10 Bizarre Ways People Used Blood in the Past

Blood has always carried more significance than the average bodily fluid. It keeps us alive, announces injury, and has long symbolized everything from ancestry and sacrifice to vitality and death. Across history, people have consumed it, prescribed it as medicine, offered it to supernatural powers, mixed it into paint and mortar, and occasionally found uses that sound almost impossible today.

Modern scientific techniques have made some of those practices even stranger. Archaeologists can now identify proteins and other biological traces left behind thousands of years ago, revealing blood in Bronze Age cooking vessels, ancient Egyptian ritual drinks, African sculptures, and centuries-old medicines.

Here are ten bizarre ways people in the past used blood.

Related: 10 Awesome New Discoveries About the Human Past from DNA

10 Bronze Age Mongolian Nomads: Food

Around 2,700 years ago, people living in what is now northern Mongolia cooked something bloody in large bronze cauldrons. That is not speculation about an especially gruesome dinner. Modern protein analysis found direct evidence of ruminant blood inside two ancient vessels.

The proteins came primarily from sheep, goats, or closely related animals. Researchers believe the blood was probably collected during slaughter and then used in food preparation. One likely possibility is blood sausage, which remains part of Mongolian cuisine today.

One cauldron also contained dairy proteins, including a peptide specific to yak milk. That does not necessarily mean someone invented Bronze Age blood-and-yak-milk sausage. The dairy could have entered the vessel during a separate episode of cooking or processing, and the researchers acknowledge other possible uses for the blood, including ritual activity.

Still, the food explanation has an appealing continuity. Thousands of years before refrigeration or modern meat processing, pastoralists may already have been making sure that almost nothing from a slaughtered animal went to waste—including the blood.^[1]

9 Ancient Romans: An Epilepsy Cure

Roman gladiatorial combat produced plenty of blood. For some spectators, that was apparently more than entertainment. It was medicine.

Ancient writers recorded the belief that drinking the warm blood of a recently wounded or killed gladiator could help treat epilepsy. Celsus described sufferers who reportedly drank blood directly from a gladiator’s cut throat, while Pliny the Elder wrote disgustedly about epileptics consuming the blood of fallen fighters as though they were drinking from living cups.

The practice rested partly on the idea that fresh blood contained a person’s vital power. Gladiators, who represented strength, courage, and physical vigor, may have seemed like especially potent donors. The sudden shock and horror involved in drinking blood at an execution or arena also became part of later explanations for why some patients claimed the remedy worked.

There may even have been a deceptive reason the cure maintained its reputation. Some forms of epilepsy naturally enter periods of remission. If seizures stopped after someone swallowed warm gladiator blood, the treatment received the credit.

For the gladiator, of course, this was one medical treatment in which being the donor was considerably worse than being the patient.^[2]

8 Ancient Egyptians: A Ritual Psychedelic Drink

A small Egyptian vessel decorated with the face of the dwarf-like god Bes spent years in a museum collection looking fairly harmless. Then scientists analyzed residue inside it.

The cup, dating to roughly 2,000 years ago, contained an astonishing mixture. Researchers identified Syrian rue, blue water lily, another medicinal plant, a fermented fruit-based alcoholic beverage, honey or royal jelly, wheat, sesame, and traces of human biological fluids.

Those human ingredients included evidence consistent with blood, breast milk, and oral or vaginal mucus.

Bes was associated with protection, fertility, childbirth, music, dancing, and other aspects of domestic and ritual life. Both Syrian rue and blue water lily contain compounds capable of producing psychoactive effects, while alcohol would have added another layer to the experience. Researchers therefore believe the cup may have held a ritual concoction rather than an everyday drink.

Exactly what ceremony required this combination remains uncertain. The authors suggest that it could have been connected with rituals involving Bes, intoxication, fertility, or mythological reenactment, but one vessel cannot establish a universal Egyptian recipe.

