Table Of ContentThe Theology of Dracula
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The Theology of Dracula
Reading the Book
of Stoker as Sacred Text
NOËL MONTAGUE-ÉTIENNE RARIGNAC
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Rarignac, Noël Montague-Étienne.
The theology of Dracula : reading the book of Stoker as sacred
text / Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-6499-9
softcover : acid free paper
1. Stoker, Bram, 1847–1912. Dracula. 2. Christianity in
literature. 3. Horror tales, English—History and criticism.
4. Dracula, Count (Fictitious character) 5. Vampires in
literature. I. Title.
PR6037.T617D7864 2012
823'.8—dc23 2011051316
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© 2012 Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac.All rights reserved
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or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the publisher.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Preface 1
The Sealed Receptacle 7
Genesis 17
Revelation 55
Revolution 91
Syzygy 101
The Children of Night 124
Kingdom Come 150
The Overturned Lamp 181
Coniunctio Oppositorium 196
Bibliography 224
Index 229
v
Acknowledgments
This is to recognize the generous contribution made to this project by
Professor Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., who took time to read and comment on
four or five first draft chapters of someone he has never met. Having come
across his essay “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest and Victorian Wasteland,” I
sought Mark out as the only critic to have approached Stoker’s text in ways
that were familiar to me. Certain paragraphs of the book were written in
direct answer to his probing questions (“What do you mean by sacred?”)
regarding my own conclusions. Thanks is also due to Dr. Massimo Introvigne
of the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CENSUR) in Turin for his
willingness to read and comment on sections of a book being written by an
absolute stranger. The generosity of these scholars deserves acknowledgment
and this expression of my gratitude.
I am also grateful for the assistance of many dedicated librarians, par-
ticularly the staff of the Bibliothèque Gaston Baty, Paris, the Bibliothèque de
l’Arsenal, Paris; the Bibliothèque de Chalons-sur-Marne, Chalons-sur-Marne,
and the special collections department of the John Rylands Library, Man-
chester, England. I would like to thank my old friend Jacques Aumont for
his belief in what analysis can accomplish and his embrace of the descriptive
act; M. le Comte d’Haussonville and Esther Duran, administrative director
of the Château de Coppet; the Frères et Soeurs de Jerusalem au Mont-Saint-
Michel; Isabelle Grasswill and the staff of the Monuments nationaux de
France; and Lizzie Calligas and her band of friends at the Cyceon in Elefsina
who were so kind and helpful to me as I walked the Sacred Way.
vi
Preface
Largely drafted during the late spring and early summer of 2010, the
chapters of this book quickly followed each other into existence. While some
sustained hard thinking went into the effort, an unstanchable flow sourced in
Stoker’s novel carried the project forward, new chapters appearing every second
or third week. An informed belief that Draculamight be a sacred text, derived
from a study of earlier iterations of the Vampire Tale, provided irresistible impe-
tus; the ways in which the novel is a spiritual meditation carried the project
forward to completion, leaving its author awed by the depth of the work
Stoker bequeathed to posterity and by its cleverness and conceptual beauty.
While medical researchers doggedly pursue the study of deadly patholo-
gies without ever being suspected of being enthusiasts of disease, within the
domains of letters, arts, and humanities there is an assumption that some kind
of pre-existing passion for a subject must be present to drive the researcher,
that scholars pursue only those subjects for which they feel a particular affinity,
that somehow the researcher’s leisure interests and professional activities align.
This is not necessarily true, since it is not the case here. No inexplicable
attraction to the sanguine, no predilection for superstition, no dedication to
the vampire as a Romantic figure nor fervent fan’s love of fantasy and horror
motivated this exercise.
My initial interest in the Vampire is attributable to a disquieted curiosity
about the increasing prevalence of deliberately grotesque cultural objects that
slowly but surely are filling the world, objects that seem to emanate from
some cultural plasma out of which forgotten totems, gods, and mythologies
recombine into icons of virtual beliefs seemingly handed down to us by ances-
tors not our own. At a time when practices of self-mutilation, fetishism, and
degradation flourish, fantasy is given precedent over practical and prudent
behavior and the virtual interpenetrates the real, the grotesque is our lingua
franca. Through fiction, film, video games, pixilated avatars, and extruded-
resin statuettes the grotesque exists to challenge our evolving global commu-
1
2 Preface
nity and its predicates, expressing itself primarily as an often-reiterated question:
If the aesthetic object presupposes and projects its natural receptor—f rom
materials and production techniques to symbolic language and encoded dis-
course—is contemporary cultural production suggesting that, subordinated to
a tradition-displacing, commercial cult of the grotesque, humanity has become
horrifying to itself?
