Psychic vampires are living people who have the ability, consciously or unconsciously of draining life-energy (prana, chi, life-force …) rather than blood from others.
Whether this ability was developed through meditation, mentally altering drug usage, or inherited, it can be used by the Psychic Vampire to drain energy for its own use.
In the words of Anton LaVey, the famous Satanist, “psychic vampires are individuals who drain others of vital energy”. As consumers of energy rather than blood, psychic vampires, like their folklore counterparts, can be men or women, young or old.
Although psychic vampirism seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, legends about vampire like beings that drain the body of its energy or ‘life-force’, soul or vitality, who use humans as a means of procreation, predate blood-drinking revenants by thousands of years.
The term ‘psychic vampire’ was popularized in the mid-1800s when members of The Theosophical Society turned their attention to researching the human psyche, described as the mind, soul, emotions, and all the other mental processes which take place within an individual and which are not visible or measurable in the physical world.
Members of The Theosophical Society theorized two types of psychic vampires.
- One was the ‘astral vampire‘, described by Henry Steele Olcott as undead but able to separate his astral body from his material body and leave the grave in search of blood or energy from the living, which he would gobble up and send directly to the buried body in order to sustain its hold on life.
- The other was the ‘magnetic vampire‘, described by Franz Hartmann as a living ‘psychic sponge’ who absorbed the energy of those around her.