Vampires: The Occult Truth

By Stefan Isaksson

Vampires: The Occult Truth
Konstantinos
Llewellyn Publications
179 pages
ISBN: 1567183808

Konstantinos’ book Vampires is mostly an interesting, easy to read, and well-written introduction to the phenomenon known as vampires; where they’re from, what famous individuals from history who have inspired the modern view of vampires, how different the belief in vampires looked in different parts of the world, and so on.

Konstantinos, who for over fifteen years have researched the occult and written several books about most matters concerning the world of goth and the occult, manages to create a (mostly) pleasing mix of scepticism and belief, especially when it comes to historical tales about alleged “real” vampires where he thorough and informative explains how folklore easily can distort stories and how things that back in the days were taken as genuine evidence for the existence of vampires today turn out to be quite invalid.

But this scepticism doesn’t last throughout the entire book. As soon as he gets to the section about psychic vampires – that is, vampires that prefer feeding on human energy instead of human blood – the perspective changes in an instant. From being both skeptical and critical in his approach Konstantinos now becomes a complete believer, as he starts talking about nightly attack by psychic vampires, a phenomenon that contains every single element from the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis (being incapable of movement, occurring right before waking up or going to sleep, a feeling of slight pressure on the chest, the notion that someone else is in the room, and so on). Obviously Konstantinos and his readers has every “right” in the world to believe in this, but it’s quite surprising that he doesn’t even mention the possibility that these nightly attacks are nothing but a very natural phenomenon which most people experience sometime during a lifetime.

This complete lack of scepticism took me by surprise, since he up till then had been critical about everything else he writes about. Yes, it’s true that the book is mostly written for people who believe in the existence of magic and the supernatural – which becomes especially apparent at the end of the book – but still, approaching this section, like the rest of the book, with a critical mind wouldn’t destroy Konstantinos’ “occult reputation” (as far as I’m concerned, anyway), so it puzzles me as to why he writes the way he does.

And also, Konstantinos does have quite annoying tendency to keep telling the reader that future chapters and sections will deal with, and time and again he does this. Sure, this way of writing works excellent and can be very useful, but only to a certain extent, and after a while it usefulness simply transforms into something that you just don’t want to be reminded of. Perhaps it’s just me, but I couldn’t help but to find this method extremely irritating in the long run.

However, Vampires is in the end a book for everyone, skeptics and believers alike, since Konstantinos makes sure to remind the reader that even something as strange as the supernatural deserves to be taken seriously. And this is, of course, very true. You might not agree with some of his ideas, but so what? Many people do, and this alone makes the field a valid one to study. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me of he finds his largest audience among the ones inclined to believe in those exact things the established scientific community considers to be pure nonsense.

That didn’t matter much to me though, because I still had a good time reading it, and I managed to learn something new in the process.