Romancing Death

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A True Story of Vampirism, Death, the Occult, and Deliverance

Romancing D eath

William Schnoebelen

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© Copyright 2012—William Schnoebelen All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request. Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version.

DESTINY IMAGE® PUBLISHERS, INC. P.O. Box 310, Shippensburg, PA 17257—0310 “Promoting Inspired Lives.”

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ISBN 10: 0-7684-4112-9 ISBN 13 TP: 978-0-7684-4112-3 ISBN 13 Ebook: 978-0-7684-8854-8 For Worldwide Distribution, Printed in the U.S.A. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 / 16 15 14 13 12

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Dedication To my beloved wife Mary, Her presence is the breath of the Spirit Lifting me up As my feeble words take flight.

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Endorsements If there ever was the Lord’s perfect person to deal with vampirism, death, the occult, deliverance, and the darkness of today’s culture in cults, books, films, and television, it is Bill Schnoebelen.

He has lived these things before God set him free and called him to expose the dark things of the satanic underworld. Bill worked as an associate in our ministry for seven years. I know he is the real deal.

His teachings and his books have opened these dark doors to the light of truth and have helped to set tens of thousands of lost souls free in Christ. I fully endorse and recommend this timely work.

Ed Decker, Author President Saints Alive in Jesus ed@saintsalive.com I have known Bill Schnoebelen for more than 25 years. Probably no Christian minister is more knowledgeable on the occult than he. I also know Bill to be a man dedicated to serving Jesus Christ with his whole heart.

James R. Spencer, Author Director, Through the Maze Ministries

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Bill Schnoebelen’s books are a joy for me to read, not only because of his great writing style but because I learn so much! I have bought literally hundreds of copies of his best-selling book, Masonry, Beyond the Light, and given it to all the leaders of my Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network across the nation, because I consider it essential for them to have a better understanding of how the enemy of our souls works and how to gain victory. I will do the same with his new book, Romancing Death. I cannot think of anyone able to teach on the enemy’s strategies in such factual and fascinating ways as Bill Schnoebelen. If you want to be truly effective in your spiritual walk, you will be well served by reading all his books. Some of the truths Bill brings to light may be surprising, but the biblical responses he shares will help you and those you minister to be set free. One of the rules of natural and spiritual warfare is to know your enemy. Romancing Death will help you gain insights on how to pray effectively and see victory.

Thanks for writing this book, Bill!

Dr. John Benefiel Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network

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Contents Preface

Are Vampires Invading the Church?…………… 13

Confessions of an Ex-Vampire………………… 19 Part I Vampires 101

Chapter 1

Are Vampires Real?……………………………… 51

Chapter 2

Vampires: An Unnatural History……………… 63

Chapter 3

From Lord Ruthven to Edward Cullen: The Vampire in Popular Fiction………………… 75

Chapter 4

Blood Suckers in the Cinema From Rat-face to “Sparkly Face!”……………… 85

Chapter 5

A Pastoral Interlude……………………………… 93

Chapter 6

Who Let the Dog in?……………………………101

Chapter 7

Werewolf: Myth and Reality……………………107 Part II Twilight Under the Microscope

Chapter 8

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“Spoiler Heaven”—Brief Synopsis of the Twilight Saga………………………………125

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Chapter 9

Synopsis of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn……………………………………137

Chapter 10

Edward: Ice Cold “Hottie” or Serial Abuser?…………………………………149

Chapter 11

Of Love and Bella—the Psychology of Twilight……………………………157

Chapter 12

Giving up Your Soul for Love?…………………169

Chapter 13

The Law of Eternal Progression—Vampire Style?……………………183

Chapter 14

Spiritual Warfare and the Covenant With Death……………………………195

Chapter 15

Romancing Death?………………………………203

Chapter 16

A Biblical Guide to Entertainment………………219

Chapter 17

Liberation From Darkness………………………239

Appendix

Why Mormon Doctrine is Incompatible with Christianity…………………253

Endnotes…………………………………………259

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Are Vampires Invading preface

the Church?

That is a provocative question to be sure, and one that we will answer in this book. Many readers, Christian or otherwise, would probably be extremely surprised to learn that vampires were anything more than the stuff of lurid gothic fiction and horror movies. Would that this were true.

Hopefully bloodsucking fiends are not literally invading your church. If they were, you would probably know about it. However, do you—as parents—realize what the adolescent children (and many adults) in your congregation are reading these days? Bookstores are filling up with vampire and occult-based fiction. The shelves of the “Young Reader” sections of major chain stores are groaning under the weight of various series of books about vampires. The Twilight Saga is just the best-known series targeted for adolescents. But believe me, there are many others. They are spreading like wildfire!

Sadly, calls and emails from distraught parents around the country confirm to me the truth that many young people in the Church, especially young girls, are devouring these novels! This is sometimes happening with the implicit or explicit approval of youth leaders or Sunday school teachers. The parents do not know what to do to try to — 13 —

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protect their children and feel helpless to stand in the way of such a huge cultural phenomenon. This is especially true when their church leaders are condoning occult fiction without understanding the ramifications of this phenomenon.

Such leaders fall into the category mentioned in the first paragraph. They honestly believe vampires and such things are fantasy. What could be the harm in reading fantasy novels about young vampire love? Other leaders might just be seeing the writing on the wall and figure that if they do not jump on board the vampire hearse, they will be left behind by their young people—thought of as irrelevant or stodgy.

It is evident that in so many ways, the world has gone through many changes. The world today is so much different than the world of the 1980s, the decade in which I got saved.

Since then, we have had enormous technological advances, terrorism, and serious wars. The United States has changed dramatically in so many ways. We have gone into decline, both economically and morally. Many Bible teachers believe the two are profoundly related.

But there has been another change that is subtler.

Since the time of the early ’80s, “religion” has been increasingly replaced with “spirituality” in common parlance. The New Age movement has grown to become a dominant feature of the landscape.

It has certainly penetrated the Church. It is as if the crabgrass of heresy has overrun the lawn of sound theology.

Organized religion is now presented as something stuffy, old fashioned, and pretty much irrelevant. Spirituality is much more fascinating and trendy. Of course, the odd thing is, if “church” is organized religion, does that mean “spirituality” is disorganized religion?

Who would want to be a part of something like that? Yet people— especially young people—seem to be going for it in droves!

— 14 —

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We were warned about this. Paul wrote: For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears (2 Timothy 4:3).

It is in this context that I have come to examine the Twilight series of books (and films) by Stephenie Meyer. While we will examine the plot elements in greater detail in the main body of this book, suffice it to say that the core plot element in the four books is a relationship between a teenage girl (who is 17 or 18 years old) and a male vampire who appears to be 18 but actually is old enough to be her great-grandfather.

These enormously popular fiction books are targeted at adolescents, specifically younger girls. Aside from my concern for the impact this series has had on the culture at large, it is especially worrisome that many Christian churches are using these books as resources in their youth groups.

This is, of course, part of a broader trend. It has been said that the Twilight saga is the new Harry Potter! While the Potter books mostly glorified magic and the occult and were not particularly romantic, the Twilight novels are very romantic.

Gradually, the media and Hollywood are increasingly exposing our children to ever-deeper levels of occultism and evil. Harry Potter was bad enough, but romanticizing vampires is even worse!

Of course, this strategy is nothing new. We have seen a gradual debasement of all forms of entertainment. Since the ’70s, there has been an increasing amount of violence, drugs, and sex in television, movies, and video games. Interestingly enough, recent studies have shown that in the past decade, movies have become less smutty (a good thing) and much more violent—not so good!

Vampires are a part of that trend. While the violence in the Twilight books and films is not as bad as some media out there, that is — 15 —

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not saying much. There are still werewolves and murders and battles between vampire “armies.”

While the sex in the Twilight books and films is comparatively chaste (a reflection of Ms. Meyer’s devout Mormon faith), the romantic tension is keenly felt—what some call “unresolved sexual tension.”

Again, we will examine these issues in detail later on in the book.

But right now, we are just laying down the foundation. The relatively “innocent” (in the best sense of the word) Christian reader may be astonished to know that vampires are huge in the book, television, and film marketplace.

As the Body of Christ, we need to ask ourselves, why is this happening? What does this say about our culture? How are we—as the Body—to respond to these trends? If our young people are getting into these books—and you can bet they are—what is our biblical response? Additionally, what about the broader question: how does a Christian family select its entertainment?

As followers of Yah’shua (the Hebrew way of saying Jesus), we need to understand that vampires are not just fantasy creatures like Tinker Bell or Frodo. There are vampires out there. They are people who are practicing these things and who need to be saved.

They represent a dark and twisted form of the gospel that offers (as we shall see) a plan of salvation through “the blood,” supposed immortality and eternal life, and also through their own sacraments.

