and Elijah.
Saint George is typically represented as slaying a dragon (or the Dragon, — as a symbol of the Devil himself); this is a symbol of Non-Being being penetrated by the vital ray of the manifestation of Being. Thus, in Kumāraswāmī’s terms: “Slayer and dragon, sacrifice and victim, are of one mind behind the cloths, where there is no polarity of opposites” (Hinduism and Buddhism 1:2). The fixed chaos is dissolved by the light that coagulates upon it to manifest Creation. In this sense, the traditional iconography of Saint George is synonymous with the very emblem of the Order of the Dragon, the cross on the animal’s back representing the four elements that are determined from the Prima Materia.
In the East, on the other hand, the Dragon is seen not as a symbol of Primordial Chaos, but as a symbol of the World Axis, — not for nothing is it associated with the rays that descend from the sky upon the Earth; it is the fullness of Yang that coagulates upon the fullness of Yin, represented by the Tiger. The marriage between the Red Dragon (or Fire Dragon) and the Blue Tiger (or Water Tiger) corresponds precisely to what Western alchemists describe as the alchemical marriage of the Red King and the White Queen, — a marriage that generates the Golden King, the birth of the Word.
In Japan, we will mention the existence of the “Kokuryū-Kai” (Black Dragon Society), which originated from the older “Gen’yōsha” (Black Ocean), taking its name from the Amur River, the “Black Dragon”, which separated Manchuria and Siberia; its leader was Ryōhei Uchida, guided by one of the founding members of the Gen’yōsha, Mitsuru Tōyama; it is not difficult to see in the colour associated with this secret society a reference both to the element of water (understood in its Chinese cosmological sense) and to Primordial Chaos.
South of the Amur River, we find the Ch’ing Lung River, the “Green Dragon”, and it’s not surprising that the Black Dragon Society gave rise to a sister society, the Green Dragon Society; while the Black Dragon’s work was centred on combating Russian influence, the Green Dragon’s seems to have taken place more in the context of clashes with the Chinese. Chiang Kai-Shek himself, according to the memoirs of his second wife, Ch’en Chieh-Ju, thought of a “completely secret system of private investigators”, modelled on the “Green Dragon Society and the Black Dragon Society of Japan”.
Beyond the political and historical considerations, however, we find a more relevant fact: if black is associated with water in the cycle of the Chinese elements, green is associated with wood, the next element; one element is at the end of the cycle, like the resting place of all things, and the other at the beginning. It is noteworthy that the Green Dragon Society’s initiation ceremony consisted of making a seed sprout through the use of one’s own ki — in other words, making the Golden Embryo develop through the descent of the spirit. In the West, the descent of spirit over matter is symbolised by the hieroglyph of Venus, associated with the colour green, in which the solar sphere rests on the material cross.
In the Chinese elemental cycle, there are both relationships of generation, as is the case between water and wood, and relationships of destruction, as, quite suggestively, is the case between wood and earth — green and yellow, associated respectively with the Green Dragon Society and the Ch’ing Dynasty, which ruled absolutely until the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century. Neither the role of the Black Dragon in the fall of the tsars nor that of the Green Dragon in the fall of the Middle Kingdom should be ruled out.
Leaving aside the de facto origins of any of these initiatic orders, like any others it is not unreasonable that, although once legitimate, they may serve as vehicles of counter-initiation, — either as de facto counter-initiatic societies or pseudo-initiatic ones, representing a staging designed to cover up the behind-the-scenes actions of the real actors in the play that will culminate in the Kingdom of the Antichrist; we can say about these societies something analogous to what Guénon says about sacred lands: “Any land of the gods with a spiritual centre becomes a land of the dead when that centre disappears” (Le Symbolisme des Cornes).
All this serves to illustrate how it is not unreasonable that, in the Western context, if it is the case that the Order of the Dragon (or, more properly, the “Society of Dragonists”, a literal translation of the Latin “Societas Draconistarum”) represented a legitimate initiatory society to which Vlad II and Vlad III belonged, the latter called “Dracula”, apparently, because of his father’s initiation into the society, it may have degenerated into a vehicle for counter-initiation until the 1890’s, when Bram Stoker’s novel is set.
The fact that the antagonist is called “Dracula”, moreover, in no way identifies him with Vlad III, but could merely mean a title transmitted discreetly, by blood or by association, like the title “Hermes” among the Hermeticists, with Enoch and Noah standing out as identified by it; furthermore, we will return to the fact that Count Dracula may predate Vlad II.
It’s worth pointing out that during the Middle Ages, in Central and Eastern Europe, vampires were not mere mythological characters, but very real figures; this was the case until recently, as attested to by an 1867 manual for Greek Orthodox priests known as “Nomokanonikó”, pages 67–69 of which are entitled “On Those Who Burn Vampires”. So real were these beings that the manual is quite clear in saying that those “who burn vampires and have been immersed in their smoke should not receive Communion for at least six years”.
“Vampire” in Greek is “vrykólaka”, a word that shares its origin with the Slavic “volkodlak”, which, however, refers not to a vampire, but to a werewolf; there doesn’t seem to be such a rigid distinction between the two beings, which is demonstrated, for example, by the fact that both can be called “volkodlak” in regions such as Croatia. In German, “werwolf” is an analogous construction — “wolf-man”, or “werewolf”, which brings us back to the counter-initiatic societies to which René Guénon refers en passant.
Another word for vampire, in Greek, is “stryx”, which passed into Romanian as “strigoi”, which is still used today to designate a vampire; In Greek itself, however, “stryx”, whose literal meaning is “screeching”, can mean both owls and witches who, imitating the behaviour of the bird, wander at night in order to obtain food, which is further demonstrated by the fact that in French “striga” refers precisely to a type of bird-woman who consumes blood, while the Italian “stregoni” carries the same connotation.
If it is true that “siddhayaḥ [powers] arise from birth and family, from psychotropic plants, from the recitation of magical formulae, from ascetic practice, and from yogī union” (Yoga Sūtras 4:1), it is also true that “whoever arrives at a certain door without having reached it by a normal and legitimate path sees that door close in front of him and is obliged to return, not as a simple profane, which is now impossible, but as a sāher [that is, a sorcerer operating in the realm of subtle possibilities of a lower order]” (sicut Guénon, Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps 38).
Such is the case of those whom popular culture has come to call “vampires”, whose differentiation from “werewolves” or other beings afflicted with this kind of condition seems to lie in the fact that the latter tend to find themselves in this situation due to a curse, while the former due to the voluntary pursuit of a properly satanic path, which does not prevent them from manifesting siddhayaḥ (to use the language of the Yoga Sūtras) commonly associated with others, such as the shape-shifting that Bram Stoker’s Dracula exhibits in the novel, — not only is he capable of becoming a bat, as is associated with vampires, but also a wolf.
In relation to each other, the wolf and the bat are analogous to the Moon and the Sun, or the mercury and the sulphur of the alchemists, — the first represents a sattvic principle, which tends to ascend (represented by the typical howl of wolves in the face of the Moon) and the second a rajasic principle, which expands to manifest Creation from the Materia Prima (represented by the echolocation of bats, which brings us back to the comparison between the creation of the world and a symphony); sattva, as we know, is associated with the colour white (like the moon and silver), and rajas with the colour red (like the blood the vampire consumes).
The meaning of blood in yogī practices is easily explained by the following saying that Śiva-Saṁhitā (4:87) attributes to the god Śiva: “For I, Śiva, am the sperm, and the red humour is my śakti: when these two merge, I unite with her!”; if, in relation to each other, the masculine and feminine are the Sun and the Moon, however, in an internal sense, the lunar spermatic element is in a saturnine state in the male body, not in the female, being the natural container of the solar sanguine element that dissipates through the female body, so that it has to be unearthed first in order to receive the solar essence, — the passive contains the active, man contributes the lunar element to contain the solar feminine and generate the Golden Embryo, in which the active pole is reborn (or “reincarnates”, understanding this term in the traditional sense, and not in the sense in which spiritualist schools understand it) in the passive pole.
