Blood is the most meaningful and symbolic material of our body. It is the essence of our body. Blood is the essence of the life force that makes the heart beat. The flow of blood and its circulation in our body is what keeps us alive. Since ancient times, blood has been a symbol of religious rituals, pain, salvation, wisdom, and enlightenment, and has been used for these purposes. The blood of the sacrifice and the crucifixion of Jesus have been used as symbols of physical punishment and martyrdom. The wine symbolizing the blood flowing from Jesus' body during his crucifixion is consumed in every Christian worship and ritual. In other words, it is considered to be the sacred blood of Jesus.
Blood is an important element for the mechanisms, expressions, and rituals of power. If there is something alongside the law, death, opposition, symbolism, and kingship, it is blood. The societal order generally cannot cope with blood, which is considered both dirty and disgusting as well as sacred. Is there a connection between self-harm behavior and the social dynamics of sacrifice rituals that occur in both primitive and modern cultures? Although sacrifice has various meanings in primitive and modern societies, fundamentally, there is generally atonement, offering, and the idea of a gift, followed by a sense of well-being and payment after the debt is settled.
In our society, the concepts of ‘it is good to shed blood’ or ‘we need to shed some blood’ seem to be a product of a necessity. The sacrificial offering is the process of transferring any kind of indecision regarding hatred, tension, competition, and mutual attack within the community to the victim. The act of sacrifice provides partial satisfaction to the members of the community by gathering and resolving the seeds of conflict that have spread everywhere. The primary purpose of sacrifice is to eliminate conflicts, competitions, jealousy, and quarrels between close ones, to restore community harmony, and to strengthen social unity.
The great Chinese texts clearly demonstrate the function of sacrificial offerings. This act ensures that the circles remain calm and that no confusion arises. Sacrifice strengthens the unity of the nation. (Chu Yu.II.2).
The Book of Rituals suggests that sacrifices, music, punishments, and laws all serve the same purpose, which is to establish order. In Euripides' Medea, the principle of sacrificing a person instead of another is clearly presented. Fearing the wrath of Medea, who had been abandoned by her lover Jason, the nurse tells the teacher to keep the children away from their mother: "I know her anger will not subside without a sacrifice. At least, let her sacrifice one of her enemies!" Medea, whose true target was her husband, replaces him with her own children. It could be argued that this mad act has no common feature with what we would consider ‘religiously significant actions’.
Like Aias, Medea takes us to the most primal truth of violence. Unquenchable violence continues to accumulate, and there comes a point when it overflows, causing the most destructive harm to its surroundings. Sacrifice, at that moment of overflow, attempts to control the naturally occurring replacement and substitution by guiding it to the ‘right’ side. The function of sacrifice is to calm internal violence and prevent conflicts.
In primitive societies, if there is no infallible healing method to be used when balance is disturbed, unlike therapeutic measures, protective measures will play the primary role. In other words, the sacrificial offering gains the property of being a protective tool in the fight against violence. Some believe that sacrifice prevents the development of the seeds of violence. It helps people neutralize revenge. In societies with sacrificial traditions, there are certain crises that particularly require sacrifice. These are crises that threaten the unity of the community and turn into conflicts and disputes. The deeper the crisis, the more ‘valuable’ the sacrifice must be. In relation to this, it is striking to see the similarity between the increasing value of sacrifice as the degree of crisis rises in both primitive and modern societies, as exemplified by a 14-year-old self-injuring adolescent. This adolescent was harming his own body by cutting it with a craft knife. He said, “The craft knives are my hands, my legs, everything.” He was classifying parts of his body by importance. His arms were not very important, and they were the areas where he harmed himself most frequently. The second most important area was his legs, followed by his wrists, which were considered important because they were more dangerous. Finally, his neck was the most valuable and important part of his body. Because when the emotions inside him, such as stress, pain, depression, anger, etc., became so intense and cutting his arms and legs didn’t relieve them, the last resort was his neck, the most valuable place, where he kept the big craft knife for. He couldn’t use it at that moment because it hurt too much. For now, he was only cutting his arms and legs with smaller, less painful knives, and they were enough.
