Vampires & Esotericism: Part 2

Warning: This is a very opinionated piece mentioning very dark times of human history. This was difficult to write and condense.

The Folklore of Exile

The connection between marginalized communities and folklore is not incidental. It is intrinsic. When power seeks to dehumanize, it often casts its victims as something unnatural. Something subhuman or more-than-human (superman). In this paradox, victims are stripped of humanity and then imbued with mythic fear.

From the ghettos of 1940s Europe to the chains of American plantations, from witch hunts in Salem to surveillance in modern cities, the archetype of *the Other* has been shaped and reshaped with each generation. Always dangerous. Always foreign. Always less than human. Jewish people, African Americans, Native Americans, Japanese citizens during wartime internment, Muslims, immigrants, queer people, and even women accused of witchcraft, all have worn the mask society handed them. The mask of the other, the stranger, the monster.

In a culture where the default pedestal is reserved for the straight, white, Christian man, any deviation from that standard becomes a threat to the illusion of purity and control. But empires fall. The ones who rule the stories today may be the demons of tomorrow’s folklore. We forget that the definition and mask of a "monster" is not static. Angels may become demons or aliens. Saints or the enlightened may be rebranded as rebels, and rebels to terrorists. Even those considered holy today may find themselves on the pyre of another age’s paranoia.

This is why folklore is inherently political. Mythology and legend are often built on the backs of the marginalized. Those who are silenced, exiled, or erased. The vampire, the witch, the changeling, the demon. These are not just fictional characters. They are projections of collective fears. They are also, paradoxically, survival stories. Archetypes forged in fire. Warnings in disguise. Icons of both terror and transformation.
The Jewish golem, created from clay to protect a persecuted people. The Haitian zombie, rooted in the trauma of slavery and colonialism. The African trickster, who outsmarts his captors. These are not tales of horror alone. They are tools of resistance. Each one says: *we survived, and we remember.*

These stories are mirrors to the real-life violence of dehumanization. The boogeyman was never a literal monster. It was whoever society needed to justify its own violence. The Nazis portrayed Jews as demonic. American propaganda painted Japanese people as beasts. African Americans were described in bestial terms for centuries to justify slavery. Immigrants were and still are cast as a disease, an infestation, a threat.

The face of “the Other” changes. But the system remains. Until we shatter it.

Even the term “monster” comes from the Latin *monstrum*  a portent, an omen, a sign. The monster is never just a beast. It is a warning and the monster is always made, not born.

​The tragedy, of course, is that even the brightest rebels can become corrupted. They can become like those who oppressed them, internalizing the methods of their erstwhile masters, becoming hypocrites caught in that terrible chain which binds the throats of men and history alike. This is the agonizing repetition of terrible cycles, the wheel of suffering turning, generation after generation, fueled by unawareness and unhealed trauma, allowing true evil, the evil of willful ignorance, cruelty, and oppression, to flourish in the fertile darkness of the covered mirror. 

The Mirror of Fear

The creation of the Other is not just an act of violence. It is also an act of cowardice. It reflects a deeper psychological impulse: the need to exile from consciousness the parts of ourselves we are unwilling to acknowledge.
Carl Jung called this the “shadow.” The dark, repressed side of the psyche. In myth, we cast it outward. We make it a werewolf, a demon, a vampire, a witch. In politics, we make it a scapegoat. In religion, a heretic. In society, a criminal. In families, a black sheep. In classrooms, the weird kid. In every system, someone is designated to carry the fear.

And yet this fear, this hatred, often stems from the most basic human vulnerability: our mortality. Our limitedness. The possibility that life is chaotic, beyond control, and uncontainable. We invent monsters not because we know the world too well, but because we do not know it at all.
And in that void, in that abyss of uncertainty, we desperately cling to stories that comfort us. Stories in which we are always the hero, always the innocent, always the righteous slayer of evil.

But what if the monster isn’t real?

What if the hero is the mask we wear to justify our cruelty?

Empires Fall, Archetypes Rise

The face of the Other changes. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s villain. History is full of such reversals. Consider how Jewish people were turned into monsters in Nazi Germany, a pretext for genocide. Or how enslaved Africans and Natuve Americans alike were cast as primitive, closer to beast than man, a necessary lie to justify genocide and the plantation economy. In American internment camps, Japanese families were labeled threats simply for their ancestry. Today, this Othering continues against Muslims, migrants, queer individuals, the neurodivergent, the disabled, the poor.

