Late in his life, in the pages of the newspaper Roma on 6 September 1973, Julius Evola wrote a short piece called “Il vampirismo ed i vampiri.” It refuses two easy exits at once. The blood-drinking corpse of folklore is, for him, crude fantasy, and Stoker’s Dracula is literature. Yet he will not let the figure dissolve into superstition either.
“The idea of the vampire in itself, however, cannot entirely be reduced to superstition.”
What he keeps is the vampire as a psychic fact rather than a physical one.
The double that walks at night
Evola’s first move goes through the werewolf. Peoples who named themselves leopard-men, wolf-men and bear-men, he argues, kept close to animal forces that the human type has largely shut out. In a personality that never fully set itself apart from them, those forces might split off and go walking: a double, half-made of the stuff the séance-rooms called ectoplasm, while the sleeper lies still. Wound the double, the old tales say, and the body wakes wounded.
Set his vocabulary aside and the shape is familiar from the consulting room. What Evola calls a scission of the personality, Jung would call an autonomous complex: a part of the psyche that has slipped its moorings and acts with a will of its own, often wearing an animal face in dreams.
Hunger among the living
The second half of the essay turns from the dead to the living. Here vampirism is the drawing-off of another’s subtle vital force. Evola reaches for King David warmed by the young Abishag, for Alexandra David-Néel’s reports from Central Asia, and for the Taoist practice of the Dragon and the Tiger, in which a man gathers a woman’s vitality to lengthen his own life.
It is the least comfortable passage, and the most revealing. The woman appears only as a reservoir; the essay never asks what the Tiger loses. Read against Carmilla, where the hunger runs between women and the reader’s sympathy is never quite settled, Evola’s version looks less like a hidden science and more like a confession of what a certain idea of mastery feeds on.
a note to come back to
Evola ends by insisting these things are remote from ordinary life but not, for that reason, deprived of every reality. Is the vampire a being, a practice, or a way of describing what one person can take from another?