The Blackberry Walk

Given my newfound NEETdom, I've decided to spend the time mildly productively writing a blog article a day. These articles may well be a little shoddier, but I'll keep them running out whilst I'm job hunting. Some ideas are deeply intuit and obvious, residing at the core of the human experience: and blood pacts are one of them. Often when I write something important to myself - particularly when it's a set of rules which I want to follow, like I did recently - I have this strange instinctual urge rise up, often taking the form of recurring unshakeable imaginations, of cutting my finger or thumb tip slightly and leaving a bloody print to seal my allegiance to the note's contents. Whilst it's poor form to assume my own experiences are common to all, the symbolic resonance of blood is one I believe is common to all. Similarly to how snake and spider fears are cross-cultural phenomena, most likely down to our biology, so too is a fear of blood, or needles; most likely, the vision of blood, the power of the crimson colour and the image, is one that is seared deeply into us. Pair this with the fact that animal sacrifice of various kinds is another kind of human universal common to all cultures (until the coming of Christ, of course), and the energy of blood can be understood. As any classical or Mediaeval writer would confirm, blood is the bodies life force; without blood, you're faint, whilst when you're spirited, your 'blood's pumping'. You can even feel your pulse, or see a vein bulge, if you're angry enough. Until the Enlightenment, after all, the heart was not a mere 'pump', but rather the organ which imbued life-force into your blood. One's blood is their life-force - their vitality; a connection which even today, despite modern science's haemoglobin and oxygen, is hard to shake. Blood pacts are seen everywhere. The hecatombs sacrificed by the Greeks in the Iliad is the letting of oxen blood to form a pact with the gods; and the breaking of the hymen in consummation is a kind of blood sacrifice for the contract of marriage. Yet to reject the blood contract, the blood pact, is a distinctly Christian invention. Christ's death is the final blood pact, the final sacrifice: of God Himself. There's a reason it's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice who makes a blood pact - a contract asking for his pound of flesh; and there's a reason he's defeated by the Christian law forbidding the letting of blood for the pact. What I'm writing may well sound ridiculous; 'blood pacts? I've never had any such inclination!', you may reply. But we stumble blindly. In his autobiography, C. S. Lewis describes himself as a "pagan convert in a society of puritan apostates" - a sentiment I very much share. The people I talk to, the people I meet, have such deep Christian convictions, without a hint of Christian belief. The fact that blood rituals never cross the average man's mind goes to show how Christian we've become; the blood ritual has become a image of jest as to what a Satanic ritual would look like. I wonder why...