The archetype of the monster is adaptable. It is a cultural technology of exclusion and control. It always serves power.

Even now, no one is truly safe. In every generation, someone becomes the new scapegoat. Someone is sacrificed to keep the illusion of order intact. That is the warning embedded in every monster myth. Even angels, in another context, might be labeled demons. Even messengers of peace, if they challenge the status quo, may be cast as subversive threats. 

Unmasking the Real Monsters, Embracing True Immortality

In this grand, often terrifying, cosmic theatre, we must remember who the real monsters are. They are rarely the fanged figures of folklore, the demons, or the haunted dolls,  but more often the mundane agents of oppression, tyrants, the willfully blind, the architects of systems that deny dignity, freedom, and truth. 

Burning the Old Script

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us with a choice: to continue retelling the same script or to rewrite the story entirely.

We must move from fear to curiosity, from exile to empathy, from domination to dialogue. This isn’t just spiritual advice. It is political. It is cultural. It is existential. Because the mechanism of Othering has led to every genocide, every war, every witch hunt in history. If we don’t break the cycle, we are doomed to repeat it, only with new names, new masks, new scapegoats.
We must ask ourselves. Is this violence innate to human nature, or is it a disease we’ve inherited? Are we born needing an enemy or taught to crave one? From childhood, we are often fed a binary script. Hero versus villain. Good versus evil. Us versus them. But who defines who “us” is?

Is the real author of this myth the ruling class, the owners of wealth, land, and power? Is othering a distraction sold to the masses to prevent unity and uprising? If we remain divided, fighting shadows, those who pull the strings stay safe.

Or is the monster also in us? A fear too deep to name. The fear that we are powerless. The fear that life is meaningless. The fear of the unknown, which we mask with control. By labeling someone else as dangerous, we keep our illusions intact. And perhaps, most hauntingly, by inventing monsters in the dark, we give ourselves permission to be the hero.

This is the lie. That if we kill the dragon, we become worthy. But perhaps the dragon was guarding a deeper truth. That the villain was never real. That the shadow was our own.

Where the Other is not a stranger, but a mirror.

When the Oppressed Become the Oppressor

History, when unhealed, becomes a curse passed down like a family heirloom, a cursed object, not unlike the Annabelle doll. It can also be seen as a generational trauma and familial loops of suffering. It contains grief, injustice, and the rage of the “othered.” But like all cursed things, it has a choice: to end its pattern or to feed it. And that, in many ways, is the turning point we now see in real time.

The state of Israel was born from the ashes of genocide. It’s a people scarred by centuries of antisemitism, culminating in the mechanized horror of the Holocaust. It was meant to be a sanctuary, a promise of “never again.” And yet, in the complex, painful matrix of nation-building and trauma, this sacred promise has, for many, been transformed into a backwards weapon.

As of today, Palestinians are being displaced, starved, bombed, and killed in a blatant genocide. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Medical and humanitarian workers are being targeted. Scholars, international legal experts, and human rights organizations have called it what it is: apartheid and genocide.

And perhaps the most chilling part is this: the same rhetorical ghosts that haunted Jews in Europe are now being summoned against Palestinians. dehumanizing language, the labeling of children as threats, the erasure of historical suffering. The Holocaust, instead of a grave warning against all dehumanization, is now sometimes used to justify the dehumanization of another.

Even the Holocaust is trying to be erased by far-right movements across the globe who simultaneously deny it happened while invoking its moral weight to justify colonial power. This hypocrisy is not new. It is a pattern.

Names change, right and left, republican and democrat, and yet the system remains in control. 

The Cycle of Empire: Othering as a Tool of Control

The same dynamic unfolds across the globe. Apartheid didn’t begin or end with Israel.

• Ireland was occupied by the British Empire for centuries. Its people treated as less-than, starved during famines (a genocide of forced starvation), and subjected to the near-eradication of their language and culture. The Irish were made the “other” of Europe: wild, ungovernable, savage. The idea that the Irish should “eat their young,” echoed in a song by, the sometimes-called Orphean singer, Hozier, satirically recalls Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay A Modest Proposal, in which he suggested that impoverished Irish families might ease their troubles by selling their children as food to the rich. It is a bitter piece of political satire indicting British cruelty and policy.

