Choosing a Nightside Name & Why to have one

Within the vampyre community, individuals often find solace, empowerment, and a sense of identity in adopting alternate nightside names, commonly referred to as “sobriquets.” This practice allows members to protect their legal identities while embracing the transformative aspects of vampyric spirituality by choosing to adorn themselves with a name that evokes within them a sense of pride and power. Someone in the vampyre community might choose a nightside name for how it contributes to their personal growth, privacy, and a deeper connection with their vampyric nature.

Picture this: You’re just learning about vampyres for the first time. You’re intrigued, you’re fascinated, you want to take a closer look. You join a couple facebook groups and like a few things, comment on some stuff, maybe even have a few great conversations. You start to connect with some folks, you accept some friends requests. When now suddenly you have some vampyres in the same friends list as your Granny or your Aunt Peggy.

“It’s fine, my family knows I’m weird” you rationalize to yourself. You get more and more ingrained in the VC with a profile that has your legal name on it. You’re cruising in the group for almost a year, getting to know folks when suddenly! you’re involved in your first round of vampyre drama.

Out of no where you’re deep in a heated argument with a rando in a VC group and now you’ve got some unhinged asshole commenting all over your pictures, looking at who your family is, commenting on their pictures for shits and giggles… and now you have to deal with the fallout of some VC troll playing for funsies all over your family’s profiles.

This isn’t a far fetched scenario. In fact, it’s rather common. It’s one notch in a major list of reasons why you should use a sobriquet or a nightside name if you intend to engage with the Vampyre Community on a meaningful level. 

The Practical Reasons Why to have a Sobriquet

First and foremost, protecting your legal identity is extremely important. In the past, people have had to conceal their nightsides because of:

•  Jobs/Careers

• Hide from families

• Keeping nightside away from your mundane local community

• Custody/Divorce Battles

There are a lot of ways your nightside can be used against you when it comes to mundane court battles, jobs with clearance levels, or even just having your family or neighborhood peeping on your vampire life. When Vampyres get petty, they will do the absolute most in the worst ways. Not only do you need to consider your sobriquet, but you also need to consider the implication of how publicly out there you are about your nature in comparison to the sensitive nature of your dayside. I’ll give you some real life scenarios that I’ve witnessed or things that I know to be true that will paint a picture of how invasive things can be.

Divorce

Are you open about your nature in screenshottable places that your significant other has access to? Is there trouble in paradise? Your vampyric nature can and will be used against you to make you look unhinged, crazy, unfit, and otherwise use your nature against you in court to destroy your character in front of people who don’t understand vampyrism.

Custody Battles

In the same way it can be used against you in Divorce, it can and will be used against you in custody battles. Anything that discusses your vampyric nature with pictures of you or your name attached can be used to paint the picture of you being a deviant and unfit parent.

Loss of Career/Job Security

Do you hold a position in an industry that has a security clearance? Are you perhaps a public servant, law enforcement, or some other job where your outward appearance matters? Those sorts of jobs and being openly part of an extremely alternative subculture mix like oil and water. I know someone personally who has a deep VC history, but works in law enforcement. In the mid 2000s he did an interview for 20/20 – His face was blacked out and his voice skewed. However, his very distinguishable accent still read through on the program and he lost his job, his entire career at that time. He’s luckily recovered, but it was a huge ordeal and setback that could’ve been avoided without mixing appearing in media while your dayside can’t support such an endeavor. That was an imbalanced mistake made, and consequences were had over it.

Doxxing

People in the VC, people of the internet in general; At least, the worst people of the internet… they will weaponize your personal information. I’ve seen people try to blackmail others holding private information for ransom. I’ve seen people post legal names and addresses around all over the internet as a form of bullying. They partake in the type of drama that includes death threats and trying to hurt you by any means possible over the internet. It’s happened to my family and I more than once.

Overstepping Boundaries

People of the internet, not just of the VC, will overstep boundaries in many ways. No matter how cautious you are. No matter how much you think people won’t go to strange lengths… one day, they will.

Someone from one of my Facebook groups took business information of mine and was reaching out to companies on behalf of my business to try to “negotiate deals for me” completely unprompted and when he needed follow up information to initiate deals, that’s when he hit me up and was like “Well as a member of your group, we’re all family so I thought this was okay” – It was the first time he and I had ever spoken.

Things that you think would be common sense for people not to do, they’ll do it. Protecting your info & identity is hugely important because of this.

