Miguel Conner on The Vampire Myth: From Lilith to Wetiko

Summary

Gnostic author Miguel Conner traces the vampire myth from the Mesopotamian night demon Lilith through Slavic heretic-revenants, colonial bloodsucker legends, and Bram Stoker's Dracula to Jack D. Forbes' concept of Wetiko, the 'cannibal psychosis' of greed. He argues that every age invents a vampire that mirrors its own fears, whether death, outsiders, disease, desire, or consumption. Using Jungian archetypes and Gnostic cosmology, he presents the vampire as the shadow made flesh and asks whether the parasitic forces feeding on humanity are outside us or within us.

Key takeaways

• 1Lilith is traced to the Sumerian tale 'Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree' and to the Akkadian night demons Lilitu and Ardat Lili. Later Jewish tradition made her Adam's first wife, and the Zohar equated the Gnostic figure Norea with Lilith.
• 2The Indian Rakshasa myth is framed as Indo-Aryan demonization of the native Dasa peoples. Citing Jason Reza Jorjani, Conner suggests the Scythians, who drank blood from enemies' skulls (Queen Tomyris allegedly did this with Cyrus the Great), may be the original vampire story and even the 'original Tartaria.'
• 3Slovenian historian Johann Weikhard von Valvasor recorded the 'strigon' Jure Grando (died 1656). Serbian villagers staked and burned Petar Blagojević's corpse after his death in 1725. In the Russian North, the word for 'heretic' (eretik) was also used for vampire-sorcerers.
• 4The Peruvian Pishtaco legend holds that Spanish conquistadors and missionaries harvested native fat, allegedly for wounds, weapons, church bells, and statues.
• 5Jack D. Forbes' 1978 book 'Columbus and Other Cannibals' recasts the Cree Wetiko as a contagious psychosis of greed behind imperialism and ecocide. Paul Levy extends the idea to Archons, hungry ghosts, and mind parasites.
• 6Conner claims his 1990s vampire novel 'Stargazer' was channeled: written while he was Catholic, it named a heroine 'Medea from the tribe of Seth' and called an oppressive surveillance computer 'The Matrix.' Guest Adrian also cites Colin Wilson's 'The Mind Parasites,' which concludes that 'the parasites are us.'

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

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Excerpt from Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, Oct 22, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.