How do you make magic spooky? You just add blood! At least, that’s how fiction seems to view it. If a story has magic, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will try a blood ritual at some point, and who can blame them? Blood magic is visceral and externalizes the idea of magic sapping a person’s life force. Naturally, this pleasant idea is our topic for this week!

• A Darker Shade of Magic 

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

Wes: You’re listening to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m your host, Wes, and with me today is…

Chris: Chris

Wes: …and…

Oren: Oren

Wes: And before we do vampire voices and things like that, let’s just put a content notice up that we’re talking about blood magic, and we’re gonna be talking about a lot of blood, which is gonna probably mean discussions of, like, gory subject material, violence. Blood magic sometimes involves self-harm and – like body horror stuff in general. So just, it might get gross, but we also get grossed out, so we’re gonna probably not gross ourselves out.

Oren: Probably a little gross, but not as gross as you might want it to be if you’re into that sort of thing.

Wes: [laughing] Yeah, thank you. That’s a good way of putting it. But that said, as gross as it can be, I feel like there’s no shortage of storytellers willing to let their characters and villains use this power.

I don’t know. Once I started thinking about blood magic, I was like, okay, this is actually cropping up everywhere, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m listening to A Darker Shade of Magic right now by V. E. Schwab, but…I’m just like, okay, now that I started prepping for this I’m thinking blood magic is all over the place, so let’s get into it. What is blood magic, Chris and Oren?

Chris: I think it’s magic that the storyteller wants to feel menacing.

Wes: [laughter] I love that answer.

Chris: Any magic that the storyteller wants to feel menacing becomes blood magic.

Wes: Yeah, it’s like a checklist of like, how much angst do I want in my story, right? [laughing] And also how menacing do I want to be? Okay.

Oren: Yeah. Most fantasy stories, if they have an extensive use of magic or even a limited use of magic in some cases will involve some kind of spooky blood addition of some sort. Now, I, personally, am a veteran of Legend of the Five Rings, which has a whole blood magic system. This isn’t “add some blood to some other magic.” No, we take it very seriously around here. Everything’s blood magic all the time, or at least it used to be. Apparently in the new edition, they changed a bunch of stuff to try to make it, like, less Orientalist, which is good. But I don’t know what that did to blood magic. I haven’t read the new edition.

Wes: Perhaps maybe on just a more maybe, I don’t know, literal level for, I think the video game enthusiasts out there. Blood magic also could be magic that is powered by blood, with blood serving as a component or like a catalyst for other magical effects. Or, blood magic could mean magic that affects blood. Which we get in Avatar, right? With blood bending.

Oren: Yeah, it can go either way, but it’s still always portrayed as like spooky and weird and gross. Except for the one counter example I can think of off the top of my head is Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys.

Wes: That’s right. Yeah. There was blood magic in that.

Oren: They do have some blood magic, but it’s not especially creepy. Now granted, this is at least somewhat a cosmic horror story, and so all magic is weird and creepy. And so the blood magic is not especially creepy, right? Like, they do some blood magic and whatever, and they also do some other magic. And some of that’s way worse.

Chris: When you have Cthulhu in the story, blood starts to sound less intimidating.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Wes: Yeah, but I do remember the main character in that story. The blood components of that magic were tidy in comparison to other stories. Certainly not a huge deal, but still present.

Oren: Because that story was also very much, “Hey, what if we reimagined some cosmic horror tropes as like actual beliefs that these beings have?” And so in that sort of situation, they’re probably not gonna be doing like the really big dramatic slashes across the palm or whatever, because that’s not sustainable. There’s important stuff in your palm! You can’t just keep slashing it, unless you want nerve damage. Especially now we have hypodermic needles. You can just do a little blood draw, and now you’ve got some blood. It’s just…calm down everybody!

Chris: I still cannot forget Ten Thousand Doors of January, where the protagonist, she just has writing magic.

Wes: Just gotta write on stuff.

Chris: She just writes. And she’s been basically kidnapped, and she has a sharp object, and instead of scratching into anything else that she could scratch, or even piercing herself and then using the blood as ink, she decides she has to cut herself, and it’s like, why are we doing this? So it’s not actually a blood magic system. I’m sure it was very symbolic.