They even have their own dark “Christ.”

As I close this preface, I would exhort the Body of believers to carefully examine this phenomenon from two perspectives: 1. How do we respond to this cultural tsunami of vampires and the occult and also protect our children?

2. How do we reach people with the salvation message who are trapped in these dark sacraments?

— 16 —

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The Church needs to take a hard look at this and remember the words of a man of God I was privileged to briefly know and regard as a mentor, Dr. Walter Martin. Dr. Martin authored many books, mostly notably, The Kingdom of the Cults. He was fond of quoting: “The cults are the unpaid bills of the Church.”1 In other words, cults rise up because somehow—at some point— the Church let someone down. A notable example of this would be Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. Many do not know that he lived in a time of great revivals in the upper Atlantic states and that he was briefly a Methodist.

I am not saying it was the Methodist Church’s fault that Smith left their denomination and started his own strange religion. Doubtless he had a lot of spiritual baggage and sin in his life. His own history shows he was not brought up well. His parents were occultists and con artists.

But just think for a moment how much different the religious landscape would be today if someone in a solid Christian church had reached out to young Smith, led him to Christ, and properly discipled him. There would not be almost 13 million lost Mormons in the world, thinking that someday—if they are good and keep all their commandments and temple covenants—they will become gods!

Though many believers may be surprised to know this, vampirism is a cult—a somewhat organized religious system. In a larger sense, the Twilight books are a cult as well, though more in the sense of the “cult of personality.” But what needs are being met by these books and strange practices?

These young people are thirsty (pardon the metaphor) for something that I believe only the Body of Messiah can fill! But instead of coming to us, they are finding their sense of mystery and wonder from the most polluted of cisterns.

— 17 —

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For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13).

Come, let us explore this and work together to educate ourselves, protect our children, and win these precious souls to the Kingdom!

— 18 —

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Confessions of an

Ex-Vampire

1. E ntering

the

“D ark S ide ”

How does someone arrive at the place where he or she wants to become a vampire?

Believe it or not, in the Twilight Saga, Bella spends the better part of three books begging for someone to turn her into a vampire.

Of course, she wants to be a vampire because of her love for vampire Edward Cullen.

Beyond the motivation of love, what other possible reason could someone have for wanting to become a vampire?

I will briefly relate how I went from being a nice adolescent candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood to someone who slept in a coffin and was living almost entirely on human blood!

Some of you may know the story of my admittedly bizarre pilgrimage, but for the benefit of those who do not, I will try and quickly summarize the low points of my life in the occult.

— 19 —

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It is important for you to know that from a very early age (about 5 or 6), I really wanted to be a priest. I was a disgustingly “holy” little kid. Most of my peers thought I was so strange that they just beat me up. Even more than being a priest, I wanted to be a “saint.”1 I believe the beginning of my downward trajectory happened when I was around 12 years old. I was out trick-or-treating with a friend on Halloween night. I chanced to look up in the evening sky, and instead of seeing stars, the vault of the heavens was filled with black, leathery, bat-like things. Looking back now, I would probably say they were demons.

As I stared transfixed, their eyes opened and were ruby red. It seemed to me that those eyes burned into my soul.

I could sense a voice in my head saying something like, “You belong to us now.” I felt a thrill go through my body that—had I known about such things—I would have described as sexual. But my body and mind did not have the emotional vocabulary to process this horror! This was the very early 1960s, and almost all children in those days knew very little about sex, unless perhaps they grew up on a farm.

At this point in my life, I had never even seen a horror film or read a scary book of any kind (other than the usual fairytales). My mother and father carefully kept me away from such things. In my wildest nightmares, I never even dreamt of anything so terrifying.

Finally, my friend, who had walked on ahead without me, turned back and cried out, “Hey Bill, what’re you doing?”

I looked down at him and then looked back up at the sky, and everything was back to normal! I went home that night and climbed into bed feeling vaguely uneasy and defiled—as if those leathery wings had touched me in an intimate way.

After that incident, I began to acquire an unexplained interest in the paranormal (haunted houses, ghosts, etc.) and UFOs. (Those two interests often go hand in hand.) Oddly enough, my eighth-grade — 20 —

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teacher, a nun, gave me a paperback book on the paranormal to read, even though she did not know I was intrigued in that subject. I was hooked!

Within a year, I had read a half dozen books on UFOs, haunted houses, ESP, and psychic research. I had even joined The National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), an early UFO group. I also owned a deck of Zener ESP cards2 that I worked with.

But the next major landmark came when I was in college in minor seminary at 18. I was taking a theology course from a young priest who had his doctoral degree.

He evidently could tell I was especially devout in my desire to be a priest because he approached me one day after class. He asked me if I really wanted to be Christlike.

Of course I said I did. I knew enough about Catholic theology to know the dictum, “The priest is another Christ.” What Catholic young person would not wish to become more Christlike?

He told me that if I wanted to be like Christ, I would need to do the things that Christ did. That made sense.

Then he dropped the bomb. He said to me, “Well, you know, after Jesus went to the temple with Mary and Joseph when he was twelve, he went off and studied the occult in Egypt and the Far East.”

I just stared at him in unbelief.

“Yes,” he continued, “He studied with the lamas of Tibet and the gurus of India. That is how He acquired the ability to walk on water, to raise the dead, and to turn water into wine.”

He went on to tell me that ancient scrolls had been found in Tibet showing that some great prophet from the west named Issa had come there and studied at the feet of their greatest teachers.3 — 21 —

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Of course, at the time, I knew very little about the occult other than a bit about séances and spiritualism because of my reading on ESP and ghosts.

So, being the compulsive spiritual overachiever that I was, I went out and found every book I could on the occult. I even joined the Occult Book Club that existed at that time. I also began reading books on witchcraft and demonology. I was further exposed to demonology by professors at the seminary, who were actually dabbling in demonic evocation4 in their spare time.

I read books that presented an entirely new view of witchcraft.

Like most people in the ’60s, I thought there was no such thing as real witches. Witches only existed in fantasy books and movies and were all ugly, old crones such as the witches in The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfes. Of course, television provided us a new vision of the witch, the cute, squeaky-clean Samantha on the popular television show, Bewitched.

In any event, these books claimed that witchcraft was actually based on an ancient religion called “Wicca,”5 the Old-English word that the modern word witch is derived from.6 According to these books, this old religion had nothing to do with worshiping the devil. It was about worshiping a mother goddess and a horned god. However, it was pagan and certainly not Christian.

These writers liked to claim the gods of the old religion become the devils of the new.7 They asserted that Jesus and His 12 apostles and their wives were actually a grand coven of 26 witches8—including Mary Magdalene as High Priestess.9 They claimed that their faith was the source of all that was true in all the religions of history because it was there first.

Being relatively ignorant of both the Bible and history (I was only 18), this sounded amazing to me. I wrote a man called the “king of the witches,” Alex Sanders, in London. Within a few months, I was connected with an American coven and was initiated as a Wiccan priest.

— 22 —

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The other thing that happened at about this same time is that I read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction masterpiece, Stranger in a Strange Land. I had been a sci-fi fan for years but had only recently been allowed by my parents to read Heinlein’s more adult novels.

Without going into too much detail, Heinlein’s novel postulated a human raised on Mars who comes to earth with paranormal powers. He ultimately starts a church called The Church of All Worlds that is dedicated to “grokking,” a supposed Martian word meaning to become so one with someone or something else that you can control that entity.10 Nudity, free love, psychic powers, and even cannibalism were part of the mix. Heinlein intended the novel to be a satirical parody on American religion, to call every sacred cow into question. He never dreamed it would inspire so many (including me) to create a Martian religion.

The ethos of Stranger in a Strange Land was very similar to the concepts I had learned about in the modern Wiccan religion. Weaving those two influences together, I created my own unique spiritual alchemy that was decidedly different from what I had when I came into college.

Years later, my poor dad rightly blamed that college for destroying my faith in the Catholic religion. Of course, I was far from the only college student to go “off the rails” in the late ’60s!

Ultimately, this alchemical mix led to me taking a leave of absence from seminary after my college graduation. After reading about the goddess and all the “feminine mysteries,” I decided the celibacy required for the Roman priesthood would be a dead end for me.

Thus I became a full-blown religious zealot for Wicca, which is also known as “white” witchcraft! I taught high school music for a couple of years and met my wife, Sharon, who was also a deep student of magic and the occult.

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We went down together and spent the summer in Arkansas studying under the grand master druid of North America, and he eventually made us high priests in the Druidic Rite of Wicca.

We were both ordained spiritualist ministers in 1972 and were married by a spiritualist minister in 1974.

We moved to Milwaukee in that year to teach witchcraft classes to 80 people! Before we knew it, we had around 300 people under us studying white witchcraft!

