Blood.

Blood, whiskey, and history. So why blood?

It is important to emphasize at the outset that it is not because of any fascistic notion of racial inheritance or purity, as in the Nazi chant, “blood and soil.” As I’ve discussed, insofar as any of us inherit anything “from the blood,” it is a heritage belonging to every single human on the planet.

To me blood means something very different. It represents some of the most delicious aspects of existence – whatever might be described as a passion. My experience of passion has been both one of the most difficult things for me to regulate in my life, and without question the side of myself that has come under the greatest scrutiny by the society I live in. I’ve conducted myself, I guess you might say, in a very unregulated way on many an occasion.

This has not of course always been a good thing. The worst times were when I had anger I could not contain, and so said or did things that hurt other people. There were also times however where my emotional state left me feeling so raw and vulnerable that the embarrassment that followed felt nearly unbearable. And this anger has also been directed towards myself, more times than I can properly recount, although a couple of instances will always stand out in my memory as exceptional.

Yet even for all the moments that could not be described as positive, I have a lust for passion that leads me to embrace it, warts and all. I gravitate towards whatever intense experience that my anxiety or my political principles do not cancel out. (Thinking on it, actually, my anxiety disorder/s have probably counterbalanced my passion in a pretty positive way in my life, ha!) I’m always seeking to feel overcome, especially since having an ever-alert self-aware and analytical mind gives me little break from evaluating experience at nearly the exact moment that it is happening. Normally a welcome process of reflection, sometimes I desperately want to turn that analytical voice off; to just drown in something. (The metaphor of drowning therefore shows up often in my poetry, such as it is.)

Lately I’ve been working to realize that experience and the conscious mind do not have to be so at odds; that analyzing something as I am experiencing it is simply part of my experience. But insofar as passion is something that can be experienced in isolation, blood is the substance that to me, captures it better than anything.

Why this would be the case is pretty obvious. Blood is what flows through us and carries the oxygen that keeps us alive; to “bleed out” is to die. When we are injured we are immediately confronted with our mortality when we see this shockingly bright substance seep through our skin. It is no surprise that red is one of the earliest colors accounted for in the history of most languages; it’s almost as if the gods purposefully designed it to carry this brilliant hue, marking out how essential it is to everything. 

Yet since it is usually under our skin and out of sight, when blood is visible there is an immediate sense of something unusual afoot; it might be positive or negative, but trite or everyday it is decidedly not. Blood is associated with violence, love, lust, birth – every month menstruating women bleed, a constant reminder of how our flesh is connected to the capacity to create new life. There’s no wonder that blood – and lots of it – plays such a central role in contemporary culture, from the horrors of slasher films to the fearful beauty of warrior epics that depict their heroes as absolutely soaked in the blood of their enemies. Blood represents everything and anything that is not a mere part of routine; blood is only visibly in abundance when something essential is happening, something that cuts to the core of who we are.

Therefore blood is easily the most important physical aspect of my rituals. Each major holiday (which for me are Beltane (spring equinox), Litha (summer solstice), Samhein (Halloween), and Yule (winter solstice)) I combine whiskey, an ingredient particular to the season, and my collected menstrual blood since the last holiday to create a little brew I toss into the fire as I go through a list of recognitions, blessings, and meditations. Some of the blood is set aside and not mixed with anything, and by the end of the night I’m usually covered in it.

If this strikes you as a bit intense or bizarre; well, yeah, exactly. That’s the idea. And I would posit that even if it’s not your cup of tea to be covered in your own menstrual blood (or any type of blood), that there’s likely some part of you that gets it. If you’ve ever enjoyed battle scenes, been touched by the depiction of a sentimental death scene, or even noticed how oddly entrancing a healing injury can be as it crusts over, you’ve got an inkling of the emotional resonance and power of blood. And, quite frankly, I’ve wanted to be covered in that power for all my life; the emotional power of watching my own blood trickling down my arms and dripping onto my garments is ecstatic. No matter how present my rational brain, using blood in ritual pushes the buttons of my both my collective unconscious and my particular passion for life in a way probably no other material substance could. The gods always come when I call them with blood.