Dracula as anti-Christ

Bare with me fellas...I started writing and just couldn't stop!

 

Count Dracula, Bram’s Stoker’s famed blood-drinking villain, is a creature of menacing wickedness, an evil figure of mastery over both body and spirit. What makes this vampire terrifying is not his domination of one’s physical self, but rather his craving of authority over the human soul by virtue of his nearly indestructible malice and brilliant personal appeal. While his character is chillingly parallel to Jesus Christ, the miracle-working savior of God’s sinful children, Dracula is perhaps Stoker’s representative of another biblical figure: the anti-Christ.

The first sign of Dracula’s anti-Christ figure is found in the omens indicating his coming, an allusion to the biblical arrival of the Messiah. Mina writes in chapter 19 that the mist in her room, Dracula, becomes a “pillar of cloud…through the top of which I could see…the light of the gas shining like a red eye” (Stoker 420), running parallel to the Old Testament concept of the Lord’s visitation through human figures. In Exodus, “Whenever the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance to the tent, they all stood and worshipped…the Lord would speak…as one speaks to a friend (New International Version, Exodus 33:10). Mina wonders to herself if this visitation is “some spiritual guidance” (Stoker). Ironically, while God as a “pillar of cloud” led Moses and the Hebrew slaves to freedom in the Old Testament, Count Dracula as a “pillar of cloud” enslaves and tyrannizes souls. This concept of the Messiah’s coming through clouds is also found in the New Testament, as Jesus ascends into heaven on a cloud in Acts of the Apostles; his amazed disciples write that “he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight…(and) this same Jesus…will come back in the same way (they saw) him go to heaven” (Acts 1:9) Bram Stoker thus makes analogous the coming of Dracula’s evil Messianic persona through perverse biblical references, as the anti-Christ – per Christian beliefs – is presumed to appear so much like the Son of God that it will be nearly impossible to distinguish the two.

Second, Dracula’s Christ-like dominion over nature is an eerie correspondence to biblical references. The reader’s initial sample of the Count buttresses the concept that he is in fact a supernatural bad guy. When wolves overwhelm Jonathon Harker’s carriage as he winds through the Transylvanian wilderness to meet Dracula, he frighteningly observes the Count’s authority over the animals. “I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command,” Harker writes, and “he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle” (Stoker 21) as the wolves fell back and “began to howl as though the moonlight had had some peculiar effect on them” (21). Of course, Jesus’ authority over nature is highlighted throughout the New Testament in multiple parables. This mastery over the natural world is a similarity between Dracula and Christ – and likewise, between the anti-Christ and Christ. Nonetheless, Jesus uses his authority to preserve and save, while Dracula uses his to ruin and feed: the same wolves the Count keeps from killing Harker later gruesomely devour a peasant woman. In fact, Count Dracula’s wolves could be yet another allusion to the Bible: Jesus Christ explicitly warns to “watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves” (Matthew 7:15). It seems Stoker included the wolves to equate Dracula’s ultimate command of the beasts with the anti-Christ’s title of the ultimate false prophet. In this sense, while Dracula’s supernatural powers seem similar to Jesus’, his evil use of them is what separates the figures.

Dracula’s supernatural powers are additionally manifested in his Christ-like miracles, while the products of those miracles undeniably point to his anti-Christ-like guise. Dracula is apparently capable of the act of resurrection: he brings Lucy Westenra back to ‘life’ three days after her death, much like Jesus resurrected Lazarus in the Gospel of John. “Your brother will rise again,” Jesus said to Lazarus’ sister Martha, “(because) I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:22-26). However, Dracula’s resurrected Lucy is the antithesis of Lazaurus, who was welcomed back into the community. Lucy is a ferocious vampire, something which Stoker’s protagonists see as someone who must be destroyed. When Dr. Seward records their discovery of the re-born woman, he notes “how changed” she is, as the “sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (Stoker 342). In fact, he only refers to her as Lucy because “the thing…(merely) bore her shape” (342). Dracula’s new project is exactly like him, “callous as a devil,” “blazed with unholy light” (343), and “unclean and full of hell-fire” (342). Though Lucy was raised from the dead like Lazarus – equating Dracula with Christ – the product of that resurrection was far more sinister – equating Dracula with the anti-Christ. This evil miracle is preempted by the Bible: “The coming of the lawless one (the anti-Christ) will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing” (2 Thessalonians 2:9-10).

Finally, the theme of blood in Stoker’s Dracula is perhaps the most glaring proof of the Count’s role as anti-Christ. The vampire’s drinking of blood is clearly prohibited in the Bible: in Leviticus, “You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off” (Leviticus 17:14), and in Deuteronomy, “You must not eat the blood” (Deuteronomy 12:16). The focus on blood in the Bible is as a gift by Jesus’ Atonement of sin, while the focus on blood in Dracula is the literal taking of it as an act of sin. In this sense, Dracula is more than a sinner, but rather an illustration of the anti-Christ – one whose use of blood to achieve eternal life and re-birth is a sharp perversion of Jesus’ gift of blood to sinners so that they would achieve eternal life. “Whoever…drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day” (John 6:54) said Jesus to his followers. In contrast, Dracula drinks the blood of his victims so that he will achieve immortality, a mockery of the sacrament of the Eucharist and what Van Helsing refers to as a “baptism of blood” (Stoker 523). By engaging in an anti-sacrifice and anti-Eucharist, Dracula is a clear representative of the anti-Christ.

Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is undeniably illustrative of the anti-Christ. As evidenced from his Messiah-like appearances, his domination over the natural world, his ability to perform resurrections and his symbolic use of blood, Dracula’s character is so disturbingly comparable to Jesus Christ that it is easy to equate him as such. Nonetheless, the motivations behind these parallels – an evil use of nature, the resurrection of people into demon-like vampires, and the reversal of Christ’s sacrifice – prove that the Count is in fact the opposite.