In
folklore, the "witching hour" typically meant midnight. At midnight,
all supernatural
beings, such as witches, ghosts,
vampires, and other creatures that typically function at night are at
their greatest power
(excepting Hallowe'en, or Samhain in
Old Religion). The witching hour, in many traditions, often extends
from midnight
to about 3 a.m.
A
Christian example of the witching hour was the time of the birth of
Christ. We're
all familiar with the Nativity
scene, in which Mary and Joseph are seen in Bethlehem at night and it is
night when Mary gives
birth to Jesus in a stable. There
is always a star shining brightly overhead. It is often thought that
Jesus was
born at midnight.
In The Witching Hour,
when Rowan gives birth to Lasher in the hall at First Street,
it is midnight, the appointed hour
chosen by Lasher to be born. Here is an astounding combination of the
powers of Lasher
being at their strongest, which
might explain the burning smell in the house that makes Rowan think the
house is on fire,
and the fact that Lasher chose the
moment of Christmas, the time of the birth of Jesus, to fuse with the
fetus in Rowan and
be born through her.
Click here to read about the witching hour on Wikipedia
What do these Gothic characters have in common?
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What
is it about witches, ghosts, vampires and other supernatural phenomena
that fascinates us so much? How to
explain the claims of departed souls returning to make contact with the
living world,
thus giving us a moving, three
dimensional glimpse of the past? What about witches, and the spiritual
paths that practice
witchcraft and give us a direct
access point to the astral plane? And how about vampires, those
tormented souls who
must survive by feeding on human
blood but that survival means never dying and never reaching salvation?
Each
of them, alive, dead, and undead, seem to be searching life and death
within life for
answers to the big questions, not
just what happens when we die. A ghost has presumably already
demonstrated what happens
- a part of us lives on. A witch
demonstrates a unique ability to concentrate will, to communicate with
spirits and
to command the lesser forces. A
vampire, the most mystical and fascinating of all, is not dead, but not
alive, somewhere
between life and death, but
prevented from peace and eternally wandering and searching.
A
ghost is already dead. A ghost is existing in the realm of the living
but cannot
actively participate in life and
share in the lives of the loved ones he/she left behind. A ghost is on
the sidelines,
at the mercy of whomever chooses to
see and to listen. If a ghost is ignored, so report the sensationalist
experts on
the paranormal, the ghost tries to
draw attention to itself by making ungodly amounts of noise or causing
unexplained disturbances
that skeptics will then be determine
to disprove as paranormal activity. Those who aren't sure will simply
be annoyed
- or scared. And that's where a
ghosts attempts are thwarted because maybe it isn't really the ghost
itself we're afraid
of, but where that ghost might have
come from. What if that ghost is in fact here to take us to another
place we aren't
ready to go and can't come back
from? Or do we watch too many movies?
A
meeting with a vampire, depending on how one defines a vampire, could
mean certain, instantaneous
death. There are as many types of
vampires as there are books and movies about them. Do they look like Fright
Night? Are they The Lost Boys?
Do they look like Bela Lugosi or Gary Oldman? How about Tom
Cruise or Brad Pitt? Are they pure
evil, out to create legions of followers available when they want to
feed, as the
hirsuit, shockingly ugly Count
Dracula informed the band who burst in on him and Mina Harker? Are they
something
to be saved from or are the vampires
themselves the ones who need salvation?
A look at the monsters of Fright Night, The Lost Boys, and previous
versions of Dracula, all
depict vampires as monsters who must be vanquished, destroyed, if
humanity is
to be saved. Vampires are not
tragic figures but evil, associated directly with the Devil himself.
Anne
Rice did something different with
vampires - she made them tragic figures with limitations not often paid
attention to except
as material for pop quizzes in fan
circles, figures who are eternally wandering, capable of feeling and
understanding human
emotion, though they are not human.
Their curse of eternal life and the need for blood as sustanance is
what damns them,
as they are the bringers of death.
They long for human interaction in a human, companionlike manner, yet
they
cannot fully attain it because their
baser need means human death.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Perhaps my favorite vampire movie is Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Though
there have been arguments that it
was badly acted on the parts of Keanu Reeves and even Winona Ryder and
some moviegoers were
not impressed with the fact that the
entire movie was shot on a sound stage, James V. Hart and Francis Ford
Coppola took it
places and brought out things that
made this film closer to the original book than any other version I've
seen.