Whatever its purpose, this was definitely not the sort of cup you wanted to pick up at the party without asking what was in it first.^[3]

7 Dogon and Bamana Artists: Ritual Statue Coatings

Some wooden sculptures from Mali developed thick, dark surfaces that puzzled conservators. These patinas did not look like ordinary paint, varnish, or the natural discoloration of old wood. The answer turned out to be much more organic.

Scientists analyzed samples from Dogon and Bamana ritual sculptures dating across several centuries. In seven of eight samples, they found evidence of blood.

The discovery supported ethnographic accounts describing repeated ritual offerings applied directly to sacred objects. Blood from sacrificed animals could be poured or rubbed onto figures along with other substances, including millet-based preparations. Over time, those repeated libations created the dense surface coating visible on the sculptures.

The blood was therefore not simply decorative. These objects were active participants in religious life, and each new offering could renew or strengthen their ritual significance. What now looks like a single dark patina may actually preserve the residue of ceremonies performed again and again over generations.

Museums usually work hard to keep fingerprints and bodily fluids off their collections. For these objects, removing the old stains would mean removing part of what made them sacred in the first place.^[4]

6 Early Modern Europeans: Medicine

If you became sick in early modern Europe, the local pharmacy might offer treatments containing herbs, minerals, animal products—and occasionally pieces of another human being.

European corpse medicine used human skull, fat, flesh, and blood to treat various ailments. Fresh blood carried particular appeal because some people believed it retained the life force of the person from whom it came.

For poorer patients who could not afford elaborately prepared medicines, public executions offered a disturbingly economical source. Epilepsy sufferers in parts of Germany and Scandinavia sometimes gathered near the scaffold with cups, hoping to drink the condemned person’s blood while it was still warm. In some places, patients were then instructed to run until they collapsed, supposedly helping the cure take effect.

The practice survived much longer than the phrase “early modern medicine” might suggest. Nineteenth-century accounts still describe people collecting execution blood, and in 1908 a woman in Freiberg, Germany, unsuccessfully requested blood from an executed criminal to treat her epilepsy.

Medical science had changed dramatically by then, but apparently some people were not ready to give up a remedy with several centuries of very gruesome tradition behind it.^[5]

5 The Nasca: Blood for a Fruitful Harvest

The ancient Nasca of southern Peru are famous for their enormous desert geoglyphs, but their ritual practices may have been far bloodier than the lines etched across the landscape.

Archaeologists have uncovered numerous so-called trophy heads associated with the Nasca culture. Some show cut marks suggesting that the scalp was deliberately opened during preparation, while other evidence points to decapitation as part of a complex system of ritual violence.

One especially revealing burial at La Tiza contained a headless man whose neck vertebra showed cut marks consistent with decapitation around the time of death. Beside him was a ceramic vessel shaped like a human head with a tree sprouting from it.

That strange combination helped researchers connect decapitation with ideas of fertility, agricultural renewal, and regeneration. Comparable Andean traditions also linked ritual bloodshed with nourishing the earth before planting. However, archaeologists cannot prove that the Nasca themselves followed every detail of those later practices.

What they can say is that Nasca imagery repeatedly connected severed heads, plants, and renewal. Blood spilled during ritual violence may therefore have represented more than death. In a harsh desert environment where crops depended on uncertain water supplies, it may also have symbolized new life.^[6]

4 The Sicán: Paint Binder and Symbol of Rebirth

About 1,000 years ago, the Sicán people of northern Peru buried an elite man beneath a monumental temple. They placed his body upside down, painted it bright red, and surrounded it with extraordinary grave goods, including a gold funerary mask covered in red cinnabar paint.

The pigment was identified decades ago. What puzzled researchers was the organic material holding it to the metal after a millennium underground.

Proteomic analysis eventually found the answer: the paint contained proteins from human blood and bird eggs.

The blood and egg proteins apparently helped bind the cinnabar pigment to the gold surface, but the choice of ingredients may have carried symbolic meaning as well. The man’s detached head was positioned upright beneath the mask, while two young women in the tomb were arranged in poses interpreted as childbirth and midwifery.

