The Inversion of Good & Evil in Vampire Stories

About this episode

The episode explores the inversion of good and evil in vampire stories, particularly through the lens of Gnosticism and its cultural implications.

Welcome back to another episode of the regular A Ghost in the Machine Podcast . As many of you already know, I’ve started doing a separate podcast series called “ Paging the Everlasting Man ,” in which I read chapters of G. K. Chesterton books, starting with Heretics , and give some commentary after each reading. If you like Chesterton, check it out. While not reading Chesterton, I have I recently read (or rather, listened to the audio books of) a couple of vampire novels: The Delicate Dependency , by Michael Talbot (who also wrote The Holographic Universe ), and Dracula by Bram Stoker. I figured Talbot would infuse the story with esoteric symbolism, and he delivered on that expectation in some interesting ways. For better or worse, it is a thoroughly Gnostic-ish novel, but while I am sympathetic to some aspects of the Gnostic perspective, I have noticed that Gnosticism has a dark side: it has a disturbingly high correlation with LGBT-adjacent perversions and inversions. (Speaking of, I guess it’s Pride-Goeth-Before-the-Fall-Month now.) Case in point, the Wachowski sisters, formerly known as the Wachowski brothers, directors of that most explicitly Gnostic-themed movie of them…

People in this episode

Host: Daniel D

Topics covered

• vampire stories
• Gnosticism
• LGBT themes
• literature analysis
• Chesterton

Keywords

• vampires
• Gnosticism
• Chesterton
• literature
• LGBT
• symbolism
• Dracula

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