Body Parts
Blood
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Blood carries life itself across an unusually wide range of traditions: the Hebrew Bible identifies the life of the flesh as being in the blood and forbids its consumption on that ground, a rule carried into Islamic dietary law; the Aztec and Maya traditions held bloodletting and, in the Aztec case, human sacrifice as necessary nourishment for the sun and the gods; and Christian eucharistic theology centers the wine as, or as representing, the blood of Christ. Blood also marks covenant and kinship, from blood oaths to the ritual first blood of many rites of passage.
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Use
Ritual UseBlood covenants and oaths, sealed by the mingling or shedding of blood between parties, appear across widely separated cultures as among the strongest possible forms of binding agreement, distinct from blood offered in sacrifice to a deity. 1 Ritual UseBloodletting and sacrifice held as necessary nourishment for the sun and the gods 1Tradition: Aztec and Maya religion Correspondences
Planetary RulershipJupiter, in Galenic humoral medicine blood is the sanguine humor, associated with the warm, moist qualities of air and traditionally ruled by Jupiter, distinct from the melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic humors ruled by Saturn, Mars and the Moon respectively. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseBlood libel, the medieval and early modern accusation that Jews used Christian blood in ritual, has no basis in Jewish law or practice; historians and religious authorities alike treat it as a fabricated antisemitic myth rather than a genuine ritual dispute. 1 Attributions
Traditional AilmentsPhlebotomy, therapeutic bloodletting to relieve an excess of blood or plethora, was standard practice in Galenic humoral medicine into the nineteenth century, with almanacs and physicians timing the procedure by the moon's position in the zodiac. 2 Meaning
Symbolic MeaningThe life of the flesh is in the blood; its consumption is forbidden on that ground 1Tradition: Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 17); carried into Islamic dietary law Symbolic MeaningThe wine of the eucharist as, or as representing, the blood of Christ 1Tradition: Christianity Learn More
Blood as Life and as Offering
Blood carries a symbolic weight in religious thought that few other bodily substances match, tied above all to the observation, available to any culture, that its loss ends life. That observation gives blood a double character across traditions: it is treated as the seat or carrier of vitality itself, and simultaneously as the material of the most serious offerings a worshipper can make, precisely because it is life given up rather than merely set aside.
Blood sacrifice, whether of animals or, in some historical and mythic contexts, of the worshipper's own blood drawn ritually rather than lethally, appears across an enormous range of traditions, from the Hebrew Bible's detailed sacrificial law to Aztec bloodletting rites understood as sustaining the sun and the order of the cosmos. The goddess Kali's iconography and cult in Hindu tradition carry an especially direct blood association, tied to her myth of drinking the blood of the demon Raktabija to prevent his self-replication and, historically, to blood offerings made at temples including Kalighat in Kolkata.
Blood as Kinship and Covenant
Separate from sacrifice, blood also stands across many cultures for a bond stronger than ordinary agreement: blood relations are treated as a different order of obligation than chosen ones in most kinship systems, and rites of blood brotherhood, in which participants mix or exchange blood to create a kinship-like tie between people not otherwise related, appear independently in societies from parts of Africa and Central Asia to the American frontier. The logic is the same wherever it appears: sharing blood is treated as sharing the substance of life itself, and an oath sealed that way is read as harder to break than a merely spoken one.
Menstrual blood carries yet another, frequently more contested set of associations, treated in some traditions as ritually powerful and in others as polluting, sometimes both at once within the same culture, a divide anthropological studies of menstrual taboo have documented at length rather than resolved into one universal reading.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Heart, Chakras The circulatory system is a modern Western chakra attribution to Anahata, following on from the Theosophical and later crystal healing literature this correspondence set draws from rather than the classical Sanskrit text.
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