Researchers have suggested that the vivid red mixture of cinnabar and human blood may have represented life force and rebirth, helping transform the deceased ruler for an existence after death.

For the Sicán, human blood may therefore have served two jobs at once: holding paint onto a gold mask and helping that mask symbolize the return of life.^[7]

3 Revolutionary France: Political Keepsakes

When Louis XVI went to the guillotine on January 21, 1793, thousands of people gathered in Paris to watch the former king lose his head.

For some spectators, merely witnessing the execution was not enough.

Contemporary reports described people rushing toward the scaffold afterward and dipping handkerchiefs into Louis’s blood. Others reportedly collected pieces of his hair or clothing. At least one account claimed that blood-soaked handkerchiefs were carried away while people shouted about possessing the “blood of a tyrant.”

The grisly souvenirs fit the intensely political atmosphere of the French Revolution. Louis was no longer simply a dead man or even a fallen monarch. His execution represented the destruction of the old royal order, and possessing something stained with his blood allowed supporters of the Revolution to carry away a physical piece of that moment.

Later legends claimed that a decorated gourd contained one such blood-soaked relic, and early DNA testing briefly appeared to support the story. More complete genetic analysis later undermined that identification, however, making it unlikely that the surviving sample actually came from Louis XVI.

Fortunately for anyone interested in the macabre, the questionable gourd is unnecessary. Eyewitness-era accounts already make clear that some spectators treated the executed king’s blood like the world’s most disturbing political souvenir.^[8]

2 The Kingdom of Dahomey: Blood in Sacred Mortar

In the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now Benin, human blood was reportedly used for something considerably more permanent than a ritual offering. Tradition claimed that it was mixed directly into the walls of sacred buildings.

King Ghezo, who ruled from 1818 to 1858, constructed funerary structures at the royal palace complex of Abomey in memory of his predecessor Adandozan. According to oral tradition, the mortar used in the buildings contained red oil, ritual water, and blood from 41 human sacrifices—a number with particular spiritual significance.

For years, that sounded like exactly the kind of gruesome story that might grow around a powerful African kingdom.

Then scientists tested the walls.

A 2024 proteomic study identified proteins from human blood and chicken blood in material taken from the sacred structure. The analysis cannot confirm that 41 people supplied the blood, but it demonstrated that human blood genuinely had been incorporated into the building material.

The practice fits Vodun traditions in which blood offerings could consecrate sacred spaces, strengthen spiritual forces, and maintain connections between the living and ancestors.

Most rulers commemorate the dead with statues or monuments. Dahomey apparently went a step further, making blood part of the architecture itself.^[9]

1 The Luoyue: Blood-Bonded Rock Art

For more than 2,000 years, enormous red figures have clung to limestone cliffs at Huashan in southern China despite heat, humidity, monsoon rains, and everything else the subtropical climate could throw at them.

Researchers recently discovered that part of the secret may have been blood.

The Luoyue people created the paintings using a sophisticated layered system. First came the limestone cliff. On top of that, the artists applied a mortar containing slaked lime, calcium phosphate or bone ash, and blood. A final red layer contained clay rich in tiny particles of hematite pigment.

Researchers detected human and animal blood proteins in the material. Those proteins appear to have encouraged the formation of tightly packed calcium-carbonate crystals, effectively helping the pigment-bearing layer bond with the limestone beneath it.

The attachment became remarkably strong. Some samples were bonded so firmly to the cliff that researchers needed an electric drill to separate them.

Scientists also found proteins consistent with human blood from women around childbirth, raising the possibility that fertility beliefs influenced the choice of blood. That interpretation remains speculative, but the practical effect is much clearer.

Two thousand years ago, Luoyue artists mixed blood into their painting material and unintentionally—or perhaps deliberately—created a kind of biomineralized glue capable of surviving millennia of tropical weather.

Plenty of artists claim to put their blood into their work. The Luoyue may have meant it literally.^[10]