Oren: It was very symbolic, I’m sure. That scene also bothered me because until now we’ve been told over and over again that the protagonist can’t do things because she’s just so conditioned to be meek and passive, which was a weird thing to say because I didn’t actually feel like she was overly meek and passive? But that’s what the narrative kept telling us. And then suddenly she’s in a situation cause she’s been kidnapped and taken to an asylum, where all she needs to do is be meek and passive, because they don’t know about her magic there. So she just needs to be meek and passive until she can get her hands on a pen, which they would probably give her just to write her dad a letter or something. But instead, she immediately goes berserk [laughter] and tries to force a pen away from one of the orderlies. And so then they lock her up. Okay, I thought she was supposed to be meek and passive. What?

Wes: Now is as good time as any need to talk about my theory, the why of blood magic that is not just, I don’t know, for edge or whatever. Doors of January is not a good book, but a good example, maybe. There’s a sense that because it’s blood, that casting blood magic is, like, there’s a sacrifice involved, right? And I think that’s just drawing on literal sacrificial history in this realm. And yeah, making January do that to herself is like a self-sacrifice, right? What is she willing to give up to make this magic work? That kind of thing. And it was completely unnecessary, [laughter] but I feel since blood spilled for teaching power, or whatever, I feel like that is the subliminal connotation to a lot of blood magic and yeah, maybe that’s why.

Yeah, it’s hard. It’s difficult. You must suffer in order to do this, and I think a lot of people do like magic that has costs. They don’t wanna just be casting spells willy-nilly, gotta be limited somehow, and blood is like a super kind of cost. Whether you’re sacrificing parts of yourself, or you are sacrificing voluntary or involuntary subjects, depends on maybe what part of the good and evil spectrum you lie on, but yeah, that’s kinda my theory. It all comes down to sacrifice and blood being the power for it.

Oren: I don’t think you’re wrong. I think that makes sense. I think a lot of the time blood magic is an externalization of the concept of sacrificing some part of yourself to do magic. And you can always describe it as, “I’ve drained their essence” or “their soul” or whatever, but that’s less real than blood.

Chris: Dark Crystal does that, but it’s really creepy. But, yeah, I think it takes a little bit more setup, right? It’s much easier to just be like, blood. Knife. Here you go. We can see it dripping, all red and stuff. Than it is to be, “Hey, we’ve got this dark crystal, and now we’ve got this, like, setup, and if you stare at the dark crystal, and then this machine does the thing.”

Oren: Also, if I remember correctly, in Dark Crystal, the machine just scrunches you up, right? Like you just rot and collapse, or something. It was bad, right?

Chris: It turns the Podlings into basically subservient zombies.

Oren: Yeah. So, in that situation, you don’t necessarily need the blood component, but often you want magic where you want the protagonist to have done that, to have given some part of themselves. And in that situation, having it be literal blood makes it, I think, hit harder than it would if you were just like, all right, I gave some of my spirit points away and now I’m very tired. And, but trust me, like on the inside, my spirit has been drained, right? It’s just less real.

Chris: I should point out that The Dark Crystal takes place in a second world fantasy with no humans. And that might make it easier to, “Hey, there’s this strange essence liquid we get from people’s bodies.” [laughing]

Wes: Yeah, good point.

Chris: I do wonder if it was the real word of humans, you’d be like, wait, but what is that? There’s liquid there. What liquid is that?

Oren: That’s some stuff. Don’t worry about it. It’s that bile we’ve been hearing so much about. [laughter]

Wes: That’s a good example. Yeah. And then that provides the answer of just what is magical ichor [eye-kor] or ichor [ih-kor] and however, depending on your pronunciations. I don’t know. It’s just some juice that comes out of things and it’s useful. [laughter] It is funny, though, or like we were talking about, it’s just, “No, I assure you I am fatigued.” But then we have plenty of people that use blood magic who should be feeling faint, at the least, but are not? At all?

