Blood, Worship, and Blood Worship

I left you standing over a bloodless cow in an Oregon field, ten gallons of blood missing from a thousand-pound animal, the ground beneath her dry. I said that blood is the most foyson-dense fluid in any living body, and that I believe what the mutilation data shows is extraction. I promised you this piece about blood, and I have been thinking about it for weeks, turning it over, because the more I look at the history and the science, the more I think blood is the thread that connects everything in this series, and I think it has been the thread all along.

Let me start with the oldest version of the argument and work forward.

Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 into one of the most powerful noble families in Hungary. Her uncle was the King of Poland, her nephew the Prince of Transylvania. By 1610, over three hundred witnesses had testified to her involvement in the torture and killing of young women at Castle Cachtice, with estimates ranging from dozens to over six hundred victims depending on the source. She was confined to the castle until her death in 1614.

The legend that has followed her for four centuries is that she bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth. That story first appeared in print in 1729, more than a century after she died, in a Jesuit scholar's account. The actual witness testimonies contain no mention of blood baths. Modern historians consider the bathing legend unreliable, and some scholars argue the entire case was politically motivated, designed to seize her lands and neutralize her family's influence.

I am less interested in whether Bathory actually bathed in blood than I am in why the story survived so completely, for so long, in so many retellings. The blood-bath legend landed on an audience that already believed blood could transfer vitality from one body to another, because that belief had been circulating in European culture for over a thousand years by the time Bathory was born. Epilepsy in her era was treated by rubbing blood on the sufferer's lips, a practice documented in the medical texts of the period. The soil was ready. The seed grew.

I think the Bathory legend persists because it touches something that runs much deeper than one countess in one castle. It touches the oldest and most universal observation that cultures across the world have made about blood, which is this: blood carries something transferable, something that sustains, heals, and restores, and every civilization that has ever looked closely at blood has arrived at the same conclusion independently.

In Rome, Pliny the Elder described crowds rushing into arenas to press their mouths against the wounds of fallen gladiators, drinking the blood while it was still warm. The physician Scribonius Largus formalized this into a medical protocol around 50 AD, prescribing three spoonfuls of gladiator's blood nine times over thirty days as a treatment for epilepsy. When gladiatorial combat was outlawed around 400 AD, the source shifted to the blood of executed criminals, and the practice continued for centuries. Edward Browne documented people attending executions to collect blood in England as late as 1668, and Marsilio Ficino, the Italian philosopher, promoted drinking young blood for elderly rejuvenation in the fifteenth century. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, was fascinated by the possibility that blood essence could serve as a universal remedy.

These are all Europeans, and the easy dismissal would be to call it a European superstition. The problem with that dismissal is that the same conclusion shows up everywhere else, independently, in cultures with no contact with Rome or its intellectual descendants.

The Aztec and Maya placed blood at the center of their relationship with the divine. Aztec ritual sacrifice offered blood to the sun god as the energy that kept the cosmos in motion, and Maya ceremonial bloodletting involved piercing the tongue and body to offer blood directly to the gods. The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania have maintained a diet of beef, milk, and fresh blood drawn from living cattle for centuries, using blood mixed with milk as both daily sustenance and medicine for the sick and for women who have recently given birth. Aboriginal Australian peoples in New South Wales fed the sick with blood drawn from the arms of healthy men who volunteered willingly. The Christian Eucharist centers on the consumption of wine as the blood of Christ, the ritual through which believers receive divine essence into their bodies.

Every continent. Every millennium. The same observation. Blood carries something essential, something that can move from one body to another and bring restoration, power, or connection to the divine. The word each culture used was different. The experience was the same.

In 2005, researchers at Stanford revived a technique called parabiosis, invented in 1864, in which two mice are surgically joined so they share a single blood supply. Irina and Michael Conboy, working in Thomas Rando's lab, paired old mice with young mice and watched the old mice's tissues begin to regenerate. Muscle stem cells reactivated. Liver tissue repaired itself. Dormant molecular signaling pathways switched back on. Tony Wyss-Coray and Saul Villeda, also at Stanford, extended the work to the brain and found that old mice exposed to young blood grew new neurons in the hippocampus at rates comparable to much younger animals. When they tried a simpler version, injecting old mice with plasma from young mice, the same effects appeared, and the old mice performed significantly better on learning and memory tests.

Wyss-Coray acknowledged the obvious resonance. At conferences discussing the results, he said, people talk about vampires.

A company called Ambrosia sold transfusions of young plasma at eight thousand dollars per liter before the FDA shut them down in 2019 for lack of proven clinical benefit. Wyss-Coray co-founded Alkahest, which Grifols, the Spanish pharmaceutical company, acquired for 146 million dollars to develop plasma-based therapies for age-related diseases. The research is ongoing and remains one of the most active areas in aging science.