The Spiritual Reasons Why to have a Sobriquet

The adoption of a Sobriquet in the vampyre world largely comes from Father Sebastiaan. Taking on a “witch’s name” is a practice as old as the craft, but for the VC – Originally, in Father Sebastiaan’s early fang making years, he would have you pick a name out of a book and that name would become your adopted vampyre name. You’d be having your transformation through the art of having your fangs made, and you’d leave the appointment with a new smile, new name, and new vampyric outlook a lot of the time.

This name aided in the transformative experience and helped you carry it forward with you. The more you use the name, the more power it would have in your ability to code switch between your dayside and nightside self.

Your Sobriquet would be the spoken key to your nightside identity. It was not just an invisibility cloak for your Dayside concealment, but it also served as a set of ritual robes, cloaking you in the Nightside and giving you an adornment that helps you shapeshift into your most authentic Vampyre self. It becomes the label under which your Nightside identity is cultivated under.

The process of coming up with a Sobriquet is highly personal, and often about embracing the transformative aspects of vampyric spirituality by choosing to adorn yourself with a name that evokes within you a sense of pride and power.

Sometimes people try on a few things before they land on something they like. Sometimes people coin something right away that suits them. Either path is perfectly fine. Our Sobriquets can evolve over time.

The Common Evolution Cycles of a Sobriquet

First, one must come up with a Sobriquet. Of course, the name you choose should be something you like and something that suits you. You can find inspiration from so many places for this. This book called A Witch’s Name by Storm Faerywolf is a great expanded resource on the power of choosing your name. You can take inspiration from mythology, or history, or people of importance in your life.

Something that is often overlooked when it comes to choosing a name is making sure it is something you can say with seriousness out loud. If you take a name that’s hard to pronounce or too fanciful, you may have a hard time introducing yourself when the time comes. Make sure to be fully comfortable with your choice when you make it. Try it on, say it out loud. Google proper pronunciations of foreign words if you’re choosing something outside of your native language.

Then, when you’ve landed on something, go to a place like a Nightclub, or the Renn Faire, or somewhere safe to experiment where people may not know you and introduce yourself to folks with this name. Does it feel empowering to do so or do you feel shame or embarrassment? Analyze your feelings and why you feel that way. Make changes accordingly if necessary. The first name you come up with may not be the one you stick with, and that’s okay. Like I said before, you may try on a few things before you land on your forever name.

Name Changes for Personal Evolution

After you’ve landed on a name from the previous process and lived with it for a while, you may feel the need to change it. Some people feel a bit of a “sunk cost fallacy” when it comes to changing your name. This is sometimes valid depending on how heavily you’ve branded yourself with that name and what you’ve accomplished with that name. Sometimes it’s hurtful and counterproductive to change your name when you’re well established. However, if you’re confident in your work, changing your name will only be a temporary setback.

For example, my nightside name was originally “Jessica Eira Lovelace”. It makes sense to have a first, middle, and last name right? However, my name changed in length due to organization taxonomies being added to my name through my experiences with the Vampyre Community. As such, the part of my name that gets emphasized has changed over the years. To most people who knew me 5+ years ago in the VC, you knew “Jessica Lovelace” – Yet a few years ago, I began emphasizing “Jessica Corvidae”. Organization taxonomies can cause some of us to have crazy long names.

Name Changes for Organization Taxonomies

Within the Vampyre Community there are varying styles of organizations. Within some of these organizations there are initiatory systems that link folks to a “Bloodline”. This typically happens within Houses & Covens but can also occur in other places. In Vampyre terms, one is Sired [initiated] into a Bloodline and then the chylde carries the name of the Sire. While this concept shares language with fiction, the act is not the same. There is no biting, no turning, and no immortality. There is however a deep bond cultivated, witchblood shared, and oaths promised as you become part of a chosen family. Once you are full initiated into that chosen family, you are able to carry the family name.

When I was Sired into O’Mallie, my name then became “Jessica Eira Lovelace O’Mallie” – but I often left Eira out of the picture for length reasons.

Then, I ended up creating my own House, House Omnia Corvus. That House created a branch on the O’Mallie Family Tree, forming the “Corvidae” bloodline. Thus, my name evolved again. My full name at this point? “Jessica Eira Lovelace O’Mallie-Corvidae” – Ridiculous right? So, I switch between Jessica Corvidae & Jessica O’Mallie-Corvidae… or Madame Corvidae in “proper” settings.

To conclude, all of this to show you that names come from all sorts of places. They come, they go, they change, they lengthen, they evolve. It’s okay to try different things on, but it’s important that you do in fact protect yourself with this style of name.