Oren: That’s just power creep for you. Okay? Once you start introducing blood magic and more stories start using it, you’re gonna have characters who you want to keep casting spells even after they’ve spilled several pints of blood, and it’s, I don’t know, do you have that much to spare? I feel like you might need a transfusion at this point.

Chris: I think you would know, Oren, because of your vampires. I remember one game – it was actually a really good ability. It just, it did stretch imagination for how much blood these vampires could hold. So what they did is they shaped things out of their blood, and sometimes it was just like, “Hey, I have a blood knife.”

Oren: No, excuse me. I was way more confusing than that. The blood knife was a separate artifact that one of them had. That was different from the other vampire who made a knife out of blood. [laughter]

Chris: [funny voice] Oh, I’m sor-ree. Excuse me, sir.

Oren: See, I want people to understand how much I did not think this through. [laughter]

Chris: But they get in fights and the vampires just cut their veins open and make things from their blood. And in particular, there was this villain that would make blood clones, and it actually worked out really well for the campaign, because we needed a way to encounter the villain, and we were all like OP in the system, where rolls were all really high. So it was really difficult for us to fail anything. But we still needed to encounter the villain, but the villain couldn’t just be defeated, or else she would lose her threat factor. So instead, she would appear to us, it would look like her, and then we would get in a physical fight with her, and she would be a difficult opponent to beat, but then it would just, the final knockout blow would turn out she was just a bunch of blood. [laughter] So she was an image of the villain made from blood. Oren did not specify how much blood that required. [laughter]

Oren: So just, let’s just imagine that it was blood spread very thinly.

Wes: Uhhuh

Oren: It was just like a one micron thick sheet of blood in a person’s shape. Let’s just go with that. Okay. Let’s stop asking questions.

Chris: Some very durable blood here with a lot of resistance to it.

Oren: Yeah, well, Chris, a wizard did it. [laughter] And since a wizard did it, it technically makes sense, and no one can critique it anymore. [laughing] This is what I’ve been told.

Wes: What kind of spells, like effects, do we associate with blood magic?

Oren: Gross ones.

Wes: Gross ones?

Oren: Or usually, it depends, there’s a lot of different versions. The most common are harmful things. You don’t usually spill blood if your spell is to help the crops grow, but sometimes you do. Everything’s…there’s a lot of different types of blood magic.

Chris: There’s also a lot of associations with stealing a life from one person to another. The whole like, [vampire accent] “bathe in blood to become young” [end vampire accent] or something like that. So, I would also think of it, anything that has to do with the body, right? Drink somebody’s blood to take something from them, for instance.

Wes: I think that’s the whole point of vampires, right? Is that they prey on young people for sustenance to stay immortal, right? It’s like literally that act of blood magic just preserves their life.

Chris: I do think an interesting example is Half Bad.

Oren: …The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself? We have to say the full title every time, Chris, we can’t shorten it. It’s a betrayal of everything that show stood for.

 Chris: Somebody just loved that title. Somebody was just very attached to that title. But this is definitely a case of using the sinisterness of blood magic to make it look like a specific group of mages are bad, so that you can then be like, no, they’re not bad, they’re the good guys! Gotcha. [laughing] But in this case, they heal faster, which to me does make sense. It fits the body theme. It’s a little eclectic. They have one very strange difference, which just feels a little arbitrary, where there’s a coming of age ritual in this setting where the mages get their special ability, and the blood mages need a drop of relative’s blood for this coming of age, or they just die.

And I think it’s used, it’s an important plot point in the show, because then the main character who is a blood mage doesn’t have any relatives, and so he has to travel to try to find their blood. So it’s used to good effect, but it is a little bit arbitrary, I feel like.

Oren: I need people to understand just how arbitrary this is because the blood mages, right, that’s one group of them, or Blood Witches I think they’re called, and they do the thing where for their coming of age ceremony, you have to drink a couple drops of your relative’s blood, and then you have the Fairborn Witches, and for their coming of age ceremony, you have to drink a couple drops of your relative’s blood.

Chris: [laughing] Oh, I forgot about that.

Oren: It’s the same, except that for some reason the Blood Witches will die because of it if they don’t get it. And the Fairborn, I think just won’t get their powers. So it’s as if you had a setting where everybody ate salt. But like one group of people had a salt deficiency and so if they didn’t eat salt, they would die. Everyone eats about the same amount, and so those group of people are the salt eaters. And it’s not impossible that could happen. It was just a really confusing thing to call them.

Chris: The other thing, I think one reason why it seems arbitrary actually is because it’s only a couple drops, right? It just stretches belief more than if they were a little bit more vampiric about it and needed a pint of blood. [laughing] The thing that’s really supposed to make them creepy is that they can eat somebody’s heart to get their powers, right, which they make a point of, oh, this means they’re bad, and super creepy and monstrous. But then, they’re like, oh, actually, in our families, somebody does this at the end of their life, they give their powers to the next person, and then those powers are inherited with each generation, which makes it look better. The problem is that they want these blood mages to be the underdogs.

Oren: So somehow you have, one side has basically the same powers as the other side, except they also have a certain number of people, it’s not clear exactly how many, but apparently most families have at least one, who can just snowball powers through the centuries.

Chris: It has like hundreds probably.

Oren: And has, and most of those powers are useless, because most of them are just not very well thought out, but a few of them are incredibly good and combined would be basically unstoppable. And so how are the blood mages the underdogs, no one knows the answer. [laughter]

Chris: And they heal faster too, on top of that.

Oren: Right. Also, for some reason, they heal faster. That show is weird because it’s also one of those shows where every witch has a specific power like the X-Men, but then they also all have all the spells, which can do whatever the writers feel like at any given time. So, like, it’s – the magic system of that story is not well thought out is what I’m saying.

But this actually segues into an interesting point that I found with blood magic, which is there’s this whole thing of maybe blood magic’s not that bad. A lot of stories do that. Or they are like, oh, blood magic’s bad. But maybe, if you want to win, you have to embrace the grimdarkness of using blood magic. And, I’m not gonna say that can’t work. I’m gonna say be careful, because you can very easily find yourself in a situation where you’ve created a scenario where being willing to murder someone directly translates into more power. And of course, in real life, there are plenty of opportunities where killing someone could get you power, but it doesn’t literally make you physically more powerful in most cases, whereas in this blood magic situation you have, and – I would just think if that’s the kind of dynamic you want in your setting. Because you might find that it’s hard to justify why the setting isn’t a horrible dystopia at that point. It’s especially bad for role playing games because role playing games tend to pull darker already, and once you start telling players, “yeah, this is a really hard boss fight, or, you could go murder a villager and then it would be an easy boss fight.” If they ever get at all frustrated, that villager murder is gonna start looking real tempting.

Wes: But do you think it works well for, I don’t know, like for a villain, right? When we were talking about this topic, Dragon Age: Absolution came up, right, with, what was his name? Rasalan? Or, yeah, Rezaren, the Tevinter mage that ends up going hardcore blood magic by the end of it. [laughing] And it’s just an escalating thread of, I just want it for this. But what he wants it for becomes an obsession. And then like that descent into realizing that if you just have enough, you can do almost anything. Which for a villain, I think it worked well in that story.

Oren: It works out okay. You just wanna be careful how much you emphasize it, right? Like in that story, we just assumed that the protagonists would never think of doing that. Or that they aren’t really in a situation where it would be practical or necessary for some imagined greater good or what have you. But, and of course they’re not players, right? So you can make them think whatever you want them to think. But if you make it more widespread, it can be an issue.

Chris: I will point out that that particular story is about an artifact.

Wes: Yes, that’s a good point

Chris: …that he wants to use. So, you could use something like that. Okay, it’s not just that we have to kill somebody, but we also have to kill somebody and have this special artifact and there’s only one of them. Or do other things to just reduce the total number of people who would be doing this, right?

Wes: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Oren: Dragon Age is very funny with its blood magic, because most of the time the game is like, “blood magic is corrupting, and if you use it, you’re on the path to evil, and it’s basically magical hard drugs and you’re, once you use it, you’re doomed” or whatever. But then Dragon Age II, which is ironically the one that focuses the most on how evil blood magic is, just lets you take a blood magic prestige class and it’s the most powerful build in the game.

