An Introduction to Blood Sacrifice
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Associate Professor of Semiotic & Semantic Engineering introduces a topic near and dear to every beating heart—and of interest to many of the stiller, quieter kind.
If you let out all of the blood from a life form that has blood, they tend to die pretty quickly. In light of that, it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion for people to draw that blood carried some sort of life force. It needed to stay in motion to keep working, so the heart was important too. But you could take blood out of people and store it temporarily in jars, and the people you took it out of would start dying pretty quickly, and then you could put it back into them and they would perk up.
So coarsely the theory checks out.
While people were looking for this mysterious life force, they found out that blood carries a lot of things. It carries oxygen, for one, each little round dimpled red blood cell carrying 260 million hemoglobin molecules, each of those with four iron atoms and, at full load, four oxygen molecules. An adult human body has around 25 trillion of those red blood cell thingies, so, all told, that’s plenty of oxygen to fuel the burning that keeps you warm. But it’s also full of water—mostly water, of course, but people tend to forget how important water is—and food and cellular wastes and materials for construction and repairs.
It’s kind of like the ocean in the terms of being a sea of food and water and resources while at the same time a dumping ground for piss and the discarded husks of previously living cells and … everything. It’s not very efficient, but then it’s never had to be. One could imagine every cell having a specialized channel for being fed and another for dumping wastes and a processing plant that pulls out useful materials for recycling and discards the rest, but as long as the wastes aren’t too toxic, there’s not much point. Drop in a couple of filters here and there and the fish do just fine swimming in both their food and their waste.
If you’ve ever kept an aquarium, the evidence of your skill is in the ratio of the total mass of all the fish to the volume of the water. In terms of that math, blood is pretty efficient after all. Eleven or twelve parts fish to one part water would be a pretty amazing feat for an aquarist.
All of this sounds like the opposite of magic. All of this sounds like you might as well use seawater instead of blood in your funky midnight rituals.
This is where you get the long stare and a bit of a nod.
See, sometimes it’s a long walk to the ocean.
Also, when you’ve taken a cup of water out of the ocean, you have a limited time to do something with it before its nature has changed, before it’s stagnant and foul and dead. Same with fresh blood from a living creature.
Also if the water has been exposed to any of the major flows, like direct sunlight, it’s probably not what you need. So if you use seawater, you have to capture it more than a thousand meters deep—or capture it in a lightless cavern, or cenote or cistern with a healthy flow and a lid kept closed, opened only on cloudy, moonless nights.
Maybe you’re starting to see why blood from a living source could be more convenient.
Skin is fairly translucent, frankly, so if you need the blood to be especially effective, you’re going to have to keep your living source of blood in the dark for as long as it takes for the effect of the flows on it to dissipate.
Any old covered pit will do. A grave with an air-hole has a bit of a traditional following. And three days is usually sufficient, with a special diet of the right kinds of foods grown in the dark—or nothing, if you’re hardcore—and nothing but dark water to drink. Or nothing to drink, but three days is definitely pushing it with respect to dehydration. One needs the prospective donor to remain alive, certainly, but you also don’t want the blood to be too sluggish.
It’s okay if the dark water (for drinking and washing purposes) is fresh instead of brackish or salty. And it’s dead easy to put a well in a basement so any water drawn never sees any light. But well-water is not living in the way that seawater is living. If you need it to be living, it would need to come from a healthy living habitat.
The considerations go on and on. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on your lair, blood is much easier to put your hands on.
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But what is this dark blood good for?
We’ve discussed what blood is for inside the body. Outside of the body it’s a number of things. Food, for one. This is where it gets a leg up on seawater. And once its source has been acclimatized to darkness, it counts as dark food for the things that require it.
Second, it’s an ablative barrier for disruptive flows, at least temporarily, until it is saturated or is old enough to be dead and denatured. This is a property it shares with dark seawater, for all that blood is much more concentrated. Anything properly encircled by appropriate quantities of either can be protected from disruptive flows for a certain duration. Until the substance is saturated or denatured.
Think of it like the gel pellets in those little desiccant packets you get in purses and shoes when you buy them new. After a certain point they’re no longer effective for dehumidification, except you can gently heat the desiccant pellets in a toaster-oven to drive off the water they’ve collected so you can reuse them.
Any necromancer who figures out how to do this with living blood or seawater should file for a patent and prepare to become modestly wealthy, or at least famous in the industry. The best we’ve been able to work out so far is to recycle it back into the creature it came from (or specially designed basement habitat in the case of the seawater), but the process is often complicated and hardly worth the effort.
Ideally you could do all of your delicate work interior to a blood-filled living creature without damaging it beyond viability. That’s really tricky. Darkroom surgery and blind vivisection isn’t for everyone. But it is extremely effective if you can manage it. Whatever your working, if you can install it in a living creature, it can be effectively masked from discovery, protected from destructive or entropic influences, and even fed indefinitely as long as the working doesn’t get too greedy.
One of the least discussed disruptive flows, necromantically speaking—in the general category of sunlight—is sentient attention. This is why some operations work best when they happen outside of your direct vision, out of the corner of your eye, when you aren’t looking at all, or when there’s nobody in the room.
