About this episode
Welcome back to another episode of the regular A Ghost in the Machine Podcast. As many of you already know, I’ve started doing a separate podcast series called “Paging the Everlasting Man,” in which I read chapters of G. K. Chesterton books, starting with Heretics, and give some commentary after each reading. If you like Chesterton, check it out. While not reading Chesterton, I have I recently read (or rather, listened to the audio books of) a couple of vampire novels: The Delicate Dependency, by Michael Talbot (who also wrote The Holographic Universe), and Dracula by Bram Stoker. I figured Talbot would infuse the story with esoteric symbolism, and he delivered on that expectation in some interesting ways. For better or worse, it is a thoroughly Gnostic-ish novel, but while I am sympathetic to some aspects of the Gnostic perspective, I have noticed that Gnosticism has a dark side: it has a disturbingly high correlation with LGBT-adjacent perversions and inversions. (Speaking of, I guess it’s Pride-Goeth-Before-the-Fall-Month now.) Case in point, the Wachowski sisters, formerly known as the Wachowski brothers, directors of that most explicitly Gnostic-themed movie of them all, The Matrix. While I think you can certainly adopt a Gnostic perspective without becoming a tranny or a fruitcake, the correlation is nonetheless there. And although there is nothing explicitly gay about The Delicate Dependency, there are definitely gay-ish overtones, with male vampires being depicted as youthful in appearance, physically attractive, and androgynous — something that appears to have become the norm in contemporary vampire literature (because what could possibly be more romantically appealing than a parasitic entity that drinks blood and avoids sunlight?). There’s a spirit behind the LGBT movement and lifestyle that represents an inversion of Human Nature, that takes what is bad and false and ugly and tries to pass it off as good and true and beautiful. Talbot was openly gay. He wrote thoughtfully and artfully, but there’s a bit of that unnatural spirit that permeates The Delicate Dependency.So I reread Dr
