Theos-Talk Archives (September 1997 Message tl00195)

Ok folks,

I'm gonna try to explain about ghouls here and if you have sensitive stomach
I might suggest you hit the delete button now.

We all know about psychic vampires.  They can be voluntary or involuntary,
but they basically feed off the energy of people.  Usually the psychic
vampire will feed off of people who are young, healthy and have an energy
field to match, in order to increase their own vital energy and maybe acquire
certain qualities they feel they lack (in the case of voluntary vampirism).

Psychic ghouls are somewhat different.  They feed off the energy of the sick
and the dying.  It is as though something in their system requires the energy
of decay to keep running.  The result is a human energy field that looks,
well, very very unpleasant because it has acquired all of the tendencies of
it's victims.

Now, one would expect that such a person would not live long, that the
disease patterns would manifest in the physical body, but for some reason
this is almost never the case.  They remain dormant in the energy field but
rarely do anything else.

In our extremely life-affirming culture, the idea of death is considered a
perversion of nature and thus the very concept of a being that would feed of
the energies that manifest as death approaches is hardly credible or
comprehensible.  Yet in other cultures such a thing is quite believable and
extremely possible.  The phenomenon reached its western peak in the
death-affirming cultures of the late middle ages and the nineteenth century
(Queen Victoria was a prime and obvious example) and many of the pre and
post-death rituals of those periods (some of which still carry into our own
more enlightened age) have less to do with mourning than with psychic
feeding.  The natural human reaction to such people is revulsion, hence the
distaste one feels for undertakers or workers in nursing homes.  There is
something fundamentally unclean about many of them but we cannot put our
fingers on precisely what it is.

The psychic ghoul will automatically place himself in a position where he is
near to the dying.  This is an instinctive reaction, because unlike the
psyhic vampire, there is no cultural glamor associated with the practice.  It
is rather an unconsciously felt need.  However, as the ghoul progresses, he
may become conscious of this need and his actions will become more
deliberate.  He will be aware that in the presence of the dying he is
energized and consciously work to increase the intake of that energy.  Such a
person will want the dying to be as conscious of their death process as
possible, so as to increase the amount of necrotic energy flowing from them,
even to the point of denying medical care (one has to wonder how many of
Mother Theresa's charges would have lived longer with a shot of antibiotics
instead of prayers) and will consciously, or unconsciously find justification
for such a denial, usually cloaking it in some psuedo-spiritual gobbledygook.

In most cases, the only danger the ghoul presents to the healthy is a
psychological one, the possibility of the revulsion becoming paranoia, but
otherwise the healthy individual has no reason to either fear, or in our
culture, even suspect the ghoul of being other than an individual with a
decidedly unpleasant occupation.

Chuck the Heretic