Hi there all.
I was wondering if anybody could give me some information about different religions and their relationship with blood. I am interested in beliefs either about blood or which involve blood in some form or another. This could be anything from merely mentioning it in scripture to acts of bloody sacrifice and ritual masochism.
Also, please feel free to share any of your thoughts on this topic. What is it about blood and its often association with holiness? How important a role can it play in religions?
I would be very grateful for any reply. Thank you for your insight.
In Biblical Judaism, blood had something of a unique position, in that it generally conveyed ritual impurity, but on rare occasions, could be a vehicle of consecration, and in one circumstance, could even be a contributory to the conveyance of ritual purity.
Blood was thought to be the fluid in which life resided (which, I suppose it could be argued, is in a sense true): for this reason, we are prohibited to eat the blood of the animals we kill, since we may take the flesh of the animal to survive, but the life in essence always belongs to God, and cannot be taken into us. But spilled blood was deemed to produce ritual impurity. Thus, for example, women became ritually impure by menstruating, and had to purify themselves prior to entering the Temple or Mishkan (like a portable temple).
Yet the blood of sacrifices was flicked upon the sides of the altar in the Mishkan or the Temple, as a symbolic act of dedicating not only the flesh of the animal but the essence of its life to God as an offering. And when the priesthood was first initiated into service, sacrificial blood was daubed in several places upon the bodies of the priests.
And the ultimate ritual impurity-- contact with a dead body-- could only be purified by being sprinkled with a unique mixture of "living water" (that is, water from a naturally spring-fed lake or river, or collected rain water, or melted snow and ice), together with the ashes of a purely red heifer, which had been burned in its entirety-- intact, including all internal organs and blood (as was never done with sacrifices)-- in a fire together with branches of cedar and hyssop, and some strands of a certain fine crimson fabric.
In Rabbinic Judaism, which is the form of the religion actually practiced today, blood is a mostly of interest because we still keep kosher, and do not eat blood (meat must be salted, drained, and rinsed clean of salt in fresh water prior to cooking, to remove the blood). Some still practice the ritual of purification following menstruation, but this is really an unnecessary rite nowadays, because ritual impurity was only relevant while there was a Temple. As there has been no Temple for nearly two thousand years, and there is unlikely to be one any time soon, ritual purity and impurity is really a dead letter.
Nonetheless, the symbology of blood is often potent for us. The literature of the Tanakh sometimes uses it as a euphemism for the core of life, or for the spirit. The word for "blood" in Hebrew
dahm is related to many other significant words, like the word for "human being,"
adahm, or a word for "earth,"
adamah, the word for "red,"
adohm, and the words for "tears,"
d'mah'ot, and for "silence,"
d'mahmah, and a word for "vision" or "mind's eye,"
dimyohn. And, of course, sometimes the symbology is fairly overt, such as blood being the first of the Ten Plagues with which God devastated the Egyptians at the time of the Exodus (the Nile and all waters in Egypt turned to blood).
