The First Lesson: Beginnings

The First Lesson: Beginnings This night’s cold, not that the packmates are about to admit it. The winter storms blast off the North Pacific and up the Columbia River, driving sleet like knives. The wind hasn’t fallen below 25 miles an hour since sunset.

Gusts sometimes move as fast as cars on a highway. The packmates feel something in the air, though, and without actually speaking a word to each other, they agree that they must take extra care to show they understand their condition.

Only two of the new recruits have any real prophetic sense, but that’s enough. The Vaulderie transmits their glimpses of an impending encounter with the mentor/judge/teacher/ cop of their brethren.

So it’s with special flourishes that they ascend to their meeting ground, the roof of the still unfinished municipal administrative building. Nobody wears an extra layer of insulating clothing. Druitt makes a grand show of stripping his chest bare before dragging himself up the scaffolding

one-handed. For the others, T-shirts and unbuttoned jackets suffice to make the point. “Yes,” their actions say to their ductus, “We understand that the memory of being cold doesn’t matter anymore. We know how to will a little blood through our veins and keep ourselves warm. See for yourself: We know that humanity lies below, while we rise above.”

Andrew watches their ascent with quiet pleasure. He remembers how long it took some lessons to sink in. If the rain let up, he could look over to the Bank of America building and see the scorch marks where Leo met the sun last fall. Leo never quite got the hang of the basics. His example goaded (or scared) the others, and Andrew doesn’t think he’ll have to destroy another of this pack. He can feel Demba nearby.

She’s not as pleased with the brood, but then she never is.

He doesn’t notice any little gatherings of shadow indicating an impending strike. He hopes that his students will make it through the night.

In short order, all seven of Andrew’s charges sit or sprawl on the rooftop tarpaulins. Through the Vinculum he can sense their fear and anticipation. He’s surprised at how much foresight Ming and the Other Razor show, and
congratulates them. “You’re doing well. It’s not quite enough, of course. If you really thought it was a trap, you should have stayed away. But your concern is a good sign. Those of you who survive will probably do well for yourselves, and each other.” He pauses. None of the fledglings can sense it, but Andrew hears the whispers in shadow and hurries on.

“It’s lecture night.” The pack groans in unison. “Not from me. Tonight you’ll be hearing from the woman who really did, once upon a time, teach me everything I know.”

He makes a slightly theatrical bow, and Demba coalesces out from the shadows in Andrew’s coat. She does not smile at the students. All their little motions, nervous tics and semiconscious habits, stop immediately. Her native appearance is completely hidden: Tonight she stands as a statue carved from shadow, lacking any facial features except very long, very sharp fangs. She has no mouth that any of the students can see, but her words carry through the air rather than directly into their minds.

“Good evening, young Keepers. This is a lecture and a test, rolled into one. Let us begin.”

All Truth First, I will tell you the foundational truth, the key to understanding everything about the vampiric condition. This is it: We can never know the truth.

You know that all evidence can be faked. Some of you here can yourselves craft works of art so flawless that no breathing art critic can distinguish them from the real thing. You know that money can buy many things, that persuasion and intimidation can earn you the rest, and that no human being begins to grasp what you and your kind can do.

You know that the kine desperately try to deceive themselves and each other about us. You’ve benefited from this willful denial, and you must realize that other Cainites do as well. You know that many important realities never appear in any records you can examine.

Furthermore, you know that will and memory are something less than absolutely sure. Most of you here can force a mortal to do something and never realize that he was, for that moment, your direct tool. Some of you are learning the art of personal charisma, making them love you simply because of the power in your Blood. You’ve no doubt seen that your ductus and other older Cainites can do far more than the few tricks you’ve learned so far.

Where is truth in any of this? Anyone’s memories can be changed. All records can be adjusted, created or removed. There is absolutely nothing you can count on.

Everything, inside you and out, might be a lie, perhaps created deliberately, perhaps the unintended side effect of some plan that doesn’t concern you, maybe even the result of haphazard psychosis. None of you have met a truly deranged elder yet, have you? Just wait till the next Palla Grande. In the meantime, cultivate paranoia.

