Blood

views updated

BLOOD

BLOOD . Among the religions of the world one finds many ambivalent or contradictory attitudes toward blood. Blood is perceived as being simultaneously pure and impure, attractive and repulsive, sacred and profane; it is at once a life-giving substance and a symbol of death. Handling blood is sometimes forbidden, sometimes mandatory, but usually dangerous. Rites involving blood require the intervention of individual specialists (warriors, sacrificers, circumcisers, butchers, or executioners) and always the participation of the group or community.

In many primitive societies, blood is identified as a soul substance: of men, of animals, and even of plants. The Romans said that in it is the sedes animae ("seat of life"). In pre-Islamic times, Arabs considered it the vegetative, liquid soul that remains in the body after death, feeding on libations. For the Hebrews, "the life of the flesh is in the blood" (Lv. 17:4).

The spilling of blood is often forbidden. This ban applies to certain categories of humans and animals: sacrificial victims, royalty, game, and so on. The Iroquois, the Scythians (Herodotus, 4.60–61), and the old Turco-Mongols, as well as the rulers of the Ottoman empire, forbade shedding the blood of persons of royal lineage. There is reason to believe that the Indian Hindu religions that have abolished sacrifices, and the feasting that goes with sacrifice, have done so more to avoid the shedding of blood than to comply with the dogmas of nonviolence and reincarnation. According to Genesis 9:4, the eating of raw meat is forbidden: "But you must not eat the flesh with the life, which is the blood, still in it." The Islamic tradition has similar restrictions.

Attitudes toward blood can be divided into two general categories: toward the blood of strangers, foreigners, or enemies and toward the blood of members of one's own community.

The blood of enemies usually is not protected by any taboo. It has been suggested that one justification for war is the perceived necessity of shedding blood in order to water the earth. One frequently encounters the idea that the earth is thirsty for blood—but only for licit blood. It can refuse blood that is not licit or cry out for vengeance against such illicit bloodshed, as the biblical passages Isaiah 26:21 and Job 16:18 illustrate. In pre-Columbian America blood was essential to the survival of the Sun, and in other countries it was demanded by the gods.

The killing of enemies is sometimes mandatory. Among the Turkic peoples in ancient times and again during the Islamic period in the sixteenth century, an adolescent did not acquire his adulthood, his name, and thus his soul until he committed his first murder. Killing—and being killed—has been the raison d'être for the Ojibwa and Dakota Indian tribes, as well as, to a certain extent, the Muslim "martyrs" of holy war and the Japanese samurai. At one time, a bloody death at the hand of an enemy seemed more to be envied than a natural death. However, concerning the caste of Hindu warriors in India, it was believed that one whose vocation was killing awaited his own immolation.

The blood of the enemy is rarely dangerous, even though the qualities and strengths of the soul remain in it. In antiquity people attempted to appropriate these qualities of blood by drinking it or washing themselves in it. Herodotus (17.64) notes that the Scythians drank the blood of the first victims they killed.

Within the community, however, attitudes toward blood and killing are different. Members of the community are connected by consanguinity, and they share collective responsibility for one another; the blood of each is the blood of all. The group's totemic animals may be included in this community, which is connected to the animals by adoption or alliance. A stranger can enter the group through marriage or "blood brotherhood," a custom practiced among the Fon of West Africa and among Central Asian peoples. Relations between blood brothers can be established in various ways, often through the juxtaposition of cuts made in their wrists or by pouring a few drops of blood into a cup, mixing it with wine (called "the blood of the vine" in antiquity), and drinking it. The Turkic peoples, Scythians, and Tibetans used the tops of skulls for drinking cups.

Murder within the community is forbidden. To kill one's relative is tantamount to shedding one's own blood; it is a crime that draws a curse that lasts for generations. When Cain murdered Abel, Abel's "blood cried out for vengeance," and Cain's descendants suffered as a result. When Oedipus unknowingly killed his father, he gouged out his own eyes to confess his blindness, but his punishment fell upon his children. After Orestes executed his mother, Clytemnestra, he was followed by the Furies, spiritlike incarnations of blood. The death of the just and innocent brings vengeance. King David protested: "I and my kingdom are guiltless before the Lord forever from the blood of Abner.… Let it rest on the head of Joab, and on all his father's house" (2 Sm. 3:28–29). According to Matthew, after the sentencing of Jesus to be crucified the Jews cried: "Let his blood be upon us and upon our children" (27:25).

A murder between families or between clans is a grave wrong that must be avenged by killing the guilty party. The latter, who in turn becomes the victim, will have his own avenger from among his relatives. Thus develops the cycle of vendetta killing, which can be broken only by "paying the blood price." Vendetta killing is found in ancient Greece, pre-Islamic Arabia, modern Corsica, and among the Nuer of the Sudan. The Jewish and Muslim demands of "an eye for an eye" may be similar to this phenomenon.

Under certain circumstances killing is perceived as a creative act, especially in the realm of the gods, where suicide or parricide sometimes leads to birth or new life. Mesopotamian and Babylonian cosmogonies feature gods who were slain in order to give life. The Greek Kronos severed the testicles of his father Ouranos (Sky) with a billhook while the latter lay in a tight embrace with Gaia (Earth). The blood of Ouranos's genital organs gave birth to new beings and, according to some traditions, to Aphrodite herself. This kind of suicide—relinquishing a part to preserve the whole—was sometimes magnified into a supreme act of love or redemption: Odin gave up one eye for the sake of supernatural "vision"; Attis emasculated himself; Abraham was prepared to slit the throat of his only son; Jesus accepted death volun-tarily.

