Religious uses of BLOOD. Among the ancients blood was used for the sealing and ratifying covenants and alliances, which was done by the contracting parties drinking a little of each other's blood; and for appeasing the manes of the dead; in order to which blood was offered on their tombs as part of the funeral ceremony.
The blood of victims was anciently the portion of the gods; and accordingly was poured or sprinkled on the altars in oblation to them.
The priests made another use of blood, viz. for divination:
Blood. tion: the streaming of blood from the earth, fire, and the like, was held a prodigy or omen of evil.
The Roman priests were not unacquainted with the use of blood in miracles; they had their fluxes of blood from images, ready to serve a turn; witnesses that said to have streamed from the statue of Minerva at Modena, before the battle at that place. But we know not whether in this their successors have not gone beyond them. How many relations in ecclesiastical writers of Madonas, crucifixes, and wafers, bleeding? At least the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius at Naples, repeated annually for so many ages, seems to transcend by far all the frauds of the Grecian or Roman priesthood. But the chemists at last got into the secret; and we find M. Neumann at Berlin to have performed the miracle of the liquefaction of dried blood, with all the circumstances of the Neapolitan experiment.
Among the schoolmen we find a famous dispute, under Pope Pius II. whether the blood of Christ, which fell from him in the three days passion, retained or lost the hypostatic union; and consequently whether it was the proper object of adoration. The Dominicans maintained the former, the Franciscans the latter. It seems the Dominican doctrine gained the ascendancy, as being fitted to favour the profits of the monks; who becoming possessed some way or other of a few drops of this precious liquor, were secured of ample offerings from the deluded laity, who flocked to pay their homage to the sacred relic. Joseph of Arimathea is said to have first brought into Britain two silver vessels filled with the blood of Christ, which by his order was buried in his tomb. King Henry III. had a crystal, containing a portion of the same blood, sent him by the master of the temple at Jerusalem, attested with the seals of the patriarch; which treasure the king committed to the church of St Peter's, Westminster, and obtained from the bishops an indulgence of six years and 116 days to all that should visit it. Mat. Paris even assures us, that the king summoning his nobles and prelates to celebrate the feast of St Edward in St Peter's church, was chiefly pro veneratione sancti sanguinis Christi nuper adepti, "in veneration of the holy blood of Christ lately acquired." Divers others of our monasteries were possessed of this profitable relic; as the college of Bons Hommes at Ashridge, and the abbey of Hales, to whom it was given by Henry, son of Richard duke of Cornwall and king of the Romans. To it resorted a great concourse of people for devotion and adoration; till in 1538, as the Reformation took place, it was perceived to be only honey clarified and coloured with saffron, as was shown at St Paul's cross by the bishop of Rochester. The like discovery was made of the blood of Christ, found among the relics in the abbey of Fescamp in Normandy, pretended to have been preserved by Nicodemus, when he took the body from the cross, and given to that abbey by William duke of Normandy; it was buried by his son Richard, and again discovered in 1171, and attended with different miracles; but the cheat, which had been long winked at, was at length exposed, the relation of which is given by Speed.