The Gospel In Reverse
Dracula as Anti-Incarnation Post-Christian Theology
Perhaps no modern work has achieved the strange, inexhaustible success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If you were alive in the twentieth century—no matter where you lived or what language you spoke—you almost certainly knew the Count from Transylvania, and probably watched him and his progeny sink their fangs into the necks of victims on a television screen. Yet this vast cultural success came at a cost: the superimposition of Hollywood’s comic imagery onto a late nineteenth-century novel, rendering it almost inseparable from its media afterlife. But Dracula deserves more than that. It is not mere Gothic indulgence, nor a curiosity of perverse imagination.
There are two main reasons to resummon Undead to examination with new interest and curiosity:
First, Dracula is one of the richest and most comprehensive archives of the long nineteenth century; the century in which our current culture was born, and which still governs our epistemic and psychic lives. It preserves, within a single narrative frame, the sediments of that age’s dreams, delusions, upheavals, contradictions, and myths. It takes seriously, and without anachronistic irony, the now-forgotten disciplines that once promised salvation: mesmerism, spiritualism, physiognomy, vitalism, racialism, phrenology, hypnosis, telepathy, and the whole haunted laboratory of scientific esoterica. Dracula is not just a novel; it truly is a compact museum of the moment of our birth. It catalogs the moment when our current world was ordered the way it is currently, records a snapshot at the instance when scientific materialism was competing with but hadn't yet fully displaced spiritual and pseudo-scientific worldviews. To read Dracula is not simply to read a vampire story; it is to descend into the archive of a world dying and a world being born that still shapes our sense of self. No modern person seeking serious self-knowledge can afford to ignore understanding the graveyard of failed projects and aborted embryos that our modern science and culture stand.
Dracula, thus, is the Gothic rendition of the history of science, and psychology in particular, the most promising post-Christian science to try to directly substitute religion in the actual concrete sense of the daily life of the individual, at the cusp of transition. It is filled with hysterias, fugues, nervous collapses, trance states, dream fugues, somnambulism, and wasting illnesses whose origins are neither clearly physical nor entirely mental. The line between hereditary weakness and demonic affliction is never firm, nor does it need to be. The novel inhabits a world where Darwinism was still half-digested, where medicine, mesmerism, and metaphysics still compete for the same vocabulary, where diagnosis is not yet distinct from discernment, and where pathology may still imply sin, and scientific materialism is still grappling with a vibrant, refusing to die spiritualism and idealism. What we now divide, psyche, soma, soul, is still tangled in its ancestral knots. Dracula is not merely a vampire; he is also a case study, a haunting symptom, a patient whose file could sit in both a monastery and a clinic.
Second, while the nineteenth century produced many works in which civilized European men faced monsters, works that meditate on supernaturalism, naturalism, and occultism, it is in Dracula that the underlying terror of the 19th century revolution of meaning, and in whose aftermath we are currently living, is most fully and completly disclosed: that we are no longer the image of the good as humans once understood it, but its exact inversion. This is achieved through producing a Dracula that is the perfect theological negative of Christ. He is not merely yet another evil villain; he presents a complete, coherent, and terrifyingly seductive alternative spiritual path. It is a path that mimics the structure of salvation (offering "eternal life," a "communion," a "baptism" in blood, a "father" figure) but inverts its substance at every point, leading not to divine life but to demonic undeath, descent to the tomb, and not ascent to heaven. That is what makes him the ultimate anti-Incarnational figure of the post-Christian condition. A path, I will argue later in the essay, that we already agreed to take a long time ago, that we don’t even remember that it began somewhere.
It is time to retrieve the monster from his flattened Hollywood image and read Dracula not as a Halloween character, but as a herald of a modern theology—an inverted Christ, heralding the Gospel in reverse.
This essay makes its case in five parts. It begins by briefly establishing the core tenets of Christian Incarnation theology in order to define Dracula’s true nature: not a simple monster, but a coherent theology of anti-Incarnation, a perfect, photographic negative of the Christian idea of salvation. Second, it demonstrates how this theological horror enters the world not through an “invasion” but through the consent of the modern, rational mind, which can no longer recognize evil in its civilized form. From there, it unpacks the devastating results of this entry by analyzing the fates of the novel’s key characters, from the Brides of the East to the Brides of the West. The essay concludes by arguing that Dracula’s victory is now complete, and offers as proof the vampiric logic that governs our own era’s criticism and cinematic retellings of this very story itself. The way modern man came to think about Dracula is proof that the successful infection already occurred a long time ago and that we are his grandchildren. For interested readers, a final addendum will explore how the novel's central dynamic provides an anticipatory prophetic template for the logic of modern postcolonial politics, in which the wronged periphery is invited to dissolve the weakened center.
