Hermeticism understands sorcerous vampires not as undead accidents, but as artificial inversions of the human circuit, beings produced when will intervenes violently in the separation of soul, body, and pneuma. The Kepn is not a revenant; it is a misconstructed remainder, created when forbidden praxis forces continuation after ontological rupture.
What kind of being results when separation occurs without release?
Lens Effect
Under this lens, the Kepn appears as:
a sorcerously fractured life-form, sustained by inverted circulation of blood and soul.
Primary effect on humans:
It drains vitality through parasitic misalignment, converting human coherence into fuel for its own persistence.
1. Creation by Black Magic — Illicit Coagulation
The Kepn originates through forbidden operative condensation, where magic is used not to dissolve or elevate, but to arrest transition. Hermetically, this is coagulation without purification, producing a being that persists without lawful correspondence.
Such entities cannot return to ordinary life because their internal circuits are closed incorrectly. Hunger replaces purpose; extraction replaces exchange.
2. Detached Head and Trailing Organs — Vertical Disjunction
The flying head form represents violent axial separation: intellect and appetite torn free from grounding body. Hermetically, this indicates pneumatic inversion, where the upper principle survives by feeding downward.
The exposed organs signify failed interiorization. What should remain hidden and regulated becomes external and predatory, seeking replacement substance to stabilize itself.
3. Dog-Headed Water Demon — Chthonic Regression
The aquatic canine form marks regressive embodiment, where human identity collapses into instinctual guardianship of thresholds. Water here is absorptive medium, allowing the Kepn to linger unseen while leeching vitality.
Hermetically, this form represents horizontal predation, contrasted with the vertical flight of the head—together completing a total parasitic field across air and water.
Final Reading
Under a Hermetic lens, the Kepn is human coherence forcibly interrupted, sustained only by consuming what it can no longer generate internally. It is not cursed by fate, but engineered by misuse, a warning that magic applied without ethical circulation produces entities that survive only by depletion.
Lesson for the Reader
Do not attempt to bind life beyond its lawful term. What is held together by force will demand payment in blood or spirit. Power that interrupts natural separation does not grant mastery—it creates hunger that never ends.
“What refuses to pass on must feed where it should have released.”