"Thou shalt not Embrace Love."
In The Book of Nod, the legendary history of vampiric creation, the first vampire, Caine, commands his children (all vampires) not to "Embrace Love." The most obvious interpretations are (a) that vampires should not create children because of their love for the victim, and (b) that vampires should not welcome love in their unlives. But why not, on either account? In a latter passage of The Book of Nod, Caine attempts to answer this question.
Caine equates Love with God, "the One Above," who has cursed him and cast him out from society. The One Above could as well mean simply the rest of human society, which has rejected Caine for his crime of killing his brother, Abel. Regardless, this One Above is the origin of Love. And since the One Above curses Caine, Caine and his children are cursed and cast out from Love. Or so Caine believes.
In this next passage, Caine paints the prohibition against Love as a natural result of his vampiric state. Because vampires drink blood instead of eating food or having sex, their existence is inextricably tied to death. Caine sees death as the opposite of Love.
But is this a logical connection? Mortals may love, yet bring death as well. Warriors may kill hundreds on the battlefield, yet do so because they seek to defend something they love. Doctors may bring a sweet death out of love for those who would suffer if they lived longer. Executioners throughout the centuries have done their killing mercifully and without regret, just as one does a job, and still gone home at the end of the day to love their families and friends.
The mortal condition is predisposed to death, yet mortals love on, in futility, regardless of the knowledge that they may die any minute from accident, violence, illness, or age. Death is in some way an integral element of Love. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," sayeth the poet, for it is true that the ephemeral quality of life, the nearness of death, gives Love much of its sweetness. On a deep, primal level, mortals know that they must love while they can because death is around the corner. Early humans had short, brutal lives, which required that they mate and reproduce frequently, just to propagate the species. Even in modern days, many people are obsessively driven towards sex and Love -- the remnants of that primordial knowledge of death's immediacy.
So then, knowing how mortals can cause and face death, yet still love, how can we not question Caine's prohibition on vampires knowing Love? Vampires feed off of life, but they do not have to cause death, except by choice. A vampire is made of two things: a civilized mind and a bestial spirit. Drawing upon the vampire's humanity, virtues, and will power, she can choose to control the beast within. If the vampire so chooses, she can never kill a single mortal creature and still live a full and satisfied unlife.
Perhaps this is what Caine looks forward to in the following passage.
Caine sees that it is possible for a vampire to find Love with a mortal and that experience will be transforming. He stresses that this Love must not be gained through the use of any vampiric talents such as Domination or Presence. He also repeats his injunction that vampires must not Embrace the mortal lover in an attempt to preserve the Love.
Again, I must protest this commandment. If a vampire and a mortal truly love each other and both wish never to be parted, then changing the mortal into a fellow vampire does not necessarily eliminate the Love between them. Of course, if the vampire wants to Embrace the mortal lover out of greed, lust for power, or to use the mortal for some purpose, then the Love will not survive the Embrace. But one could say that that was not a True Love in the first place.
It is not impossible that the vampiric Embrace could be given out of real Love. Just as Love is sweetest and truest when given freely, unconditionally, without compulsion, and without desire for personal gain, so can the dark gift of immortality. The vampire sire would have to give the Embrace out of nothing more than Love, and the mortal would have to be consenting and wish to spend all of eternity with the vampire. In this case, and in this case only, could a vampire Embrace Love and not suffer Caine's prediction.
Here, in Caine's final pronouncement on Love, he shows his own pessimistic distrust of both the emotion and of mortals. I think that Caine was not so much a visionary here as he is a victim of his own time and situation. During the recorded time of Caine's existence (for he may still be roaming the earth, but he has not spoken), Caine saw himself and his children as a race set apart from mortals. His own curse had been eternal exile from human society, so he seemed to believe that his children would forever be a society unto themselves, only preying upon mortals, and keeping interaction to an absolute minimum.
But after the fall of the First City and the start of the Jyhad, there was a great diaspora of the vampires. Kindred spread all over the world. They were increasingly forced to hide their true nature within mortal society. They went under cover and, in many cases, completely integrated themselves into human cultures and cities. This process was formalized into The Masquerade. In this hidden state, it was often necessary for vampires to interact with mortals, thus learning their ways and habits and how best to secure themselves against prying mortal eyes.
Thus, in the modern world, mortals know next to nothing of real vampires and harbor little or no resentment against them. Predators or no, vampires are generally not feared or hated. If anything, some mortals are attracted to the seductive idea of the vampire, and this has caused numerous blood doll cults to spring up around the world, not to mention the plentiful vampire figures in popular culture. Likewise, the entire Gothic subculture is strongly influenced by the mysterious and incredibly sexy nature of vampires and other denizens of the darkness.
Because mortals do not automatically fear vampires, reasonable and even friendly intercourse is much more possible between vampire and mortal now than in Caine's time. His pessimism is definitely a good warning for Kindred today, but it is no longer an absolute restriction.
This is a terribly reductive commentary on Caine's commandments on Love. Like many an elder vampire, Mr. deLaurent gets out of the discussion only what might be useful to him. deLaurent does not see the beauty or wisdom of Caine's vision of the transformative power of Love -- he only sees it as a potential escape from the curse of immortality. Obviously, deLaurent could never experience True Love because he could not give freely or unconditionally or accept something so freely given.
Love is not a tool used to gain power or even redemption. Love is more like art -- True Love is given and received and experienced only for Love's sake. Likewise, real Art need not answer to anyone or anything; Art exists for Art's sake. Thus, the Toreador probably has the best chance among Kindred to understand and experience True Love. Perhaps Arikel, the first Toreador, was farthest from her grand-sire's blood? Who can tell...
-- By Trystan L. Bass
Footnotes:
-- The Commandments of the Kindred1
And they asked Caine the old Father,
"Why do you command us to not Embrace
those we love?"
And Caine said to them, "Love is the sweet rain
which falls down from the One Above.2
Love is the gift of life.
Remember ye not Auriel's Curse?
That we are to eat only ashes, drink only blood?
Blood is not sweet rain. Our drink takes Life."2
And then Caine's eyes got the look of Visions,
and he quieted, then he spoke:
"But if ever one of us
is gifted
with the love of a mortal
without Command
or Awe,
without compulsion
a Love given freely,
then that Love will be as
the gentle rain
to even the lowliest of us.
And though we shall not Embrace it,
it will feed us as if we supped at our Father's table
it will satisfy our deepest thirst.2
But harken ye, my children!
The Children of Seth will always hate us again and again,
for we are their predators
we are their Masters
and they know this, deep in their soul.
Look not for Love among them! They will not give it.
Be not a fool."2
Footnote to the above passages, from Aristotle deLaurent, compiler of The Book of Nod:
I place this here [in the prophecies of the Chronicle of Secrets] because it is pure speculation and is attributed to Caine's prophetic powers. Certainly Love is a powerful force, one that I am not familiar with, but I have heard tales of the newly Embraced being rescued by those they loved and subsequently Rebirthed into mortal form.3
1. The Book of Nod by Sam Chupp and Andrew Greenberg, page 77.
2. Chupp and Greenberg, page 109.
3. Chupp and Greenberg, page 114.
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