Читать книгу Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 11

The plural form of “Lilith” in Hebrew is “lilim,” which is found in Talmudic and Kabbalistic literature as a term for spirits of the night. Lilith is most often depicted as a beautiful woman with long, unkempt hair and large, bat-like wings. According to the Midrash, Lilith preys not only on males as they lie sleeping, but also upon mothers who have just given birth, as well as their newborn babes.

Lilith quite likely was first feared in ancient Babylon as Lilitu, who, together with Ekimmu, wandered the night world in search of victims for their insatiable blood lust. In Hebrew folklore, Lilith was Adam’s wife before the creation of Eve, the true chosen mother of humankind. The terrible night creatures known as the incubi and the succubi were the children of Adam and Lilith. The incubi materialize before human women as handsome men, hypnotically seducing them and withdrawing from them their life force. Succubi appear to human men as lovely, sensual women, tempting and promising, disguising their thirst for human blood.

While those human males who consort with a succubus often meet an untimely end, drained of their life forces, on occasion their interactions with these entities brings about a horde of demonic children, who will one day gather at the deathbeds of their human fathers, hail them as their sires, then scatter to capture as many human souls as possible.

The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, translated by MacGregor Mathers from a manuscript written in French in the eighteenth century, is dated 1458 and claims to be translated originally from Hebrew. The text states that the universe is teeming with hordes of angels and demons that interact with human beings on many levels. Humans are somewhere between the angelic and the demonic intelligences on the spiritual scale, and each human entity has both a guardian angel and a malevolent demon hovering near him or her from birth until death.

Venerable traditions state that such entities as Lilith and her spawn first manifested on Earth at a time when the gods were said to walk freely among humankind. To these godlike creatures of darkness, the primitive humans who regarded them with such awe and reverence were property, chattel from which to gain energy and sustenance.

The apocryphal Book of Enoch tells of the order of angels called “Watchers,” or “The Sleepless Ones.” The leader of the Watchers was called Semjaza or Shemhazai (in other places, Azazel, the name of one of the Hebrews’ principal demons), who led 200 Watchers down to Earth to take wives from among the daughters of men. It was from such a union that the Nephilim were born. The Nephilim are said in the Old Testament to have been the progeny of the “sons of god,” whose union with Earth women produced “giants … men of great renown.” Although often translated as “giants,” the word Nephilim actually means “the fallen ones.”

Since the Watchers manifested on Earth as angels, the Watchers were beings of spirit essence, rather than of flesh and blood. What these fallen ones invading Earth needed from humans was their blood and their flesh so that they might become corporeal beings. The Watchers and the Nephilim were the first real vampires to exploit humankind, and they continue today to feed on the life force of humans—both their blood and their spirit.

Real vampires are those vulnerable humans who have been possessed by the spawn of ancient entities such as Lilith, the seductive fallen angel (illustration by Ricardo Pustanio).

Once in physical bodies, the fallen angels taught their human wives to cast various spells and to practice the arts of enchantment. They imparted to the women the lore of plants and the properties of certain roots. Semjaza did not neglect human men, teaching them how to manufacture weapons and tools of destruction.