Assume, for the moment, that you do exist. I do not give you my word that I have refrained from tampering with your perceptions of this occasion. What good would that do? None of you can tell if I’m lying or not.

So I simply assert it. You are Cainites, as am I. We are in fact a sort of walking corpse that feeds on the blood of the living. We burn in sunlight. Our progeny grow weaker with every generation. We are not part of the natural world. We make no sense in scientific terms, and science isn’t bunk, no matter what some fools would tell you. It explains many parts of the world, and the fact that it cannot explain us is just one more sign of our alienation from nature.

I’ll return to that point again later, perhaps. For now, remember this: The fact that you are what you are, here and now, does not mean that the stories we tell each other about how we came to be are true. Individually, each of you has lied to each other and to yourselves about how you came to be what you are, both before your death and after. Do you think that we stop lying as we age? Nor do we become infallible in our observations and deductions. When we talk about our shared past, we tell stories. Just as you must distinguish what seems like fact from what may prove the case after all, so you must distinguish the facts of now from the explanations offered for them.

Origins on Earth Many Cainites, whether they believe in the common myth about our origin or not, describe it as a Christian tale. “Adam and Eve had two sons,” the story says, “named Caine and Abel. Abel was a herder, Caine a farmer. Each offered the best of his harvest as a sacrifice. God accepted Abel’s sacrifice of meat but rejected Caine’s sacrifice of fruits and grains.

Caine murdered his brother. God cursed Caine with vampirism. All Cainites descend from Caine.” Some versions embellish the tale with details of the steps by which our dark father Caine rejected God’s forgiveness, learned secrets from Lilith and otherwise carried on like some Campbellian folk hero. This version suffices for our purposes.

I have, in the first place, reason to suspect that a fairly recent editorial hand has been at work in the common tale. The terminal “e” in “Caine” doesn’t make sense in any of the ancient languages of the Middle East, where the story presumably originated and smacks altogether of an English speaker who either wasn’t careful with his (or her) spelling. Given that we are a proud and boastful

lot, I’d be unsurprised to find that the unknown editor simply wanted to suggest that this was the real spelling of our father’s name, as opposed to the version used by ignorant mortals.

Name aside, this story exists in a suspiciously polished framework. The linkage with Adam and Eve isn’t really necessary in any meaningful sense to the story, and several scholars of our clan say that some early renderings of the tale don’t mention the Hebrew figures at all. The God who curses Caine need not be the God in the sense that a modern Christian or Jew would use the word, and maybe not even in the sense that an ancient Mesopotamian or Babylonian would.

The God of this story is a powerful force being appeased through sacrifice with the power to inflict the curse of undeath. That’s all. Everything else is accretion.

I believe that the tale conveys an important truth, which I shall try to summarize for you.

Caine and Abel represent, respectively, the societies of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age and the Neolithic or New Stone Age. Humanity’s ancestors gathered and scavenged before they hunted. For a very long time, great beasts preyed upon humans at least as often as they preyed on other creatures. Before brave warriors hunted these creatures, nervous defenders huddled and hoped to keep predators at bay. This is where the first weapons came into use: not for aggression, but for defense. Caine is quite rightly the elder brother, the symbol of that time of peaceable, passive and frightened existence. Abel, the younger brother, symbolizes the move toward mastery and conquest.

I told you at the outset that not all truths can be known. I believe that “Cainites,” for lack of a better word, prowled the starless night before any known human civilization and in fact before humanity. Perhaps the dominant species of any given era receives the deathless power, or perhaps it arises some other way.

Regardless, I think it sensible to say that the predators Caine and his folk feared weren’t just wild beasts, but creatures like us, at least in some cases. Perhaps those early Cainites were human, perhaps they belonged to some other hominid species, perhaps something else altogether. Abel the hunter didn’t just fight animals, he fought the devils in the night.

Caine’s example shows that it doesn’t do to underestimate the kine. He rose up and mastered first his own brother, then the powers in darkness. They may have forced undeath upon him, but perhaps he compelled them to give such to him, and then destroyed them. The fact that no trace of them remains except implicitly in stories like this one shows the magnitude of his victory.

Whatever the “Cainites” before him were, they have left no lineage that any of us can now detect. We are all Caine’s childer. This is why we venerate what some of you call the “homicidal farmer” — not for his agriculture, but for the thoroughness with which he became what he had previously feared and hated.

