Vampires and Demons and Goblins, Oh My!

28 October 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us seek to overcome evil. Evil isn’t as powerful as it seems. Both the evil around us and the evil within us don’t get their force from a moral power, but from an unholy hunger, using us for its own selfish ends.

Let us remember that we can overpower most evil by staying grounded in life, in love, and in an unshakable sense of our own sacred worth. For we are children of the universe, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, the sons and daughters of God. Living out of that identity is living in the light, and evil hates the light.

Let us not be tricked into feeling unworthy of the great gift of life and love that connect us with our core and the core of all other living things.

One of evil’s worst tricks is making us doubt our own worth. So let us never forget that we are as worthy as everyone else, that we are beloved of this place, and beloved by God, by all the gods of life, truth and light. Let us remember this, remember this.

Amen.

SERMON: Vampires and Goblins and Demons, Oh My!

It’s Halloween and I want to talk about vampires. Not those unimaginative literalist suckers who just want to drink blood. I mean the far more numerous, and far more dangerous kind known as psychic vampires, who can suck the life out of you.

These people, in their more extreme forms, are also called sociopaths by psychologists. They’re people who can do immense psychological and sometimes physical harm to others without ever feeling any guilt, which is what makes them so dangerous. We need to recognize them, and know how to protect ourselves from the psychic vampires both around us and also within us. For while only a few have a truly sociopathic character, we can all slip into this behavior, and it never serves us or others well.

It’s about the lack of a conscience, the lack of a capacity for feeling guilty when we demean or harm someone, and that’s a bad thing. The very first personality disorder recognized by psychiatry – that means a permanent, untreatable character disorder – was guiltlessness (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 6)

Sociopaths are now estimated to be 4% of our U.S. population. That’s one in twenty-five people, an incredibly high number. It means that within the roughly 2.5 million people here in and around Travis Country, there are about 100,000 sociopaths. Or that right here in this church of about 600 voting members and over 900 in the whole community, there would be two or three dozen here. Well actually, there aren’t any here. We have these invisible filters across all the doors, so that only completely pure and selfless people can get in. Good thing, too – or this church would just be a representative cross-section of the world around us”.. These people are dangerous, but they are not rare.

Not all life-draining vampires are sociopaths, though all are destructive. They’re dangerous because these are extreme, sometimes unalterable, forms of selfishness. And selfishness is the cardinal sin of every religion in the world of which I”m aware. You really don’t matter to them, except as you serve them and do it their way. Your wishes, needs, spirit, soul – they don’t matter. You’re a piece in a game they have played – played perhaps all of their lives. And if they’ve played it all their lives, You’re not going to change them.

Stories of psychic vampires go back into our prehistory, probably six thousand years and more. So people who live by draining the life out of others have existed in all cultures throughout history. They can be immensely charismatic and seductive, and we seem fascinated by them in that disguise.

As part of my homework for this sermon, besides reading or re-reading two books, I watched seven movies about this character. One was George Cukor’s 1944 classic “Gaslight” about a pure sociopathic character (an excellent and powerful movie in which a young Ingrid Bergman won her first Academy Award for Best Actress and Charles Boyer played her sociopathic husband chillingly).

The other six were all vampire movies. As far as I know, there have only been six well-known vampire movies in the past 85 years. In two of them, both named “Nosferatu,” the monster is presented without any charm at all: just grotesque, hungry evil. Not surprisingly, both these movies, in 1922 and 1979, were commercial failures. We like to see our evil sugar-coated. (If you want to see one of these, I think the 1922 silent film is the better one.)

The four commercially successful films were the four in which the vampire is very charming and seductive. These include Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film “Dracula”, the 1979 version where Frank Langella plays a wonderfully seductive Dracula, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” where charisma and seduction are everywhere. The most recent one, the 1994 movie “Interview with the Vampire,” carries sexy charisma to the extreme of casting Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Antonio Bandera as the male vampires, and an 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst is cast as a beguiling child vampire who will say “I”m hungry, and the city awaits.” Yes, children can be vampires too, from very early ages. It can start early in life, and is found in all professions including psychotherapy, ministry, law enforcement, teaching and parenting; they walk among us and look like us.