The Conboys added an interesting complication. They found that replacing half of an old mouse's blood with saline and albumin, a substance carrying no youthful factors at all, produced comparable rejuvenating effects. The benefit may come less from adding young blood and more from diluting old blood, removing inhibitory compounds that accumulate with age and suppress the regenerative capacity the body already possesses. Old blood, in other words, actively blocks what the body already knows how to do. Youth may live in blood less as a substance and more as the absence of what shuts renewal down.

I think the parabiosis data would have surprised exactly none of the cultures I just described. The Romans who drank gladiator blood, the Maasai who give blood to the sick, the Aztecs who offered it to sustain the sun, all of them were operating from an observation that Stanford confirmed with instruments in 2005, which is that something in blood, something transferable, measurably reverses decline and restores function. The folklore had the observation. The science now has the mechanism. The convergence is precise.

There is one more compound that belongs in this conversation.

Adrenochrome is the oxidized form of epinephrine, the hormone most people know as adrenaline. Its chemical formula is C9H9NO3, it turns violet in solution, and it was first observed in 1856 by the French physician Alfred Vulpian, who noticed adrenal gland extracts changing color when exposed to air. It was isolated in crystalline form in 1937. In the 1950s, psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond proposed that adrenochrome accumulation might play a role in schizophrenia, and small studies reported psychotic reactions in test subjects. Those studies were never replicated successfully, and the hypothesis fell out of favor after the American Psychiatric Association identified methodological problems in 1973.

Adrenochrome has documented cardiotoxic properties in laboratory studies. Its stabilized derivative, carbazochrome, is used medically as a hemostatic that promotes blood clotting. The compound is produced biologically in the body at sites of inflammation and oxidative stress, and its production increases when the body is under extreme physiological activation, because the more adrenaline the body produces, the more adrenochrome results from its oxidation.

The conspiracy theories attached to this compound can stay where they are. The documented chemistry is what I am interested in. A psychoactive and cardioactive compound is produced naturally in mammalian blood, its concentration rises under conditions of fear and physiological stress, and it was taken seriously enough by the psychiatric establishment to generate decades of research. Those are facts from the medical literature.

I think those facts carry their own weight when placed beside the traditions I have described. The gladiatorial blood that Romans valued was taken from men in mortal combat. The blood offered on Aztec altars came from living sacrifice. The cattle found mutilated in fields show evidence, through clamp marks and tissue state, of having been alive when the process began. The pattern across traditions and across the mutilation data is consistent: blood taken under conditions of extreme activation carries something that blood drawn from a calm or deceased body carries in much lower concentrations. The science tells us what that something includes. I am going to lay the parallel there and leave it for you to examine.

European folklore identifies three substances as the primary protections against nonhuman peoples: iron, salt, and sunlight. These three appear across Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Slavic traditions with a consistency that rivals the blood traditions I have been describing.

Iron is the metal at the center of heme, the molecule inside hemoglobin that carries oxygen in every red blood cell. Salt governs the glycocalyx, the sugar-protein barrier coating every cell in the body that controls what passes through. Sunlight activates biochemical pathways in the skin and blood, and ultraviolet exposure plays a direct role in vitamin D synthesis, immune modulation, and circadian regulation. All three connect to blood. All three govern the systems that blood depends on to do its work.

The folklore says these substances ward against the faerie peoples. The biochemistry says they govern the body's ability to produce, maintain, and defend its blood supply. I think the overlap between those two statements is where the foyson argument goes next.

Certain medical conditions map directly onto the three wards. Porphyria is a disorder of heme synthesis, the iron-dependent pathway that builds the molecule at the heart of every red blood cell. Chronic anemia involves persistent difficulty maintaining adequate iron, hemoglobin, and red blood cells. Acute salt sensitivity disrupts the cellular barriers that regulate absorption and exchange. A body carrying all three of those conditions has a very specific relationship to blood and to everything blood carries. I carry all three, documented since early childhood, and I stopped treating that alignment as a coincidence a long time ago.

The final installment of this series goes much deeper into the three wards, what they mean biochemically, what they mean in the folklore, and what it looks like when the pattern converges in a single body. Blood is the thread that runs through everything I have been writing about across this entire series, the foyson in the food, the cow that carries the most of it, the mutilation that extracts it, the traditions on every continent that recognized blood as the ultimate vessel of life-essence, and the wards that govern whether a body can produce and protect its own blood supply or whether it has to find other ways to compensate.

Still here..?

Tillie