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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you. Father Sebastian has been very active in the vampire subculture since nineteen ninety two. He is a master Fanksmith, published author, has appeared on The Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures, the History Channel, The Discovery and MTV as well and our program numerous times. Father Sebastian, back on Coast to Coast, Father, welcome.
Thank you for having me, George.
Have you been You ready for Thanksgiving?
Oh?
I'm ready, ready and ready more.
I'm going to be going to Vegas.
Have a great time.
Now.
What is a Fanksmith? What do you do?
Thanksmith is a professional dental technician who specializes in making custom may bangs. It's kind of a mix of special effects artists and dental technicians.
Is there a market for that.
There's a huge market for that. But it's all custom maze and we make them by hand.
We call it old school and or analogue where we make it like an old dental technician would in a dental lab. And now we have three D printing where you can go to your dentist and.
Get a scan of your mouth and will mail you your fangs.
And they just snap right over you glue them.
Nope, they yes, they snap right in and they're kind of a right of passage for everybody getting into the vampire culture.
That culture, is it still growing?
It is, it's growing quite rapidly, and it's becoming more and more paranormal and magical and crossing over with the witchcraft community and the paranormal community.
Is there anything Father Sebastian, about the old vampire folklore that does not necessary necessarily happening today.
Well, slaying vampires isn't something that's very popular these days. The vampire lore is so diverse because there's a vampire vampire myth in almost every culture. In fact, there's multiple vampire myths and every culture. So vampiric beings have been in Aztec, Romanian, Russian, Scandinavian, Native American, Asian cultures throughout the world. And it's a phenomenon and it's a monster that we can all become.
Well, you've been doing this for thirty plus years. What got you into this in the first place?
A mother?
Your mother, My.
Mother was an Ris fan. She introduced me to an Riis and I was in the kit I was in my kitchen when I was fourteen, and she was like telling me Tom Cruise is losing his losing weight to become a vampire for a movie called Interview with the Vampire. Yeah, and I wanted to see the movie, but it was three years before it came out because that.
Was a very complex movie to make. And when.
She finally I was old enough, she finally gave me the Interview with the Vampire and I hated it. I hated an Interview with the Vampire. It was a terrible book. And then I read The Vampire.
Lestat and I fell in love with him.
And Louis de Pont de Lac, the character main vampire being interviewed in an Interview with the Vampire, was a whiny, brady, not very fun character. But stat the lion Claw was very much a rebel. He embraced being a vampire and he sent me as a he said, and I set me up as a role model.
What did you think of the movie.
Movier's phenomenal Tom Cruise wasn't really my favorite pick for Lestat. He did a good job, but I think that Sam the guy that plays him in the new TV show is much better less.
That is the vampire lore growing around the world.
The law is growing.
Because fiction and fantasy and mythology are compounding on each other. The vampire genre that we know is today has been in three waves.
The first wave was.
Accumulation of all the vampire lore of the Victorian era in Dracula, and that set the foundations. And then the second phase came along with Anne Rice because her vampires were basically atheists and they had a they embraced being vampires. And then the excuse me, vampires get sick too. I
got a little bit of a cold. And then finally, Vampire the Master Grade came out in nineteen ninety one, which was a role playing game that took all the vampire mythologies and wrapped them into one universe, and movies like Blade and TV shows like True Blood all kind of copied that pattern where they created clans of vampires, and each clan of vampires represents a different vampire mythology
and they're all in the same universe. So what we know today is the modern vampire mythos has really started in nineteen ninety one with the game Vampire the Mess Grade, which was a role playing game that you got to address up and play in nightclubs as a vampire.
Now, before you took on the part of Father Sebastian, were you considered a vampire before that.
I've always been a vampire, but I didn't awaken to it in one step. I was aware of it. Probably ran nineteen ninety five when I went to New Orleans for the first time and I was attending the Anne Rice Memnoch Vampire Ball and I had a series of awakenings, but I really didn't understand what my nature was until about nineteen ninety seven when I was able to interact
with some other vampires that were awakened. Because we kind of awaken each other, it's called a proximity awakening, yeah, and we come into a realization of what we are when we're in groups.
How did a Father Sebastian moniker begin?
Well, I was in a club called Limelight if you ever seen the movie Party Monster, and that was a club that had a lot of drugs in it, and I was completely sober. I didn't do drunks, I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, and as the club scene in New York in the nineties. The owner of the club
loved me because I wasn't any trouble. I was running vampire LARPs in the back rooms of the club, and my mentor at the time got named Dimitri, and I were running Temple of the Vampire Rituals, where we'd summoned spirits into the room, and the owner of the club came by and goes, Sebastian, are you doing a Satanic ritual? And I go, no, Peter, we're not. We're doing a vampire mascot role playing game. So we were hiding the actual magical rituals within the confines of a LARP live
action role playing game. And I had a bunch of paranormal experiences in that place. And the seventeenth of January, sorry seventeenth of August nineteen ninety five, was in the back room and I went to go have a cigarette and I was in the backpoint. Now this club was a church, a deconsecrated church from eighteen forty six, and.
I was in the back room.
And I heard whispering and I looked over and I saw this like shadowy figure, well group of shadowy figures, and I was like Wow, what the hell is that? And it was a full manifestation and I heard a whispering and it said that you would bring forth vampire culture. Never call yourself king of the vampires.
