Blood Read online

  In this chapter, I will explore two means by which we associate blood with notions of truth and honour. The first concerns what we do with our blood. How do we go about removing it from human bodies, and once it is out, what do we use it for? This initial section of the chapter will explore how we offer blood to the gods, slay our oppressors, depict heroic violence in art, and sometimes fail as artists by neglecting to pay enough respect to blood. This first part will also examine three issues that are both social and medical: stem cell research, the tainted blood scandals erupting in many countries in the 1980s, and blood donation policies. Each of these issues pertains to notions of honour and truth with regard to our blood. Because they deal with the very core of our bodies, the debates on these subjects have been vociferous.

  In the second part of this chapter, I will focus on physical changes that are invisible to outside eyes, and even to our own: adjustments to our blood composition. Such adjustments mark us as profoundly as plastic surgery. Changes to the blood in our veins have the power to affect our self-perception and how others see and treat us. Do you want to know about a person’s honour or truthfulness? Look closely at their blood, and how its composition may have been altered.

  HOW DO WE CONVINCE the ones we love, and the ones we wish to impress, that we deserve their affection and support?

  We work extra hours for our bosses when we truly wish to impress them, and we bust our backsides to render good service or turn in a great product. In exchange, we hope we will be protected, remunerated, and promoted.

  To earn the trust and love of children, we hold them and show up when they need us. In the kitchen, on the street, in the doctor’s office, at the daycare or school drop-off or pickup, we secure our children’s trust by offering daily acts of support, and by respecting their individuality.

  How do we keep the ones we love, romantically? We show an interest, court like crazy, and when they finally say, “Yes, I will love you,” we find ways to love them back daily, monthly, and yearly. For some of us, this means providing money and security. For others, it may suggest meals and other support offered at home. For relationships that satisfy, we hold each other whenever we can, and most certainly through the darkness of night. We look out for each other. We make love to move into as intimate a space as possible with our loved one. Emotionally and physically, we touch each other to preserve and nurture our love.

  So how does that work for our relationship, if we have one, with our God or gods? Over the millennia, we have principally looked to one means of connection with our deities: we spill blood. Blood of animals, of other humans, or our own.

  Slicing open a vein, bleeding an animal properly, or even ripping out someone’s heart and holding it up to the sun is the ultimate way to tell our God: we fear you, and we hereby prove our fealty and ask that you meet our needs today and tomorrow.

  Would we offer God a bag of peanuts, or $10 from a $200,000 bank account? The idea is risible. To win the care of God, we are meant to lose what counts the most: human blood, and sometimes human life.

  From Biblical writing and earlier, we have long associated bloodshed with honour, expiation, and offering. Human sacrifice — with blood as a central element — seems to date back as far as human civilization. The Mayans, who settled some four thousand years ago in what is now southern Mexico and northern Central America, practised some forms of human sacrifice. In the ancient culture of the Zapotec peoples, who settled around 1150 BCE in what is now the Oaxaca area of Mexico, two types of blood sacrifices were practised: priests cutting themselves during cult ceremonies, and ripping the hearts out of prisoners or slaves to offer life force to the spirit powers. Historians and others have noted that human sacrifice has been carried out in many corners of the world: in ancient Rome, ancient Sumeria, China, and the West African kingdom of Dahomey, to name just a few.

  The Aztecs, who lived in Meso-America from about 1400 to the time of the arrival of the Spanish explorers, are perhaps best known for practising human sacrifice. As Mark Pizzato describes in Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence, Aztec sacrifice rested on creation myths having to do with gods who sacrificed themselves to allow a new sun to rise over the empire. Because the gods had died for the sun to ascend, humans too would have to be sacrificed to ensure that the sun would continue to rise each day and feed mankind. The Aztecs, Pizzato writes, sacrificed children or prisoners of war on a nearly monthly basis. Victims were schooled with great care and detail. In their daily interactions with other people, they assumed the characteristics of a god so that the final moment of their lives — when they were held down so that a priest could extract their beating heart and offer it up to the sun — would approximate the sacrifice of the early gods.

  The notion of offering something of primordial value to the gods, in exchange for protection, or food, or the continuation of the rising sun, is also rooted in religious texts. Rembrandt and Caravaggio, among other painters, both explore on the canvas the most famous near-sacrifice in Biblical literature: the story of Abraham and his son Isaac.

  According to the Book of Genesis, God commanded Abraham to take his son Isaac up Mount Moriah and to sacrifice him. Bob Dylan comments on this act in his song “Highway 61 Revisited,” suggesting with his colourful lyrics that Abraham might have asked if this were some sort of joke. However, it was not uncommon in the time of Abraham for children to be sacrificed to pagan gods. According to Genesis, Abraham raises the knife to obey God’s command. An angel appears and says: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad,” and tells Abraham that it was merely a test of his faith.