Chris: Oh, my goodness. [laughter]

Oren: And, nothing happens when you do it. Like, it’s just very weird, if you side with the Templars in the little oppressed mages story they have going on, and you break into the mage sanctum, and all the mages are doing blood magic, and it’s all horrible and evil, and the Templars are like, [dramatic voice] “We must cleanse this place with fire.” And then they look over to you and are, like, “Do you have our backs?” And you’re standing there with, like, huge ribbons of blood circling you, [laughter] and big glowing red orbs, and you’re like, “Yeah, let’s get these blood mages!”

Wes: That’s hilarious. I haven’t played two, but I remember in one the mages’, like, quest line where you saved them or whatever. And if I think if you had unlocked blood magic and done that, that you’ll rescue everybody, but then the headmaster Dumbledore figure will be like, “Thank you! But by the way, you were using some magic back there that I’m a little worried about.” And you can just be like, “It’s Grey Warden magic. Don’t worry about it.” [laughter]

Oren: “It’s fine.”

Oren: Yeah, see Dragon Age II was also annoying because most of the time in Dragon Age, if you wanna be a blood mage, you’ve gotta devote significant resources to it. It’s like a prestige class. But then all these random newbie mages are just, like, “Blah! Knife stab self, now blood magic happens.” And it’s like, “Hey, I had to work hard for that, and you all just get it for free?” [laughter] That’s some nonsense.

Wes: Bringing up Dragon Age is a good segue to this, that I’m curious if you two think there’s a strong association or not between this, cause, one of the ways to unlock blood magic in that game is that one of the, oh, forget what they’re called, but, like, the demons, can teach it to you, right. To what extent is there like some kind of devilish aspect to blood magic in stories?

Oren: In stories? Basically all the time. I don’t know if you know what the historical connection there is. I see historical dramas all the time. The witch hunter will come to town and be like, [witch hunter voice] “The evil witch is doing a blood sacrifice for Satan.” And I’m like, maybe that’s a thing witch hunters said in that time period. I don’t know. I haven’t checked, but I do know that’s very common in fantasy fiction all over the place.

Wes: To the point where you feel like if I was writing a story and I want to include like magic that I am certainly running the risk of maybe inviting that kind of, like, premise into the story?

Oren: I don’t know if I would say inviting. I don’t think it’s so common that if you have blood magic, people are gonna be like, [complaining voice] “Where’s the demon to go with the blood magic? Continuity error.” It’s not quite that common. If you had blood magic and then there was like a demon or devil, some kind of supernatural, evil creature that was giving the knowledge of it, or that was what people thought it was, I mean, readers are gonna take that in stride, right? That’s a pretty well established trope.

Chris: I would say that it would be a little odd if you had blood magic and nothing about it seemed – like it was perfectly nonchalant. “Oh yeah. The blood, it’s just like any other element, and there’s just nothing menacing about it.” Then that would be a little strange, not like impossible, depending on context. If you have the right magic system, you might be able to do that, but in many cases they, people would look for some kind of commentary on whether it’s good or bad.

Wes: Interesting. I mentioned earlier that I’m not, that I’m maybe only a third of the way through A Darker Shade of Magic. And one of the early things that happens in that story is that he trades basically a, uh, it’s almost like a little like trinket type game with the four elements and then a little piece of bone to a collector in Grey London, which is a place that doesn’t have much magic. Kell, the main character, describes it as a toy that lets you assess your affinity for magic in, like, Red London. And so it’s like the four elements and then bone, which essentially is blood magic. And I’m just like, I don’t know where the story goes, so maybe demons are gonna show up or something, but it’s just, okay, so we’re having an elemental system and then, blood…as like something else, there. And I know that elemental systems will go beyond the traditional four, but that doesn’t make me necessarily think that there’s gonna be like a demon component because of the way magic was presented through that frame.

Chris: Perhaps? It’s normal to have the four elements and then some kind of life-related fifth element. I will say that the choice of blood or bone for that is a little more sinister than I would expect for a normal, traditional elemental system.

