Akasha

Those Who Must Be Kept

Of Those Who Must Be Kept
What can we know?
Can any explanation save us?

Akasha and Enkil,
We are your children,
but what do you give us?
Is your silence
A better gift than truth?

Mother and Father.
Keep your silence,
Keep your secrets,
But those of you with tongues,
sing my song.

Sons and daughters
Children of darkness
Raise your voices
Make a chorus
Let heaven hear us

Come together,
Brother and sisters,
Come to me.

Akasha! Enkil!
Keep your secrets
Keep your silence
It is a better gift than truth.

The Queen of the Damned ~ Anne Rice

An ancient Egyptian queen who became the first vampire, she is part of the vampire couple known in legend as Those Who Must Be Kept. Her name was inspired by a place name Rice had seen on a map in the book Lost Cities of Africa.

Becoming a queen upon her marriage when she was a mortal, Akasha, with her husband King Enkil, turns her people away from cannibalism and encourages the eating of grains. In all things Akasha disregards the beliefs of others and demands that everyone practice hers. Her dark, nihilistic side compels her to seek evidence of the supernatural and, as a result, she has the twin witches, Maharet and Mekare, brought to her court. They perceive that she throws a moral cloak over her evil deeds, so that these deeds become a mix of good and evil that is actually more dangerous than pure unadulterated evil. Akasha has no true morality but is driven to continually create meaning. When the twins demonstrate to her what the spirits can do, she is caught between fascination and rage. She needs elegant beliefs to fill up her inner emptiness, but the presence and power of these spirits confirm her nihilism. When she scorns the spirits, one of them - Amel - attacks her, prefiguring a future attack that will result in a bizarre and disastrous bond.

Akasha humiliates the twins by making them undergo a public rape, then sends them away. By attacking the perpetrator, Amel avenges the twins. Akasha and Enkil then attempt to learn more about this spirit and consequently put themselves at risk. Those mortals who wish to lead the people back to cannibalism use the occasion for an assassination attempt. Akasha and Enkil are both seriously wounded, and as Akasha's soul ascends, Amel joins with it and re-enters her body through her wounds, fusing with her heart and brain to produce a new entity: the vampire. Akasha then saves Enkil by making him a vampire and goes on to give the Dark Gift to Khayman, who gives it to the twin witches.

As her progeny proliferate, Akasha's need for blood diminishes. Eventually she becomes a living statue, kept safe for centuries by guardians who know that she is the source of their existence and immortality. After one of these guardians, the Elder, tires of the task, he places Akasha and Enkil in the sun. Akasha draws Marius to her and urges him to take her and Enkil out of Egypt. Marius does so and protects them for nearly two thousand years. During that time, Akasha projects her soul from her body and watches the world through the eyes of mortals and immortals. At one point, the witch Maharet, now a vampire, stabs Akasha in the heart. As Maharet feels the energy leave her own body, it confirms the legend that to kill Akasha is to annihilate the vampires. Akasha however, does not react to the attack.

"She was too catatonic," Rice explains, "utterly indifferent. After all those thousands of years she doesn't give a damn. People can do anything, but it's not going to hurt her."

When Lestat first sees Akasha, he wants to touch her immobile face. That she seems to be alive inside an inert body upsets him; it is like being buried alive. Marius urges him to talk to her, and Lestat tells her that she is beautiful. He kisses her and she reveals to him her name. Later he plays the violin for her, waking her from her trance. She allows him to drink her blood while she drinks from him; they remain locked in the intimate embrace until Enkil, too, wakes up and, in a rage, separates them.

Marius then sends Lestat away, but not before Marius has made an ominous statement that becomes a prediction: "Who knows what Akasha might do if there were no Enkil to hold her?"

In 1985, Lestat again wakes Akasha with his music - this time rock music in which he mentions her name and the legends about her. She rises, and upon realising that Enkil no longer has power to keep her with him, kills him. She then leaves the shrine and becomes a relentless destroyer, killing most of the vampires. She leaves a few, including Maharet and Khayman, to be immortal witnesses and to join with her in her plan for a new world order: to kill ninety-nine percent of the world's men and to set up a new Eden in which women, with Akasha as the goddess, reign. While Akasha insists this is for the benefit of mortal women, in truth she wants to dominate and be worshiped, to once again subject everyone to her will. The surviving vampires form a plan to stand against Akasha, aware that the witch Mekare, also a vampire, is moving to join them.

