I'm dead serious (excuse the pun). If you look carefully enough you'll see that a whole lot of...er...very creative people have discovered a lifestyle and a culture of the vampire. This circus has several ringmasters, and I happen to be one of them. How? The perils of keeping an open mind...
To this point, I have been using Sappho Wolf almost exclusively in my dealings with the vampire community. But why? Vampires are real, so why not start to use my own real name? And so I'm Emilie Conroy, here called Lady Em.
Let's get some madness out of the way--namely, vampire myth and legend.
1) I do not think I am immortal, unless we're talking about serial immortality and reincarnation, in which case who knows?
2) I do not drink blood, except when I've been hit in the mouth with, say, a hockey stick or a football or taken some other blow to the mouth, which happens more frequently than I like.
3) I do not start to smolder and burn in sunlight, but I do have a very Irish complexion and the sun can be brutal on pale skin and freckles.
4) I do not have my own fangs, but I do have the rattlesnake fang my shaman teacher gave to me.
5) I do not sleep in a coffin, but my partner and I do own a nice casket, which we use as a bookcase.
All right. That should do it.
In most creative endeavors, and especially those that take me way out of a dream of a dream of the mainstream, I use Sappho Wolf to identify myself. That would be "Sappho" as in the ancient Greek lyric poet from around 600 BCE. To quote her, "What is beautiful is good and who is good will soon also be beautiful."
George Gordon, Lord Byron, wrote
"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet..."
"Wolf" is in honor of my sister in spirit of Wolf Clan who passed away in 2000. Myself, I'm Snake Clan (wisdom and healing) if anybody cares.
It's been about 20 years since I finally realized that my interests were just never going to be mainstream and that I should capitalize on going where most people never dare.
I'm a professional and published writer, but then there are plenty of those. I'm the one who peeks behind the veil, the one who goes walking between worlds for experiences readers on this side want to know about but prefer someone else's first hand account.
Quite possibly I am the first real vampire you have ever met. If you would like the whole explanation of how vampires could possibly be real you can either check out the websites I've given or consult my Hybrid Vampire Handbook which explains it all. Strange as it may seem, I do a lot of teaching and group mediation in my capacity as a Matriarch. People adore reading about vampires, and reading the work of an actual vampire never gets boring.
THE JOURNEY
This is the story of how I have arrived at this point without getting into dull Dickensian description or some morass of pointless self-promotion.
Let me begin by saying I was raised in a philosophically open family. My family encouraged me to use my mind and my imagination, to explore and discover. There was no such thing as taboo. Now I can look back and see where the roots of my vampirism are in my own upbringing. I was raised to be open and aware, and so I have continued to be.
My "awakening", as it were, happened on August 6, 1985--the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Actually, that was the day when months of self-examination and reflection crystallized for me. I was not yet 14 years old. I hadn't known the words "empathic" or "psionic" and consequently could not have used them to describe what I had been experiencing. I knew I was living with a different and heightened set of senses, and that the whole of me hungered and yearned for something I couldn't identify.
I had come into the sphere of House Maidenfear, a vampire sanctuary, months before through initiated friends that seemed to really understand what I was experiencing. On that day, the puzzle pieces of my thoughts clicked into place. I too was a vampire. I decided that I would never deny that aspect of me--in fact, I could never deny it. I would embrace vampirism and my existence as a vampire.
For the following four years I spent a great deal of time at House Maidenfear, learning and developing my own abilities. My own initiation was in 1989, once I turned 18. However, I had to take the Maidenfear Way and my own life as a vampire on an adventure. I moved away to college, where I studied history and linguistics and became an expert vampire researcher. I was able to enhance that skill in graduate school in Florida. Wherever I went, I made connections with the local vampire communities. I came home to House Maidenfear in 2001 and I was elected to my current station in 2003.
I'm known affectionately as the "Vampire Philosophe" for the amount of time I've spent in the more cerebral aspects of the vampire existence. Here are a few of my thoughts.
There exists an entity of living energy all around us and in the universe. I mean that this energy is both alive itself and imbues all things with life of one degree or another. A vampire is an adept at energy play, an adept at tapping into this living energy for self-benefit. For some this is achieved through drinking blood, for others it is a matter of psychic living energy. A vampire knows how to take what energy they want and need and use it for their own purposes.
I believe we as vampires are at an exciting time in our history. At no other point in the history of the world have circumstances been so ripe for us to fully express ourselves and be true to what we are. My commitment to the vampire community is to help us achieve our greatest potential.
And now it gets even more bizarre. I'm also a legal minister--especially bizarre since I myself don't adhere to one faith. On the other hand, I have had the training to counsel and comfort people of virtually any faith. My specialty is grief counseling and what I call "deathtalking". Basically this involves me sitting at the bedside (or whatever) of a person ready to pass over and speaking to them, or you might say offering permission to depart.
Years of training, and then extra years of training others, have given me a wealth of material, which I in turn hope to share with a larger audience through writing.
VAMPGEIST
As an independent project that has risen from a literary services agency, Vampgeist Vampire Community Creative Media was established in June, 2007. Our mission statement--to maintain an advocacy for real vampires in the mainstream media--is much more simply phrased than achieved, but we're meeting the battle head-on every day in print, on television, on the radio, and through any media we can find.
We aspire to create a friendly outreach into the non-vampire community, so that we may learn about each other.
We want to provide accurate, researched, and factual resources for other media outlets so that they may get their information from actual vampires.
We assist vampire writers with getting into print--that is vampires who are writers. All subject matter is considered.
We hope to provide a wide range of educational materials for vampire mentors, houses, and others who desire to share the vampire.
We are looking to establish an international media connection, which with the Internet has become entirely possible.
WHY I'M HERE
The bottom line for me in everything I do is seeking to answer the question, how do we make it all better for everyone?
I'm hoping to use this page to communicate with readers and potential readers, so don't be shy. I only bite on request.