At the same time, I got involved in Freemasonry on the advice of the aforementioned grand master druid. I was made a master mason in 1976 and went through both York and Scottish rites within a couple of years.

Should you wish to know more about my journey through Freemasonry and why Christians should not be involved, please see my book Masonry: Beyond the Light.

During these years, I had befriended a leading occultist and witch in Milwaukee who owned the occult bookstore in town. He had arranged to have Sharon and me come to Milwaukee to teach dozens of his customers the deeper mysteries of Wicca.

About a year after we had moved to town, this man handed me a book off the shelf in his store. It was The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey. Of course, I was shocked. I had heard of it. What college student had not heard of probably the most iconoclastic book of the sixties?11 But I had always been taught that witches do not even believe in the devil. The devil was someone made up by the Church to scare people into being good. Witches, I had been told, were just happy little pagans dancing through the forest gathering herbs and worshiping nature. Satanism was for losers! It was an inversion of Christianity.

Wicca, as generally presented, was not anti-Christian. It was just a-Christian. — 24 —

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Parenthetically, I feel it is important to clarify a couple of things about this controversy. I was a witch for 16 years. The vast majority of Wiccans are moral, ethical people and do not knowingly worship the devil. They do not kill or torture animals or people and do not shed blood. They are often ecologically oriented and vegetarian or even vegan. Most are feminists. They believe they are worshiping the ancient gods and goddesses of nature by many different names and that their religion is matriarchal—the goddess is supreme. Having said all of that, it is also important to note that Wiccans are lost individuals who need to come to Calvary in saving faith. They also are unknowingly worshiping the devil, who is hiding behind the masks of the goddesses and gods of the craft. Also, there are an unknown but probably small number of Wiccans who are also satanists but who do not let their followers know that.

My friend, the bookstore owner, told me that for serious practitioners of magick (which I certainly was becoming), there were some very important insights in The Satanic Bible. I read it fearfully and discovered a lot of things that made sense to my Wiccan-trained mind. In between the hateful diatribes against God and Jesus, supposedly penned by satan himself, there were a lot of powerful magical insights.

I next read the sequels to this book, The Compleat Witch: Or What to Do When Virtue Fails and then The Satanic Rituals. By this time, I found myself being seduced by whatever forces were behind LaVey. Finally, I joined the Church of Satan. Sharon knew about this but was very dubious and never followed suit. I later became a second-degree member (warlock).

Paradoxically, at the same time, I sort of revisited the Roman Catholic Church. Both Sharon and I had been thrown by all the bizarre changes taking place in the traditional Roman church in the late ’60s. It seemed as though the Vatican had gone crazy!

In Milwaukee, however, we ran into a group called the Old Roman Catholic Church. Without wanting to get too complex, this was — 25 —

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an autocephalous12 church (meaning it was separate from Rome) and derived its Holy Orders13 from the Archdiocese of Utrecht in Holland. From Holland, in the 19th century, it spread to England and North America, chiefly through two bishops, Arnold Harris Mathew and Joseph RenĂŠ Villatte.

In the United States, this church allowed married clergy (good for me, since I had been married to Sharon for three years!) and celebrated the sacraments in the vernacular, not just in Latin. The Old Roman Catholic Church also refused to recognize the authority of the First and Second Vatican Councils, since they had not been invited to them.

Thus, they still celebrated Mass the old-fashioned way. Most parishes of the ORCC were very traditional. As a result, they attracted a lot of disgruntled Catholics who were fed up with guitar masses, clown masses, and communion in the hand.14 I was ordained as a priest in the Old Catholic church in 1976.

At this turbulent time, our little Old Catholic parish attracted a fair amount of scandalized Catholics. So here I was, an associate pastor of an Old Catholic Church, who also ran a witch coven on the night of the full moon and was a card-carrying warlock in the Church of Satan. On top of that, I was an ordained spiritualist medium, as was my wife. Even with all of that, the Catholics seemed to like my sermons!

The paradox was, I was deeply into all of these things! As a traditional Catholic, I celebrated Mass daily. I said at least fifteen decades of the Rosary every day. I said the Divine Office. But I was also a devout and serious witch high priest! I worked magic, taught classes, wrote ritual workings, and even was a professional astrologer and tarot card reader.

I also worked hard at my studies as a member of the Church of Satan!

Now I am sure some of you are wondering how such a person could exist. Was I nuts? Well, you need to understand that to be an occultist, and some of these other things, does rather require that you suspend your natural skepticism. Just as much as Christians, occultists have to take things on faith. — 26 —

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Think about it: if I could believe that Jesus would come down to earth and appear for me in a wafer of bread, literally becoming flesh in that bread, how much harder would it be to believe in the occult or even in the Church of Satan?

It is important for the reader at this point to understand that Sharon and I were getting most of our guidance at this time from spirit guides.

Spirit guides are supposedly disembodied beings from higher planes who have escaped the cycle of rebirth (most witches and all spiritualists believe in reincarnation). They are like saints (a Catholic term) or Bodhisattvas (a Buddhist or Hindu term). Spirit guides no longer need to incarnate but just hang around and talk to us lowly mortals through trance mediums. Both Sharon and I were trained mediums.

So, when we had a spiritual question, one of us would just go into a trance and the other would ask the questions. We had faith that the entities speaking through us were wise and lofty spirit beings of profound intellect and unfathomable insight. How did we know this?

They told us so.

Oh, we did have a method for screening out any bad spiritual entities. Our mentor in the spiritualist church told us that whenever an unfamiliar being came near or tried to enter our bodies, we should just challenge it by asking, “Do you stand in the light?”

The rather glaring problem with that little challenge is that we neglected to specify which light! Obviously, Yah’shua (Jesus) is the Light of the World. But we need to recall that satan is also known as lucifer, the light bringer. Believe me, from 16 years of experience, I can tell you. Lucifer can appear to be an angel of light to mediums like Sharon and I were, just as the Bible warns us (see 2 Cor. 11:14)!

Obviously, if we asked an entity if it “stood in the light,” a servant of lucifer could guilelessly reply, “Yes, I do stand in the light.” Then we trusted that entity with our very souls!

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Just as Roman Catholics do not believe the Bible to be the final authority, neither did we. Instead of trusting in the pope, we were trusting in spirit guides. These spirit guides led us on quite a spiritual rabbit trail.

Our spirit guides, even a spirit guide claiming to be Jesus, told us that there were many ways toward truth out there. In fact, the motto of the spiritualist church to which we belonged was, “All paths of love are paths to God.” Thus, there was nothing contradictory about being both a Catholic priest and a Wiccan priest. There was nothing contradictory about being a Freemason and a satanist. Each of these paths, we were told, contained different currents of spiritual energy that were entirely complementary. Indeed, we believed they enhanced one another.

Even though Wicca, satanism, Freemasonry, and Catholicism all seemed different or even contradictory to one another,15 we were told that this was just illusion. In fact, one guide even used a metaphor. He said we see all the blades of grass on a lawn and they all appear separate and unique, but underground the plants are all actually tangled together as well.

Another guide said that these faiths were like different wells emerging from the same underground river. Thus it is with religions.

To the outer consciousness, they appear different or opposed, but to the truly enlightened person, they are all just different manifestations of the same divine impulse.

Thus, there was nothing the least bit crazy about me being a Wiccan, a Catholic priest, and a satanist all at the same time. I was just blending together the richness of many different currents of power for my own “great work.”

Even though most sane people would just shake their heads at this idea, it made perfect sense to us. We were serving the gods of chaos — 28 —

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and the father of lies. Please recall, I was full of demons by this time! It would hardly be expected that I would follow a sane, spiritual path.

The amazing thing about all this was that I am sure most people thought I was a perfectly pleasant and normal individual. Indeed, I was attending a Catholic seminary at this time, working on a graduate degree in theology. I interacted with other students, with professors, and with my faculty advisor. Additionally, I dealt with the parishioners at the Old Roman church. They all were impressed with me.

I also attended lodge and chapter meetings faithfully in the Masons. They all seemed to enjoy my company, though some said they thought I should lighten up a bit and not be so serious.

Sharon and I continued to draw more witch candidates into our covens. By this time, Sharon had more than five or six covens under her along the west coast of Lake Michigan. All seemed to be going very well.

But the devil was about to throw even more chaos into our lives!

I nterludium Some Brief Thoughts on the Importance of the Bible I need to make one other point clear before we go further into my dark odyssey. As may be evident from the first segment of the book, my wife and I suffered from a serious deficit in our lives.

That was simply a lack of objective information and truth. Most of the readers of this book, I imagine, would be followers of Yah’shua.

Hopefully, they understand the need for something solid to stand on—like the rock of Christ.

This may be self-evident to Christians, but it was not to me. As a Catholic, I had been raised in a world virtually ignorant of the Bible.

