The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Ancient and classical myth writers, poets and artists were a small but significant part of a much larger reality...the eternal story of humankind.

The images and words that emerged from the tales of old are about mortal actions that encompassed forces which transcended the individual. Life and death were depicted as a great mystery, beyond human understanding. Through images and words we were reminded to accept our temporal existence with grace, humility and gratitude.

However, mankind today, with all of our science and skeptical reasonings, have conquered imagination and any belief in unseen realms. The irony of it all is that by removing the mysticism from our existence, mankinds purpose has diminished rather than increased in significance.

The imagery of the life, death and fear mythologies are symbolic of the spiritual and emotional powers within each of us. The characters of the ancient mythos represented the finest attributes of man, but also the loneliness, death, despair, displacement, fear, evil and the darker archetypal facets of life.

As humans we have and will continue to seek out a meaning to our life, "the truth" of our existence and the search for the significance of life and death.

We need life to be of value and our experiences to have had some meaning. So the emphasis of that "truth" should be placed on the more difficult question to answer: How to live?

What does it mean to be fully alive and to have our senses operating at full capacity?
What does it feel like to possess acute spiritual awareness?

The answers to these questions can be found within the varied myths and tales created through the classical conceptualizations of those writers and artists of old.
Within that ancient kaleidoscope of symbolic truths we will find the recurring theme on the remembrance of death, these forms of the human psyche serve to remind us of our own mortality and in the process, leave behind fear to pursue life.

We are all aware or at least should be, of the torture and tragedy of life. However that are many among us that are not cognizant of the fact that life's tortures and tragedies are the foundations of our fears.

Tragedy forces us to ask ourselves: Why are we here? Does life and death have meaning and purpose?
Even though the cause of suffering varies, the purpose remains the same: Only through suffering can we attain greatness or wisdom.

Through the experience of tragedy we are forced to reevaluate our convictions, inner strength and of course our weakness. But even tragedy has its counterpart within its formula. And that counterpart is comedy. The obverse to tears is smiles, both walk hand in hand, to smile with a tear of happiness and not of sorrow.
If tragedy is the constant descent from a harmonious posterity driven down towards suffering and chaos, then comedy is the circadian rhythm of that same descent, the proverbial roller coaster of life, governed by the tides of flowing beats never missing a cue never skipping a beat...a single rhythm that coexists in a harmony with its counterpart, adjusting life as it goes along...it is the protagonist of human kind...that which makes us great must first make us weak.

The mask of the Harlequin symbolizes both tragedy and comedy, it breaks up the tension and reminds people to laugh and accept the inevitable experiences of both tragedy and comedy and accept and deal with on a higher level their fear and anxiety.

From the Classical artistic works of Bosch, Bruegel, Fuseli and others, we experience the concept of the transient nature of life and sensual pleasures and the inevitability of evil and death.
By way of men such as Shakespeare and Marlowe and of course Poe, where the combining of tragedy and comedy are prominent we experience the continuum of the fears of life and death.

So what is the verdict of that which shall come to pass, of that which is not only the inevitable of existence, but also the constant companion of man that propels him to question his own purpose only to speculate and make conjectures as to his own mortality out of fear or autological terms.

The verdict is your own, life is yours as an independent being. The questions you seek of your own mortality are already answered within you.