“A New Order Of Beings”
"Well, in him the brain powers survived the physical death. Though it would seem that memory was not all complete. In some faculties of mind he has been, and is, only a child. But he is growing, and some things that were childish at the first are now of man's stature. He is experimenting, and doing it well. And if it had not been that we have crossed his path he would be yet, he may be yet if we fail, the father or furtherer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life." — Dr. Seward’s Diary, Dracula.
With this description, Bram Stoker, through the diary of one of his characters, names what he believed Dracula ultimately is: not a Gothic villain, not merely a supernatural monster, but a herald of a metaphysical revolution. Dracula is no longer a man, but not yet a demon; he is a figure suspended between species, bent on generating a new kind of creature whose path into being passes, not through birth but through desecration and whose posterity is multiplied through infection rather than fellowship, parasitism rather than communion.
The observation that “the brain powers survived the physical death” is among the most unsettling in Dracula. It names, without dramatizing, the novel’s central terror: not that Dracula is dead, death after all is the fate of all, but that something essential, something cold, calculating, controlling, and instrumental, has survived death. The form has decayed, and the soul has departed, but the brain remains functional enough to plot, to read, to organize, to destroy.
Dracula is humanity that is no longer a human intellect, no longer an image of the divine Logos. It no longer remembers fully, no longer loves, no longer suffers. What's left are only the most useful bits: logic, will, and design. Whether Stoker meant it or not, he's sketching out exactly what modern man looks like after God's death—something that moves through the world with ruthless efficiency, hungry and infinitely clever, but heading nowhere in particular. It knows how to dominate, but only through a particular kind of intelligence, the kind that survives even when the body dies, even when the soul does. Without memory, it has no identity.
This is our post-Enlightenment condition: a brain that keeps going after death (the death of God, of the author, of philosophy, theology, history, humanism, man himself, and all meaning—what Nietzsche called us the "murderers of murderers," since we didn't just kill God but killed those who killed him too). Still working, still learning, still conquering the world, but completely severed from the moral, theological, and historical language that might have once told it who it was and what it was supposed to be doing. What's left isn't madness—it's pure reason. A perfect executor of desire, a brilliant tactician, a predator armed with maps and books and ledgers and absolutely nothing else.
That phrase—"a new order of beings"—shouldn't be read lightly. It's not biological, despite the organic nature and obvious erotic undertones of blood sucking, but metaphysical, setting up the novel as fundamentally theological terror where the very meaning of human nature and our place in the cosmos gets turned completely upside down. To see this clearly, we need to remember what vision of man this "new order" is trying to replace—the image of the old order. For Dracula to herald an inversion, there has to be something worth inverting. And to get a sense of what's been inverted, we have to consider the metaphysical framework that the 19th century still partly held onto.
Ecce Homo
In biblical and Christian thought, man doesn't create himself or own himself. He's a creature, formed from dust, given life by God's breath, made in God's image not as some kind of essence but as a calling. Man gets called, named, spoken to, commanded, and saved. His life isn't his own property but something given to him. He doesn't earn dignity through his own strength or willpower, but rather receives it through relationships—first with God, then with other people.
This Biblical vision is ordered and finite. Man gets placed in matter, in the garden, in the body, and after the fall, in history. He sinned gravely, but God's love and mercy didn't abandon him. He's free, but only because he's bound to law, to covenant, to death. He eats, loves, works, and dies. But this death isn't final annihilation or some meaningless accident; it's the boundary that lets redemption come through. (Religion's stroke of genius here is turning death itself, the threat of nothingness, into the very promise of salvation.)
In Christianity, this vision gets its ultimate fulfillment and becomes flesh in the central Christian event that all creation was made for: the Incarnation. God becomes man in Christ in order to go through death so we might be saved from it. He doesn’t come to dominate flesh, but to make it holy. Christianity reads the entire Hebrew Bible—from Genesis's first words to Malachi's last—as building up to the Incarnation. God becoming man so man could become God was always the plan. For it to work, the incarnate God had to suffer and die. His blood was freely given to humanity. His communion, his sharing of bread and wine, was a deliberate sacrifice. He died so that man could have eternal life. And his victory, his cosmic breaking down of the barriers between man and God, death and life, wasn't about living forever on earth, but about resurrection into glory.
"Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” —Matthew 26:27-28 and Mark 14:24
The Eucharist's centrality to Christian devotional life becomes intelligible once we grasp that it represents far more than ceremonial observance—it constitutes the liturgical axis around which the entire sacramental economy revolves. Stoker's genius lay precisely in recognizing this theological architecture and constructing its perfect inversion. The ritual is not ornamental but ontological: through the consecrated elements, the Church claims to effect real participation in the divine nature, not merely to commemorate a historical event.
The patristic witnesses understood this. When Ignatius of Antioch termed the Eucharist "the medicine of immortality," he was articulating a paradox fundamental to Christian soteriology—that life emerges through death, healing through wounding. The very blood that flows from Christ's pierced side becomes, sacramentally, the agent of restoration. Cyril of Jerusalem's insistence on the "real" rather than "painted" nature of the eucharistic blood reflects the Church's refusal of merely symbolic interpretation: what appears as wine has been transubstantiated into the actual substance of divinity made flesh.
This sacramental realism creates the theological conditions under which Dracula's inversions achieve their full horror. Christ's blood flows outward in self-gift. The vampire's feeding moves inward in appropriation. The communion that should nourish the communicant with life instead depletes the victim to death.
Within the original sacramental order of the Eucharist, blood undergoes a metaphysical transformation that inverts all natural categories; what flows from wounds becomes the source of healing, and what signifies death becomes the pledge of life eternal. The logic is scandalous to reason—the divine empties itself into the creaturely, the infinite constrains itself within finite elements, the immortal submits to mortality that mortality might partake of immortality.
The eucharistic mystery thus centers on a fundamental reversal of power: Christ becomes that which is consumed, offering his substance as nourishment for those who approach the altar. The blood flows outward in pure gift, unconditioned by merit or reciprocity. It is precisely this gratuitous self-offering that has compelled the Church's most sustained doctrinal reflection across the centuries—from the Fathers' disputes over the real presence to the scholastics' elaboration of transubstantiation, from Eastern theologies of deification to Protestant formulations of justification. The cup contains not merely wine transformed, but the entire economy of salvation compressed into sacramental form.
This establishes the theological architecture that Stoker's Count systematically profanes. Where divine love once poured itself out, now a vampiric hunger draws inward.
Even as faith in the literal presence receded, the symbolic inheritance of this act retained its grip on the Western imagination. This framework of redemptive suffering became a kind of cultural grammar, repurposed by secular movements and revolutionary ideologies dreaming of national renewal through blood. Look closely, and you will find that no image of what it means to be human, to die, or to live in the West is entirely free from the echo of this offering—or, as we shall see, its grotesque distortion.
Dracula’s monstrosity is not simple predation but blasphemous imitation, counterfeit. He inverts the divine pattern—a ghastly anti-savior. He offers the chalice of eternal life, but it’s filled with the blood of others. He promises immortality, but the promise is void, purchased by the annihilation of the self. His kiss is not communion. It’s a violation that sires not followers but specters bound to his insatiable ego. His dominion? Not the Kingdom of God but the ever-expanding empire of the grave.
He stands as the ultimate perversion of the Paschal mystery. Christ descends to harrow Hell and conquer mortality. Dracula rises to enthrone it.
“If we don’t want to twist and split hairs, if we want to leave behind ‘yes and no’—in a word, if we want to speak as honorable and honest people, then we must confess: we are no longer Christians.” — David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872)
Bram Stoker wrote in an age of profound cultural schizophrenia. The Victorian world was still haunted by the older Christian vision of man: a creature finite and fallen, yet made in God’s image and offered redemption through the Incarnation. But that image was fracturing under the relentless pressure of modern changes—Enlightenment rationalism, Romantic humanism, the biological fatalism of early Darwinism.
This was an age of double vision. It inhabited the ruins of Christendom while championing a new gospel of human autonomy. The moral and symbolic architecture of the Christian faith was preserved even as experiments in its demolition proceeded—a process that would find its brutal conclusion in the trenches of the First World War. The common soldier might still carry a Bible into battle. The intellectuals, politicians, and even many clergy who sent him there were reading from a different script.
It was in this twilight that Dracula could be born. The old faith was still visible, but the new world was pulling irresistibly toward a post-Christian dawn. He functions so powerfully as an anti-incarnational figure because the framework of the Incarnation was still a living cultural memory. Still potent enough to invert.
