"Drink, my young one, my wounded one."

I felt his heart swell, his body undulate, and we were sealed against each other.

I think I heard myself say: "Marius."

And he answered: "Yes"

~

"But I warn you," he said, "there's a danger in this. I don't possess the ultimate answers. I can't tell you who made the world or why man exists. I can't tell you why we exist. I can tell you more about us than anyone else has told you so far. I can show you Those Who Must Be Kept and tell you what I know of them. I can tell you why I think I have managed to survive for so long. This knowledge may change you somewhat. That's all knowledge ever really does, I suppose..."

"Yes -"

"But when I've given all I have to give, you will be exactly where you were before: an immortal being who must find his own reasons to exist."

~

"What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place."

~

Marius ~ Dany & Dany ©2000

~

"You are the damnedest creature, Lestat," he murmured. "The point is I can do anything I like to you if you tell. Surely you know that. I could crush you underfoot the way Akasha crushed the Elder. I could set you ablaze with the power of my mind. But I don't want to utter such threats. I want you to come back to me. But I will not have these secrets known. I will not have a band of immortals descend upon me again as they did in Venice. I will not be known to our kind. You must never - deliberately or accidentally - send anyone searching for Those Who Must Be Kept or for Marius. You will never utter my name to others."

The Vampire Lestat ~ Anne Rice

A vampire who represents the figure of the wise teacher.

"I'm always fascinated with the idea of the older, wiser teacher," says Rice. "It captured my imagination in The Teachings of Don Juan - that an older, more experienced mystic or adept would teach one [an apprentice] how to use such powers."

Lestat first hears of Marius when Armand explains how he became a vampire. When Armand first knew him in the fifteenth century, Marius had been a Venetian nobleman and artist. He chose to work among mortals, have mortal apprentices, and make religious art. It was Marius who bought Armand from a brothel and fell in love with him. He then painted The Temptation of Amedeo in an attempt to capture on canvas Armand's qualities forever, and he made Armand so that he could join with another kindred soul. Marius desired their bond to be permanent, but their happiness became short-lived when, only six months later, Santino's coven put a torch to Marius and captured Armand. Marius managed to escape to his secret shrine in the mountains of northern Italy, where he healed himself by drinking the healing blood of Those Who Must Be Kept. He did not see Armand again until 1985 in Sonoma, although he had been aware that Armand was suffering through three centuries of loneliness.

"I don't remember the first moment Marius sprang into my mind," says Rice. "Maybe it was when Lestat said he wanted to know whether immortals had been made in Roman times, when it was more enlightened and sophisticated than the Dark Ages. So Marius evolved as a character who really had the wisdom of that ancient world - the cleverness, the wit, the perspective on the world that I feel a sophisticated Roman should have had. He may have even evolved from the force of Armand's image. I might have written Armand's story before I knew who Marius really was."

After hearing about Marius from Armand, Lestat decides Marius could teach him a lot about the best way of living as an immortal. He sets out to find him, for ten years leaving messages all across Europe until Marius - won over by Lestat's persistence and innocence - finally comes to him. Marius then takes Lestat to his sanctuary on a Greek Island.

With blue eyes and white-blonde hair, Marius wears red velvet, no matter what the era. His face astonishes Lestat: "What one of us could have such a face? What did we know of patience, of seeming goodness, of compassion? Marius seems to depict a pure image of human love. Gentle, vital, and noble, he emanates a godlike power, although he is more human than any vampire Lestat has ever encountered. Marius does have the ability to perform supernatural feats like levitation and mental telepathy, but he prefers to do things the human way. To him, human gestures are more elegant and require less energy. "There is wisdom in the flesh," he claims. His goal is not to transcend human emotions but, rather, to refine and understand them. He also seems connected to everything around him - thus being the antithesis of Armand, who is connected to nothing. Marius shows Lestat Those Who Must Be Kept - Akasha and Enkil, the original vampires - then tells his own story.

The bastard child of a Keltic woman and a wealthy Roman, he was a citizen of the Roman Gallic city of Massilia durning the time of the Roman Empire. Never bored or defeated by life, he always felt a sense of invincibility and wonder. An important life theme for him was the idea of the existence of a continual awareness because Marius desired that nothing spiritual ever be lost. A scholar, he was, at the age of forty, at work on a history of the world when a Druid abducted him. Because he was an extraordinary human being, the Druids wanted him to become their new god and thus replace the God of the Grove, a burned and crippled vampire who no longer inspired their ceremonies.

The Druid priest, Mael, forced Marius to learn the Druid language and customs. On the night of their great Feast of Samhain, the Druids took Marius to the giant oak tree where they had imprisoned their other god. Inside it, the vampire god taught him the lessons of the vampires and urged him to go to Egypt, to find out why vampires in other places - and himself as well - had been burned or destroyed. After being made a vampire, Marius broke free of the Druids and pursued this new course.