In the same sense, the Hindus speak of the “kośas”, “sheaths”, of Ātman; as René Guénon says: “[…] if one were to go only by the apparent positions of Heaven and Earth (or rather, what represents them), it might seem that Heaven is on the outside and Earth on the inside. But the truth is that here again we mustn’t forget to apply the analogy inversely. In reality, the ‘interiority’ always belongs to Heaven and the ‘exteriority’ to Earth” (La Grande Triade).
However, if there are legitimate traditional practices of any kind, it is not unreasonable to admit the existence of similar anti-traditional practices, as Guénon exemplifies in Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps, dealing with the subject of the relationship between Šamánism and witchcraft: “It can happen that some people, operating more consciously and with a broader knowledge, which does not mean of a higher order, use these same forces for quite different purposes, without the knowledge of the šamáns or those who act as them, and who then play the role of mere instruments for the accumulation of the forces in question at specific points. We know that throughout the world there are various reservoirs of influence whose distribution is certainly not fortuitous and which serve very well the designs of certain powers responsible for the whole modern deviation”.
Let’s emphasise that the fact that Bram Stoker’s story takes place in Transylvania is not without meaning — Count Dracula himself mentions that the Szelekys, the inhabitants of the region, trace their origins back to Attila, chief of the Huns, in whose “veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert”.
Let’s remember that, as Jean-Marc Allemand shows in his study of the Seven Towers of the Devil, “[…] the Huns came into contact with the descendants of the ancient Scythian tribes. It was in a Scythian region that Attila managed to cover his greed (his love of gold was well known) with a supposed election from Heaven to establish his kingdom over the whole Earth! It was a shepherd who, looking for the cause of his animals’ wounds, discovered a sword stuck in the ground”. According to the Scythians, it was a sword fallen from Heaven, the sword of the god of war, likened to the Mars of the Romans, which could only be wielded by legitimate Scythian kings. We must remember, however, the words of the Christ: “[…] all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52). “Without a Mandate from Heaven, all power is disqualified”, to quote Allemand again.
Count Dracula, as a member of the decadent Transylvanian aristocracy (notwithstanding the possibility that the Societas Draconistarum may have been a legitimate initiatic society in other times), represents counter-initiation, the root of which lies in the revolt of the kṣatriyas against the priestly authority of the brāhmaṇas; in India, at the coronation of a king, the brāhmaṇa says: “I am this, you are that, I am Heaven, you are Earth” (Aitareya Brāhmaṇa 8:27). Not for this reason, however, should we identify the character with the historical Dracula, prince of Wallachia, — such an identification is a conjecture by two Boston professors, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, which is not supported by fact; it is the opinion of Dacre Stoker, a descendant of the author of the classic, that “Bram’s monster was far older than Vlad the Impaler. In fact, he was a product of the Șolomanță as detailed in the first line of this note [by Stoker]: ‘ Șolomanță = school in mountains where Devil teaches mysteries of nature. Only ten pupils a time and retains one as payment’. That ‘one’ was Dracula” (sicut Dacre Stoker’s note to his “Dracul”).
Regarding Șolomanță and the Draculas, Stoker is not silent in his work: “The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Șolomanță, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the Devil claims the tenth scholar as his due”. In the words of Emily Gerard, in Transylvanian Superstitions: “Șolomanță, […] supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, […] where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the Devil in person. Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired and nine of them are released to return to their homes, the tenth scholar is detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon a dragon he becomes henceforward the Devil’s aide-de-camp”.