I was taught to believe my priests, my bishop, and of course the pope.

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When the Roman Church seemed to explode into chaos in the ’60s and ’70s, many Catholics, including me, felt cast adrift.

I did not understand then, as I do now, that men and women may let you down. Even institutions will let you down. But Yah’shua (Jesus) will never let you down. He is the living Word, and the Holy Bible is His consummate revelation to us. It is the written Word, but it is no less alive. It is quick and powerful and sharper than any sword (see Heb. 4:12). Therefore, it will never let you down either.

As young adults raised in the Roman Church, most of us Catholics did not understand that. Popes and councils come and go, but the Word is eternal, and it is unchanging (see 1 Pet. 1:24-25, Ps. 12:6-7). Just as YHWH does not change (see Mal. 3:6, Heb. 13:8), so His Word does not change.

Just like the old hymn that we, as Catholics, had never heard, says: On Christ the solid Rock I stand All other ground is sinking sand We felt like we were on pretty shaky sand by the mid-’70s. I am not making excuses for us, except that we had been taught that the Catholic Church was always the way it had been in the 1950s and that it would never, ever change.

Then, just a few years later, it did change; rather spectacularly, I might add. Nor were we the only ones confused. More than 90 percent of the men and women who joined our witch covens in Milwaukee were former Catholics.

What I wish to make clear before proceeding is that what we lacked was something objective, something real, that we could depend upon!

Yes, the Roman Church and other similar institutions have documents and edicts written by their hierarchical leaders, but it can be documented rather easily that often later written documents contradict — 30 —

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earlier written documents. This obviously happened in the time of Vatican II (1962–67).

On the other hand, the Bible has stood the test of millennia!

Through findings like the Dead Sea Scrolls, it can be shown that the Torah is about 98 percent identical to the texts we hold in our hands today! That is pretty amazing.

The problem is, all these occult groups (witches, New Agers, etc.) will make claims that the Bible has been tampered with. They claim that important material was censored out of the text in the first few centuries of Christendom. I read this in several books by prominent witches. I believed them. I believed them so much that I came to believe that Yah’shua was actually a witch who led a coven of 12 men and their wives and that this had been removed from the Bible by evil priests or monks.

Had I bothered to use the academic training I had been given in school and seminary, I could have easily gone to primary sources and find out that this was utter twaddle. There is actually no history to back it up!

Yes, there have been documents discovered (like the Nag Hammadi scrolls in Egypt) that present a very different view of early Christian thought. However, none of these writings support the idea that Yah’shua was a witch or that He taught reincarnation, or any other such things.

Since YHWH has promised to preserve His Word, we need to understand that He is all-powerful and therefore perfectly capable of keeping evil human hands from messing with His Book! He would be not much of a deity if He made a promise (like the preservation of His Word) and then somehow dropped the ball on it. Would such a Being be trusted with anything else?

You see, we were depending upon vaporous meanderings from “spirit guides” that we really knew nothing about. They gave messages — 31 —

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about past lives or long-dead civilizations. It was all fluff! There was no way to prove objectively that anything that they said through us as mediums was true!

For example, I gave many prophecies as a medium. These included statements about the future or about things unknown to either me or the person I was prophesying to the time. I would estimate I had about a 25 percent accuracy rate. That is rather dismal. It is worse than a weatherman!

This is not like the Bible. Every single prophecy in the Bible, so far, has come to pass with amazing accuracy. Of course, some are yet to be fulfilled. So this is my point. My error was going to books that were subjective and unprovable. They were the works of fallible men and women. Unlike the Scriptures, there was no objective, testable reality to those things.

The Bible is objective. It is testable. It has been around for around 3,000 years, and some of the greatest minds in history have been hammering away at it, trying to prove it wrong. They have all either become believers or else walked away very disappointed. The Word still stands. If only someone had told me this so that I understood, it would have saved me years of grief and frustration!

Speaking of which, let me return to my strange spiritual pilgrimage now.

C onfessions

of an

E x -V ampire : P art 2

“The Blood Is the Life” Drawing Nearer to Satan Before we get into the remainder of my testimony, let me gently warn the reader that some of the following material will be intense and disturbing. It is certainly not for children. I need to share these — 32 —

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things not to sensationalize but rather to demonstrate the literal and sometimes gritty reality of the world of satanism and the occult.

I also wish to share these things so that believers in Yah’shua can see how awesome are His mercy and grace. His power is so much greater than the powers of darkness. He could even reach down in His loving-kindness and save a wretch like me.

Paul commanded us to expose the unfruitful works of darkness (see Eph. 5:11), and that is what we are doing. But hold on, it may be a bumpy ride.

Things were reasonably “normal” in our lives except for two problems. One, the Old Roman church with which I was involved was getting involved with some unfortunate things. I ultimately separated from them because some of what they were doing was either unethical or immoral.

The other problem was that I felt that the Church of Satan was not taking me far enough. I was led by my spirit guides to seek out something more—ahem—intense.

Both things began to come together (the devil is great at orchestrating these things). I met a man who was both a high-level and serious ceremonial magician and a bishop of the Villatte apostolic succession.

Roman Catholic theology says that a priest cannot really function without being under the jurisdiction of an ordinary bishop. Since I had distanced myself from the bishop in Milwaukee, this fellow (who was in Chicago) seemed an answer to “prayer.”

He took a shine to me and offered to consecrate me as a bishop.

Naturally I was thrilled and accepted. Sharon, a couple friends, and I traveled down to Chicago for the event.

Beyond that, this fellow was extremely strange, brilliant, and powerful. I will not go into all the gory details, but his level of magick was very beyond anything I had experienced.

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I am simplifying this, for the sake of brevity and also because the story has been told more fully in one of my other books.16 I will say this much: this man was involved with high-level Aleister Crowley followers like the Ordo Templi Orientis.17 Crowley (1875–1947) was one of the most influential magicians of the 20th century. Though he died a heroin addict in relative obscurity in England, he had a huge following among occultists by the 1970s, many of whom called themselves Thelemites.18 This was derived from the Greek word for “will,” thelema.19 This was the touchstone of what Crowley taught.20 Crowley claimed to have received a revelation from a superhuman being in Cairo, Egypt, in 1904 named Aiwass. This revelation was published as a kind of weird, blasphemous Scripture called Liber Al Vel Legis, commonly known as “The Book of the Law.”21 Its cardinal rule was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, love under will.”22 This became the byword of Crowley and his followers. Crowley believed himself to be the prophet of a New Aeon, which would overthrow the Christian faith and bring in the age of the “crowned and conquering child,” Ra-Hoor-Khuit (an Egyptian deity also known as Horus).

Crowley (who was raised in a devout Plymouth Brethren home) delighted in scandalizing English society. He deliberately changed his name for magical reasons so that it added up to 666.23 He took on the title To Mega Therion (the Great Beast) as one of his magical names.

He delighted in being called “The Wickedest Man in the World.”24 Crowley taught, among many other bizarre things, sex magic, both heterosexual and homosexual.25 He was ordained a bishop in the Gnostic Catholic church and actually created a Gnostic “Mass” 26 which we celebrated frequently.

This man in Chicago took Crowley’s stuff even further. Though I did not know it at the time, he was a homosexual. This only became — 34 —

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apparent later. He practiced what Crowley called XI° workings (11th degree), meaning sodomite sex magick! The IX (ninth) degree of the OTO27 was heterosexual sex magick. Crowley created the XI degree because it was IX backward (typical black magical thinking!).

I nto

the

N o sferatic M ysteries

This is the man who introduced me to the vampire cult. He took me to a strange Russian Orthodox Church in the heart of Chicago.

This was supposedly the “only true Russian church”28 that had fled over to the United States during the fall of the Czarist regime. Members of the Russian nobility who had survived the Bolshevik purge and made it safely to the States supposedly supported them.29 This church regarded the Patriarch of Moscow as a bought lackey of the then Soviet Union (this was in the late ’70s).

This church seemed to have a decidedly creepy tone, and was allegedly the home of a real vampire.30 It was said to be a temple of the Nosferatic31 (Romanian for “undead”) mysteries.

Soon after that, back in my home, I was visited by a being who claimed to be a vampire. In retrospect, I believe it was a fallen angel.

This thing taught me what I needed to do to become prepared to enter the ranks of the Nosferatu. I would eventually become a real vampire!

Others in the satanic brotherhood had told me that in order to progress further, I had to choose to either become a vampire or a lycanthrope (werewolf). From what I had heard, I easily chose the vampire path. I had heard how awful the other path could be.

Among many things, this entity told me that the path of the vampire went back to before the time of Christ. However, he claimed “the vampire Jesus” had refined the energy to an amazing extent. He had taken it up to a much higher level. Jesus, I was told, was actually a vampire god.

