Vampire: The Masquerade, indigenous legacy and the origin of contemporary myth.
By Aredze Xukurú and Porakê Martins
Translated by Rafael d’Ávila
Vampire: The Masquerade has always been a game focused on European culture and mythology, especially Christian biblical mythology, as seen through the very particular way in which it explores the ethical conflicts between the inner Beast and the Humanity of its characters as a central theme, something we have already discussed HERE. This is not surprising considering White Wolf, the company that created the World of Darkness, was originally based in the United States of America, and whether we like it or not, all of us are immersed in the Eurocentric “Western” culture that, in fact, holds global hegemony at least since the Victorian Era.
The game's own mythology and metaplot declaredly sought inspiration from the vampires established in the popular imagination by Hollywood, in films such as Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), Dracula (1958), The Hunger (1983), The Lost Boys (1987) and Fright Night (1985-88). Interestingly enough, the emblematic Interview with the Vampire (1994) would only premiere three years after the release of the first Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. Such cinematographic works were based on 19th century European Gothic literature, in short stories such as The Vampyre by John William Polidori (1819), Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1871) and the acclaimed novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897), in which, decades later, the famous U.S.A. writer Anne Rice would inspire her acclaimed works. This Victorian literature, in turn, was partially informed by the classic myths of European popular culture, such as that of the Greek Empusa and Lamia, that of the Roman Strix, and, most importantly, that of the East European Slavic traditions, historically marginalized in the context of Europe itself. However, what may be surprising to discover is that the native cultures of the American continent have had a decisive and underestimated influence on the way we imagine vampires since the “Victorian Era”, despite being relegated to secondary roles by the game and hardly related to vampires in the contemporary imagination.
In classical Greek and Roman myths, the creatures that would inspire current vampires were usually female figures, emissaries of the wrath of deities such as Hecate. These were spectral or monstrous creatures endowed with the ability to change shape and often related to animals such as snakes or owls, and were not restricted to drinking the blood of mortals, being capable of devouring their victims as well.
On the other hand, in the popular traditions of Eastern Europe, to which we seemingly owe the very etymology of the term “Vampire”, creatures such as the vrykolakas were associated with the risen dead, clawing out of their graves for the lack of appropriate funeral rituals. These would often be described as decomposing bodies driven only by their most basic instincts, something much closer to what we would understand today as “pop culture zombies”. These creatures were even confused with revenants or lycanthropes, due to their monstrous and instinctive nature, and tended to persecute the living and spread diseases without necessarily needing to feed on blood.
So far, nothing as glamorous as what the term “Vampire” evokes in our imagination, right?
Modern vampires, who desperately depend on the blood of the living to remain young, seductive and powerful, capable of walking with ease among mortals, would only appear in Gothic literature of the 19th century. But not without first incorporating important contributions stemming from the fascination that the culture of native peoples of the “New World” instilled on the European imagination, from the “Colonial Era” and onwards. This is where things get really interesting.
Gothic literature owes part of its inspiration to reports from the “Age of Discoveries”, which captured the popular imagination in European metropolises throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Stories of civilizations considered by them as “exotic”, peoples such as the Mexicas, the Mayans, the Incas and the Tupinambás, whose treasures and relics, looted throughout a bloody colonial process, flooded the coffers and museums in Europe, as well as the imagination and literature of the Europeans. Reports such as those made by Amerigo Vespucci, Gaspar de Carvajal, Hans Staden and Anthony Knivet, that disseminated a prejudiced, mystifying, Eurocentric, fascinating and terrifying vision of the “New World”. Highlighting cultural elements that sought to reinforce the supposedly primitive and savage character of the native peoples such as the ritual anthropophagy of the Tupinambás, and the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs. Practices that in their own terms were not absolutely unknown to the peoples of Europe, but that in the European imagination appeared as curious reminiscences of civilizations supposedly “lost in time”. This supposed savagery and primitivism, however, contrasted with the material and cultural wealth of indigenous peoples, exported to the “Old World” in ships filled with gold, silver and works of art. A bounty that fuel discussions and speculations to this day and which, at that time, already fed the colonial propaganda machine, with myths such as the fantastic cities of El Dorado or Paititi, and enchanted lakes such as Parime and Iaci-Uaru.
It was those reports that kept alive in the European imagination the image of beings lost in time, as sophisticated as they were thirsty for the blood of unwary victims sacrificed in the name of obscure deities, who in the European imagination made rivers of blood flow from the top of their sumptuous, golden and smaragdine temples.
This inspiration, the result of the fascinated distortion of Native American cultures by the colonial gaze, would inspire writers who, in the following centuries, would lay the foundations not only of Gothic literature, but also of all “Western” horror, from H.P. Lovecraft to the acclaimed works of Stephen King with its infamous cliché of indigenous cemeteries.