And I'm like, all.
Right, So I chose Father instead, and I kind of took on a priestly role, doing weddings and ceremonies and baptisms and whatnot.
By making things.
I felt as a provider. And I didn't like the lordly titles because it reminded me of too much of the role playing game being Lord. All that stuff is for me, it's roleplay, and I wanted to be taken more seriously, so I chose Father.
Sebastian eighteen ninety seven, bram Stoker came out with Dracula. Has that changed dramatically over the years.
Durracula was not a romantic story at the time. It was a story of a monster that was coming from the Slavic countries, which was there was an immigration of Slavic population in London, so it was kind of a story of the Slavic invasion of immigration as the British saw it. And Dracula was a disease cursed by God and in nineteen ninety two when Bramstucker's Dracula came out by Francis Portcoppola with Gary Albin, Oh my god, he
was amazing. He really redefined it as a love story and of reincarnation and the like, because the story of Dracula coming to coming to the UK and Whitby, landing in Whitby and coming into the city was to find his love and the romantic part.
Was brought over ocean.
I crossed oceans of time to find you, my dear, and that really redefined the story, the actual core of the story, which I found very very cool that the story could evolve so quickly over a century.
I'm going to bite you. Do vampires still do that.
There are three types of vampires in the vampire lifestyle, three main categories. One of them is called sanguine, and they are people who believe, in many different ways and many variations of them, that they need to consume human blood to maintain their mental, physical, and spiritual health. And it's done clinically and usually done with lancelets on the back.
It's not done on the neck because that's dangerous. You can put puncture a veiner in our artery and it's done very safely with sanitary wipes, in a clinical way, very much like you would do a body piercing.
Is that healthy well, if the donor has been.
Tested and clean and.
Safe, or been in a monogamous relationship for.
A period of time and usually maintains a good diet, it's pretty safe because you don't take a lot of blood. You're not damaging the person. You're not cutting with a scalpel or taking a syringe and.
Pulling blood out of them. It's very small droplets of blood.
What percent, Father Sebastian, do you think the people who drink blood are there in the vampire community.
There's a lot less than people think. It's a very sacred thing because you have to be you have to trust the person that you're taking blood from, and you've got to respect them.
You've got to make sure.
That they are treated properly and given love and kindness, and it's a gift. But to do it safely is really something.
That is part of the love and you know, make it a good experience for them.
Put candles out, fragrances, make them comfortable. And the people that do donate the blood the donor are very very honored and treasured in the vampire community because they're giving something that only they can give. So I would say that sometimes it's sexual, sometimes it's not. The majority of the time it's clinical, but it's still sensual.
And I would say.
Probably about one to two percent of the vampire community actually consumes blood.
On a constant basis.
Now, you mentioned that there are three types of vampires, and this was one. What are the other two?
The most commoner lifestyles are people who identify with the archetype of the vampire. They sleep in coffins, they dress up, they like the aesthetic, the costumes.
The theater.
And then there's the third, which are psychic vampires. Now, psychic vampires coming out a vast variety of types, and I can only go into a couple of them in the time that we have. So you have your typical psychic, ethical psychic vamp, and they take life force from people. And an ethical psychic vampire has a code of conduct. They don't feed from this infirm or sick. They don't take too much life force from people, and they usually do it with consent when it's done deeply in the chakras.
And there's three types of three levels of feeding. There's ambient which is like anybody can feel ambient energy when you go to a concert or a shopping mall, or a Christmas celebration, or a political rally or a race car sporting event, a concert, and.
You kind of osmosis, you kind of use your.
Breath to control of the energy flowing into you. But that's the least satisfying.
Then there's touch or tactile or.
Direct, whatever you want to call it, which is the second level, which you take from the outer layers of the aura, and that kind of comes off people like a heater, so you're just collecting the energy harvesting it. And then the third is a deep feed, which is something that usually happens when you need consent for and you take the energy directly from the chakras. You can't
hurt somebody, you can make them tired. However, the only danger is is when you feed off one donor for a prolong period of time, you can create a what we call a sympathetic vampire, which is a temporary form of psychic vanprism. Now, when we talk about psychic vampires, in Anton LaVey's book The Satanic Bible, he talks about a section called not all Vampires Drink Blood, and he coined the term psychic vampire as far as I know,
in nineteen sixty six. And these are the people that drain us emotionally, that we feel is.
The typical type of psychic.
Vampire, and some of them don't even know they are that.
The majority of the yep, excuse me, The majority of the vampires are the actual not practicing but people that
are vampires are psychic vampires. And we meet and I would say about ten percent of the population is them, and they don't identify with the vampire archetype the majority of the time, and they are just people that you just can't They're usually narcissists, and they drain us of our emotional energy, like an old woman in a nursing home that keeps complaining about her husband that died forty years ago, or that person at work that just annoys
the hell out of you. And for example, Colin Robinson in What We Do in the Shadows is a good example of a psychic vampire. He just annoys you until you go crazy.
And you have to get away from these people.
Only the best defense is to avoid them.
And how do you know who they are? Initially, I can identify them.
Because they are usually very negative. When I get an email from someone that's fifty pages long, I usually don't read the whole thing. I speed read it, and I can usually tell if it's a psychic vampire because truly psychic vampires.
Can feed through the Internet.
And they make negative, negative experiences for people to connect to them, and then they drain their energy that way.
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