If no pathology, the grotesque constitutes a phenomenon worthy of
examination. Following Edmund Burke’s mid–eighteenth century codification
of our ideas on the beautiful and the sublime as complementarily charged ele-
ments of a dynamic system, a modern poetics has emerged in which the grotesque
vies with beauty as art’s object. Congealing through emergent genres, forms,
and media concurrent to a period of successive and interrelated transforma-
tions so intense as to be termed “revolutions”—rapid demographic shift
(urbanization), equally radical changes in prevailing modes of production/dis-
tribution of goods (industrialization, development of transportation and com-
munication networks) and social organization (democratization, secularization)—
the anti–beauty paradigm transported the West from the agrarianism that had
endured since the late Neolithic era to the mechanized mercantile societies
that began to take form over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this
dawn of the industrial, twilight of the agrarian, the grotesque attained the
increasingly dominant position it has maintained ever since, to begin extend-
ing its influence beyond the decorative or peripheral to permeate—from
underlying structures to overarching themes—entire artworks and modes of
creation. The grotesque became its own subject, object, and creative process.
Parallel to technological, political, and aesthetic displacements, the
processes through which cultural objects became socially enfranchised under-
went a polar shift as well: Instead of integrating alien symbols through trans-
formative accommodation and recontextualization as traditional cultures had,
our post-revolutionary hegemonic culture began to appropriate symbols
through assimilative desacralization, decontextualization, and fragmentation,
the grotesque often being produced through the promiscuous mating of the
sacred and the vulgar, the archaic and the modern, the mythic and the com-
mercial. If this tendency began by a Romantic turn towards orientalism, famil-
iar titles Tomb Raiders, Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones:
Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Forsaken Gods suggest the penetration of the cul-
tural mainstream this creative process of sacrilegious coupling has more
recently enjoyed.
The English Gothic and related “paraliteratures,” unwearying carriers of
the grotesque’s poetic virus, helped found what Victor Hugo termed “The
Third Epoch of Poetry”—our own era—during which the grotesque has
become coequal to and dominant over beauty as art’s subject and object. A
Preface 3
lively, worldly aesthetic, no longer subservient to notions of the sacred and
classic, the grotesque’s premier iconoclastic, confrontational, and enduring
genre was Horror; its primordial emblematic antihero, the Vampire. Yet if
horror arose with and out of the death of the sacred, it seems that its contin-
uation could not have been assured without its ghost, for, surprisingly, horror
as perpetuated by the Vampire repeatedly serves to reframe myth.
In my book Dionysus Unmasked, being prepared for publication, I main-
tain that within the Vampire Tale dwells a Neoplatonist allegory, developed
from Thomas Taylor’s understanding of Eleusinian rites, whose Neolithic
roots entwine a mythological nexus focused on an agrarian order’s preoccu-
pation: the tension between light and dark. The cyclical interplay between
those opposing values drives all the great vampire texts to be produced over
the succeeding centuries. The Vampire appears as a refugee from earlier ages
and revisits the rise of the dying god, a corollary to the development of metallic
tools and agriculture, and his cosmetic attainment of supremacy over blood-
thirsty fertility goddesses in order to inform cosmic rites of renewal. Con-
trasting markedly with other creations of Gothic horror, the Vampire permits,
indeed propounds and perpetuates, a sacred discourse. Although the lessons
that can be abstracted from the Vampire to inform the grotesque are not the
topic of this book, it does seem that the Vampire suggests that the grotesque
speaks to a spiritual unease and general alienation from society and ourselves.
Remarkably, the Vampire prescribes a spiritual remedy, and it is within this
context that Dracula—as aesthetic emblem and synthesizing paragon of earlier
vampire texts—was approached.
Upon its creation, the English-speaking world critically dismissed the
Vampire Tale as abhorrent, grotesque, even as its genius was being hailed on
the Continent by the likes of Johann Goethe and Charles Nodier. Continental
romantics welcomed the Vampire and rapidly assimilated it into new and
evolving forms. The internationalization of the grotesque gained great impetus
through Nodier’s insertion of the vampire into the still developing form of
melodrama—creating a radical variant that not only placed a Manichean uni-
verse in suspenseful imbalance, but plunged its divided protagonist into a
metaphysical conflict pitting body against soul. In transforming melodrama,
the Vampire’s content projected form. The Vampire has since proved to be a
peerless generator of grotesque formal developments and a singular motor for
producing modernity and what follows, and whose unique ability to spawn
new poetic vehicles has not yet been exhausted.
Stoker’s Victorian novel, though separated from the literary Gothic by
any close historic standard, insists on allying itself in subject matter and style
with the Gothic—echoes of Emily St. Aubert’s coach ride to Udolpho being
heard at once in Jonathan Harker’s journal—and most closely with its horror
