Augustine was a secret society based in Whitmore College. They were known to gather in Whitmore to identify potential candidates for membership in college students. Augustine members were aware of the supernatural and were especially interested in vampires and the magic and science behind their enhanced senses and abilities. Highly qualified doctors such as Grayson Gilbert and Wes Maxfield experimented on vampires, and intended to use what they learned in their research to benefit humanity, such as using vampire blood to cure fatal illnesses. However, in order to accomplish this goal, the doctors captured and tortured vampires by doing experiments on them to test their theories.
After discovering what they were truly doing, Aaron Whitmore, the sole surviving member of the Whitmore family, who owned Whitmore College and who was the last person in charge of the trust that funded Augustine's experiments, eventually cut the entirety of their funding. A while later, two former Augustine vampires, Damon Salvatore and Lorenzo St. John, were finally reunited after each escaped captivity, and began tracking down and killing all the known Augustine members in revenge for all the they went through while used as test subjects. The sole living Augustine member, Wes Maxfield, managed to continue some of his research on conditioning vampires to feed on their own species instead of humans without the Whitmore family's funding, and was able to create what became known as the Ripper virus.