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The being told me that when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, after five days, Lazarus became the first modern vampire. The next initiate of Christ was supposedly the “disciple, whom Jesus loved,” John the Evangelist. The spirit being told me that there was evidence of John’s immortal life in the Bible. At the end of John’s gospel, he wrote a cryptic remark about him possibly “tarrying” until the Second Coming (see John 21:22). Because John was an immortal vampire, he would live for centuries until Jesus came again.

The spirit told me that throughout the centuries, supposedly an “official vampire” had been attached to churches in every city. These were the angels of the churches mentioned in the first couple chapters of Revelation (see Rev. 2:1, 8).

The alleged functions of these vampires was as angels of death to facilitate the passing of people in their community to the other side.

They would come and feed off the life force and blood of the dying individual and then lead him or her to heaven.

These were supposedly immortal beings who lived forever. I was told that when I finally died, after this “initiation,” I would rise in three days as an immortal vampire. But for now, I was just an entrylevel vampire.

Of course, none of this stuff could be proven. It involved a significant amount of Bible-twisting as well. Even though I was attending master’s level classes at a Roman seminary at the time, I did not have the tools necessary to discern truth from error.

Believe it or not, the seminary spent more time teaching me about Kierkegaard, Thomas Aquinas, and Jean-Paul Sartre than they did about the Bible. Oddly enough, I got a master’s degree in theology from this seminary without ever having to open a Bible! Consequently, although I knew a lot of psychology, Catholic history, liturgical theology, and philosophy, I knew next to nothing about the Holy Bible.

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Because of this, my intellect was not able to dispute these utterly strange teachings. As the Bible warns us, spiritual things can only be discerned spiritually (see 1 Cor. 2:13-15). I am sure this was partly because my mind was seriously fogged with large numbers of evil spirits.

Under the instruction of this unearthly mentor, I was given plans to build my own coffin according to certain precise dimensions and trapezoidal angles. I was assigned special dark magical sigils (symbols) to paint on the inside of the coffin. Then, the coffin would be lined with silk.

Sharon reluctantly helped me with the fabric part of all this. She had her misgivings, but due to the ethos we believed (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”), she did not believe it was right for her to tell me to stop this foolishness. It would be violating my “true will.”32 When I was ready for the initiation, I would have to sleep in this coffin during the day. I also had to travel to my hometown in Iowa to get a bag full of “sacred earth” from the Catholic cemetery there.

This would line the bottom of the coffin (it made it a bit lumpy, I can tell you).

I also sought out a third-shift job because I was told I would have difficulty being in sunlight for any length of time. Fortunately, a friend of mine in the coven arranged for me to get a job working for the newspaper, putting papers for sale in those metal boxes in the wee hours of the morning.

Finally, after spending weeks taking special herbs and vitamins (which shall go un-named), along with copious amounts of cocaine, which is oddly related to the vampire magical current, I was deemed ready and worthy.

We had a chapel in our apartment (naturally!), and on the assigned night, I did a special rite there. Then I snorted enough cocaine to probably kill a normal man33 and waited in meditation.

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Again, Sharon had her misgivings about all this, but she loved me enough to let me do it. For the purposes of the ritual, though, she went out with “the girls” to give me some privacy.

Finally, this being showed up. He laid his hands on me and gave me some dark blessing in a tongue I did not understand. I later learned it was Old Slavonic. Then he bit me in the neck and drank from my blood. He took almost enough to make me pass out but not quite.

Then he performed a brief kind of “liturgy” or “mass” dedicated to the dark christ of the vampiric current, Vlad Tepes (also known as Dracula). The rite, again, was mostly in Old Slavonic. He gave me “communion” (oddly enough, rum) and then slashed open a gash in his own chest and bid me to drink his blood. My head was swimming from the horrible energy surrounding me, but I did as he commanded. His blood burned in my throat. Then he laid me in the coffin I had made.

As near as I can tell, I stayed in the coffin for about a day and a half. I finally had to come out to answer nature’s call. It was proof I was still mostly human.

But not entirely.

The first thing I noticed was that my senses were keener. I could smell and hear much more effectively. It was as if I had my senses enhanced by some drug, but I knew all the drugs had to be out of my system by now! Also, I had no appetite for food at all. I did want blood!

Fortunately, Sharon came back and allowed me to bite her in the neck and drink her blood. I was careful, of course, to just take enough to slake my thirst but not enough to cause her to black out or die. Talk about “true love”!

My mentor told me that part of the secret to surviving as a young vampire in training was to take advantage of my “powers” as an ordained Catholic priest.

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Some of you may know that in Catholic theology, it is taught that when a man is ordained to the priesthood, certain powers are bestowed upon him. They are contingent upon him being under the authority of an Ordinary (Bishop), but of course now I was a bishop! In fact, being ordained to the bishopric was a prerequisite to moving up into the vampiric liturgy.

Among the powers given at ordination are the power to forgive sins and the power to confect the sacrament of the Eucharist. In plain language, this means the priest is given the power to speak the words of institution over the bread and the wine at the mass or liturgy. This (according to Roman doctrine) turns the bread and wine into the “body, blood, soul, and divinity” of Jesus Christ. This is called the doctrine of transubstantiation.

This is not the time to get into a discussion of the merits of this belief. Suffice it to say that it is believed (in one form or another) by millions of Catholics, millions of Eastern Orthodox, and also many Anglicans.

This related to my new vampirism in a simple way. Since I had the priestly “power” to celebrate the Eucharist, I could magically produce the entire body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus (a full-grown, 33-year-old man). My dark teacher told me that by drinking the chalice full of sacramental wine I was drinking—somehow—ten pints of Jesus’ blood out of a small chalice.

Therefore, if I celebrated a mass every evening when I got up out of my coffin, I would have my “fix” of blood to carry me awhile. But it was not enough.

Fortunately for me, we had a large number of witches in our covens.

Like any social or ecclesiastical organization, it had levels of attainment.

At the top of the pyramid were Sharon and me as witch queen and magus respectively. Under us were about a dozen or so high priests and high priestesses who had, over the years, mastered what they needed to attain third degree in our rite of Wicca (Alexandrian Rite34). Under — 39 —

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these members were many second- and first-degree members at various stages of training.

Of these, many of the third-degree people, especially the women, were into Thelema, Crowley, and some of what we liked to call the “dark stuff.” I quickly learned, upon delicate inquiry, that almost all of these women were delighted to let me bite them in the neck and drain a judicious amount of blood from their jugular vein. They found it very erotic and kinky.

A system was worked out where a young lady high priestess would drop by our apartment virtually every night. She would come into our temple and relax, and I would drain her blood—as much as was safe to do. The next night, a different high priestess would get the same attention from me, and so on.

In this way, no single woman would get anemic from my predations. Again, please realize they claimed to really enjoy it.

But this was not all fang and bites! I found I could not really go out into the sun for more than a few minutes unless my body was completely covered with clothing. Fortunately, I had a wide-brimmed Amish hat from my days in Arkansas, and that helped. But I really had to stay indoors, hence the third-shift job. Sharon was nice enough to make absolutely lightproof drapes for our bedroom (even though I had to sleep in a coffin next door).

I really could not eat or drink anything except blood and communion. Sharon was frank enough to inform me that the result was that my breath reeked of a charnel house. I went through a bottle of mouthwash every other day. Fortunately, I did not interact with many people on my job, and she loved me enough to stick by me even though my breath would probably have knocked over a rhino!

Let me tell you, I very quickly grew bored with my new diet! It sounds like a bad joke, but I really missed normal food after a few days. I tried to eat something normal, and it just came right back up!

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The worst thing was garlic! The idea that vampires don’t like garlic was not created in Hollywood; it is true. I expect it is because garlic functions as a blood cleanser and purifier.

I could barely walk into the produce section of a grocery store. If I got within ten feet of the garlic hanging there, it was like being in strong sunlight. I had to back away.

But I am saving the best part till last. You know how it is with addictions? If you are an alcoholic or a drug addict, you develop a tolerance for the substance of your choice. Perhaps at first, you would drink three beers and get a real good buzz.

Then, after a few weeks of that, you had to drink a six-pack to get the same effect. It would just keep getting worse. Many years after I got saved, I worked as a licensed master’s-level substance abuse counselor. I would deal with men and women who had to drink a couple of fifths of whiskey a day to keep from getting the shakes. That amount of liquor would kill a normal person!

It may surprise you to know that drinking blood is extremely addictive, at least in a psychological way. I believe it is worse than cocaine (the other drug known for its addictive powers that I have tried).

That is why YHWH forbids us from drinking blood all through the Bible. It is a highly dangerous substance (aside from all the morerecent issues with HIV and other blood-borne pathogens). Like any other addiction, you start needing more of it.