  As Steven Shankman observes in his book Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies, the works by Caravaggio and Rembrandt offer contrasting interpretations of this key moment. In his 1603 painting The Sacrifice of Isaac, Caravaggio, who came first, showed Abraham with the knife in hand, holding the groaning face of his young son, at the moment when the angel grabs hold of the father’s wrist and prevents the sacrifice. Rembrandt rendered homage to the same Biblical story in his 1635 painting The Sacrifice of Isaac and in his 1655 etching Sacrifice of Abraham. Here, I’ll refer to the former work. Rembrandt painted it at the age of twenty-nine, the same year that his first son died in his infancy. In the painting, Abraham uses his giant left hand to smother the face of his son at the moment when the intervening angel knocks the knife completely out of his hand. Isaac’s bound body is exposed in Rembrandt’s painting. Naked but for a cloth around his waist, Isaac is on his back, knees bent, hands pinned beneath him, completely vulnerable and immobile as heavenly light spills across his body. In that bright, surreal light, blood gushing over Isaac’s skin would render even more horrid the barbarity of a father killing his own son.

  In Genesis, Isaac is saved. When the angel intervenes, Abraham finds a ram caught in a thicket and slaughters it instead. According to Genesis 22:1, God speaks to Abraham through the angel and says, “Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.” The story is meant to signal the end of human sacrifice as condoned by God. From this moment forward, as far as blood sacrifice is concerned, animals will suffice.

  To this day, the ritualized spilling of blood permeates humanity and evokes notions of honour. Japan has a long tradition of self-sacrifice for the sake of honour and country. The ancient warrior class known as the samurai practised seppuku, a form of ceremonial disembowelment, as a way to die with honour or to atone for having shamed themselves or their nation. Some women — wives of the traditional samurai — have also committed ritualistic suicide, by slicing the arteries in their necks. At times, this was done to avoid capture or rape at the hands of inv
ading enemies.

  In English, the word kamikaze refers to recklessly self-destructive behaviour. It entered the North American imagination as a reference to the World War II Japanese fighter pilots who committed suicide by crashing their planes into enemy ships. Thousands of Japanese pilots committed suicide in this way, and succeeded in sinking dozens of Allied vessels. The attacks have often been interpreted as a manifestation of the emphasis on loyalty and honour in Japanese culture. Writing for the BBC History website, journalist David Powers quotes a twenty-three-year-old Japanese airman writing home to his mother just days before his suicide mission in August 1945. Ichizo Hayashi wrote: “I am pleased to have the honour of having been chosen as a member of a Special Attack Force that is on its way into battle, but I cannot help crying when I think of you, Mum. When I reflect on the hopes you had for my future . . . I feel so sad that I am going to die without doing anything to bring you joy.” Honour may have been central to Japanese culture, including honour in death. But that does not mean that every soldier leapt with purpose and joy toward that honourable death. Some, it is safe to bet, were surely shoved. Forced to be honourable, and to die for their country.

  Committing suicide to preserve one’s honour is one thing, and murdering someone to accomplish the same goal is quite another. The United Nations estimates that some five thousand honour killings — the murder of relatives, often women who are said or believed to have dishonoured their families by having unauthorized sexual or romantic relationships, or who refused arranged marriages — take place each year. It is a method of exacting conformity to rigid rules that men set for women, and punishing those who won’t cooperate. In the eyes of those who practise honour killings, it removes the “stain” from a family’s blood and intimidates others into accepting coerced behaviour. In other words, “Do as I say or I’ll kill you.”

  Writing for the Independent in 2010, Robert Fisk noted that many women’s organizations believe the number of honour killings to be at least four times higher. It’s a barbaric act and a perversion of the term honour. As Fisk wrote, “The details of the murders — of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the ‘honour’ of their families — are as barbaric as they are shameful.” Fisk focused on honour killings in the Middle East, but acknowledged that the contagion has spread to Western nations. Indeed.

  Writing in 2011 for the Canadian Criminal Law Review, University of Sherbrooke law professor Marie-Pierre Robert noted that the number of honour killings reported in Canada is on the rise. The first was in 1954, the second in 1972, and the third in 1983, Robert wrote, but then another thirteen took place between 1999 and the date of her article, in 2011. In 2012, a jury convicted a Montreal couple and their son of murdering the husband’s three daughters and his first wife because the daughters had been dating, refusing to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and skipping school.

  It would be smug and self-serving to attribute honour killings solely to Islamic culture and to leave the conversation there. In nations founded on Judeo-Christian values, murdering one’s spouse or partner can be considered a Western equivalent of honour killing. Often, it involves homicide carried out by a man who wishes to control a woman and does not approve of what she says or does. According to Statistics Canada, between the years 2000 and 2009, 738 spousal homicides took place in Canada. Women were three times more likely than men to die of spousal homicide. According to a scholarly article written by Bridie James and Martin Daly in a 2012 issue of the journal Homicide Studies, police reported 13,083 cases of spousal homicide in the United States between the years 1990 and 2005. Of the spousal homicides, 9,828 of the victims were women and 3,255 men. Whether we think of honour killing in some cultures or family violence in others, spilling a woman’s blood to control her behaviour is widespread around the world.

