Come Into My Parlor...Chronicles of the Mayfair Witches

What does "the witching hour" mean?

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?

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 sustenance 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.

Revenants - Western Europe's Version of the Vampire

Lately, I have been researching revenants - a combination of ghost and undead. Revenants are a tradition from Western Europe, whereas vampires originated in the mythology of Eastern Europe. Regardless of location, revenants and vampires have much in common.

Like vampires, revenants are literally "the walking dead." They arise from their graves to suck life - the blood - out of living humans, thus killing them. Once finished, they return to their graves by day. Unlike vampires, revenants often attack people they had known in life, usually out of a diabolical desire for revenge. Revenants were often identified as people who had led "unholy" lives, sinners of the worst sort.

Like their Eastern European counterparts, people in villages under attack by a revenant congregate to reopen a revenant's grave and dispatch the revenant by staking the heart and decapitating the corpse. What was also similar to the myth of vampires was the state of the corpse when exhumed. Corpses were found to appear as if they were merely sleeping and not dead, their flesh had a rosy flush to it and the corpse was bloated, engorged with blood and leaking blood through the ears, nose and mouth. This was supposed to be the ultimate proof that the person in the grave was in fact a revenant that must be destroyed in order for the village to be returned to peace.

It is the corpse's appearance at this stage that is the original idea of what a vampire actually looked like. Certainly, a bloated, bloody corpse was not a figurehead of preternatural sexuality.

People in villages of Eastern Europe had the same findings in their attempts to dispatch vampires in the same fashion. What people of the middle ages did not know was that bloating, blood leakage and flushing were stages of decomposition. Rates of decomposition vary according to several factors - temperature, burial containers, presence of water, condition of the soil, cause of death, and later embalming being among the primary factors.

Revenants differ from traditional ghosts because they use a corporeal body to move about. They also have a very specific purpose in returning from the grave, whereas a classic ghost's reasons are anybody's guess.

Lasher was assumed by many to be a ghost, even more to be a demon, but no one ever referred to him as a revenant. Though he does turn out to be the spirit of a 16th century Taltos, he claimed that wanting to be in the flesh again was not directly an act of revenge, but of reclaiming what he had lost when the villagers of Donnelaith murdered him. In a way, his return could be said to be revenge against a God who turned out not to exist for him by echoing the birth of Christ.

Whether revenants actually intend to harm their victims or not, Lasher's destruction certainly had that effect upon the Mayfairs, the women in particular. This destruction is what motivated Michael Curry to destroy Lasher in much the same way the villagers of Europe dispatched revenants and vampires. The only difference was that Michael killed Lasher by blows to the head rather than by piercing the heart. He did, however, remove the head in keeping with the mythology of revenants and vampires.

Take a look at Wikipedia's listing for revenants by clicking the link below. There are also links to some fascinating documents from earlier centuries about revenants.