In Alexandria, Marius encountered other burned vampires. One of them took him to the Elder - a vampire who told Marius about Akasha and Enkil, the vampire progenitors. Marius learned that he, like other vampires, is vitally connected to them, and that if they suffered harm, he and all other vampires would experience similar damage. Since they had been placed in the sun, as a consequence vampires everywhere had been burned or destroyed. The recognition that whatever happens to them happens to him upsets him, although it affirmed Marius's desire for the existence of a continual awareness.

That same night, Akasha asked Marius to take her and Enkil out of Egypt before the Elder - the one who had deliberately placed them in the sun - destroyed them. Marius took them as requested, travelling with them around Europe until he settled on an island fortress in the Argean, where he built a shrine for them and where he now sits with Lestat.

Marius feels he is truly immortal, that he is the perfect guardian for Akasha and Enkil, and that his is now the "continual awareness." He is in love with humanity's progress, although he realises that human evolution away from belief in gods and superstitions has made him, as a vampire, obsolete. No purpose is left for him.

After Marius tells his story, he sends Lestat away to live on his own, for the equivalent of one mortal lifetime. He tells Lestat not to look to history to give himself meaning because the dilemma of how to live one's life is always a personal one. However, Marius vows that he will be available if Lestat ever needs his help, and extracts from Lestat the promise never to tell anyone about him or his whereabouts.

They do not meet again until the twentieth century, when Lestat becomes a rock star and reveals the whole vampire history in his songs. By that time, Marius has moved his immortal charges to a northern wasteland where he plays Lestat's music videos for them. In response, Akasha rises and destroys the shrine, trapping Marius in ice for ten days. Marius sends out a signal of danger to the other vampires. His child and lover, Pandora, urges Santino to help dig Marius out, and while Marius survives, the experience has humiliated and spiritually bruised him.

(Marius) The Vampire Lestat
~ Innovation Books ©1990

He appears in BT only as an angry presence at Lestat's antics; he turns his back on Lestat in front of Louis's burning shack as if he is finally finished with him.

In a segment that was included in the first draft, then condensed to a few lines, Marius uses Khayman to bring Lestat to Hong Kong. There he scolds Lestat for making himself conspicuous to the mortal world. At this time Marius is still the scholar, reading newspapers and books in many languages, and looking through a high-powered telescope in search of the continual awareness about which he dreams.

Continual Awareness

A concept that Marius describes to Lestat, it captures his longing for an eternal preservation of values and identity. Since Marius fears chaos and ultimate meaninglessness, and since he cannot tolerate the possibility that even the simplest memories might be lost, he wants to believe that there is an omniscient force in the universe that keeps track of everything. He longs for something that possesses extended awareness, to give meaning and structure to life and death. As a vampire, he sees himself as the embodiment of this concept when he tracks human progress across a millennium.

This concept is significant for Rice. The idea that she might die and be forgotten, or that she may never find out why certain events happened, signifies an unacceptable degree of chaos in the universe. Such darkness and disorder do not make sense to her.

"I have always found the idea of a continual awareness to be seductive," says Rice. "It was an idea I had as a child that I took for granted. I saw it then as a sense of God and Christ at the final judgement, that there would be a moment when everyone gathered together and the truth of every single moment would be told. All suffering, pain and confusion would be redeemed in a moment of great illumination and understanding. But I'm afraid that there really is no continual awareness, that there is no one who knows everything that's happened."

The vampire figure offers a source of awareness that extends beyond a mortal life span. In Rice's short story "The Master of Rampling Gate," the mortal character Julie sees through a vampire's eyes the lost towns of past years, of people now dead and forgotten. The immortal vampire is a being who knows of these people; his memory preserves them from having meaningless, obscure deaths.

The sense of a continual awareness increases with each of The Chronicles. Louis sees that Lestat offers the possibility of a greater life span, but it is Armand who represents to him the meaning of several centuries of awareness. Armand is four hundred years old and claims to be the oldest vampire in existence. But after Lestat hears Armand's story, he seeks out Marius, Armand's maker, who has lived for a thousand years. Marius tells Lestat about the vampire progenitors who sitll exist and who were made thousands of years earlier. For Marius, it is Akasha and Enkil who embody the continual awareness to the greatest degree. When Enkil is destroyed, Marius mourns the memories that go with him.

By QD, Lestat has learned of several vampires who trace their existence back as far as Akasha; one of them, Maharet, has kept track of her human lineage though the mortal child she birthed. She possesses extensive documents that trace what she calls the Great Family back across both time and continents. Since she has survived and remained conscious across the millennia, she offers the truest sense of continual awareness of any of the vampires.

Parallel to the vampires is the Talamasca, the organisation that documents paranormal activities. In existence since A.D. 758, they have observed and kept records of vampires, witches, ghosts, and anything else that hints at the realm of the occult. The Talamasca represents a more limited, yet clearly focused dimension of continual awareness.

Akasha turns the concept of continual awareness on its head when she exploits her awareness of over six thousand years to devise a plan of great violence. Her use of this concept, although she does not recognise is as such, is the opposite of what Marius thought the knowledge should be used for. He wants to witness and care about human evolution; Akasha uses it to aid her in intervening and changing human existence.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland