Vampire Ritual Book, © by Michelle Belanger, [2003], at sacred-texts.com. Material can be reproduced for personal use on an individual basis in private spellbooks, books of shadows, and the like. Reproduction for distribution in any media or format is not allowed. To reprint material that appears in this book in a book, magazine, or website, please contact the author at the official House Kheperu website. For more information, consult www.kheperu.org
Back in 1999, Father Sebastian asked me if I would be up to the task of composing a vampire ritual book for the Sanguinarium. This was at a time when I was highly active on a couple of Internet sites that allowed freelancers to post their work and then paid them a small amount of money for each independent hit that their work received. I had found early on that I had great success with my rites and rituals on these sites. I got a great deal of fan mail from Pagans and Wiccans who had encountered my work on the sites, and there were many requests to use my rituals for handfastings, child naming ceremonies, funerals, and the like.
I had already been hard at work developing the ritual structure for House Kheperu, and some of the early versions of seasonal rites and rites of initiation were up on my website at www.kheperu.org. These also gained me a great deal of email from individuals who wanted to make use of the rites or who simply wanted to let me know how much the rituals there had moved them.
However, House Kheperu is a pretty unique animal in the vampire community. At that time, our caste system was still very controversial, and many of our past life beliefs also distinguished us from other vampire households. As the past life material was worked into a number of our rites, it made them a little hard for groups that didn’t have that background to make use of. Many of the other rites have integral roles played by members of each caste, and this further excluded the Kheprian rituals from a widespread, general use. Several groups were still borrowing bits and pieces of our rites and integrating them into their own practices, mainly because there were no other well-written ritual traditions publicly available that were vampire-based.
At first, Sebastian and I considered developing “official” Sanguinarium rituals, but I tabled that idea right away because there was too great a chance such a tradition would just degrade into something rigid and inflexible. Based on my experiences with ritual and my strong beliefs on the purpose of ritual for the group and the individual, I felt it would be healthier to develop sample rituals that would serve as a guideline for others who could use them as inspiration for writing their own.
I wrote up a number of rites, rituals, and prayers that I felt would appeal to a generalized vampire audience. In the meantime, Sebastian continued to evolve the Sanguinarium, taking it in different directions, until it gave way to his private occult order, the OSV. The idea for the Sanguinarium ritual book was tabled, and nothing more became of the manuscript. However, as I’m wont to do, I kept the completed manuscript on my hard drive, tinkering with it now and again, and adding new rituals as they occurred to me. Some were adaptations of Kheprian rites, but others were designed exclusively to answer needs I saw within the vampire subculture.
Today the community is constantly changing, but the need created by organizations like the Sanguinarium remains. Many people are drawn toward the vampire as a spiritual archetype, and those people feel a need for rites and rituals that differ from those belonging to more typical Pagan and Wiccan traditions. In the interest of helping such people develop a tradition more suited to their tastes, I picked up the old ritual book, dusted it off, and presented it here. Several of these rites have a distinctly Sanguinarium flair, for they were written with that tradition in mind.
Even in its heyday, the Sanguinarium did not appeal to everyone, but there are many individuals who celebrate the spirituality of the vampire. Because of this, even with the lingering Sanguinarium influence, I feel the rituals compiled here can have relevance to some aspects of our community. Certainly, with a few alterations here and there to customize the rites for a specific group, many of these rituals can be appropriate to anyone who feels drawn to that powerful archetype. It’s important to keep in mind that even at the time of their original writing, none of these rituals were cast in stone. The section on “living ritual” addresses this more fully, but suffice to say that I firmly believe rituals should grow and change as the need for them grows and changes, and individuals should never feel shy about tailoring the rites to their own tastes in whatever ways seem most appropriate. Perhaps the most important lesson you can take away from the introductory portions of this book is the knowledge that a ritual has no power if it does not appeal directly to those who are participating in it. As such, treat your ritual work as divine play. Change the rules when it feels right, and adapt the words so you can feel your heart resonating through them.
--Michelle Belanger
December 14, 2003