Caine is kine become greater, victorious over all opposition. He is therefore rightly our ideal, our Platonic ideal, if you will, the one in whose name we turn on our own opponents.

The Goddess Before I proceed, let me insert a caution about assumptions. The oldest signs of human worship that I’m aware of all involve the worship of a devouring great goddess. Certainly, men throughout history (and before) have sought to make women’s display of power an evil and unnatural thing. That need not be the whole story, however. Perhaps Caine was the first male “vampire,” or at least the childer on whom he turned were female.

When people of every continent share the imagery of a woman wrapped in darkness, who must be placated with blood along with other gifts, who awes all around her, we may well have a window into the real past.

Before the Flood If you’ve got an ear for fairy tales, you can seek out the Noddists among our sect. They’ll gladly prattle on about the First City and the Second City and who knows
what else, with tales of this brother and that sister and the other nephew. I have no patience for such things as anything except entertainment on a dull night. You may come to agree, or disagree. Let the tale-spinners give you their versions and make up your own mind.

However, I can discuss some facts. Insofar as anything I tell you is true, what I tell you about the physical world is. Go and see it, go and speak with others who have. It’s easier to detect tampering with rocks than with the soul.

The very word “Antediluvian” presumes facts not in evidence, as a solicitor would put it. More strongly, it presumes claims proven false. Who was present at this universal flood? No god or spirit ever covered the world with water during humanity’s existence, eliminating all but a few chosen survivors. Floods swept different parts of the world, both rapidly and through gradual inundation. But the term “Antediluvian” implies being a rare survivor of the deluge that destroyed almost all others, and so nearly as science or examination can say, this is merely hubris. Use it to refer merely to the eldest get of Caine and those of the lowest generation (or generations), and you’ll avoid deceiving yourself into accepting the myths.

We first find traces of Cainites in history much as they are now. The same clans existed, apart from a handful of dubious experiments that managed to turn on their creators or would-be manipulators. Here is the lesson of Caine again. Do not underestimate the kine.

And if the kine can accomplish so much, how much more can we? I am aware of few Cainites now active who personally recall events of the pre-Christian era, but we do have a smattering of documents and physical evidence, and we have a surprisingly accurate roster of Cainites whose sires date back millennia.

Everything different about Cainites — those independent of the current clan lineages, for instance — is conveniently pushed back before the first available evidence. You can believe that Caine and his childer really did found the city of Enoch, if you like. I cannot prove you wrong. I simply point out that you have no objective evidence for it. Noddist literature is precisely as useful as any other holy book, which is to say, not at all except when it comes to finding out what the priests want you to think and do.

I suspect that if we could peer into prehistory, we’d find that clans of some sort existed long before Caine.

Each lineage’s particular gifts sometimes change over time, with the emergence of bloodlines. This conforms precisely to Darwinian evolution, and while we are supernatural creatures, we are nonetheless partly natural.

One cautionary note: The sages of our clan know of about 13 clans, more or less depending on where one separates “clan” from “bloodline.” In the absence of mysticism and numerology, I see no pressing reason to assume that we know of every Antediluvian and its progeny. Do not assume that you know everything about who else rises as the sun sets.

In any event, here we are, and there we were. The earliest human settlements were in southwestern and southern Asia. Even when we reject the notion of an actual city of Enoch, the archeological record points at foundations for more complex truths underlying the mythology.

Catal Huyuk predates every other known human city. Its remains stand on a plateau in interior Turkey, an area now barren but then fertile. By 6500 B.C. it was already a flourishing city, with more than 6,000 permanent inhabitants. Around 5600 B.C. the old city was abandoned in favor of a new site to the west, and around 4900 B.C. people left the area altogether. Human archeologists debate the reasons for the inhabitants’ actions. Catal Huyuk anchored trade routes stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Oddly enough, the city had no streets. The buildings stand flush against each other, with openings in the roofs to let people out. Traffic moved across the roofs.