It seemed as if the more the distress increased, the more the shedding of blood was required. The more the distress increased, the more the blood needed to flow, and it was thought that only this could stop it. Here, the adolescent’s words can be related to the sacrificial offering and the value of the sacrifice in primitive tribes. The adolescent here, in fact, categorized the most valuable ‘body part with the highest fatality’ according to the intensity of his distress, as much as his inner dilemma and crisis. So, just like in primitive societies, as the social crisis, violence, and adversity become more uncontrollable, the value of the sacrifice increases. When we reduce the intensity of pain from the societal to the individual, the more incomprehensible and difficult to understand the internal, the more intense the physical pain must be, so that they can balance each other and restore equilibrium, preventing any disintegration or breakdown—this is the concept of homeostasis in spirituality. The sacrifice made against societal order and chaos works to restore spiritual balance and prevent disintegration and disorder in the society, thereby avoiding social breakdown.
Euripides' tragedy Ion is one of the works that most effectively illustrates the two qualities of blood, namely its violence. Queen Creusa is considering killing the hero with extraordinary enchantment. From the same blood, the Gorgon blood, with two drops. One is a deadly poison, the other is an antidote. The queen’s old servant asks: How did these two come together, goddess?
Creusa: When the fatal blow is struck, a drop comes out of the vein...
Old Servant: What use is that drop?
Creusa: It wards off diseases, it adds power to strength.
Old Servant: And what does the second drop do?
Creusa: It kills. It is the poison of the Gorgon snakes.
Old Servant: Do you carry them together or separately?
Creusa: Separately. Can the good and bad mix together?
There is nothing more different than these two drops of blood. Yet, there is nothing more alike. Therefore, it is easy, perhaps even provocative, to confuse them and mix them together.
If the hidden violence of a crisis of sacrifice destroys differences, this destruction, in turn, develops the violence. In short, when we touch the tradition of sacrifice, we jeopardize the basic principles on which the community’s balance and harmony depend. These are the theses regarding sacrificial offerings in ancient Chinese thought. Plurality owes its tranquility to the sacrificial tradition. Severing this bond causes general chaos. (Radcliffe-Brown, 1965).
The sacrificial victim removes the violence directed toward ‘natural’ objects within the community.
The sacrificial offering in the ritual is always replaced by a substitute sacrifice. Since the substitute sacrifice represents all the members of the community, the sacrificial rite plays its role in protecting the members from each other’s violence. However, this protection always occurs through the substitute sacrifice.
Cutting and scraping the skin were once used during the adolescent process to test courage, strength, and endurance. And these acts symbolized a step toward adulthood in these rituals.
Scars, like blood, were symbols of grandeur. Scars were not only a permanent symbol of harm or pain but also symbolized healing.
Scars and cuts were a form of the person’s memory and a mark of evidence. A few strokes of a razor or a blade allow the person to release what is inside. It flows it out, empties it. Perhaps the excitement of seeing blood is this: It comes out of me, whatever it is, for now, it flowed. A path was opened for it, a door, a source, a way was found on the skin, and through that opened path, the fluid left itself.
Self-harm (self-mutilation) wounds; cuts, burns, scabs, are actually special codes that need to be carefully listened to, thought about, and worked on. They are like cryptograms, and because they are quite archaic codes, once learned, they may reappear in a different form, and they represent emotions that need to be evaluated in the time span and represent the periods in which they occurred. Just as historical events must be thought about and evaluated within the characteristics of the period in which they occurred, self-injury, mutilation is a language. Just as deaf and hearing-impaired individuals have a universal language and can only express themselves through those fast and seemingly meaningless movements, it is a language as meaningful as that. It is a statement I hear very often in my clinic, especially from adolescents. It is a sign, it is proof, it is a trace. It is the trace of past experiences, the things that could not be expressed at the time, or the memories that were frozen to be answered in the future.
