Red Pentecost
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The Red Pentecost is a fictional religious practice of the Cainite Heresy, in the medieval setting of White Wolf Game Studio's role-playing game Vampire: The Dark Ages.
The Red Pentecost mimicks the Christian Pentecost, in which the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit and performed miraculous actions. In the case of the Red Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is replaced by the Beast that lies within all human beings, who is freed and allowed to take control.
The victims are subject to a kind of divine madness with the aid of psychedelic drugs and sometimes the Malkavian Discipline of Dementation, which cause them to suffer horrible hallucinations. Free from all clues of reality and from moral restraints, the attendants will perform the most barbaric perversities on each other (from rape to cannibalism and anything in between).
The Red Pentecost is used as a confessional sacrament and occasionally as an initiation rite. It is usually supervised by a powerful ghoul or even a full vampire. It is not celebrated often; many Heretic churches do so only in the week before Lent and sometimes in a few other "holidays", since keeping such practices secret is problematic.
[edit] See also
- Blood Communion (the main sacrament of the Cainite Heresy)
- Entheogen (a substance used in religious rites for "being in God")
- Orgy and Bacchanalia
[edit] Sources
- Vampire: The Dark Ages - Cainite Heresy (ISBN 1-56504-296-4), by White Wolf Publishing, Inc.
