Vampires and Dancers Portraits
The vampire is a strange phenomenon of the imagination, a shape-shifter, hypnotist and captivator, erotic and chillingly repugnant at the same time. He or she is often ravishingly, irresistibly seductive.
That the vampire is also represented as a form of were-animal, fanged and nocturnal, suggests that as a psychic factor it shuns the light of consciousness, manifesting in the twilight of the subliminal as a sexual compulsion or another form of raw, insatiable hunger that cannot be put to rest and eventually takes possession of the whole personality. Psyche portrays the vampire as one of the most compelling and libido-draining aspects of the inner “other” and part of its paradoxical attraction is that it is potentially dangerous. Some have compared the vampire to the “hungry ghost,” the revenant of unmetabolized deprivation and trauma, which obsesses us, keeping us out of life. The most deadly aspect of the classic vampire is that with each attack it replicates its condition in the victim, who becomes one of the melancholy, exhausted or restless “dead.”
More contemporary portrayals have idealized the vampire as a being of pale, lunar beauty, in whom soulfulness, wisdom and magical powers combine with exhilarating animal instinctual. In this version, because the vampire lives forever, it can teach us the lessons of history. The human and vampire lovers of the popular Twilight series reflect the youthful romance between consciousness—which involves process and change—and the alluring fantasy of physical perfection, immutability and immortality. But though the vampire can never again become human, a human can become a vampire, suggestive of our vulnerability to the wholly absorbing nature of desire.
–The Book of Symbols, edited by Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin. Germany: Taschen, 2010. Page 700.
