Jessica Corvidae: My Awakening & Journey through the VC thus far

My awakening story started as a young teen. It was around 2002, I was around 12 years old. At the time, I felt like my whole spirit sort of shifted. My whole life shifted, really. I was in Middle School at the time and I remember something in me changed and my rapid descent into teen angst and anarchy began.

I dove headfirst into my “goth phase.” I was getting in more and more trouble at school. I was getting into more altercations with students and teachers alike and I just didn’t give a fuck. I loved the energy of the altercation… and I intrinsically gravitated to the vampire archetype to cope with the problems I was having at the time. I was desperate for something more than the life I was currently living and I expressed that in some questionable ways. I totally became the vampire kid at school. Oops? I was watching the same couple vampire movies over and over every day. I even had my mom buying me vampfangs back then so I could wear them to school. I had kids convinced for a second they were real. Yes, I was that nerd. (Check out this Vampfangs spotlight I did a few years ago.)

The Awakening

Around 2003 is when I discovered DrinkDeeplyAndDream.com and I figured out what was going on with me. I was having an awakening and I was seeking these altercations to feed on the energy of it. The brute force energy of my vampyric spirit was coming alive and I was looking for ways to flex those muscles and testing the depths of that power. I was engaging in fights and altercations to control my surroundings. The young “primal/predator” was testing her strength and the weaknesses of others. I was seeking out the media and aesthetic to express the change that I was going through. I was only 13 at the time though, so I learned everything that I could from the DDD website and moved on. Being so young, I didn’t really have outlets to speak to others about it. Back then, I didn’t realize there were spaces that welcomed teens. So, I turned to the Pagan communities to learn and cope. It was this experience that led me to organically explore vampyrism through the lens of a witch. I’ve always known about certain vampyre websites and outlets, so I learned what I could and applied it to my magickal journey. I quickly gravitated towards working with Hekate at that time and have spent my life working with her ever since.

 

The Fallout from said Awakening

During my late teens, my life would descend into chaos. When I was 14-15 I dated a guy who was diabetic. He was your typical greaseball goth teen with an unlimited supply of needles and lancets. So, of course, we explored my sanguine side. We had our little Angelina & Billy Bob moment and wore each other’s blood in pendants, any time he pricked his finger to check his sugar I got the blood that was able to be squeezed out of the finger. We did sketchy blood draws with needles, which I highly do not recommend… but I had a regular sanguine donor for the duration of that 2.5 year relationship. Once that relationship was over, my life descended into chaos. Looking back at what I was up to at 15-16 years old is horrifying to think about as an adult looking back at kids around the age I was doing all this crazy shit. I dropped out of school, moved out of my parents house at 16 years old, had a job, was paying rent. I was just so explosive and chaotic that my mother kind of had to just let me go make my own mistakes… and mistakes I made, lemme tell you. I was living a life of partying, chaos, and toxicity and it was fueling the untamed vampyric nature inside me something fierce. I loved it, but it was *so toxic*

After I turned 18 in 2008, it became the local EDM scene that fueled the flame within me. Many vampyres find feeding and solace in club scenes, and I was no different.  Un/fortunately for me I ended up in the EDM scene rather than the Goth scene. Over the course of the following 10 years I would go from “professional” party kid, to security of the rave, to security manager of one of the bigger regional event production companies in the DMV area. I would experience so much from the deepest loves and heartbreaks to the trauma of watching people truly fuck themselves up in ways I don’t even want to begin to describe. That chaos kept me engaged and the public safety-esque dynamic of the job I carved out for myself kept my shadow side engaged. I knew I was energetically hooked to this dynamic and not exactly in the healthiest ways. However, it wasn’t till halfway through this career that I brought my vampyric nature off the back burner. Through the experience of my tenure as professional rave mom/security manager of the EDM shitshow,  I was able to learn a lot, make a lot of mistakes, handle a lot of trauma of my own and other people’s… It was a crash course in guerilla crisis response and learning to read, manipulate, and ground energy in and out of emergency situations.  It’s where I learned to hone the mindset that I have and was able to do a lot of shadow work that got me where I am today. A lot of really difficult lessons were learned through it all… and even harder ones learned when I left it all behind.

 

Finding the VC so Much Later

I didn’t find the actual vampyre community again until late 2016. By this point I had put the idea of vampyre community way far in the back of my brain. I had been practicing on my own the whole time but the idea of finding others wasn’t something I ever thought about anymore. I think by this point I had maybe 3 conversations with others about the topic in 13 years?… but then I saw Logan & Daley South talking about their shit in Austin on MTV and I was floored. Like, HOLD THE FUCK UP… When did this become popular enough to be featured on MTV? Has it really gotten that serious? What have I missed?!

