Tag Archives: blood

Ascension Day, Part 2

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Icon of Ascension Day, showing Christ enthroned in glory above with the apostles and Mother of God below. The Ascension icon can also be viewed as an image of Christ coming at the end of time to judge the world.

Icon of Ascension Day, showing Christ enthroned in glory above with the apostles and Mother of God below. The Ascension icon can also be viewed as an image of Christ coming at the end of time to judge the world.

Ascension Day is an important day in the church calendar and in the rural, farming calendar as well. It is also an important day among the Pennsylvania Dutch (The Pennsylvania Dutch, commonly called “Amish,” maintained numerous religious affiliations, with the greatest number being Lutheran or Reformed, but many Anabaptists as well.)

Among the Pennsylvania Dutch sewing on Ascension Day is strictly forbidden. Other work of many kind, especially farm work, is also eschewed. Lightning has been reportedly striking those sewing or working on Ascension Day. Rain water from an Ascension Day storm is thought to cure eye and vision problems if used to wash the eyes with. Not only does rain fall and thunder rumble down from the heavens above, these are generally associated with Thursdays; as Ascension is always a Thursday, making the 40th day after Easter, thunder came to be associated with Ascension as well. (The Pennsylvania Dutch name for “Thursday” is a variant of the word for “thunder.”)

Reportedly in Bulgaria the grandmother of each family will go to the cemetery on Ascension Eve and lays face down atop the grave of the most recently deceased family member. She prays there a while for that family member and for all the deceased ancestors, following which she nicks her left breast (above the heart) and lets a few drops of blood fall onto the grace to feed the ghost(s) and bring blessing to the deceased for another year. Happy ancestors will bring fertility and good luck to the family, their farms and farm animals until the next Ascension Day.

For more, see the excerpts from Eastertide in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study.

The Sword

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This viking sword was forged in the 9th-10th century and used in Northern, Western, and Central Europe.

This viking sword was forged in the 9th-10th century and used in Northern, Western, and Central Europe.

Swords go hand-in-hand with “knights in shining armor” or Vikings as well as gladiators and Greco-Roman soldiers. Swords are also one of the four suits (with Wands, Cups, and Pentacles) of the Tarot’s Minor Arcana. In tarot readings, swords correspond to the element of Air, and therefore signify freedom but also quick change. The Swords suit also traditionally represented the military, which implies strength, power and authority, but also responsibility, violence and suffering. Most readers today, however, interpret Swords in terms of thought and mind, ways of thinking or organizing the world even though certain of the cards retain interpretations of sorrow and anguish.

One of the four traditional tools of the occult practitioner, the sword or athame often — for practical reasons — becomes a small dagger or knife. It is used to cut and loose in a variety of circumstances or demarcate boundaries, as in tracing the outline of a magic circle or other geometric shapes (ex. pentagrams). It was also used to kill in ritual settings, such as offering a sacrifice (an animal) or in cases of alleged ritual murder.

The constellation Orion, easily identified by the 3 stars that form his “belt,” is said to depict the great warrior wielding a sword in the heavens as he prepares to strike a scorpion (which had been sent by a goddess to torment Orion); this battle between the Hunter and the hunted scorpion is said to be the reason that Orion and Scorpius (a sign of the zodiac) never appear in the night sky together. (Hungarian folklore identifies Orion with Nimrod, the great hunter in Genesis 10. In Scandinavian tradition, “Orion’s belt” was known as Frigg’s Distaff (friggerock) or Freyja’s distaff but the Finns call the Orion’s belt and the stars below it as Väinämöisen viikate (Väinämöinen’s scythe), keeping the association with the magical sword.)

In modern playing cards, the tarot suits have developed from Swords into Spades, Wands into Clubs, Cups into Hearts, and Pentacles into Diamonds.

Elizabeth Bathory

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Copy of the lost 1585 original portrait of Erzsébet Báthory (disappeared in the 1990s)

Copy of the lost 1585 original portrait of Erzsébet Báthory
(disappeared in the 1990s)

Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (Báthory Erzsébet in Hungarian, Alžbeta Bátoriová in Slovak; 7 August 1560 – 14 or 21 August 1614) was a countess from the renowned Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungar. She has been labelled the most prolific female serial killer in history and is remembered as the “Blood Countess,” though the precise number of victims is debated.

Later writings[ about the case have led to legendary accounts of the Countess bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth and subsequently also to comparisons with Vlad III the Impaler of Wallachia, on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based, and to modern nicknames of the Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.

After her husband Ferenc Nádasdy’s death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing to them over 650 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. Due to her rank, Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor convicted. But upon her arrest in December 1610, she was imprisoned in Čachtice Castle, now in Slovakia, where she remained immured in a set of rooms until her death four years later.

She was kept bricked in a set of rooms, with only small slits left open for ventilation and the passing of meals. She remained there for four years, until her death. On 24 August 1614, Elizabeth Báthory was found dead in her room by a guard looking in through one of the slots. Since there were several plates of food untouched, her actual date of death is unknown. She was buried in the church of Csejte, but due to the villagers’ uproar over having “The Tigress of Csejte” buried in their cemetery, her body was moved to her birth home at Ecsed, where it is interred at the Báthory family crypt.

The case of Elizabeth Báthory inspired numerous stories during the 18th and 19th centuries. The most common motif of these works was that of the countess bathing in her victims’ blood to retain beauty or youth. This legend appeared in print for the first time in 1729, in the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi’s Tragica Historia, the first written account of the Báthory case. At the beginning of the 19th century, this certainty was questioned, and sadistic pleasure was considered a far more plausible motive for Elizabeth Báthory’s crimes. In 1817, the witness accounts (which had surfaced in 1765) were published for the first time, which included no references to bloodbaths.

The legend nonetheless persisted in the popular imagination. This myth is speculated to persist in part because of Báthory’s connection to Transylvania and vampire lore. Some versions of the story were told with the purpose of denouncing female vanity, while other versions aimed to entertain or thrill their audience. The vampirism connection extends to the 21st century documentary Deadly Women, where she is profiled in the first episode of the series as maintaining her good looks by iron supplementation she obtained by drinking her victims’ blood.