If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend the 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by psychologist Martha Stout, and Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves & Others, by Barbara E. Hort (1996).

We now have quite a bit of empirical data on sociopaths. By inserting a series of questions to measure along the Psychopathic Deviate Scale into the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI – it’s Scale 4 in the MMPI), psychologists have collected data from hundreds of thousands of people. That’s where the data come from that say about 4% of our society are sociopaths.

The author relates stories of an eight-year-old son of very wealthy parents who used to blow up frogs for sport – I don’t know whether this was meant as a reference to George W. Bush, who did the same thing, or is just an innocent coincidence. She also told the story of a psychologist who used her power to do great psychological harm to patients who seemed too smart or too pretty – and got away with it for over a decade. Both these authors, psychologists themselves, make a point of warning that there are many sociopaths acting as psychotherapists.

When you suddenly realize that someone in your life is sociopathic, it can be a terrible jolt. The scene that comes to mind for me about this comes from another movie that I saw when I was fourteen: the original version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” It was the most powerful movie of my teen years, and for me even then, it was a movie about the difference between “real” and “unreal” people. The scene that stuck with me – one of the most frightening scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie – comes when the couple (who know of this alien scheme for body-snatchers taking over the earth) are walking down the sidewalk with, I think, one of their uncles, or at least a friend who has known them all their lives. They’re trying to convince him of this unlikely story, and he looks understandably unconvinced. Then as they’re talking, you hear off-camera the sound of a car’s screeching tires, a “thump” and the cry of a dog, and you realize that a car has just killed a dog a few feet to the right. The couple turn immediately to look. But their friend just keeps walking straight ahead, unaffected. That’s when I understood the difference between what I would call “real” and “unreal” people, and it was chilling.

These vampires or sociopaths are people for whom the life force – or even the life – of others simply does not matter. It’s about control, persuasion, winning, manipulating, and the game never ends until they are stopped. And in all the mythic lore, there are no stories of vampires ever committing suicide. Once they start feeding, they will continue until they’re stopped.

Why do they do it? It looks like it may be about half genetic and half cultural.

The Texas Adoption Project (which followed adopted children for 35 years) reports that, where scores on the Psychopathic Deviate scale are concerned, individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have never met, much more than they do the adoptive parents who raised them (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 123). So a person’s tendency to possess certain sociopathic characteristics is partially born in the blood, perhaps as much as 50% (The Sociopath Next Door, pp. 123-4).

Where does the other half or more come from? It’s curious. There are no data linking sociopathy with childhood abuse or attachment disorders. (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 134) But it does look like our culture helps create sociopaths.

In America, the guiltless manipulation of other people blends in with social expectations a lot more than it would in Asian countries, for instance. Asian nations have traditionally taught that we are interconnected, and that we owe something to others, both through their religions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and through their secular cultures. And in Asian nations, the percentage of sociopaths are between .04% and .13%, or one-thirtieth to one-one-hundredth of ours (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 136). That’s a big difference, and a frightening one. A growing number of our citizens” bodies and souls are being claimed by the body-snatchers.

A lot of charismatic leaders are such vampires, and they’re easy to spot, though people don’t seem to spot them until it’s too late. You have a charismatic vampire any time a leader or teacher sets himself up to be a conduit of wisdom, truth, or divinity that is not directly available to lesser mortals – like us. This applies to religious or political leaders, for instance, who believe God has spoken directly to them – but not to those who disagree with them (Unholy Hungers, p. 52).

Most of the vampires that we meet, though, aren’t this dramatic or large. They’re kind of ordinary, though psychologists who work with their victims will tell you they do immense and lifelong harm. I knew a young woman who was a very bright girl, brighter than her sociopathic boyfriend. When she graduated from college at the top of her class, her C-average boyfriend said, “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing that you’re pretty smart, because you’ll never be very pretty.” That’s a vampire, sucking the life out of his own girlfriend. When I heard this story, I wished it had ended with her telling him, “Look, Bucky Beaver, beauty is only skin deep – like you!” But it didn’t end that way. His remark took life from her, that she didn’t get back for many years.

