Vampires, Nude Mediums, Witchcraft: "Sex and the Supernatural"

Author of about 60 books on ghosts and the paranormal, ranging from haunts in Illinois and New Orleans to the Bell Witch story and the St Louis exorcism that inspired William Blatty's Exorcist, Troy Taylor now tackles the role of sex in the supernatural.

Top of the list of blatant eroticism mixed with the supernatural is one of the most ubiquitous dark images of modern cinema. Sex is a key to the whole vampire mystique.

Look at the subject: a vampire is generally a male who has an irresistable, supernatural power over women who yield to him without hesitation. Remember that the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi, was not promoted as a monster movie but as "the strangest love story ever told." Bram Stoker's modern storytelling counterparts have been less subtle in exploiting the relationship between sex and vampires.

Troy Taylor delves into the vampire myth and relates the fiction and of the fact, including the true stories of Vlad Dracula and of the Blood Countess, aging Hungarian aristocrat Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in the blood of hundreds of maidens to preserve her beauty. The vampire myth has, of course, influenced murderers like the Dusseldorf Vampire, Peter Kurten and the Vampire of Hanover, Fritz Haarman, convicted of 27 murders, portions of the victims' bodies winding up in his butcher shop. Both Kurten and Haarman preyed in 1920's Germany.

Bram Stoker's vampirism defies logic but the Spiritualist movement did exist built around the concept of contacting the spirits of departed loved ones. The movement arose in the mid-1800s when the Fox sisters started communicating with a supposed spirit at their home using a knocking code.

The movement grew and mediums helped provide contact for grieving families. One even visited the Lincoln White House on a number of occasions. But the nature of the movement attracted scammers. Female mediums were the norm in Spiritualism and as part of their con, the fraudulent mediums supposedly proved there was nothing up their sleeve by dispensing with sleeves. In fact, they often dispensed with clothing altogether. The ultimate magician's tool of misdirection. Not only a fairly convincing gesture, but certainly a huge unadvertised draw for repressed Victorian gentlemen clients.

Volumes can and have been written about the medieval church's obsession with witchcraft where sex was a major motivator. Celibate priests and monks found themselves unable to focus their attention on godly matters with impure temptation filling their heads of women and carnal desire. This resulted in classifying those women most tempting to the priest as the devil's handmaidens, seeking to corrupt them. An industry grew around searching out these women for harsh judgjment, Even their pets, regarded as familiars, were killed. (The slaughter of cats led to the boom in rats which, in turn, helped in the spread of the Black Death which killed a quarter of the European population.) The result was an estimated 100,000 burned at the stake for consorting with the Devil. (The bible, by the way, never really describes Satan. However, because of the old religion which had goat-legged Pan as its diety, guess who the medieval church decided Satan most resembled?)

Taylor delves into other areas as well, including the pre-Christian religious views of sex and the supernatural, ritual sex magic, the Satanic groups of more modern times, demonic rapists, the relationship of sex to demonic possession, poltergeists which are often ascribed to psychokinetic activity unwittingly caused by an adolescent, and there's even a short chapter on making whoopee, as they used to say on TV's Match Game. A short chapter, obviously, because who's willing to go on record that they had sex with a ghost?

Another execcelent book from Taylor.