  BLOOD AND HONOUR FREQUENTLY intermingle, even when death is not involved. The gods of Greek mythology were said to have a substance known as ichor in their veins. This gold-coloured fluid was toxic to humans, but sustaining for the immortals. Greek myth held that the sorceress Medea managed to kill Talos, the bronze giant who guarded Europa, the queen of Crete. Medea used a potion to put Talos to sleep, and then pulled out the nail (some call it a plug) that stoppered a vein running from his neck to his ankle. The ichor that kept Talos alive began to flow out of this one weak spot, and thus the god bled to death. Medea had a bit of a thing for spilling blood. She also murdered her brother, her husband’s new fiancée, her sons, and her uncle.

  But spilling blood in Greek mythology also gave rise to new life. Gaia, the goddess of earth, was the wife of Uranus, god of the skies. But Uranus had an unusual method of parenting: he forced his children to stay hidden in the earth (effectively inside Gaia’s body). Fed up with this arrangement, Gaia offered a sickle to urge her children to lash out against the father who appeared not to love them. Cronus, the youngest and most ambitious of her sons, used the tool to castrate his father. From the bloodied testicles of Uranus, which fell into the sea, emerged Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality. Cronus’s attack on his own father also spilled blood on the earth, and from those drops emerged other, more aggressive creatures, such as the Furies (also known as the Erinyes), who were deities of vengeance and whose eyes dripped with blood. Uranus’s story shows two potent results of mixing blood with another substance. Mix it with the sea, and you create love. Mix it with the earth, and you generate vengeance.

  Uranus survived the castration and prophesied that Cronus would be overthrown by his son. As a result, Cronus began killing his children, epitomized by the graphic and bloody Saturn Devouring His Son, a painting dating back to about 1820 by the Spaniard Francisco de Goya, who depicted Saturn (the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Cronus) eating his naked child.

  One blood crime usually leads to another, in history and mythology. Literature and paintings serve to remind us that blood must not be spilled in vain. Blood is life, so it must present itself to us for a reason. And when blood runs, we look for consequences.

  TO THIS DAY, WOMEN WHO DRAW BLOOD brutally loom larger in our imagination and generate more fears and myths than their male counterparts. We wring our hands with worry and ask how it could be possible that a woman could be brought to kill. I would answer that it’s a miracle that women don’t kill more than they do. If we come to expect that a certain level of violence is inevitable in, say, a city of three million people, what makes murder by a woman any graver than homicide by a man? Are women supposed to nurture? Some of them. Aren’t men supposed to nurture too? Yes, and many of us do. Neither men nor women have any business killing people, except in ritualized situations: executioner, perhaps, or soldier. Women go to war now too. They shoot, and they get killed. As we move to a more equal society, we find ourselves having to accept some uncomfortable facts: women will sometimes murder, and they will come home from war more and more often in body bags.

  In the Biblical Book of Judith (which is in the Catholic Old Testament, but excluded by Jews and assigned by Protestants to the Apocrypha) a beautiful Jewish widow named Judith is upset that her people seem passive in the face of occupation by their Assyrian enemies. She gains the trust of the enemy general, Holofernes, slips into his tent one night, and while he lies drunk in bed — wanting her but never having touched her intimately — Judith beheads him. She then returns, with the decapitated head in her hands, to her people. The occupying army is spooked and flees, and the control of Israel returns to the Jews.

  This scene inspired a painting by Caravaggio from 1598 to 1599, as well as two paintings, entitled Judith Slaying Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi between 1611 and 1620. The first Italian woman to paint major images and stories related to history and religion, Gentileschi depicts Judith in both works with her maidservant, pulling back Holofernes’ head to better cut it off while blood courses over the bed.

  It appears that Gentileschi pai
nted this shortly after she had been raped by a man named Agostino Tassi. Not quite eighteen at the time of the assault, Gentileschi was tortured during the course of Tassi’s rape trial — the court subjected her to thumbscrews while demanding to know if she had been a virgin before meeting her attacker. Tassi was found guilty and banished, but he was not tortured or punished in any other way.

  Women of the day were not permitted to paint unless they were married to painters. The year after the rape, Gentileschi married a minor painter and went on quickly to create Judith Slaying Holofernes. In addition to being a wife and mother, she became well known as a painter, eclipsing her husband in the public eye.

  Some people have speculated that Gentileschi created Judith Slaying Holofernes to dramatize her own personal story of rape. Some have even suggested that the face of Holofernes is meant to bear a likeness to the rapist Tassi. I don’t know if this is true. And I don’t know if it matters. Artemisia Gentileschi was a painter. She drew upon her talent to create the image of a universal story: woman slays oppressor, thus liberating herself and her people. Gentileschi, regardless of her past, was doing what many great artists must do: retelling stories of oppression, bloodshed, and liberation.