This influence, which was never properly recognized by Hollywood, with the possible exception of an emblematic scene at the end of the infamous From Dusk till Dawn (1996), can be traced in the “DNA” of Vampire: The Masquerade in the standard forms of the classic Protean Discipline. After all, considering only the inspiration of European traditions, it would make much more sense for said discipline to allow vampires to take the form of wolves, owls or snakes, never that of a bat, as vampire bats are animals present exclusively in the New World. Apparently, Bram Stoker established the cliché linking Vampires to vampire bats that dominates the “pop imagination” today in his classic novel, drawing on colonial reports about the fauna of the “New World” and in native myths such as those of the Mayan Camazotz and the Apinajé Cupendiepes.
Despite all this, it would take a few decades for the World of Darkness to make its way back to its unsuspected roots by approaching indigenous cultures as something more than footnotes and obscure supplements.
Canonical precedents regarding vampires native to the New World
The first official reference to vampires of indigenous origin in the World of Darkness was made in the obscure supplement Awakening: Diablerie Mexico (1992), an adventure for the very first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. In the best hack'n slash style, it promised players in the 1990s Mexico setting an opportunity to take a sip of the vitae of Mictlantecuhtli, a Native American fourth-generation methuselah, asleep beneath an ancient Mayan pyramid.
The basis for a slightly less caricatured representation, however, would only come more than a decade later, with the introduction of the Tlacique bloodline in the revised version of the Clan Book of the Followers of Set (2001), already in the third edition of the game. It was followed by an equally obscure native bloodline of necromancers linked to the Giovanni clan, called Pisanob. The latter, however, would probably be the result of the colonial process, being originally Embraced by some intrepid methuselah who decided to accompany the colonizers on their journey to the “New World”.
Thus, for a long time in the canon of Vampire: The Masquerade the Tlacique were lonely and renegade stars of the game's setting for pre-colonial America, alongside generic Gangrel and Nosferatu as native antagonists/allies. Still, Tlacique themselves suffered from a Eurocentric approach to the game and never received much attention from their developers, although they remained canonical in the 20th Anniversary Commemorative Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, appearing in the supplement Lore of the Clans (2015).
It was only in 2017, when we who would form the Brasil in the Darkness team took for ourselves the task of compiling all the official information about the Tlacique bloodline and proposing our own native approach, that the Tlacique would see a representation more worthy of the legacy of the great native civilizations of the New World that inspires it. We launched our Tlacique Bloodline Book through Storytellers Vault, which you can purchase at the link in the image below:
https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/227967/Livro-da-Linhagem-Tlacique
Drowned Legacies: an important step on the path to representation.
The official supplement for V20 titled Beckett's Jyhad Diary, which updated the game's meta-plot to the present day setting the stage for the release of V5, introduced in 2018 a greater concern for diversity and cultural wealth of the native peoples of America, with the conceptualization of the Drowned Legacies.
They are presented as a new and complex society of Kindred, analogous to the African Laibon, which explores not only the theme of native peoples of America’s heritage, but also introduces new creatures, powerful, threatening and almost completely unknown, even to the more experienced players. That brings back the atmosphere of imminent danger and intricate conspiracies that has enchanted fans since the launch of the first edition of the game.
Unfortunately, all the good intentions the developers had by including in the game representations of cultures that escape the Judeo-Christian-Western ethnocentrism (thus expanding the game's horizon of possibilities), end up marred by the superficiality with which the Drowned Legacies are presented.
On one hand this superficiality could mean more creative freedom to the narrators; on the other hand, the general lack of knowledge about the history and culture of the native peoples will hardly make Drowned Legacies more than bizarre and generic variants of old clans and lineages already known to players, with no true identity of their own.
Narrators truly willing to explore such elements will need to undertake laborious research, since the canonical material does not offer much support for understanding the peculiarities of the “Drowned Society”. Appallingly, not even the very term “Drowned”, used by these creatures to refer to themselves, is explained. And when push comes to shove, those dedicated narrators will inexorably find out that, in the end, the Drowned Legacies drink much more from Latin American “folklore” source – resultant of the syncretic mix of European, African and indigenous cultures’elements –, than the proper history and culture of pre-colonial native peoples, as would be expected for creatures capable of existing across centuries.
Which has the curious consequence of making the “footprint” given to Drowned Legacies be seemingly more related to the themes and concepts of Changeling: The Dreaming, another of the games from the World of Darkness universe, than to the Vampire: The Masquerade itself.
You can purchase the original Beckett’s Jyhad Diary, in English, at the link in the image below:
https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/225322/V20-Becketts-Jyhad-Diary
A fan approach seeking to further develop Drowned Legacies
In the links below you can check out an approach developed by our team, which seeks to deepen Drowned Legacies’ framework while maintaining everything established by the game's canon, and at the same time, trying to do justice to the legacy of indigenous peoples by incorporating elements of their cosmogonies through an anti-colonial perspective:
Drowned Legacies – Part 1: Presentation
Drowned Legacies – Part 2: Worldview
Drowned Legacies – Part 3: Society