Clearer-minded thinkers will understand that sunlight is disruptive because it’s attention—the attention of the nineteen zabaniyah that live in and animate the sun, that are our jailers on this world here, and that have definite views as to what sorts of activities are to be tolerated. It is their spiteful, gleeful task to keep us here, and they are opposed to any technique or technology that could eventually allow us to slip away to elsewhere. If they hate it, if sunlight disrupts it, you know it’s potentially useful.
For each of us that escape, they are held to account.
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Even in the human world, in the sunlit world, a decent quantity of fresh blood will attract and soak up a significant amount of human attention. Just in these terms, blood can be a concentrator of attention, directing attention to the target of your choice and, coincidentally, away from whatever you would like to remain unnoticed.
Additionally, being in the presence of large quantities of fresh blood is stimulating, activating, energizing, exciting—and I’m listing these terms in their most emotionally neutral contexts. Attraction or repulsion, delight or disgust, are secondary and, necromantically speaking, largely irrelevant.
For people without extensive habituation to large quantities of fresh blood, the limbic system takes over, rational thought becomes impossible, and people become remarkably predictable, switching between fight and flight responses with readily available signaling devices and noisemaking tools of startlement, and prone to banding together into the kind of aggregate entity or mob that many fiends have become skilled at manipulating.
People who are willing to spill a significant quantity of fresh blood can accomplish just about any desired individual- or mass-manipulation—as long as that desired effect is compatible with such horror and rage that the capacity for rational action is destroyed. It is especially effective in manipulations where the destruction of the capacity for rational action is the actual goal.
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Spilling fresh blood tends to have a lasting effect in the area where it has been spilled. It leaves an odor, either by direct residue or by impact to the local ecosystem, akin to the phenomena of petrichor, dimethyl sulfide, dictiopterene, and bromophenol for smelling water on soil or the nearness of the sea. Vegetable and fungal life, and absolutely microbial life, are also affected in ways that one can learn to detect consciously. These changes to the environment can be self-sustaining for a very, very long time.
Unless it is very strong, the effect on humans is usually unconscious, but it tends to generate an activating agitation, an irritability and general malaise in any animal life that detects it. Most people can detect the presence of old spilled blood without being conscious of how. It’s a survival trait, after all, to be conscious of locations where violence is a possibility.
There is a type of person that seeks out these environments to savor the thrill, which is why sites of bloodshed appear on certain sorts of maps.
Spilled blood can be used to mark a territory or arrange for a site to have that eerie, taboo feeling that will attract one sort and repel another. Clever uses of different types of blood can be used to create and bait trails that lure predators of whatever species into traps where they can be contained or eliminated or encouraged to remain in an area to provide consequences for other intruders.
Blood can be used as ink to write messages on terrain that will last for centuries.
If you’re working out some recipes, I can provide some general guidelines.
Per unit volume, one part of dark blood is approximately equal to three parts from any free-range, daylight walking donor of the same kind, assuming three days or so confinement in absolute darkness with only dark sustenance. Weeks or months or lifelong containment can increase the efficacy to at maximum almost double, so there are definitely diminishing returns on that score.
One part of dark blood is approximately equal to eleven or twelve parts of dark (living) water, salt or fresh, or 30 to 40 parts living water from daylight sources.
There is basically no difference between dark blood and daywalking blood for long-term environmental impacts. There is also a lot of leeway regarding freshness. So use dark blood to minimize the impacts or whatever is most convenient to maximize them. Splashing seawater around absolutely has an environmental impact but does not have the same environmental impact as splashing blood around, so there is no capacity for substitution here.
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Up to now I’ve just been discussing the effects of using blood as a substance, in terms of spilling or splashing, and often in the context of capturing and directing attention. Any skilled necromancer who has been following along has been cringing at this implied waste the whole time, which is a mental image I have been savoring. To their relief, however, I will finally mention that, with blood or dark blood as ink, the ink and what is written in that ink are mutual force multipliers. This is the traditional, most powerful, and most effective use of harvested or donated blood in occult works.
Once you have attracted the desired attention and are holding it with your gory ink, you will never have a better opportunity to deliver the message of your choice, whether it is a warning, or instructions, or an incitement.
Poetry counts. As does grammar and spelling, and calligraphy and penmanship and the accuracy of your linework for sigils and sketching. Your work won’t have the impact you were hoping for if it inspires giggling and ridicule, and all of your preparation will have been for nothing. Brevity is an excellent idea as much of your intended audiences won’t be committed readers. It also helps if you use a language that will be understood by your audience, or is at least decipherable with a little work.
Much can be said about using a code or cipher. It can save you work and time and materials, but also it can make your message exceptionally memorable if your audience has to work hard to extract it. However, this is only useful when addressing those who would be hooked by this bait. When your audience is simple, it’s best to remain clear and direct.
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For today’s classroom exercise you will notice that you have been provided with a scrap of parchment and a dry pen with a very sharp nib. Consider this a composition exercise. You will, of course, provide your own ink.
You may begin.