The Magenta Dragon

[I wrote the following article for The Wild Hunt (a UK Pagan magazine) in 2016. It also appeared locally in SA Vampyre News (SAVN) and on Penton Alternative Media at more or less the same time. At the time I was acting as the chief researcher for the Alternative Religions Forum, after working on the academic paper known as "Satanism: The Acid Test".]

Most in the South African Vampyre community who have done a little research into the history will know that this community’s recorded history began in May 2010 with the foundation of House Valur. Most will know that the community only began growing and taking form with the founding of the South African Vampyre Alliance (SAVA) in June 2011, but little if anything is known about the community in the time before that.

Shades Of 2012

I enjoy history, in fact I often make mention of the proverb "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". Faced with certain revelations of late, and a certain amount of introspection, I am loathe to add "that depends on your history". This of course, is not simply because history is written by the victors, but because of the increasingly apparent detail that while we might know some of what has passed before, we don't know it all. There is clearly a significant amount of earlier history that is unknown, lost.

Fortunately it seems that we can still find fragments of it in the deep, dark places of the world. The only question is whether or not we will be open to accepting what our digging into the past brings to light?