Behind Newcastle Cathedral in the north of England a rabbit with blood red fangs and blood red claws crouches over a back door. It perches on top of a big round window that looks an awful lot like an eye and it glares straight down into the old churchyard where the city once buried its dead. The locals call it the Vampire Rabbit. At night somebody even lights it up (because apparently the fangs weren’t doing enough).
The nickname didn’t come from any city council. According to folklorist Gail-Nina Anderson it came from Newcastle’s goths, who adopted the snarling little guy as a landmark until the name stuck like gum on a church step. You have walked past a thousand strange church carvings in your life without a second look. This is the one that should have stopped you.
The official story is short and kinda dull in the way official stories usually are. The building is Cathedral Buildings on Dean Street, a block of shops and offices finished in 1901 by an architect named William Wood. One theory says Wood put the rabbit up to scare off body snatchers who supposedly worked that quiet corner of the churchyard after dark. The other says it was an inside joke for his pal Sir George Hare Philipson, a physician at the Royal Infirmary whose middle name did all the heavy lifting.
So the official position of history is that a grown man with an architecture practice carved a bloodthirsty bunny over a graveyard as a PUN. If my friends ever honored me that way there’d be a stone wolf on an e-bike snarling over a parking lot somewhere in Wyoming and honestly I would have earned it. Doctors and grave robbers make a tidy little story for the walking tour.
BUT WHAT IF THIS WAS A LIE TO HIDE THE TRUTH?
His Bed Was Thirteen Feet Long and Made of Iron
Some occult scholars say the rabbit is a symbol of Og of Bashan. If that name draws a blank don’t feel too bad since Sunday school skips him for the same reason it skips the Nephilim. Og was the giant king of Bashan who went to war against Moses and the Israelites on their way into the Promised Land. The book of Deuteronomy actually pauses after the battle to brag about his furniture because his bed was made of iron and stretched nine cubits long. That works out to more than thirteen feet of bed frame and Scripture even names the Ammonite city where it sat on display like a roadside attraction.
The same verse calls Og the last of the remnant of giants. Where the English says giants the Hebrew says Rephaim and that’s the same word the Old Testament uses for the shades of the dead drifting through Sheol.
That leaves an obvious problem with the Flood. If God drowned every giant on earth then how was one still sleeping in a thirteen foot iron bed generations later? The old Jewish legends have an answer for that.
Og couldn’t get inside the ark so he rode out the Flood on the outside hanging onto its timbers while Noah passed him food through a hole in the hull (history’s first drive-thru window) and in return the giant swore to be Noah’s servant forever.
The occult scholars take that oath and run with it. In their telling Noah only let Og aboard after the giant pledged his loyalty and worship to the One True God. The pledge was a trick. Og learned everything Noah could teach him about what these scholars call Rabbinical Magick and THEN ran off with Boaz and Jachin, the two pillars Enoch made to carry the combined knowledge of the world that drowned.
(Noah, you survived the literal end of the world and still got played by a hitchhiker.)
The Masons Had This Story in 1450
If all of that sounds cooked up on a message board last Tuesday, the Freemasons would like a word. One of the oldest documents in Masonry is the Matthew Cooke Manuscript from the middle of the fourteen hundreds. It tells the story of Lamech’s four children living before the Flood and one of them was Tubal Cain, the first blacksmith in the Bible. Fearing God would destroy the world by fire or water they carved every science they knew into two pillars. One was marble so it wouldn’t burn and the other was a kind of brick that wouldn’t sink. Many years after the waters went down the pillars turned up again and the manuscript says Pythagoras found one while Hermes found the other.
Masonic lodges still decorate with two pillars named Boaz and Jachin after the pair at Solomon’s Temple. Tubal Cain’s name still turns up in their ritual too. The occult scholars say Og and Tubal Cain are the same being under two different names and that the Masons worship him as their false God King.
That brings us back to the doctor with the convenient middle name. According to local researcher Andrew Curtis Sir George Hare Philipson was a Freemason who founded the University of Durham Masonic Lodge just two years after the rabbit went up over that door. Curtis figured the doctor angle covered the vampire part on its own. (Fair enough, nobody draws more blood than a hospital.)
Gentlemen of the lodge, if you wanted us to stop asking questions you really should have stuck with the body snatchers…
(Don’t kill me! I’m just a researcher!)
Every Coat of Paint Tells on Somebody
The scholars aren’t finished with Og. They say he never died and still walks the earth as a wight, the ancient world’s name for a blood drinking VAMPIRE. The Rephaim come back in right about now because the Bible’s giants and the Bible’s restless dead share one Hebrew word. A wight who studied Rabbinical Magick at Noah’s elbow would be a Wight Rabbi and if you say that fast enough it comes out White Rabbit.
And it gets weirder because White Rabbit is exactly what some locals used to call it. When Gail-Nina Anderson asked around Newcastle about the creature some people told her it was originally white and went by that very name. A library photo from the late eighties shows it painted white as a church candle. Another local told Anderson it had once been painted green and the scholars have an answer for that too.
A medieval German poem tells how the archangel Michael tore the crown off Lucifer’s head during the war in heaven and a jewel broke loose and tumbled to earth. Later occult writers decided that jewel was an emerald and that the Holy Grail was carved out of it. These scholars say Og began as that very emerald and that’s your green paint explained.
And why has it been jet black since 2008?
Well these scholars say that’s because Og of Bashan is the ‘Prince of Darkness’.
So you get to pick between two stories. In one a turn of the century architect carved a pun about his doctor buddy over a graveyard and went home for supper. In the other a giant conned Noah, robbed the drowned world of its secrets and has been sucking blood behind a cathedral under a fresh coat of paint ever since.
What do YOU think that White Rabbit really represents?
You Don’t Have to Con Noah to Get In
Og had to lie to a righteous man and hang off the side of a boat for a year to get his hands on the secrets of the ancient world. You don’t have to do any of that. From now until New Year’s a paid subscription to The Wise Wolf is 80% off for your first year. If you haven’t been able to afford the upgrade to paid, now is a great time to do it.
For less than the price of a crappy cup of gas station coffee you can make sure a middle aged weirdo keeps a rundown motel roof over his head and maybe someday affords health insurance to prevent an early death. Og supposedly survived the Flood and several thousand years of bad press without health insurance but I’m not a thirteen foot giant with a vampire problem. I’m a guy with a laptop who would very much like to see retirement age in 20 years. Every time you share this article that guy gets one step closer to a real checkup (preferably from a doctor without a fanged rabbit on his building).
We’re also trying something new over on YouTube. Lily doesn’t want to do on camera stuff because she’s already had more than one guy on Substack mail her photos of something she DID NOT want to see. She’s worried that if we did this kind of video on YouTube it would get even worse. So we hired an actress we found on Fiverr to be the face of a new series of YouTube Shorts and we’re calling her ‘Kitty Wolf’. (That is obviously not her real name.)
If we learned one thing from the Lily situation it’s DO NOT USE YOUR REAL NAME ONLINE because weirdos WILL find you and send you spicy pics.
If you’re into video content check this one out on The Wise Wolf Club channel. Kitty goes all out in every video and wears a new cosplay outfit each time. I seriously cannot believe she’s doing these Shorts for 20 bucks a pop. She’s even more broke than Lily and myself apparently!
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
Sources
Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV), Bible Gateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+3%3A11&version=KJV
Noah in Rabbinic Literature, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_in_rabbinic_literature
The Matthew Cooke Manuscript c.1450, The Square Magazine, https://thesquaremagazine.com/mag/?p=3675
Tubal-cain, Grand Lodge of Iowa, https://grandlodgeofiowa.org/docs/Symbolism/Tubal.pdf
27 Dean Street, vampire rabbit or hare, Tyne and Wear Historic Environment Record, https://sitelines.newcastle.gov.uk/node/222433
Vampire Rabbit, St Nicholas Church Yard (Andrew Curtis), Co-Curate, https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/resources/view/97021
The Vampire Rabbit (1988 photo), Co-Curate, https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/resources/view/97022/
Haunted City: Gail Anderson on the Vampire Rabbit, Bad Witch, https://www.badwitch.co.uk/2018/07/haunted-city-gail-anderson-on-vampire.html
The Holy Grail as Lucifer’s Crown Jewel, Jason Colavito, https://jasoncolavito.com/the-holy-grail-as-lucifers-crown-jewel.html
"They say he never died and still walks the earth as a wight ..." Oh sure, WW, blame the wight man! Everyone else does!
You should do a piece on the gas and food crisis somehow coinciding with super el niño and a brewing world war 3 and also plagues