Then there are the more passive-aggressive vampires – probably my least favorite type – who make others serve their desires by hanging around like bats, poisoning the air, making the place toxic until people finally decide to give in so they can have some peace. These people aren’t just passive-aggressive selfish pests; they are vampires, because they don’t care at all – or even notice – the wishes, needs or values of anyone else. Others exist only to serve their wishes. This has to begin sounding more familiar, doesn’t it? They’re just not rare.

Some of these vampires, goblins and demons do it through outright power and charisma. Others do it through evoking pity, which makes people let them get away with murder. Pitying someone can blind us to the fact that they use that pity to paralyze us while they behave badly again and again. Pity is like the anesthetic that lets the operation happen.

One author says that the combination of consistently bad, selfish or demeaning behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a sociopath’s forehead as you will ever be given (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 109).

The best-known example is the battering husband who sits at the table crying, head in hands after beating her again, apologizing, saying it will never happen again. But it will (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 108).

The pity play is used to wipe the slate clean so they can begin the cycle of hurting and repenting again. The crocodile tears come not from deep feeling but from a deep kind of scheming.

How do you spot Vampires? What can you do?

The clearest way to know that you have been in the presence of a vampire or a sociopath is a feeling of shameful insufficiency. We should look around for a psychic vampire whenever we feel that we are somehow flawed – not because of what we”ve done, but because of who we inherently are (or are not). We feel we are not good enough, or thin or smart or sexy enough: “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing you’re pretty smart because you’ll never be very pretty.” (Unholy Hungers, p. 15) Whenever we experience this feeling of shameful insufficiency, we have probably been the victim of a psychic vampire (Unholy Hungers, p. 16). They can be parents, relatives, friends, teachers, ministers, psychotherapists, spouses, children – anyone.

For a long time, I’ve had a mental image of a sociopath that has helped me understand them, and might be useful to you. I learned it from a psychologist I knew when I was 21. We were talking about a very pretty woman we both knew who was a striking example of this style – very quick, witty, seductive, and manipulative. At one point, I said, “You’re a psychologist. Can’t you people fix her?” He said, “You have the wrong picture. You’re picturing people like this as a very nice house which has a big gap in its foundation, and you wonder if the gap can’t just be bricked up. But no. Instead, imagine a building – several stories tall – that is very strong and attractive, with a foundation that goes fairly deep, but which is built at a twenty-degree angle. It’s stronger than most of the buildings around it, but dangerous for anyone who runs into it the wrong way.”

So you have probably been around a psychic vampire or sociopath if you leave feeling deeply unworthy, insufficient, flawed. Or if they have this cycle of demeaning or vicious behavior, followed by dramatic apologies that let you feel sorry for them so they can begin the cycle again – which they will. Or if They’re the passive kind that hang around like bats, making the psychic atmosphere toxic until they get their way.

Now the question that’s in every vampire movie: how do you kill a vampire? Understand I am not talking about physically killing something or someone – just ending their ability to drain your life and the life of others. And I don’t just mean other people who are vampires. We can also fall into this drive for power over others at all costs.

One psychiatrist I’ve read has said, “I am convinced that we enter the world seeking love, and when we don’t find love, we settle for power.” (Jean Shinoda Bolen, quoted in Unholy Hungers, p. 17).

That seems right to me too. So killing an inner vampire means we need to go back to the moment when we couldn’t find love and settled for exploitation (Unholy Hungers, pp. 215-216).

The vampire myths are helpful in telling us how to kill psychic vampires. They say that the most desirable woods from which to fashion the stake to kill a vampire are hawthorn and ash. Hawthorn blooms early in the spring, and its bloom signals the beginning of spring’s rebirth from winter’s death – a regenerative moment that would be odious to a vampire. Ash is the wood of Yggdrasil, the tree of Norse mythology from which all life was created (Unholy Hungers, p. 60). So the enemy of the destroyer of life is life itself, renewed and refocused around a living center inside of us.

And that brings us back to church.

This is where honest religion can help, because its job is to help us find and reconnect with healthy life, to be filled by it. And religion is part of almost all the vampire stories, where they say a cross or a consecrated wafer is something vampires can’t stand. The reason the cross and the consecrated host worked against vampires was because those were seen as the symbols of the sacred. But the most recent vampire movies (since 1979) make it clear that these things don’t really have any power.

In “Interview with the Vampire” they acknowledge that those are myths made up by Bram Stoker a century ago. That’s really a measure of religion’s loss of respect over the past fifty years or so. But what’s right about this is that when we are connected to what is holy and gives us life, or when we are serving our calling, doing what we are meant to do, we are nearly immune to the power of a vampire because he or she has nothing important to offer us: we already have life, which is what they don’t have. The myths call vampires “the undead,” but they’re also “the non-living.”

So: do the sociopaths win? Is life really stacked in favor of those who can take advantage of it? Are the rest of us – as sociopaths believe – just fools for valuing feelings and love, which make us so easy for them to take advantage of? Do they win? No, they don’t win. Martha Stout, the author of The Sociopath Next Door, sums it up in a way worth repeating:

“One study found 75% of sociopaths were dependent on alcohol, and 50% on other drugs, to dilute the boredom (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 187).”Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do hot have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 188).”A person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naive individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 191).”At the other extreme, interviewers talked with 23 people with super-conscience and selflessness and found they shared three traits.

(1) “certainty,” about what is right and what they must do;

(2) “positivity”, an optimistic outlook;

(3) “unity of self and moral goals.” integrating their moral stance with their concept of their own identity, and the perceived sameness of their moral and personal goals (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 194).

“So my best psychological advice is, do not wish to have less conscience. Wish for more (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 195). “Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 216).

“If we can connect with our life force – our psychological immune system – we are far more invulnerable to psychic predators because what they offer is trumped by the life we have within us. Some of you have experienced this when you were in a toxic relationship and finally came to your senses or stood up to one of these predators. It takes some courage and heroism to defeat a vampire, but not the action-hero kind. Even the vampire myths say it’s feminine energy that destroys a vampire.

There’s a great story Martha Stout tells about this. There was a bully on a bus of middle-schoolers who was sitting next to a retarded boy, picking on him, making fun of him – something he had done often. But this day, there was a young girl sitting in the seat behind him. She leaned forward and said, “That’s mean. Quit it!” He sneered at her and called her some names, but she held her ground and he got up and moved.

Confronting a predator is like exposing them to the sunlight, and vampires hate sunlight. Why, as we grow up, do we so often lose the courage to confront the predators in our lives, our relationships, our institutions, our government? The people who habitually put others down and demean people or whole classes of people – why do we lose the courage to stand up and say, “That’s mean. Quit it!” To say it and mean it and not back down? (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 98)

Here was a girl on the school bus who knew she was worth something, that her friend was worth something, and she wouldn’t let a big bully pretend otherwise.

And humor has a lot of power to dispel the vampire’s strength – because it’s hard to be intimidated when you’re laughing (“Look, Bucky Beaver”.) And there is something tragicomic about a person trying to live in a non-human way; they would have to be, and live among, an entirely different species of Snatched Bodies for it to work.

If we can remember a few basic facts, we can be protected from vampires. First, when you identify a psychic vampire or sociopath, get them out of your emotional life immediately. You may still have to work with them or see them at family or professional gatherings. But never again give them any emotional opening, because they will use it only to manipulate you, and you are not likely ever to beat them at this game they play so well.

Just remember that you are a child of the universe, a child of God, and that it really doesn’t get any better than that. You are not inadequate, not broken, not in need of someone else’s special redemption. You are loved. And love, fired full bore, will blow away the nastiest vampire, like a blast of sunlight.

It’s not too hard to make most monsters vanish. Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too. But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them, like saying “That’s mean. Quit it!”

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way. The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts. It must never have rained in the land of Oz, though I don’t think it was the water that did it. I think the water was just stage business. What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking or backing down. It took a girl who was not afraid. The trick looks like magic, but it isn’t magic.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween is that most of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears. Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities. On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.

Happy Halloween, precious people.