Akasha abducts Lestat to be her apprentice and prince; he participates for a brief time, then stands against her with the surviving vampires. Their rebellion enrages her, but before she can attack them, the witch Mekare shoves her into a glass wall. The broken shards cut off Akasha's head. Maharet immediately grabs Akasha's heart and brain, and gives them to Makare to eat. As Mekare does so, she takes into herself the source of the spiritual fusion with Amel and becomes the new life force of the vampires.

"Akasha is the villain of QD," Rice explains, "because she is subordinating everything to a pure idea."

(Those Who Must Be Kept)
The Vampire Lestat
~ Innovation Books ©1990

Those Who Must Be Kept

The first two vampires made, Akasha and Enkil. Akasha was the first vampire and she came into being when a spirit, Amel, passed into her mortal body through a fatal wound and fused with her heart and blood. In turn, Akasha made Enkil a vampire as he lay dying. As immortals, they were soon worshiped and envied. They did make other vampires, but they contained the process so that Egypt would not become solely a race of Blood Drinkers. They mythologised what had happened to them with the tale of Osiris, believing they were meant to be gods. A cult grew up around them to try to use their power for good, although some priests wanted to steal from them the secret of immortality.

Khayman, Akasha and Enkil's court steward who was the third vampire made, was largely responsible for the spreading of vampirsm. Among these early Blood Drinkers there were often battles for supremacy. Some of them imprisoned Akasha and Enkil beneath heavy stones in order to steal the powerful blood, but eventually Enkil and Akasha broke free. As the centuries passed, the king and queen grew silent and immobile, taking victims only occasionally and changing their position when no one could see the movement. Legend grew that all vampires were connected to Akasha and Enkil, the Mother and the Father, and that their destruction would mean the end of the whole vampire race. Thus, the priests who worshiped them began guarding them, and eventually these two came into the care of the Elder, an Egyptian who reluctantly took on the burden of protection.

In QD, some of the vampires surmise that Aksaha's and Enkil's silence is a result of thier being overwhelmed by the noise of all the voices - the endless cries of the world - which come to them by virtue of their magnified sense of hearing. Vampires have to learn to screen out these voices or go mad. Akasha basically confirms this supposition when she tells Lestat of the trance that came over her and how only his voice came over all the rest to wake her and motivate her to rise.

The Elder comes to dislike Akasha's and Enkil's silence and lack of response. He begins to doubt the legends, so he decides to place them in the sun. He wants them to react, to move to save themselves. He also desires to see if anything would happen to him and the other vampires if these two were harmed. The legend proves true. In the sun their skin turns a deep bronze, while all other vampries are either disintigrated or terribly burned; only the oldest ones survive without calamity. The Elder then removes them from the sun.

After the burning, Marius is made a vampire. He is drawn to Egypt, where Akasha comes to him to ask him to become the new guardian. Shaken by the knowledge that what happens to these vampries happens to him, he takes her and Enkil out of Egypt and erects temples of secrecy and protection for them all over Europe.

After Lestat searches for Marius for ten years, Marius comes to him and brings him to an island where he has built a fortress of stone on the cliffs. In a chilly room deep inside the cliff he shows Lestat Those Who Must Be Kept. The vampire progenitors sit silently on thrones, dressed in fine white linen. In three hundred years they have not taken a drink, although Marius has drunk from them. They seem like stone, simultaneously dead and alive. Marius admits he does not know whether they are at peace or simply locked in silence, but he keeps things in their room beautiful for them in case they can see. The room is full of flowers and torches, and he has painted on the wall a mural of Egypt. A huge gold tabernacle engraved with Egyptian designs dominates the room.

Lestat is upset at the thought of becoming like them one day and urges Marius to leave with him. But Marius tells him to talk to them, and Lestat tells Akasha she is beuatiful. The next night, Lestat goes to them and plays a violin in the hope of waking them with music. Akasha awakens and urges him to drink from her. He does so and she bites him, drinking from him at the same time. Enkil intervenes, almost killing Lestat in the process, and Marius sends Lestat away, extracting from him the promise never to tell anyone about what he has seen or heard.

However, two centuries later, in 1984, Lestat writes about this adventure in his autobiography. He also records the images, legends, and names in his music videos. Marius, who has take Those Who Must Be Kept to an ice fortress in the north, plays the music videos for them. In response, Akasha rises, kills Enkil, traps Marius under ice, and abducts Lestat from Carmel Valley. It becomes clear to the vampires that the vampire spirit resides only in her, and that Enkil was irrelevant all along, except to be her companion.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland