Drinkers of the Blood

Drinkers of the Blood names the vampires in Marius’s account of their origins and history. The expression is more than a description of their diet: it connects their unnatural survival to blood sacrifice, religious practice, and sharply opposed ideas about death and human life.

Origins and the Need for Blood

In the history Marius tells, Akasha and Enkil were human rulers who came to Egypt from an older land. They guided the Egyptians away from cannibalism, teaching agriculture and animal husbandry. Their transformation began when a demon entered their bodies; it altered their minds and capacities, but left them unable to eat, grow, die, or have children. To keep their bodies animated, the demon required blood—the substance from which it was itself made. Drinking renewed and strengthened them, while allowing them to experience the victim’s death. The rulers thus became the first Drinkers of the Blood, bound to the very substance that sustained their supernatural existence.

Cults, Rites, and Transmission

The earliest followers of Akasha and Enkil are not identified in the account. Their religion nevertheless spread beyond Egypt, reaching islands in the Mediterranean, lands between the rivers, and northern forests. Shrines and blood sacrifices made the moon god’s power a focus of worship: during periods of starvation, the god’s mind could leave the body, travel, and acquire knowledge, while people considered pure of heart could come to the shrine and hear its voice. By the time Marius knew the story, this religious tradition had become old and fragmentary. Its surviving traces suggest that the identity of the Drinkers of the Blood was transmitted through cult and ritual as well as through the creation of new vampires.

Rival Histories of Feeding

Marius distinguishes the older, sacrificial tradition from a later, more violent form of vampirism. In the benign cult of the Good Mother, the vampires starved and then drank from offerings made to her. Other Drinkers of the Blood became ruthless predators who killed at will, treating individual human lives as no more significant than death within a universal rhythm. Their human worshippers served them and supplied victims, living under the threat of becoming prey themselves. Marius places such powers in ancient Babylon, Assyria, forgotten cities, India, and lands whose names he cannot identify. The expression therefore encompasses a divided history: a shared dependence on blood does not imply a shared ethic.

Meaning of the Name

The phrase gives vampirism a religious and historical dimension. Blood is at once the means of continued existence, the object of sacrifice, and the medium through which a victim’s death becomes part of a vampire’s experience. The history also complicates the boundary between worship and predation: the same supernatural beings may be approached as gods, served by human communities, or feared as arbitrary killers. By naming them Drinkers of the Blood, Marius describes a kind of being whose survival and power are inseparable from the lives they consume.