It was at that point I sought out the community. Unfortunately, I was quickly shown how toxic the VC was. I found some community groups on facebook and this was right at the beginning of the shit show that was “The Unity Project.” I ended up getting scooped up into that debacle and within 6 months of finding the community I was thrust into leading the Vampire Court of Baltimore. I was definitely not prepared for that at all and then left to my own devices to figure it out on my own shortly thereafter due to the negligence of those in charge of said Project. Every person around me that paraded as someone who wanted to better the community and as a mentor for this group of people I was part of ignored every attempt I made to come to private, amicable solutions to the myriad of problems that I was having within the ranks of said Unity Project. The problems with some of the people in that project have persisted until today, which is why I’m so critical of VC groups around now. But digging into that experience is a conversation for another post.

 

The Pursuit of Something Better

Because of the problems I faced in the aforementioned project, I corrected course and parted ways with them and most of its constituents. From then on, my early years in the community were spent fighting Elders and active community members to treat people around them with common courtesy and fighting the rampant ego that is commonplace. Elders in the community didn’t take kindly to the new girl “Queen” strutting around expecting decency from her peers. To them I wasn’t a peer and to be fair, I wasn’t… but a monster was created and I gave zero fucks. My lack of experience in the community meant I didn’t know nor care who was a 20 year veteran and who wasn’t. So, I called a lot of people out for being assholes. Everyone wants to sing the song of community leadership, togetherness, chivalry, study, and helping your fellow nightside kin but rarely do people rise to the pretty words they speak. I tended to point that out a little too loud for people’s tastes.

My demeanor had/has gotten me ostracized from some parts of the community, and to be honest I don’t care. It’s taken me a while to stop caring, but ultimately I did not feel supported in the slightest by a community that claims to want to do so much for its people. I felt the complete opposite. The toxic experiences I went through, the bullying I saw and faced between Elders and everyone else… the egotism, the fighting about what is and isn’t a vampyre or whose way is the right way… It all inspired me to put work into changing the narrative.

 

Finding the Best There is

In early 2018, I was introduced to House O’Mallie. It took a while for me to warm up to the idea of being part of a House again after the last bad experience. It took months for me to even want to talk to new people, let alone let them get anywhere close to me. My Sire, Stephen O’Mallie, took the time to get to know me and showed me that it wouldn’t be anything like the first time around. He took the time to cultivate a relationship and I was Sired as an O’Mallie in September of 2018. Since then, I have gotten to know what support in the community actually looks like. It’s been a driving force helping me continue on my journey of trying to change the common narrative of what the GVC/OVC is like. Steve and the entire O’Mallie family has been a huge blessing in my life and I’m so thankful for everything they’ve done for me.

 

The Reign of the Ravens

By the time I had made it into House O’Mallie, I had already been running the VCB with my brother Kronos for at least a year… and at that point I had already known the Court thing would be temporary. Pretending to be “Queen” was so not my thing. Pretending to be royalty made my skin crawl. So, I had already been working in the background to create a House. By December of 2018, the House was raised. We ratified and made House Omnia Corvus public on January 1, 2019.

 

In December of 2020, I became the Headmistress of The Vampyre Coven. I’ve been fortunate to find some amazing family members through this work, thus the Corvid gang has ultimately become who runs the Coven. The Coven’s Regent Emeritus, October Von Vanderslice, brought me onto the admin team to help sort out the Coven when the group was run amock with spam and scammers. At that time, the group had 8,000 members. By the end of 2021, we had 18k members. The rapid growth spurt made the group absolutely crazy for a bit, but we’re so proud of the practical and productive atmosphere we’ve cultivated over the years! At the time of writing this, we’re sitting at around 16k members in our Facebook group worldwide. We also have a smaller invite only inner coven now for serious vampyre witches and several other adjacent community outlets under my umbrella.

 

The Official Razing of the Vampire Court of Baltimore

In July 2022, After 5 years of service to the Mobtown Halo, I hung up the crown that I never wanted anyways after 5 years of being the “Queen” of the Vampire Court of Baltimore. I proved that I could do good with the circumstances I was granted but I didn’t have to carry the royalty schtick just because it was the fad thing I got ignorantly thrown into. So I dissolved the Court entirely. Absolutely nothing in reality has changed. I’m the same leader, doing the same events and meetups, doing the same work, living the same life, just without the need to parade around like the fake Queen of whatevers that people need to bow to. I now carry this work out through my House & Coven.

 

The Mission Going Forward

Nowadays I try to be the best support I can be for those who follow a path of esoteric vampyrism. It has always been my mission to provide the best support I can for this community. I’m proud of my House, my bloodline, and my Coven, and other groups for being hubs for nightside people to find support in ways they often don’t find in other places. My only hope has always been to be able to offer the kind of support I could’ve used along the way and to prevent others from being sucked into the same VC traps I found myself in.