What is VampyreCraft or Vampyre Witchcraft?

The term VampyreCraft is not a new one, at least not brand new. Vampyre Community websites from the early to mid 2000s (from the age of angelfire and geocities) define VampyreCraft as magick produced by Pagan Vampyres who follow the old ways. VampyreCraft is practiced by Vampyres who include magick & witchcraft as an integral part of their beliefs. It commonly includes dark flavor to it, although in general vampyric spirituality of all kinds includes an appreciation for the balance needed to keep our cthonic selves in check through indulgence, not abstinence. Therefore we often resonate with the taboos of life.

“Vampyre Magick” is a modern magickal style & tradition that blends elements of ceremonial magic, shamanism, witchcraft, & New Orleans voodoo. It emphasizes ceremony & ritual, astral, and energetic aspects of vampyrism. If you peer into the Vampyre Community’s public magickal teachings, you’d see that lots of it has ceremonial magick backgrounds. You can trace the roots of many popular vampyric systems back to well known LHP & Ceremonial influences like Laveyan Satanism, The Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, Temple of Set, and so on and so forth. The difference between most Vampyre Magick and VampyreCraft or Vampyre Witchcraft is the innately Pagan and Witchcraft influences that Vampyrecraft aligns itself with. While you’ll find many similarities between the various styles of Vampyric Spirituality, my personal flavor of VampyreCraft is heavily viewed through the lens of the witch.

My Quest & Pursuit of VampyreCraft

Our quest as The Vampyre Coven has been to explore and define our own emerging current of VampyreCraft by taking a look at energetic techniques used in things like traditional energy work, meditation, spellcasting, divination, hedge crossing, etc. and adapting them for optimum use when utilized by a vampyric practitioner. As said above, VampyreCraft is a gray path that explores both light and dark techniques. VampyreCraft is obviously not a “love & light” type of path, but it’s not all doom & gloom either. Balance is key in all things. Without the dark, we can’t recognize the light… but most of us have lived so deeply in the dark that we value and cherish our time with the light. We’ve seen how consuming the dark can be, and we stave it off with balance.

VampyreCraft is also the exploration and understanding of the vampyric phenomenon as something synonymously transpiring in your magickal journey, not something separate. It is the willful dissection and integration of your shadow to transcend above the negative frequency we can and sometimes do exist on. It is the alignment of the vampyric spirit deep within our souls, peeling back the layers of social conditioning until we are able to freely live as a mirror of our true spiritual selves. Or, as close to it as you can get without having a negative impact on your dayside life. Remember, balance is key in all things.

As Vampyres & Witches, we are liminal and we are paradoxical.
… (uh, wtf does that even mean?)
To be liminal means to be transitional.

It’s the act of occupying a position at, or on both sides of a boundary or threshold. It is the space between worlds. It’s the space between the physical realm and the astral realm. It is the aether in which energy moves. You become liminal as you traverse to astral realms and you have things like out of body experiences. Vampyres & Witches are liminal creatures in many ways. We occupy space between reality and myth, human and monster, corporeal and ethereal. Collectively, we are always evolving. We are always transitioning and our liminality is one of our greatest strengths but biggest weaknesses. Our community’s liminality causes such a rift between what everyone believes that it becomes impossible to have important conversations out of fear of offense. The work I do is to combat this dynamic.

To be paradoxical is to be seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possible.

I’ll give an example from my own personal practice. There were a few years where I spent a lot of time trying to ponder whether or not the deities I work with were real. Am I petitioning real omnipresent sky beings? Or am I tapping into the godform energy created by collective belief over thousands of years? It wasn’t until a dear friend told me that he is perfectly happy living with paradoxical thoughts on his spirituality that I gave up this internal debate. Why not treat it as both? The godform energy from thousands of years of belief is undoubtedly a powerful force to tap into and pull into ritual. Treating deities as energetic beings to invoke to pull some of that into you and your work. What better way to do that than venerate them as real Gods? The doubt I cast on myself through this internal debate was doing nothing but hurting the faith I had in my own practice. Choosing contentment in the paradox and using both sides of the coin allowed me to move on from this limiting frame of mind and transcend it.

Our Paradoxical nature is ever present in the varied collective experiences had throughout the vampyre & occult community.

The fact that you’ve made it here means that you’ve in some way had interest in or are curious about vampyre witchcraft… Or what I do as The Vampyre Witch. On the contrary, there are entire sects of the Vampyre Community that believe my entire practice is bullshit and not what they experience as vampyres at all. Our many sects have completely contradictory stories of the origin of our vampyric nature. Is any group wrong? Nope. Our paths are all valid. Such is the paradox that is a constant subject of struggle in all esoteric communities. No way is the “right” way because all of these ways are right for those who partake in them responsibly.

My relationship with VampyreCraft

As for me, I’m a Vampyre, Witch, Heathen, Priestess, Corvid Spirit, and Daughter of Hekate.
Hekate has been my Patron Goddess for 20 years. She was the first to reach out to me and she’s been with me ever since. Yet, I lean into folk traditions from ancient Norse, Greek, and American Conjure styles. I respectfully utilize the traditional folk practices of several cultures, tailoring them for optimum use with my vampyric nature, and piece together a practice that is unique to me. I consider myself an “Omnist,” because I believe all spiritual paths/religions have truth to them. Some more than others, but there are common threads between them all. I think it’s all an ancient game of telephone telling the same stories over and over and here we are in modern day trying to make sense of it all. In this way, I move in the chaos magick paradigm of “use whatever works.” Ultimately, my belief is what steers my magickal ship. The folk traditions I use are what I *prefer,* not what I think is the one true way.

My practice is always changing and evolving as I learn new things and add different techniques and perspectives to my repertoire. No matter what I do, my practice has always been and will always be viewed through blood colored lenses. As a Vampyre, it bleeds into my spirituality in every way, and I find power in that. I regularly work in chthonic realms and pull power from those places in my magick.

The flexibility, adaptation, and constant evolution of my craft is my own personal liminality and paradoxical nature in action. Many people who end up on the vampyre path piece together their spirituality from multiple places that are unique to them, albeit often from a spectrum that we all work within naturally.. Our liminal nature allows us the space to craft what works for us and always be in a state of flux and flow with our personal systems. My goal is to equip people with the framework to take what works for them and be confident working with it. Everything I share can be altered. You can tailor everything to suit your own needs.