It is into this spiritual vacuum that Dracula arrives—fittingly, in the modern metropolis of London—as a Christ in reverse. An anti-messiah who comes not to redeem humanity but to consume it. He does not merely oppose what man is; he presents a terrifying new possibility for what man might become: a creature “freed” from death by becoming a vessel for it, “freed” from God by engaging in a monstrous parody of Him. This makes Dracula a figure of profound theological terror.
Dracula embodies an inverted Paschal logic. His blood-offering enslaves rather than liberates. His communion feeds upon rather than nourishes the communicant. His multiplication of “life” proceeds through desecration rather than generation. Christ’s sacrifice purchases redemption; the vampire’s predation establishes parasitic dominion. The flesh he promises is not transfigured but suspended indefinitely in a state of animate corruption. His resurrection lacks all glory—it is mere persistence, a prolonged refusal of proper death that leads not toward light but deeper into privation.
The nineteenth-century reader could still recognize this constellation of inversions because the theological structure remained partially present. What made Dracula truly terrifying was not his alienness but his systematic perversion of the sacred—each element of his nature corresponding point-for-point to some aspect of Christian soteriology, yet rotted from within. He was legible as evil because the categories of good retained sufficient cultural authority to render their negation spiritually intelligible.
The novel’s very structure amplifies this theological architecture. An epistolary collection of diaries, letters, sworn testimonies of those who “witnessed these events”—in the words of Saint Luke—the form itself parallels the New Testament. Just as the Gospels and Epistles were compiled as collective witness to the world-altering event of the Incarnation, Stoker presents a new sacred text assembled from multiple sources, this time testifying to the arrival of its horrifying inversion. What unites these voices is not style or theory but a shared confrontation with something real, mysterious, and terrible. Something they could only understand by recording it, sharing it, passing it on.
But how does Dracula get to London to begin with? How does such terror arrive in the very capital of 19th-century civilization, order, and humanity? What is striking about the Prince of Night is that he did not invade our world. He was invited into it.
The Journey to the East
How did the prince of the dead arrive in the city of the living? A boundary, indeed, has been breached, but how? Dracula does not invade London by force but is invited into it through a series of freely granted permissions, legal, economic, erotic, and symbolic, to cross boundaries he was not meant to cross. Indeed, not just in his entrance into the civilized world, but even at the most concrete level, entering the house of the victim, Dracula had to be explicitly invited in.
Jonathan Harker, the young solicitor, an English gentleman who seeks the capital with which to start his life with his beloved Mina, is the one who journeys Eastward to conduct a legal transaction through which to acquire such capital. He is selling a piece of London, a piece of home that is, to the unknown wealthy master in exchange for immediate, calculable profit. Much of the history of the modern world is already included in this single fact of the fictitious work. Harker represents the modern liberal order at its most mundane: the extension of credit, the signing of contracts, the securing of property, the professionalization of exchange. Like a true English imperialist, not the leftist caricature, he travels in the spirit of adventure and commerce, not conquest.
Without invoking the now-ossified odious thesis of Orientalism, it is clear that “the East” in Dracula, as in 19th-century literature, already functions not as an empirical referent but as a symbolic inversion, a negative figuration, through which the West secures its conceptual integrity. It is not a geography but a pole in a metaphysical schema of contrast. When Harker remarks, “It seems to me that the further east you go, the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” he is not expressing colonial contempt, but unconsciously articulating a contrastive metaphysic—a spontaneous utterance of his metaphysical disorientation, a result of breaching boundaries. He is not really registering a delay, but his own increasing deviation.
Here, the “East” is not an index of imperial condescension of racial hierarchy, etc. There is nothing more truly pathetic and flattening than to immediately allegorize all such literary and semiotic devices as symbols of power, race, coloniality, etc. It is much more fruitful to isolate the deeper epistemic operation: a contrastive act by which Stoker is structuring reversal as the precondition for the meaning-making polar points of fixity. The act of contrast, East against West, is not political, but analogical. It names the disturbance of established measure. Theologically speaking, it is the precondition for discernment: the world out of joint by which the moral imagination is tested.
The destination of Harker is an ancient castle in the deep East, in which an old, wealthy nobleman lives in his dynastic home, Transylvania, the heart of the Carpathian mountains, a brilliant invention of Stoker that became inseparable from vampires ever since. In this late Victorian age, the East, the European East to be exact, was part of that vexing “Eastern Question,” a land of constant strife, racial murder, Turkish tyranny, poverty, superstition, feudal backwardness, and political instability. It was the East of the Bulgarian atrocities and the Armenian genocide, a place where the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, justice and tyranny were often non-existent in what Dracula described as “a whirlpool of European races.”
