Origins on Earth

Origins on Earth 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 Chapter One: An Unmirrored Corridor 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 Clanbook: Lasombra 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