• Pakistan inherited its division through colonial extraction,  a bloody partition drawn with imperial pens that divided India, leading to genocides, displacement, and systemic inequality. Even today, many Pakistani communities suffer under caste systems, ethnic cleansing, and religious discrimination.

• South Africa, too, lived under a system of apartheid for decades. There black and brown lives were systematically stripped of rights, made invisible, silenced.

A New Script, A New Garden

We must begin to see the pattern: today’s victim can become tomorrow’s tyrant if they do not face the trauma within. With the rising threat of fascism and authoritarianism it's important now to look at the root of the issues. To end cycles of oppression, we must not only fight outwardly, we must look inward. The real monster is not the immigrant, the Jew, the Muslim, the witch, the black man, the queer child, or the refugee. The real monster is the empire that demands an “other” to devour.

As the author Peter Hamilton-Giles reminds us in The Afflicted Mirror, the shadow we cast is shaped by how we face (or refuse to face) the mirror of our collective soul. If we do not confront what we are capable of, we are doomed to become it.

Let's write a new script. 

The Machinery of Dehumanization and the Necessity of Shadow Work 

In moments of great political and cultural unrest, a familiar and dangerous narrative reasserts itself: the reduction of human beings to objects, to statistics, to threats. In contemporary America, particularly under the resurgence of Trump-era authoritarianism, we are witnessing a renewed orchestration of dehumanization aimed at immigrants, asylum seekers, and the historically marginalized. This process, while legalistically framed, is existentially violent. It constructs the "other" not merely as a problem to be managed, but as a contagion to be eradicated.

The recent escalation of ICE raids, particularly in Los Angeles, where reports have surfaced of expedited deportations without due process and the militarization of city streets, exemplifies this logic of state-sponsored dehumanization. The language used to justify such actions mirrors the semiotics of historical fascism: invoking infestation, disease, or lawlessness as a justification for the erosion of civil rights and the rise of unchecked executive power.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarianism begins not with overt violence but with the normalization of cruelty through bureaucratic systems. When individuals are reduced to units in a deportation algorithm, or children to collateral damage in a border policy, we are not merely witnessing policy decisions, we are confronting an ethical collapse.

This is not new. History is littered with regimes that built power by scapegoating the vulnerable. But the danger today lies in our tendency to see such history as resolved, to relegate fascism to the past rather than recognize its evolving manifestations. As philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” To move forward, we must cease to look away from the shadow side of our own civilization.

Shadow Work and the Unfinished Past

Carl Jung’s concept of the “shadow”, the repressed, unacknowledged aspects of the individual and collective psyche, is essential in understanding the current crisis. The shadow is not only composed of personal failings but of systemic, inherited violence: the legacies of colonization, slavery, xenophobia, and genocide that remain unexamined in national narratives. Without direct confrontation of these suppressed truths, they inevitably return, more virulent, in the form of revived ideologies and institutional violence.

What we are witnessing is not simply a political shift, but a metaphysical one: a resurgence of the unintegrated shadow on a national scale. The ICE raids, the demonization of immigrants, and the proliferation of fascist dog whistles in public discourse are not deviations from the American story; they are expressions of its unresolved trauma.

The Immigrant as Archetypal “Other”

Throughout history, immigrants have been cast in the role of the scapegoat, bearing the projected fears and failures of the dominant group. In Jungian terms, they are made to carry the collective shadow, the unacknowledged chaos, instability, or economic anxiety, of the host nation. This othering is not incidental; it is ritualistic. It allows society to preserve a myth of purity and order by expelling the foreign, the unfamiliar, the supposedly “uncivilized.”

Yet, as depth psychology and postcolonial theory both affirm, the figure of the “Other” holds profound transformative potential. When we reject projection and approach the Other as a mirror, not a threat, we begin the process of individuation, both personally and collectively. We grow. But such growth is impossible without radical truth-telling and accountability.

The Role of Historical Reckoning

We cannot move on individually or nationally until we confront the full weight of history’s darker dimensions. The United States remains haunted by unresolved histories: the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the transatlantic slave trade, the internment of Japanese Americans, and ongoing racialized violence against migrants and Black and brown communities. These are not closed chapters. They are open wounds.