Oren: If I remember correctly, the bad guy in Darker Shade of Magic uses blood magic, but it’s been a while.

Chris: Oren, did you just spoil the story for Wes?

Wes: Yeah, thanks a lot, Oren. [laughs] The main character Kell does use blood magic.

Oren: Oh, does he?

Wes: Because that’s how he goes between the Londons, angsty fashion. He has to cut on himself, and…

Oren: Oh, is that how he opens portals?

Wes: That’s how he portals because, and this is another thing I wanna talk about with blood magic, because he’s an Antari, which is some kind of just human that is just, like, naturally more magical. And so he heals better, because he’s naturally more magical. His blood is actually just a little bit more magical.

Chris: Ah, yes, the convenient, “I heal better because the storyteller wants me to get injured a lot.”

Oren:  Exactly. Not only do I have blood magic power at my disposal, but my blood itself has more, like, magical capabilities than some rube over there. [laughter]

Chris: That reminds me of the Kushiel books. We wanna have sexy times blood. So…heal fast!

Wes: Heal fast! I guess some stories can do it right. Certainly, I don’t love insinuating that just the blood in some people’s bodies is just better than others. [laughs] I’m not a big fan of that.

Oren: Yeeah, I can imagine why you might not love that idea. [laughs]

Wes: Oh, really?

Oren: [laughing] But the important thing is that I didn’t actually spoil anything for you cause I was apparently wrong.

Wes: Oh, okay, good. Thanks.

Oren: Cause I don’t remember Kell using blood magic.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t remember that either. [laughing]

Oren: That’s actually very reminiscent of 7th Sea, where the portal magic in 7th Sea was, like, blood themed, but not the person’s blood. For some reason, the portals you made just bled. To be extra weird and gross, I guess.

Wes: That is gross. [laughs]

Oren: Yeah, it was odd, and it was like, it’s cause you’re cutting into the universe.

Chris: [noise of disgust]

Oren: Does the universe have blood? I don’t think that’s how universes work, man. Uh, now if it started bleeding out some dark matter, now that I could appreciate.

Wes: Yeah. So, Interesting. Oren, how does blood magic relate to the Necro Industrial Complex? Are necromancers blood mages?

Oren: Depends on the story, but usually the difference between death magic and blood magic is the difference between light gray and dark gray. It depends on how much the storyteller feels like separating it. Now, like in traditional D&D, which is where the Necro Industrial Complex comes from, there isn’t any blood related to necromancy. It’s, for some reason, opals are the material component. You need to raise skeletons in 3.5 D&D. So opals, it’s the Necro Opal Complex is actually what it is, but in a lot of stories, blood is very connected to necromancy.

In L Five R [Legend of the Five Rings] I was mentioning earlier, that’s a big one. Blood mages do a lot of raising the dead. Which is weird, because it’s part of the plot of L five R if you read deep enough into the lore, is that blood magic used to not be evil. It was just like a thing people could do, but then the Dark God fell down from heaven and he made it evil somehow on his way down. And so I’m like, okay, so before the Dark God showed up, did blood Magic still have all this gross resurrection type? Did you still raise zombies with it, or is that a new thing that it has only now? I don’t know, but yeah, L five R is one of those scenes where necromancy  and blood magic are basically synonyms, and there are a number of other settings that do something similar. The whole, because again, the blood here is the externalized idea of you sacrificing life to bring something back from the dead. So you can see why they go hand in hand.

Wes: Yeah. But definitely if your necromancy required blood to, like, power it, then maybe you’re running into some inefficiencies with the industrial complex part of that, right?

Oren: Because yeah, cause skeletons don’t have their own blood, okay. So you’re gonna need to get that blood from somewhere. And that’s gonna raise your operating costs, and it’s just not. It’s not. I wouldn’t recommend it. Now that we’ve learned that the Necro Industrial Complex is made less efficient with blood magic, I think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you made it through this episode without getting grossed out, consider joining our Patreon. And if you didn’t make it through this episode without getting grossed out, consider joining our Patreon.

Wes: And thanks for skipping to the end. [laughter]

Oren: That’s very important to skip to the end, to hear the Patreon read.

Wes: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.