INTERVIEW - Robert M. Place Describes the Animus Lurking Within His Vampire Tarot

Creating an authentic Tarot deck requires more than simply coming up with a cool image to suit each card. In creating The Vampire Tarot (available in June; you can pre-order on Amazon), Robert M. Place discovered uncanny parallels between Bram Stoker's Dracula and the classical themes that give the Tarot its structure. In this interview, Place touches on ancient folklore, the inspiration he drew from modern vampires in film and television, and how Stoker's original evil count has been adapted to suit the times. Enjoy!

Place's other works include The Alchemical Tarot and The Buddha Tarot, as well as the book The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.


TB: I remember seeing at least one other vampire-inspired Tarot deck, but what you've done with The Vampire Tarot seems to be quite an original approach.

RMP: Yeah, I wanted the story that’s in the book (Dracula) to hook up with the story that’s already in the Tarot cards - that is actually expressed in the pictures on the trumps and was there from the beginning when it was created in the fifteenth century. That's what I try to teach people about Tarot: the right way to go is to learn as much as possible about the images, and the history of the images, so that what you know about the Tarot is grounded in reality. I’m no strict purist – after all, I did a Buddha Tarot. The people who made the original Tarot weren’t thinking about Buddhism, but so much of it fits in with what they were doing. The story of Siddhartha becoming Buddha is the archetypal hero’s journey and that is what is expressed in the Tarot. So Siddhartha’s story is a real fit. When looking for other themes for decks, I look for things that also really do fit the real message that was originally there.


TB: Are you interested in modern vampires as well as the classics?

RMP: I keep up with all of them; I saw Twilight when it came out. I wish I could have seen it before I finished my book, because I would have mentioned it.


TB: Did you read the Twilight books as well?

RMP: No, I didn’t. I was really extensively reading all of the old stuff, like Dracula and Carmilla, and Poe’s poems. Going back to the romantics. And some newer stuff too: I read Interview With the Vampire and things like that. But I was actually more inspired by the movies. I watched every movie I could find. And I watched all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows, and Angel -- I love them! Movies are what really got me involved with vampires, more than books.

When I was a kid I loved the Bela Lugosi film, but that wasn’t the key thing that got me so interested. It was in the early ‘70s, after In Search of Dracula came out, a book about the historic Vlad the Impaler, by McNalley and Florescu. I read that book and thought it was fascinating, and it also really influenced filmmakers at that time. For example, there was the 1974 made-for-TV retelling of Dracula directed by Dan Curtis, starring Jack Palance as the count. The movie was entrancing because they included a lot of that historical stuff, which really brought it home for me -- as it would for anyone who’s a historian or interested in art history, because here you’re dealing with someone who’s lived for centuries, someone who is a living, or undead, link with history! That’s the brilliance of Stoker that he has that aspect in Dracula. It was a stroke of genius.


TB: How did Stoker arrive at his vision of Dracula?

RMP: You know, he was working for seven years on that novel, and he would write at the reading room in the British Museum library, in London. There, he found The Land Beyond the Forest, a book about Transylvania, its history and customs. He never went there, but he read this travelogue about Transylvania, the local dishes, and what it was like there. And when he started to look at local history, vampires were part of that history. At first, he was going to call his vampire Count Wampyr, which is pretty lame. And he had a different name for the book itself, right up to the end he was calling it The Un-Dead; they know this because they have all his notes in Philadelphia. But then he crossed out the title and wrote down "Dracula," just before he handed it in. He’d just looked in a book and read about this medieval warlord, and didn’t even really know anything about him. He just knew that the name meant "devil" or "dragon," and thought it was perfect.

The stuff he put in the book about the historical Dracula isn’t necessarily accurate. But it’s close enough. He gets talking about how the blood of Attila runs in his veins and so forth – just really gets you going. So then afterward when people started really looking into Vlad, it turned out he really was a monster! He killed thousands of people, horribly -- 40,000 to 100,000 in only six years by staking, eviscerating, and burning. Stoker didn’t even know what he had opened up, it was totally intuitive. That name is so integral to the power of the story.

What movies like that Jack Palance Dracula did is start picking up on some of that history, like including flashbacks to the Middle Ages showing them fighting the Turks. And it introduced one other important element from outside the book, which was that Dracula would come to England to find Mina because she’s the reincarnation of his long lost bride. That idea of reincarnation adds this whole mystical and romantic element to the story that makes sense.


TB: That wasn't in the original version?

RMP: No, it wasn’t in the book. When I watched the extras on the DVD, Dan Curtis talked about why he had changed the story. Before Dracula, he had directed Dark Shadows, with the vampire Barnabus, who also was looking for the reincarnation of his lost love. Curtis decided to include the same theme in Dracula, to answer the question: Why did Dracula want to come to England?


TB: That's actually a good question...

RMP: When Stoker wrote the story in 1897, no English person would have questioned why Dracula would want to come to England – everyone wanted to come to England! It was the center of the world as far as England was concerned, and anyone with any sense went there. With the Lycaeum Theatre and all the famous people there, it was like being in Hollywood. So of course Dracula would want to go there after he’d killed off all the people in Transylvania. There was also a whole genre of invasion literature, in which some foreign power was always invading England, which is like what War of the Worlds is, really. But now, to an American audience, everyone would wonder, "Wait a minute, why would he want to go to England?" They don’t have the same prejudice, so we need to give him another motivation in order to update the story.

What Curtis did was so brilliant because it works perfectly into my whole theory that the power of the vampire is that he’s really an animus figure. When you look at the vampire in folklore, he’s obviously a shadow projection -- it’s like everything evil in yourself that you don’t want to recognize, and you project it onto the Other. The vampires in folklore are disgusting. They’re ugly, stinking corpses that creep out of the grave and want to suck the blood of the living, and they’re just disgusting. And they’re stupid -- you can stop a vampire from coming into your house by leaving a pile of beans out front, and the vampire has to stop and count them and then the sun comes up so it has to go back to its grave. They’re really dumb. And the whole reason you stake them is because you don’t want them to come out of the grave, so you drive a stake all the way through them and nail them to the coffin.

When the Romantics adopted the legends, they were picking up on a whole different thing. It’s a mythological god, and really it’s an animus figure, or an anima if it’s a female vampire. It’s a personification of your unconscious that first appears to you in some sort of demonic form which can be destructive, but if you interact with it, it can evolve to higher and higher forms. And that’s exactly what’s happening -- the vampire’s becoming more and more romantic, more heroic. Wiser. The animus figure is still evolving through all these stories. That's why Bela Lugosi got all those marriage proposals after Dracula; it wasn’t because he was a monster, it was because he was an animus figure, and they were projecting that onto him.


TB: And stories like Twilight have ramped up that effect even further...

RMP: That’s just it, it’s continuing that whole point of the story, and that’s what gives it power. I went to see Twilight in the theater the second night it came out, and when my wife and I went into the theater, everyone else in there was a teenage girl.


TB: Growing up, could you ever have imagined the prevalence of the goth/vampire/occult lifestyle?

RMP: Well as a kid we all loved horror movies, and would read horror magazines, and Dracula and Frankenstein and all that were sort of lumped together. It wasn’t until I saw the Palance Dracula that the vampire thing started taking on its own significance to me, as an adult image. Then my friend Rosemary Ellen Guiley, who worked with me on The Alchemical Tarot, was writing about vampires, and I started reading her books. She was always saying, "Why don’t you do a vampire tarot?" I started working on one right after The Alchemical Tarot, but nobody wanted to publish it. They looked at me like I was nuts. Until now, of course!

Illustration from The Vampire Tarot © Robert M. Place