In
this movie, we see Dracula as more than just the demon monster that
must be destroyed
if Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra are
to achieve salvation at death rather than vampirism and eternal
damnation. Of course,
this aspect of Dracula has not
changed, but his motives have been developed more in relation to the
female protagonist, Mina.
In
history, Vlad the Impaler's wife, the "River Princess", was supposed to
have drowned
herself in the river to avoid the
Turks. Though the acts of Vlad the Impaler were (and still are)
considered to
be extremely diabolical, to say the
least, he is still considered a hero in Romania. It would have been
diabolical to
the sensitivities of Victorian
England in the late 19th century. In the book Dracula, this
aspect of the Count's
"evil" history is used to
demonstrate his lust for power and dominion, to the point where he has
given up salvation in return
for earthly power - something
destined not to last.
In
the movie, Dracula's motives for becoming a vampire, for thirsting for
blood, are a combined
result of battle with the Turks (we
see an impaling scene in the beginning battle sequence) and his wife's
suicide as a result
of her being falsely led to believe
he had been killed. Instead of thirst for power, his becomes a thirst
for revenge,
as if the blood is a salve for a
broken heart.
Dracula
is the enemy who would be destroyed because he has the power to destroy
Mina's immortal
soul; Dracula sees Jonathan Harker
and the rest of the men who destroy him as his enemies because they keep
him from reuniting
with his one true love, his wife
(who is reincarnated through Mina in the film). Only with her love can
his own
soul be restored and indeed, that is
what happens, though he must truly die a human death to achieve the
peace he so needed.
Bram Stoker's Dracula,
though appealing to the vampire fans, Gothic enthusiasts
and MTV culture, actually has a good
deal in common with Anne Rice's concept of the vampire. Lestat
describes Dracula
as "hirsute", which he certainly
was. Lestat himself, the Brat Prince, was from the start the sexy,
alluring vampire
that Dracula is often expected to
be. But both Dracula in the film and Lestat in the books are vampires
who search on
behalf of their own souls and are
motivated by similar losses. Both must drink blood to survive and they
don't always
turn their victims into vampires,
nor do they always kill their victims.
Dracula (as depicted in the film) and Lestat (as he is in the books) could be described
as monsters who have lost their souls when they weren't intending to.
Ghosts
like Lasher are lost souls in a way. They are clearly the remnants -
they are
dead. Yet, they have somehow become
earthbound and unable to pass on to wherever it is souls go when people
die.
So they linger on, unable to
interact, unable to rest, and at the mercy of the reactions of the
living.
Witches
as lost souls is debatable. If we mean a witch is a lost soul due to
past
persecution of supposed witches or
being called charlatans, that depends on what they were doing and why.
Then there
is the debate of what a witch is and
what a witch does. Are they Satanists? No. Are they perverts?
No. Are they evil? No. That is,
depending on your definition of evil in this world. Can they be lost?
I'm sure they can. There is one
thing that keeps them rooted here and not lost though - witches are
still living.
Isn't that the difference between
vampires and ghosts as tortured souls and witches as the living people
who can identify
them, communicate with them and
understand what they are?
But
what if a witch is born with her or his power? A witch's soul can be
lost if being
a witch is defined in similar terms
as the Mayfair Witches. If a witch is confused by and does not
understand that power,
they can surely be tormented.
Consider Rowan Mayfair, whose power to kill through directed rage was
incomprehensible
to her, made her feel dirty like a
murderer so much so that she used her talent and intelligence to go into
medicine
to make up for the lives she knew
she had taken, but did not understand how, why, or where this ability
came from
Claiming
her family has a great deal of meaning for Rowan since she is not only
claiming
a life she had been kept from; she
is claiming her witch heritage and clear answers as to how she came to
have this power,
along with mind reading and
affecting living, organic matter like cellular structure.
We
become lost souls in life and in death if we are simply not
understood. What we
don't know is scary to us. What is
most precious to us, life, is even more precious if we have lost it and
must watch
others continue in life. We want
what we cannot have. Lasher thought life was so much more precious than
eternity
that he went to great lengths over a
period of 300 years to come back in the flesh. He paid a terrible
price for that
hunger by dying so soon after his
rebirth.
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