Also let me be clear, America is only 249 years old, and yet, all of these atrocities have occured within that time. That is only a few generations. History is not a time, long long ago, but very recentand we continue to live it. 
To forget or deny them is to remain caught in repetition compulsion. Endlessly recreating the same atrocities under new names and legal frameworks. To break this cycle, we must name the systems, ideologies, and historical dynamics that created them.

To confront the shadow, as Jung suggested, is not to be consumed by it, but to integrate it, to look clearly at what we have been, so that we might consciously become something else.

The metaphor of the rose is apt here. It does not bloom in sterile soil but in wasteland, rich with decay, death, and transformation. Our future as a civilization depends not on purity, but on depth. Not on erasure, but on remembrance. The rose blooms only when the truth is spoken aloud and when we dare to look beneath the rug at what has been swept away.

How to Break an Egregore: Reclaiming the Narrative

To disrupt an egregore, one must starve it. To remove attention, challenge its underlying story, and cultivate alternative energies. 

In his book "Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny," Mark Stavish delves into the multifaceted nature of these powerful, collectively created thoughtforms. He explores their historical context, their creation in various spheres of human activity, and crucially, how to dismantle their influence.

Dissolving the egregores involves several steps:

1. Naming the Construct

The first act of resistance is awareness. As long as the Other is accepted as natural or inevitable, its power remains intact. Naming the process of othering reveals the machinery behind it. Reveal language as control, myth as manipulation, image as weapon.

2. Rewriting the Narrative

Breaking an egregore requires creating counter-narratives: stories that affirm the humanity, agency, and complexity of the Other. This is why art, literature, and personal testimony are revolutionary acts. When silenced people speak, they dismantle the symbolic scaffolding that upholds the system.

This mirrors the Jungian process of shadow integration—not destroying the shadow, but incorporating it, recognizing it as part of the whole. In political terms, it means accepting difference without demonization.

3. Disrupting the Ritual

Egregores are sustained through repeated behaviors like rallies, chants, policies, images. These rituals must be interrupted or re-coded. Civil disobedience, satire, cultural resistance, and compassionate presence all act as disruptions. Silence in the face of injustice is ritual complicity; speaking truth breaks the spell. 

4. Rebuilding from Within

Finally, breaking a collective egregore demands personal sovereignty. As long as individuals outsource meaning to mass ideology, status quo, other authority figures like a pope or spiritual leader, a politician, or ancient texts regarded as law. True resistance begins with deep internal deconstruction. Refusing to identify with fear-based narratives, and choosing authenticity over inherited belief. The more authentically you live as yourself (while finding who you are of course) among a world trying to define and box you, you create ripples of change that break down these cage-like  mental frameworks. 

Alchemy can be seen in a psychological lense as a working pattern or path which begins as deconstructionism and ends with reconstruction of the self. In this way no change can occur in the world until we ourselves change, which begins with changing how we see the world, ourselves, and others. 

The Power of the Threshold

In esoteric thought, transformation often happens at the threshold, a liminal space between old identity and new. The system that creates the Other fears this space, because it offers agency. When the marginalized step into the threshold and speak, the world tilts. During times of unrest and unease within the world narratives are challenged by societies. This naturally occurs as world views shatter and are deconstructed by a gap between mental status quo and reality. This gap causes a type of cognitive dissonance in which the brain must seek out a new story to describe the world as the old story no longer fits. This is a time of great transformation in cultures whether for the better or worse. Civilizations can either embrace the unknown/change and create new narratives or fall back extremely into control and autocracy in the fear of change. 

As Mark Stavish suggests, the goal is not merely to fight the old egregore but to generate a new one: a living symbol of integration, compassion, and multidimensional truth. Such a force emerges not through conquest, but through resonance. Like archetypes which arise to signal what humanity at this pivotal moment needs most. Through story, image, and invocation. My personal new narrative, or archetypal force of choice, is a new egregore of truth, reason, and liberty. The goddesses: Marianne, columbia, libertas etc as old ideas to use now as agents of change. Let's do the great work and build a new myth of the future.

Conclusion: The End of the Spell

To break the spell of the Other is to reclaim reality from the machinery of control. It is to see the monster not as an enemy but as a mirror, and in that reflection, find both the danger and the possibility of transformation.
And as Jung reminds us:

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Only when we change ourselves can we cause a ripple effect to change the world. True change starts at the individual level and great schools of the ancient past knew this too. They attempted to help individuals grow in mind and spirit in a community setting through ritual and the use of myth. 

