Bloodlust

In her history of late medieval blood devotion ( Wonderful Blood , 2007), Caroline Walker Bynum teases out the connections between withdrawal of the cup from the laity and blood mysticism: “some of the cloistered, denied access to the cup at mass, received it in vision. Others (for example, Beatrice of Nazareth and Catherine of Siena) experienced the proffered wafer as the withheld blood, gushing into their mouths or over their bodies. What the clergy denied them, they simply obtained in another way . . . . Ordinary laypeople too cried out for the withheld chalice. In fifteenth-century Bohemia, the demand for the eucharist in both species . . . gave its name to a group of the followers of Jan Hus, the Utraquists, also known as Calixtines (from cup or calix ).” Even after Constance branded the Hussites heretics, “the demand for the chalice continued. Blood in body was not enough.”

Without the cup, devout Christians seek blood elsewhere. But what if they aren’t devout Christians? Will they satisfy their bloodlust more crudely, more violently?