week 9: dracula isn’t the villain - how the darkness can save us

Cards from Robert M. Place’s classic Vampire Tarot

This week, I remembered to bring out one of the great tarots of all time, Robert M. Place’s Vampire Tarot, published (and held hostage by) St. Martin’s Press. The reason he can’t reprint this deck, as he has his others, is that the copyright is owned by SMP and they ain’t doing anything with it. Capitalism at is most moronic. The deck goes for hundreds on the collector’s market and maybe there’s a collector’s lobby preventing a reissue. I don’t know. But it’s typical bullshit and I hate it. 

Anyway, I love the deck. Place frequently uses a combination of pip and imagery to create his minors, and I really enjoy that. 

This week, we get: Eight of Knives (influenced by Queen of Stakes/Wands); The Hierophant (Van Helsing) (Influenced by the Knight of Knives); and the Ten of Stakes (influenced by The Hermit.)

I was talking yesterday about the solitary labor of the eights. We’re alone, and we’re working alone, in this case trapped in our mind-jails, ruing all that there is to rue. The Queen of Stakes makes us believe that if we think just right, we can slay monsters. (This Queen of Stakes is Charlotte Stoker, who was married to Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. She might have been a bit in this boat. Stoker, who was closeted and queer, may well have seemed a mystery she could solve if the only thought or said the right thing.) 

“I know I can slay this monster! I know I can! I’m the fucking Queen of Wands, after all!”
There’s a feedback loop because our own sense of importance (and impotence) and our need to logic this out. Something tells me logic ain’t it, but let’s keep exploring. 

To the left of the Eight of Knives, we have The Hierophant (Van Helsing) influenced by the Knight of Knives. 

If you place a queer lens on the story of Dracula, it’s not hard to see it as an allegory. Dracula represents our hungers, our thirsts, our desires; he also presents otherness and foreignness. He’s painted as the villain because he preys on pretty, white, Christian girls, but the book doesn’t limit him to women as the movies usually do. Even Bela’s Dracula feeds on Renfield, one of the few films to depict the count having a same-sex encounter. (The recent BBC adaptation puts Harker in the position of being asked if he had sex with the count, but we have no sense it happened.)

The straight-washing of Dracula isn’t shocking. Stoker himself was clearly on Van Helsing’s side, and he was clearly drying to pray the gay way. And after Oscar Wilde, Stoker’s contemporary, wound up in prison for being a homo, Stoker turned virulently anti-queer. In essence, he went from Harker to Van Helsing. 

Anyway, there’s a huge history of racism and anti-Jewishness in vampire myths. The Vampire mythology cannot be divorced from stereotypes of Jews and Romani as predators. I think Robert Egger’s recent Nosferatu did an excellent job playing that up, at least in the parts where rats infest the German town the main characters live in. I think the imagery of rats and plague and Dracula all speak to the white euro horror of “the other.” I do take issue with this portrayal of the Romani, who aren’t really characters—and that’s typical of Eggers’ work. It skirts queer liberation, it even skirts the dismantelling  of stereotype, but often he falls into whiteness tropes.

But if you look at it through a queer, less colonial lens: Dracula isn’t a villain; he’s simply higher on the food chain than we are. 

Anyway, to misquote the title of a recent Broadway play, Van Helsing is the Villain. (The play is John Proctor). Van Helsing, at least in the book (he’s not at all this way in Eggers’ Nosferatu), uses a kind of pragmatic blend of Catholicism and Calvinism to end his foe, and, like the Hierophant, he uses faith as a weapon. (A plot point in Dracula I always make fun of: somehow all these Church of England Anglican anti-Catholics suddenly discover the solution to their problems is Catholic imagery . . . it’s cute.)

The Knight of Knives (Colerage, not useful here) reminds us of the bloodless intellectual approach to achieving our ends—which does underscore Van Helsing’s kind of bloodless lack of sex and intrigue. Dracula, like the Devil in tarot, invites us to be our wildest animal, our most innate, our “darkest,” which I take to mean our most anti-colonial, non-“christian” selves—our witchy, political, messy, selves. Van Helsing loathes that, and the Knight of Swords takes up the cause without thinking because he’s a holy roller and a truster of the status quo. 

What got us here won’t save us.

The Ten of Stakes influenced by The Hermit has lots to say. First, yes, you might need a rest this week. You might need to hole up for a day or so and spend it in your coffin, hiding from the vagaries of existence. The Hermit for sure amps up that vibe—but this hermit, who is one of Dracula’s disguises, seems to invite us into his world, not to avoid it. 

There’s a scene in a Hammer film, the first Dracula they made without Christopher Lee, where the sort of Renfield character, a madwoman midwife, kneels on the grave of a recently-bitten victim and essentially midwives her out of the grave—out into the the world. She plays delivery room doctor to a newly-minted vampire. 

That’s what this Hermit remind me of. “Rest,” he says, “but not for long. I need you to come with me.”

There’s a scene in one of the lesser Dracula films, I think it’s the Frank Langella, which is one of my least favorite (Langella doesn’t want to be playing Dracula; he wants to be playing Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights), in which he tells Mina, “I need your blood. I need your blood.” And in a relatively sexless interpretation, it actually jolts up the fire for a hot second, because that kind of desperation is really sexy (to a certain kind of weirdo—hi, I’m the problem). 

I’m drawing another card for context and—it’s The Lovers! Which depicts Dracula in the act of Draculizing (and damn, RMP, this one is JACKED). 

Dear ones.

The solution lies not in Van Helsing’s conservative uptight attempt to erase the “other.” The solution lies not in attempting to overcome the overwhelming urges for a deeper kind of liberation. The solution, in fact, is taking a quick nap and then going deeper into the darkness. 

That is, after all, what is common this time of year anyway. 

The Dark Daddy, the Witch God/ess, the Devil, Dracula, Lilith, Hecate, Baba Yaga . . . it is the counsel of the dark ones, the ones who understands the margins better than anyone, that we must trust and fall into the embrace of. It is there where we taste our deeper, inner selves; and it is there that we find ways of transcending the mortal limitations of christo-capitalist Van Helsing-esque bullshit and discover that we, too, have access to higher powers that the Van Helings of the world would like us to forget, forever, that we have. 

Fangs out, little ones. 

Into the dark! ​