We are the Rewriters of Myth

Stories return in cycles, echoing through time not merely as entertainment but as lessons we are called to understand. Just as history repeats itself, so too do these archetypal narratives arise, inviting us to break the pattern.
Yet we are not bound to relive the past. We possess the capacity to author new trajectories, to step out of the gravitational pull of self-fulfilling prophecies and choose a different path. This, in a sense, is what is now required of us.

In the vast theatre of the world, the unseen Director behind the curtain has grown weary of the same dramas, the same tragedies endlessly rehearsed. Something new is being asked of us, not merely to perform, but to participate in the authorship of what comes next.

Certain archetypes, when awakened within us, step forward onto the stage to disrupt the old order and catalyze transformation. I choose to become one of them. I choose to write my own myth, to become the conscious author of my life and whatever lies beyond it.

This is what it means to be awake: not merely to act within the play, nor to mimic the roles written by others, but to co-create with the Architect of Reality itself. It is to observe the play from the audience of angels, to direct it from beyond the veil, and to embody it on stage with full lucidity and purpose.
In doing so, we create ripples that extend outward, altering not just our own narrative but the collective mythos. We offer a new story, a necessary one, because even the gods, like us, grow weary of repetition. They cry out for change. 

 Patterns: 

Here below is a non-exhaustive list of genocides in history to see a pattern. 

• Armenian Genocide (1915-1916, Ottoman Empire/Turkey):
  • Why it occurred: The Ottoman government, facing internal unrest and external pressures during World War I, sought to consolidate Turkish Muslim dominance and blamed Armenians, a Christian minority, for perceived disloyalty and collaboration with external enemies (Russia).
  • Why they were othered: Armenians were historically a distinct religious and ethnic group within the Ottoman Empire, often viewed with suspicion due to their Christian faith and perceived economic success. Nationalist rhetoric portrayed them as an internal threat to the state's security and integrity.

• The Holocaust (1941-1945, Nazi Germany and occupied Europe):
  • Why it occurred: The Nazi regime, driven by an ideology of racial purity and supremacy, sought to eliminate Jews and other groups deemed "inferior" to create a "pure" Aryan nation.
  • Why they were othered: Jews were systematically demonized through antisemitic propaganda, blamed for Germany's economic and social problems, and portrayed as a distinct, alien "race" inherently dangerous and parasitic to German society. Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals, and Slavic peoples were also "othered" and targeted based on racist and eugenic ideologies.

• Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979, Cambodia):
  • Why it occurred: The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, sought to establish a radical agrarian socialist society, eliminating anyone deemed an enemy of the revolution, including intellectuals, urban dwellers, ethnic minorities, and those with connections to the previous government.
  • Why they were othered: People were "othered" based on their perceived class, education, ethnicity (e.g., Vietnamese, Cham Muslims), or political affiliations, viewed as corrupting influences or obstacles to the creation of a "pure" communist society.

• Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994, Rwanda):
  • Why it occurred: Extremist Hutu leaders orchestrated a systematic slaughter of the Tutsi minority, fueled by decades of ethnic tension and political manipulation.
  • Why they were othered: The Tutsi, historically favored during the colonial era, were portrayed by Hutu extremists as a foreign, privileged, and dangerous "other" responsible for the nation's problems, and were dehumanized through propaganda that likened them to "cockroaches."

• Bosnian Genocide (1992-1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina):
  • Why it occurred: During the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces, with support from Serbia, aimed to create an ethnically "pure" Serb state, targeting Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat populations.
  • Why they were othered: Bosniaks and Croats were "othered" based on their distinct religious and ethnic identities, portrayed as obstacles to Serb territorial ambitions and as inherently different and threatening. The term "ethnic cleansing" itself reflects the intent to remove "others."

• Darfur Genocide (2003-present, Sudan):
  • Why it occurred: The Sudanese government and its allied Janjaweed militias targeted non-Arab ethnic groups (primarily Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa) in Darfur amidst a rebel uprising, seeking to suppress dissent and gain control of resources.
  • Why they were othered: Non-Arab Darfuri groups were "othered" based on their ethnicity and perceived political opposition, depicted as a threat to the dominant Arab government and its vision for the region.

​Welcome to the Garden.