“We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.” —Dracula to Harker
In Transylvania, Dracula has a place, a castle of his own, which is known and avoided by the locals. He fits, in a manner of speaking, in his natural place. The local mountain peasants and gypsies recognize the evil of Dracula and have developed an entire system of rituals, symbols, taboos, signs, totems, etc. to contain him and deal with him which he stays in his Castle with his “gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. None of it that I [Harker] noticed was less than three hundred years old. There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them old and stained.”
In Stoker’s writing, both the world of the Carpathian locals and of Dracula’s castle struggle with boundaries. The Eastern European landscape is a geography of spiritual confusion—perpetual strife, collapsed distinctions, blurred lines between war and peace, civilization and barbarism, past and present, Christianity and Islam, superstition and truth. In other words, the constant absence, if not negation, of boundaries in space and time. Dracula, himself, is an icon of pure transgression. Even in the mundane facts of his existence, he is without order. He has no drivers and no servants; he moves alone through his great house, a solitary custodian of a decaying aristocracy. His wealth is indiscriminate: Harker observes hoards of gold from every empire—Roman, Ottoman, Austrian—stacked in disarray, untouched by time, belonging to no economy or sovereignty. Dracula is not merely undead, but he is entirely and totally unplaced. His violation is not just of life, but of all form.
The theme of inversion, perpetual negation of boundaries that give shape to forms and individualities, and the constant denial of meaning has been the central haunting ghost of the Enlightenment since the 18th century, and which will come to completion in the work of Nietzsche a century later and postmodernism at large. It was the late 18th-century German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi who coined the term nihilism specifically to warn of the Enlightenment’s consequences, as reason has only the power to negate and destroy limits, yet none to establish any. This received its most iconic literary representations in Goethe’s haunting verse:
I am the spirit of perpetual negation;
And rightly so, for all things that exist
Deserve to perish, and would not be missed—
Much better it would be if nothing were
Brought into being. Thus, what you men call
Destruction, sin, evil in short, is all
My sphere, the element I most prefer. — Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust (1806)
Is it possible to say that Dracula, then, is an incarnate Mephisto, the Enlightenment anti-logos made flesh? A Gospel of birth from an unholy spirit?
Back in Stoker’s story, despite that Dracula and his neighbors shared this world of boundarylessness, the locals still were able to save themselves by learning to draw lines, a hard boundary between them and the Count, a boundary that is made, not from passports, checkpoints, and paper, but from wreaths of garlic, crosses, icons, and sacred words; a containment that depended on what seemed like arbitrary separation conducted through arbitrary laughable, and essentially effeminate, means.
Harker, on the other hand, armed not with such backward relics but with rationality, does not believe in monsters. He does not believe in evil. He believes in deeds and ledgers. He journeys East as a solicitor, representing a London real estate firm. In his briefcase, he had only contracts, papers, pens, and other necessary stationery. He sells property, a piece of England itself, to an ancient nobleman with strange manners and stranger appetites. He enters the castle with confidence, not because he is brave, but because he believes the world to be governed by reason. The modern transaction, the masculine security of law, he assumes, will protect him. It does not.
Which is superstition, and which is clarity? Well, it is the Englishman who opens the gate to evil.
We are already operating on multiple registers and symbolic levels, which I will not be able to cover in a Substack essay, but I hope to touch on enough to spark the reader's imagination and thought: the circulation of capital, the expansion of empire, the intrusion of instrumental reason into mystical space, the confusion of masculine rationality with moral clarity. The permission that is given to Dracula occurs through a single act, which is really the hypercondensation of the series of boundary transgressions that define the modern world, from physical boundaries to gender, and to the questions of knowledge. In other words, Harker’s entrance into the Count’s castle is the theological equivalent of eating from the tree in Eden. A transaction meant to secure capital ends by collapsing the boundary between the sacred and the profane, the living and the dead, the human and the demonic, good from evil.
Inside the Castle: Dracula as Our Reflection in the Mirror
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” —Count Dracula to Harker
Since the first moment the Count appears, what is interesting is that, technically speaking, Dracula does not lie, not once. He gives factual, albeit limited, information that does not disclose his true nature and reality, but he does not fabricate falsehoods. He explains to Harker why the castle is empty by saying, “It is late, and my people are not available,” both of which are incontestable facts. In other words, rather than a simple deceiver, he becomes something more terrifying, a figure who operates entirely within the bounds of modern rational discourse while pursuing utterly malevolent ends; perfect civilized evil.
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