I learned this after a few weeks as a newbie vampire. The one Mass a day deal no longer did the trick. I started having to do two every night, a few hours apart. I also started needing more real, warm blood from the ladies in the covens. Finally, one night I got carried away and the high priestess I was draining actually fainted from blood loss.

Fortunately, Sharon had medical training and was able to help her.

She gave her something to eat and got her home safely, but that really frightened me.

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Beyond that, my job was giving me problems. Here I was, driving around in a newspaper truck at 3:00 in the morning. My job was putting newspapers in boxes on street corners—a real glamorous job for a vampire, right?

So I would be driving down the dark streets of Milwaukee and see the occasional street person or prostitute, usually all by him or herself.

It took a large amount of self-control not to park the truck, walk over to the hapless individual, and drain him or her completely of his or her blood!

It was getting so bad that I could smell their blood from a block away! I tried to keep focusing on how much I loved Sharon and how this sort of thing would ruin our lives. I did not want to be the next Ed Gein35 to emerge from the dairy state, either locked up for life in prison or ensconced in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. I loved Sharon too much for that. But every night as I drove around the dark city, I felt as if I was just hanging on by my fingernails.

L ight D awns

in the

D arkness

Then the Almighty intervened. Every year I wrote a check out to the Church of Satan to pay my dues so I could get their newsletter, The Cloven Hoof. I had been doing this for some years. On this particular year, I got the check back from the bank as usual. However, a lady bank officer had written something on the canceled check.

“I’ll be praying for you in Jesus’ name.”

She obviously felt that anyone who was sending money to the Church of Satan was in a whole world of trouble, spiritually. She was certainly right!

In spite of my dire straits, I just sneered at the check. I muttered to myself that this lady was some “moron Christian” who didn’t even know that Jesus was actually the son of satan! (Yes, some satanists actually believe that!)

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I threw the check in my file and forgot about it. However, the Holy Spirit did not forget about me!

Literally within 48 hours, Heaven fell on me like a ton of bricks!

My life was shattered! I lost all my occult powers. I lost my job! I felt as mean and sick as a 100-year-old pit bull! Paradoxically, this meant I lost almost all my vampiric qualities as well!

I also was delivered from my addiction to cocaine! All this in a few days!

Parenthetically, let me just underscore the facts here. I want to emphasize the power of prayer! I was arguably one of the most powerful sorcerers on the west coast of Lake Michigan. Yet one praying woman turned my world upside down! Remember this, those of you who are praying for lost loved ones, friends, or co-workers: your prayers are not wasted. In my case, it took almost five years for the prayers to be answered, but they were answered!

Of course, I had no idea what was going on. I was too pigheaded and arrogant to admit that the silly check had anything to do with the disaster my life had become.

I went into my painted-black temple, got on my knees before a large inverted pentagram, and cried out to lucifer for a sign. I told him, “I sold my soul to you, and I did everything you asked of me. I gave myself to you, body, soul, and spirit! I got others to do the same. I am your faithful servant! Why is this happening? What does this mean?”

Thankfully, even though I was praying to lucifer, the Holy Spirit took over the switchboard and answered my cry for help.

The next day, I got a phone call from some teenage satanist girls in Chicago. They had heard about me (the great satanist priest, who now felt like something the cat had dragged in). They wanted to know if they could come up and have an audience. They said they would bring an offering.

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Since I had just lost my job, I thought it might be worth my time.

They showed up the next day. The offering they brought, as I recall, was mostly a desire to have sex. I was decidedly not interested. However, they had also brought two Christian comic books about the dangers of the occult.

These young women said the comics were just so stupid they were Neanderthal, and they thought I might get a good laugh out of them.

What I did not know at the time, of course, was that in the back of those comics were steps on how to become born again. They contained the answer to my prayers.

However, I was too sick and too proud (never a wise combination) to care, so I chucked them in a box in the back of my closet and forgot about them. I forgot about them for four years.

The devil is never one to leave a void place alone (see Matt.

12:43-45). Literally, within a day or two of my crying out to lucifer, there was a knock on the door. Sharon opened it to find two LatterDay Saints (Mormon) missionaries standing there, looking all innocent and pink cheeked.

While this book is not exactly about Mormonism, I will just mention the fact that we had been told some years earlier that if we ever got in trouble (as witches) we should join the Mormon church, since it had been started by witches and for witches.36 The grand master druid of North America told us this.

This seemed to be the sign we had been waiting for. We joined the Mormon Church in 1980. YHWH used the LDS church to bring me to the place where I was finally ready to receive the true gospel (not the Mormon brand).

After four years in the church, being an elder, going to the temple (no mean achievement), and even being an elders’ quorum president and church institute teacher, I finally read enough of the Bible to figure out that Paul could never have been a Mormon. For that matter, — 44 —

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neither could Yah’shua (Jesus), even though the Mormon church is named after him.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (“Mormon” is just a nickname) had me in its thrall for five years. In a way, it was almost providential.

You see, Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight books, is a devout Mormon. She is a Brigham Young University (BYU)37 graduate. Her faith informs these books in surprising ways. As a former Mormon elder and a former vampire, I am rather uniquely qualified to write this book examining her work.

For whatever reason, the Almighty allowed me to spend five years as a Mormon. I believe He used the church to teach me that I was a sinner and needed a Savior. It was almost as if the Holy Spirit used the LDS Church as a spiritual decompression chamber. He used it to bring me up out of the depths of satanism to a place where I could finally be exposed to the true light of the gospel of grace!

There is not time here to go into the entire account of our Mormon pilgrimage. Just suffice it to say that at the end of it all, I learned two important things: 1. The Church was failing miserably in living up to its promises to its members. At the time I was a member (1980–85), it was running at about a 85 to 90 percent failure rate by its own figures.38 To be sure, Mormons are mostly fine people, exemplary people, and in some ways they do better than Orthodox Christians at living the gospel. But sadly, they are almost all as lost as a golf ball in a wheat field!39 2. I realized that the true gospel as presented in the Bible is much simpler than all the accouterments that encrust Mormonism like barnacles. I realized that I could not possibly keep the thousands of LDS commandments faithfully, as hard as I and others tried. I understood finally that I needed something more.40 — 45 —

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The church institute of religion called me to teach a course in the New Testament for LDS adults, since I had a master’s in theology from a Roman Catholic seminary. As I worked diligently to prepare for this course, I actually read the entire New Testament from cover to cover. As I read Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians, I understood the gospel of grace—how Yah’shua (Jesus) had done it all for me on Calvary.

I did what Mormons are supposed to do in times of spiritual crisis. I prayed and fasted. I fasted and prayed. This is based on advice given in one of their “scriptures,” the Doctrine and Covenants. I was sincerely seeking the truth.

The more I studied the Scriptures, the more it became clear. All I had to do was come to Yah’shua in simple faith. Finally I did that.

I remembered those Christian comics stuffed in a box in my closet.

While my wife Sharon was at nursing school, I dug them out and read them carefully. When I got to the end, I was convicted by the Holy Spirit.

Additionally, I began to see more and more contradictions between LDS scriptures and the Bible and even internal contradictions between the Book of Mormon and current LDS doctrine.

On June 22, 1984, I took off my magic Mormon underwear (a temple garment41) so there would be no static on the line to Heaven.42 I knelt at the foot of my bed and acknowledged I was a sinner, and I asked Yah’shua to save me from my sins and be the Lord and Master of my life.

In short, I became born again. That sealed the deliverance from addiction to blood and cocaine that began in 1980. I have never had any desire for either since that date. Hallelujah!

I never knew how empty I had been until Yah’shua filled my heart with His love. When my wife came home from nursing school, at first I was afraid to tell her. It is not uncommon for a Mormon to divorce his or her spouse if he or she becomes born again, and I feared losing her.

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Confessions of an Ex-Vampire

However, after about a week, she discerned the truth and rejoiced with me. It turned out she had recommitted her life to our Messiah many months earlier and had been afraid to tell me for fear of losing me!

I had a huge amount of occult paraphernalia, which I knew I needed to get rid of (books, swords, knives, robes, etc.). I understood this after reading the excellent book The Beautiful Side of Evil by Johanna Michaelsen.

I began calling around to churches, asking them to help me burn my junk, but they kept hanging up on me. They probably thought I was crazy or something. Finally, I reached an Assembly of God pastor who rejoiced with me and had me bring over all my occult garbage.

He said he had a farmer in his church who had an industrial furnace in his barn that could even melt steel swords.

We met together, and he prayed with me, to make sure I really was saved. We spent some wonderful times in that church. This was where I first learned how to preach the gospel and win souls.

But some things were still troubling me. This church taught that as a born-again person, I could not have demons, and I was coming to realize this was not the case. I was still demonized because of my extensive occult past.