Some kinds of sacrifice are centered around blood. Blood is the drink of the gods or the drink shared by mortals with the gods. Blood sacrifices are varied in form and function. In Jewish sacrifice (abolished since the destruction of the Temple), the victim is not human but animal; its death has reconciliatory and expiatory value. In Muslim sacrifices, the gift of meat is the price paid by the genuinely guilty; there is no blessing or grace expected, and reconciliation and expiation are not involved.

In the Christian concept of sacrifice, the slitting of an animal's throat is abolished, and the animal is replaced by the "Lamb of God," Jesus on the cross. Crucifixion and asphyxiation, although not bloody in themselves, are perceived as fundamentally bloody. The sacrifice (at least, as it is understood outside Protestantism) is renewed daily; it is both expiatory and redemptory. The sacrifice is accompanied by a communal meal (Eucharist) where the believer is invited to eat bread, symbolizing the body of Christ, and to drink wine, symbolizing his blood. Charles Guignebert has noted that the bread has been of less interest than the wine; the wine "is the symbolism of blood that dominates in the Eucharist … and affirms its doctrinal richness" (Guignebert, 1935, p. 546). Christ, who offers the cup to his disciples, says, "This is the blood of the new testament that is shed for many for the remission of sins."

Judaism had already established that the covenant between God and his people was one of blood, of circumcision and sacrifice. Moses sprinkled the people with the blood of sacrificed bulls, saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you" (Ex. 24:8).

The idea of establishing a covenant through blood is found in many cultures. People create covenants among themselves as well as between their gods and themselves. Some peoples in Central Asia, in Siberia, and on the steppes of eastern Europe cut a dog or other animal in two to seal a treaty or to take a solemn oath, thus guaranteeing their loyalty. The protective force of blood is illustrated in the covenant between God and Israel in Exodus 13:7–13; the Israelites, remaining in their homes, which were marked with blood, were spared from the death that struck the Egyptians. A similar idea is expressed in Indonesia when the doors and pillars of houses are smeared with blood during sacrifices of domestic dedication.

Blood can eliminate flaws and weaknesses. In Australia, a young man would spread his blood on an old man in order to rejuvenate him. Some Romans, in honor of Attis, emasculated themselves and celebrated the dendrophoria by beating their backs, hoping thus to escape the disease of death and to wash themselves of its stain. Similarly, Shīʿī flagellants relive the martyrdom of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, grandson of the prophet Muḥammad.

The most common type of self-inflicted wound is circumcision. In the female the incision of the clitoris sometimes corresponds with this rite. Male circumcision is required in Hebrew tradition, where it is the sign of a covenant with God. It is common also in Islam. Many explanations have been given for this almost universal rite. It is seen primarily as a manifestation of the desire to eliminate any traces of femininity in the male. It is doubtful that circumcision is an attempt to imitate the menses. If the sexual act is considered a defilement, the removal of the foreskin could, in effect, rid the sexual organ of impurity transmitted from the mother. Yet there are some societies where the circumcised male is considered to be as impure as the menstruating female and where he is treated as if he were one.

The menses are universally considered the worst impurity, due to the involuntary and uncontrollable flowing of blood. Menstruating women are believed to pose great dangers to men, and for this reason many peoples of New Guinea, Australia, Polynesia, Africa, Central Asia, and the Arctic have feared them and imposed innumerable bans on them. One finds similar fears in the Hebrew (Lv. 20:18), Islamic, and Hindu traditions. Researchers have not yet properly emphasized the implications of the interruption of menstruation during pregnancy; one can surmise that the fetus, believed to be fed with the impure blood, acquires this impurity, which has to be removed at birth. The impurity only indirectly appears to be a function of the sexual act or of the vaginal bleeding at delivery.

Bibliography

Nearly all works on the history of religions mention blood, but there are no valuable monographs on the subject other than G. J. M. Desse's Le sang dans le rite (Bordeaux, 1933). The reader is referred also to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's The "Soul" of the Primitive (New York, 1928) and to Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York, 1958). Numerous facts on the topic are found in Bronislaw Malinowski's Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London, 1927) and Crime and Custom in Savage Society (New York, 1926). W. Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 3d ed. (London, 1927), is still fundamental in the study of sacrifice. Charles Guignebert discusses the symbolism of blood as found in the Christian Eucharist in Jesus (London, 1935). On circumcision, see B. J. F. Laubscher's Sex, Custom and Psychopathology (London, 1937). On blood brotherhood, see Georges Davy's La foi jurée (Paris, 1922). Bruno Bettelheim's Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (Glencoe, Ill., 1954) and Paul Hazoumé's Le pacte de sang au Dahomey (Paris, 1937) are also worth consulting.

New Sources

Jean-Paul Roux has published Le sang. Mythes, symboles et réalités (Paris, 1988), which is the only monograph tackling this subject in a cross-cultural perspective. There is a plentiful bibliography but the approach is old-fashioned and the style not very scholarly. An indispensable tool for any further research is represented by the imposing series "Sangue e antropologia," edited for nine years in twenty two volumes by Francesco Vattioni under the auspices of the Centro Studi Sanguis Christi (Rome, 1981–1996). Philologists, historians and theologians present and discuss a host of materials related to blood functions and symbolism in various cultural contexts, with focus on Christianity in Biblical and patristic times.