Presumably walkways, ladders or ramps connected the

rooftops with the surrounding hilly ground. The city evolved around obsidian and the volcanic goddess who produced it. Imagery of the all-creating, all-devouring goddess fills the city. Leopards, who even tonight prey ferociously on humanity and its primate kin, attended her. Wrapped in cyclopean blackness, she cast forth destructive heat that in turn carried the precious black glass. Her devotees in Catal Huyuk traded it for all the necessities and luxuries their own people couldn’t produce, spreading the earth’s extrusions far and wide, and the religion of the goddess with it.

Does none of this strike you as allusive? When you hear this story, do you not think of the power that moves in you, and picture it moving across the landscape of the first city? Can you not picture your sire’s sire’s most removed sire reaching down, by hand or shadow come to life, drawing forth sacrifice from the life-filled rooms below? Does your mind’s eye not show you individuals so terrible that the kine found it easier to objectify them and associate them with forces of the earth itself? Can you not picture human worshippers scattering in the wake of some dreadful conflict between Cainite lords and ladies, the humans scurrying to establish some new center as the old dissolves into blood and unleashed fury?

This is our Enoch, the echo of our present state in the past, reminding us of our legacy. This should be sufficient for you for now.

The winds have died down, and the sleet’s piled up wherever drifts can collect. In the calm, the temperature rises slightly and then falls. Hail and snow meld into solid masses of ice.

The change doesn’t affect Demba’s steady pacing. Her shadow feet leave no mark on the rooftop. Her shadowwrapped throat emits no quiver or stutter to disrupt her speech. Druitt wishes he hadn’t been quite so melodramatic in ascent and is burning through his vitae to heal the frostbite threatening his fingers, toes and buttocks. The others don’t actually huddle for warmth, but do make an effort to avoid wasted motion and unnecessary exposure to the worst gusts.

Demba pauses mid-step. Her face remains as blank as before. The gathering heard a brief snuffling sound, air moving through some passage very unlike a human nose.

“It’s later than I realized. One more topic and I conclude for the night.”

Origins in Darkness In addition to the facts of history, timeless, recurrent principles arise. We are the clan of darkness supreme, and you can look for our origin in every shadow. The fears embedded in human consciousness and culture feed our kind, giving us openings to exploit — what you might call “leverage” in modern business jargon.

“The oldest and strongest emotion is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

So said an American writer, Lovecraft, 80 years ago or so. Lovecraft showed the peculiar blindness of his era in thinking that identifying something as rooted in fear meant showing that it was not rooted in reality. I tell you now what you should already know: The kine are right to fear us. When you loom out of the shadows that obey your command, demonstrating the ability to shatter a human body and overwhelm a human mind, you act not just with your own force but with the heritage of countless millennia of our kind.

Throughout history and before, gods in the night have demanded blood and meat from humanity. These are our sires. You are Artemis. You are Ahriman. You are the volcano goddess of Catal Huyuk and Tezcatlipoca, the Aztecs’ god of the smoking mirror. You look skeptical. Think, students. A darkness so thick it obscures the sun, wielded by the one who requires more blood than any other god except the sun? This should sound familiar. You are Inguma, the Basque spirit that haunts the Iberian night and strangles sleeping victims who did not propitiate it. You are Hina, the Polynesian goddess who guards the underworld and teaches crafts.

You are darkness personified. So were your sires back to the beginning. Look through history for darkness.

There you find us.

Without warning, Demba’s form collapses. Her shadow flits from the rooftop, leaving Andrew and his pack alone.

What Manner of Creature Cainites don’t have sex very often, and after a few hundred years many of the physical and psychological features associated with gender wither.

Elder Cainites often cease to care very much about gender questions. Nonetheless, anyone wishing to speak of an Antediluvian needs to use some pronoun.

Camarilla usage generally goes with the genders that tradition assigns: male to Brujah and Tremere, female to Gangrel and so on down the line. Many Sabbat instructors encourage their students to strip the implied humanity from the Antediluvians. Just as they frown on traditional names like “Ennoia” in favor of “the Gangrel Antediluvian,” so most Lasombra priests teach that the best pronoun to use when speaking of an Antediluvian is just “it.” Some Lasombra and Tzimisce never speak the clan name when referring to the Antediluvian at all, preferring titles like “the King of Shadows” and “the Eldest.”