After a lot of prayer about this, I realized I needed help getting victory over besetting sins in my life.

About a year later, a Foursquare pastor, Don Allen, and his wife, Lavina, ministered deliverance to Sharon and I, and we were completely set free from evil spirits acquired by years in the occult, freemasonry, and satanism. These dear folks taught us most of what we knew about deliverance over the next couple of years.43 Indeed, he whom the Son sets free is free indeed!

About a year after that, I made contact with Ed Decker,44 one of the leading defenders of biblical faith against Mormonism and — 47 —

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Freemasonry. After hearing my testimony, he invited me to come out to a major Capstone conference that was held every summer in Salt Lake City. It was a place where Christian experts on Mormonism could gather and share research and ideas.

There I got the chance to street preach and witness to Mormons during the Pioneer Days festival they hold every year in Salt Lake.45 At the conference, I got to share my testimony with hundreds of both Christians and Mormons with a groundbreaking talk, “Joseph Smith and the Temple of Doom.” The talk caused a major sensation and led to the publication of my first book with my friend (and former Mormon) Jim Spencer, Mormonism’s Temple of Doom, in 1987.

That same year, Ed Decker took me on as a full-time minister at his ministry in Issaquah, Washington. It was out there that I learned a lot more about the Bible and how to defend the faith. I counseled with hundreds of Mormons and helped many of them get born again.

That was also where I was called into the deliverance ministry.

We started our own ministry, With One Accord, in 1992 and have since prayed for over 2,000 people to be set free from evil spirits by the power of the blood of the Lamb.

Full victory can be yours in the name of Yah’shua the Messiah!

My life is certain proof of that!

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Part I

Vampires 101

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Are Vampires Real? chapter 1

Before we examine the Twilight Saga in detail, we need to examine the broader phenomenon of the vampire in religion, culture, and history. I realize that some readers will know some of these facts. I also know that some readers will suffer a snore attack at the thought of history. But please bear with me. This can be a fascinating ride!

Let me explain that some of the material in the first part of this book is both dark and detailed. This is being done in part because Scripture warns us that we are not to be ignorant of satan’s devices (see 2 Cor. 2:11). In these last days, moving into the realm of fetishistic blood drinking is certainly a dangerous deception of satan.

Additionally, though, believers who do not frequent the dark world of the Goth and the vampire cultist need to understand that this world is very real to them. It is rich with evil intricacy, even as the worlds of online gaming or Renaissance Fairs are extraordinarily detailed. These people can be very compulsive about their hobbies, and some of that compulsion is what can move them into the demonic realm.

Fixation on Renaissance Fairs or Star Trek conventions can be comparatively innocent unless carried to extremes. But obsession with inherently sinful activities like drinking blood and believing one can live forever without Christ can be spiritually catastrophic. — 51 —

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Let me begin by answering the key question: Are vampires real?

Unfortunately, I am going to have to answer that one yes… and no.

Let me explain.

Dealing with the negative answer first, I need to be frank and say that much of the popular conception of the vampire is not supported by history. For example, though I have been researching this subject fairly carefully since the late 1970s, I have not found one scintilla of evidence that there are immortal, 500-plus-year-old vampires walking the earth today.

To be sure, there are men and women who claim to be centuriesold vampires, but they have no evidence to support that assertion.

They usually do not make that claim in public but only within their private little circle of disciples.

However, that is not to say that there are not people out there drinking human blood. It is impossible to get an accurate figure, but I suspect there are thousands in the United States, perhaps tens of thousands in the world, who drink blood. This is based on years of monitoring the media and websites that cater to vampires, as well as many interviews with either former vampires or people still practicing the drinking of blood.

T oward

a

T axonomy

of

V ampirism

We need to break this down a bit also. There are two major varieties of self-proclaimed vampires: 1. The psychic vampire 2. The sanguinarian vampire Psychic vampires are not usually psychic in the sense of Miss Cleo and her phone lines, although they might claim to be. They use the word psychic in its more original sense, as in the soul. Psychic comes from the Greek term psuche, which is usually translated as “soul” in the New Testament. It can mean “breath, the breath of life, then the soul.”1 — 52 —

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Thus, psychic vampires believe they feed on soul-force or life energy. They do not sully themselves by biting people or drinking their blood. They prefer the more rarified liqueur of what is called Ki (Japan), Chi (China), or Prana (India).

These various cross-cultural terms used to be very arcane in the West, but now—thanks to yoga, karate, and Chinese wu-shu (disciplines like Chi-Gung, Gung Fu, Tai-Chi, etc.)—they are now wellknown at least to folks into Eastern thought, martial arts, or New Age spirituality. Ki, Chi, and Prana all mean breath or life force.

So psychic vampires believe they can gain strength, vigor, or longevity by sucking the life energy out of people. Some think they can do this through touching, and many do it through casual sexual contact.

Others believe they are accomplished enough at it that they can do it just by brushing against another person in a store or a grocery line.

These folks will claim that many “normal” people are psychic vampires and do not consciously realize it. Every family or other human grouping seems to have a member who is always stirring up trouble. They criticize or pick fights and get everyone riled up. Everyone else in the family (or office) feels exhausted (drained?) afterward, but the instigator feels great! Psychic vampires would claim that such a person is vampirizing others without even understanding what he or she is doing.

They would also point to hospitals. Many times family members will visit a sick loved one in the hospitals and then report feeling drained or unusually tired afterward. Those in the hospital—including loved ones and other patients who were very low on energy—drained the energy from visiting family members. These psychic vamps would say that life energy, like water, seeks its own level. This is to say that if you are full of energy and you walk into the room of a sick relative, they believe that some of your energy will drain off of you and onto the relative. These patients, it is believed, are not aware they are doing — 53 —

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this. It just happens naturally. That is why folks who have more visitors in the hospital seem to get well faster.

It is important to mention a common factor here before moving on. Both types of vampires frequently have learned to play the same card gays and other people living in rebellion to God’s laws have come to play with great success. They claim they were born this way.

Both kinds of vampires frequently make the claim that they were just born with some sort of strange deficit of life energy or Chi. Perhaps their bodies are not capable of properly digesting their food or maybe their endocrine system is out of balance. In other words, they play the victim card. Whatever the reason, many of these vampires claim that they have resorted to either psychic or other sorts of vampirism to get enough Chi to live on and have fulfilled, successful lives.

Of course, it goes without saying that these claims have not been proven by medical science.

There is also not really much evidence that this psychic vampirism even works. The above-mentioned phenomena (aftermaths of arguments,2 hospitals draining people, etc.) could all be due to just the psychological wear and tear of either fighting or visiting a dear one who is very sick. Those things can be “draining” to our adrenal system without having to resort to spooky, metaphysical explanations of strangeness.

“I V ant

to

D rink Y our B lood ”

The second type of vampire in this strange subculture is the sanguinary vampire. This term is rooted in the Latin “sanguinarius” meaning “bloody.” These people actually pierce the skin and drink human blood! The vast majority of them would claim they only do this to willing partners. This is probably true.

History, however, is full of the occasional, real monster that attacked other people against their will and drained them of blood. The — 54 —

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Düsseldorf vampire is the most notorious example.3 It is doubtless that there are people walking around today who attack people and drain their blood. Police from southern California have personally informed me of that fact.

But most sanguinary vampires are only engaging in consensual blood drinking. Remarkably, there is an entire creepy subculture within a subculture that emerged in the last 20 years. Most sanguinarians are part of the Goth subculture—young people who dress in black, use black lipstick, and paint their faces white. Most of these have tattoos and piercings on their bodies, and some like to sleep in coffins.

They seem obsessed with death.4 Some Goths are sanguinary vampires, henceforth known as SVs. Some SV types have their teeth worked on by a dentist (dentists do this?) so they have permanent razor-sharp fangs. I have met some who also wear contact lenses that make their eyes appear either bloody, vivid red, or some other ghastly effect. For these folks, every day is Halloween! They drink the blood of their partners by actually biting them in the neck, in the wrist, or in other areas where there are veins or arteries. Needless to say, this is highly dangerous—especially in this age of HIV and other blood-borne diseases. As we will discuss later in more detail, such behaviors are spiritually dangerous as well and are forbidden by the Bible.

Other members of the SV “school” use scalpels or razor blades to cut open their partners’ skin to “tap a vein.” Still others use a kind of silver bodkin, a very sharp, pointed instrument that has the added romance of looking very old-fashioned and Victorian. These gained popularity on the SV scene after being used in the hit film Interview with the Vampire (1994).

Believe it or not, most large cities, at least on the West Coast, have vampire clubs or bars similar to the gay bar scene. Here SV types can go and “hook up” with a person who wants to get his or her veins tapped. Sometimes they go back and forth, first one drinking from the — 55 —

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other’s veins and then switching. These folks claim this experience is the most intimate form of love.