The image of Șolomanță as a school is an inversion of the “Great Agartthian School” with which Saint-Yves d’Alveydre had contact, whose function was, according to the same author, to teach “the cosmic mysteries: not only as they were imagined by the Judeo-Christian məqūbbālīm, not only as they are practised in secret by the current disciples of Saint John the Baptist and by certain esoteric schools in Cairo, Sinai, and Arabia, but also as they are professed scientifically and practically by the mages of Agarttha”.
If we treat these things not as unreasonable, or absurd, it’s because we take into account Dacre Stoker’s opinion that “Bram Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction but as a warning of a very real evil”; in the original preface to Dracula, after all, removed from the first edition so as not to cause panic in England, which was still experiencing the terror of Jack the Ripper’s crimes, the author stated: “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight”. We don't have access to the original edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but the Icelandic translation of the work, Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness), by Valdimar Ásmundsson, seems to have been based on an earlier manuscript than the one that was published in English in 1897; in this translation, we find elements that we don’t find in the English work, such as the involvement of foreigners in the Count’s political conspiracy.
As Hans C. de Roos’ introduction to Makt Myrkranna states: “Thomas Harker’s host not only commands a large crowd of ape-like devotees but also finances and masterminds an international diplomatic conspiracy, aiming to overthrow Western democratic institutions. In the London part of the story, the Count, acting under various pseudonyms, also entertains a large number of high-ranking guests in his lavishly furnished Carfax residence, where he is always surrounded by the most stunning and elegant young women”. It only comes as a surprise to those ignorant of the roots of the metacapitalist bloc that a revolutionary oriental count finds support in the West for his pretensions of global domination; in the terms of Professor Olavo de Carvalho: “[The metacapitalist is] the individual who gets so rich from economic freedom that, after a certain point, he can no longer submit to the oscillations of the market and has to take control of it. The transfiguration of the capitalist into a monopolist is a ‘qualitative leap’” (Saltos Qualitativos, Diário do Comércio).
For those who are scandalised by the idea of a revolutionary movement within the West itself that intends to supplant its official regimes, it is pertinent to read Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, by historian James H. Billington, librarian of congress on the recommendation of President Ronald Reagan; we quote from this work a description of the Enlightenment initiation (or counter-initiation): “Marks were made with blood on the prostrate nude body of the candidate. His testicles were bound by a pink and poppy-colored cordon; and he renounced all other human allegiances before five white hooded phantoms with bloody banners after a ‘colossal figure’ appeared through a fire. Finally, the bands and marks were removed, and he was accepted into the higher order by drinking blood before seven black candles”.
The association between blood and sexual aspects, both in the actions of the revolutionaries and in the literary figure of vampires is not fortuitous; as author Isaac B. Singer in his short-story Le Dernier Demon: “The məqūbbālīm know that the taste of blood and the taste of flesh are brothers, which is why ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is immediately followed by ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’”; Jean Tourniac clarifies: “[…] blood plays a special role […] because it is the ‘igneous’ element among the elements of bodily existence; it is the vehicle of life. […] the same madness […] explains crimes of passion and hate crimes […]. It is precisely at this point that Divine Charity and the Spirit no longer intervene, but only the unbridled force from below, which only has control over the body, the soul or the ‘feeling’, and not over the spiritual intellect” (Vie Posthume et Résurrection dans le Judéo-Christianisme).
In view of all these considerations, however, let us remember, quoting Guénon: “[…] that disorder, error and obscurity can only win in appearance and momentarily, that all partial and transitory imbalances must necessarily concur towards the great total equilibrium, and that nothing can finally prevail against the power of Truth” (La Crise du Monde Moderne). Sicut Schuon: “Evil is not a matter for wonder; it is here, thou see’st it every day; it is bad enough. Look toward the good — it is wonderful, and bears witness to the Creator, against all illusion. In the good radiates the Absolute, the One, which cannot not be, and which vanquishes nothingness; so be patient, and also grateful. thou knowest that everything lies in the hands of the Most High” (World Wheel 1:117).
Very good, buddy