SVs believe that they will gain great strength or sexual prowess by drinking human blood. Others seriously believe that drinking lots of human blood will enable them to become immortal and live forever!

Needless to say, there are strong links between the SV scene and the sexual fetish scene. Many of these people are recruited through fantasy role-playing games (FRPG) like Vampire: The Masquerade or even the old standby Dungeons and Dragons.

Of course, again, there is no proof that drinking blood does any good for people whatsoever. All it may do is give them a potentially fatal disease! Additionally, it is utterly forbidden in the Bible (see for example, Lev. 17:10-12). As the Scripture there says, “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (v. 11). Human life is sacred and belongs to the Creator, and it is not ours to take, even in the relatively small quantities being discussed.

While not as easy to establish, it is my belief from more than 20 years of praying for folks to be set free from demons, that drinking blood is—like illicit sex—a way in which evil spirits can pass from one person to another.

Additionally, the study of the cultures surrounding Israel reveal that consuming blood was not uncommon as part of pagan religious practices. Since Israel was to avoid pagan rites, drinking of blood would be a key practice to avoid.

Of course, there are also hygienic reasons for not drinking blood.

Even in the days of the Torah, before there were diseases like HIV, there were still many pathogens and bacteria that could be spread by drinking blood, either animal or human. Like the dietary laws and the laws about leprosy, both of people and of houses, these commands show YHWH’s concern for the physical as well as spiritual health of His people.

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H igh C hurch

or

S eriously L ow C hurch ?

Beyond the two types of vampires commonly understood to be out there, there is also another distinction. Some vampires are more or less atheistic or agnostic and care nothing about any kind of religion beyond a kind of dark, twisted version of New Age fluff.

These people might be considered “un-churched” vampires, whether psychic or SV. They do what they do either because of a misguided belief that they need it to live or thrive forever or else because they find it sexually stimulating.5 They may also be addicted to blood. These vampires may appear completely normal, or they may be part of the Goth scene, in all of its macabre glory. However, I know one vampire who works as a doctor in a hospital and who looks absolutely normal.

Some may find it hard to imagine how an individual could be addicted to blood. Let me explain that I worked for years as an addiction counselor (master’s level) and that there are two kinds of addiction.

Drugs like heroin, meth, or cocaine are physically addictive. That is, the body needs the drugs on a physiological level to maintain a semblance of normality. In severe cases, without proper medical care, addicts to those sorts of drugs can get very sick or die without the drug.

Then there is psychological addiction. This is true of marijuana.

Addictionologists agree that cannabis is not physically addictive.

This is due to biochemical factors beyond the scope of this discussion. However, a person’s mind or soul can become so habituated to the drug that he or she can become irritable and even ill without it.

An even better example would be gambling addiction. Gambling addiction is called a process addiction, because no extraneous chemical is involved, only a process like gambling or shopping.

I worked for three years counseling compulsive gamblers. The gambling was addicting them to a degree because it opened up pleasure — 57 —

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pathways in the brain and released endorphins (feel-good chemicals) to an amazing degree.

One middle-aged lady I counseled had terrible back pain. However, she could go to the casino and sit on a short, uncomfortable stool for 12 hours and play slots and not feel any pain! This is the power of the mind over the body when these endorphins are released in response to gambling or other addictive behavior. Video games can produce a similar euphoria without any drugs being involved.

I would submit that the addiction to blood is a similar phenomenon involving both psychological addiction and spiritual (demonic) bondage, which comes from violating YHWH’s commandments.

On a more psychiatric level, there are documented cases of what one doctor has called “Renfield Syndrome.”6 It is also called “clinical vampirism.”7 Another clinical writer states that clinical vampirism is a medical phenomenon in which myth, fantasy, and reality converge.8 His medical definition would be the following: Clinical vampirism is named after the mythical vampire, and is a recognizable, though rare, clinical entity characterized by periodic, compulsive blood-drinking, affinity with the dead, and uncertain identity. It is hypothetically the expression of an inherited archaic myth, the act of taking blood being a ritual that gives temporary relief.

From ancient times, vampirists have given substance to the belief in the existence of supernatural vampires…

From childhood [four actual case histories later cited] cut themselves, drank their own, exogenous human or animal blood to relieve a craving, dreamed of bloodshed, associated with the dead and had a changing identity. They were intelligent, with no family mental or social pathology… Vampirism may be a cause of unpredictable repeated — 58 —

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assault and murder; and should be looked for in violent criminals who are self-mutilators. No specific treatment is known.9 Thus, just as people feel compelled to gamble, shoplift, or do other dangerous things in spite of social or legal sanctions, so those who practice sanguinary vampirism feel virtually powerless to stop drinking blood. The demonic component of all these addictions should not be overlooked as well. It is a spirit of bondage (see Rom. 8:15)!

Then there is the more sociable kind of vampire. These have formed organizations or even churches. Mind you, some of these “churches” may only exist on paper or as websites. But others are large and formidable organizations.

Some of these groups have rituals resembling neo-pagan or Church of Satan-type rituals, while others have large, involved, and elaborate rites similar to an Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy but with decidedly different icons on the altar. Some vampire churches are relatively nonhierarchical, rather like many Protestant churches, while some are more Episcopal in character, with priests, bishops, and other hierarchical titles.

There is also some crossover between vampire groups and larger “dark” churches like the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set.

R eal

vs .

R eel

Now that we understand the players, we can continue. As mentioned earlier, Hollywood has its conventions about vampires that have only recently been shattered. Originally, much of what the ordinary person understood about the vampire myth was drawn from the seminal novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (more on this later).

In the book Dracula, and much of the pre-Twilight cinema, vampires had the following characteristics: — 59 —

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1. They either cannot go out by day or else function very poorly in daylight. (In my experience as a vampire initiate, this was true!)

2. They must sleep in coffins by day, lined with holy earth from their homelands. (I had to do this as well!)

3. They cannot eat or drink—except for blood, of course! (I could not drink or eat anything but blood and Catholic communion!)

4. They cannot cross running water (unless they are in their earth-lined coffin) and fear it. (This was my experience as well!)

5. Their bodies are cold to the touch. (This was not true of me because I was still living, but the man who initiated me was ice cold!)

6. They cannot enter a person’s home without being explicitly invited. (This happened to me when I was into this several times.)

7. They have occult powers. (It definitely heightened my demon-given psychic abilities!)

8. They are stronger and faster than normal and have more acute sight, hearing, and smell. (This was my experience to a degree.)

9. They fear the cross, holy water, and other Christian symbols.

(Sort of. We will discuss this later.)

10. They have seriously bad breath. (I went through a lot of breath mints. This was partially from never eating or drinking!)

11. As long as they can get blood, they will live forever. (There is no evidence for this!)

12. They can control weather. (This is true to a limited degree— see occult powers.)

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13. They can turn into a mist. (No evidence!)

14. They can turn into a bat or a wolf. (No evidence!)

15. They can turn into mice or swarms of other vermin. (No evidence!)

16. They can fly or levitate. (No evidence!)

It should be noted in passing that modern fictional works have begun breaking some of these conventions. For example, in the Twilight novels, you have the notorious “sparkly” vampires. These vampires can go out in daylight without any problem but do not because their skin sparkles like jewels in the sunlight. This would reveal their true nature, which is a big no-no in the Twilight mythos. They also do not have to sleep in a coffin. Indeed, they need no sleep. But they cannot turn into animals.

Also, in the Twilight books, it is possible for vampires to abstain from human blood. The vampire “family” at the center of the novels, the Cullens, have chosen to be “vegan vampires” and to only live by hunting large game animals in the Pacific Northwest and drinking their blood. They will not drink human blood. This makes them, ahem, good vampires.

However, just as Stephenie Meyer “changed the rules” for the vampire genre, it must be realized that much of what Bram Stoker wrote was “changing the rules” for the vampire lore of Europe and other nations. Before we can really understand Twilight’s power, we need to go back further and examine the origins of vampirism.

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Vampires: An Unnatural chapter 2

History

Hopefully, the previous chapter has cleared up some of the fog generated by Hollywood and other media sources. However, it is also key to understand that there are real people out there who enjoy drinking blood and have thereby given themselves over to evil supernaturalism.

Before we get into a brief but worldwide historical survey, this point needs to be hammered home.

One of the most compelling proofs for the reality of vampirism is the fact that the Scriptures condemn it repeatedly in the strongest possible sense. Many believers may not have noticed this prohibition of the practice of blood drinking in the Word.

First of all, God mentions it to Noah: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat (Genesis 9:3-4).

This is what is commonly known as one of the Noahide Laws.

Since Noah was the father of all those currently living on earth, long before there were Israelites, this is considered by most Bible students — 63 —

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