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Recently, there has been an uptick in celebrity news that has some involvement with…blood. Whether it’s drinking it or putting it on your face or body, blood seems to have become something of a trendy topic. But that’s not exactly a new thing.
In the world of the occult, blood was, and in some cases still is, regarded as useful for the purposes of healing, strength, and fortification. Menstrual blood was believed to be dangerous, and feared by men; meanwhile, human blood was said to carry the soul with it. If a conqueror drank the blood of their victim, it was believed they could gain the power and strength that previously belonged to them. In other cases, it was believed that carrying the blood of an individual would give you power over them and harness their emotional state.
Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess
Long before the age of social media and mass egocentrism, youth, beauty, and vitality were revered among royalty and other elites. Some of them would engage in blood rituals in pursuit of those.
Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, known by some as “The Blood Countess,” went to particularly fearsome measures. Born in 1560, she allegedly slaughtered some 600 young girls in order to preserve her youth. How? She believed the fountain of youth ran in the blood of virgins.
Although her story is surrounded by a lot of folklore, it’s alleged that Elizabeth grew up witnessing regular cruelty and sadism, seeing her family’s officers administer all sorts of inhumane punishments and cruelty in the name of justice. By the time she was grown up, she was no stranger to violence.
Elizabeth was married off at 15, and her husband would spend a lot of time on war campaigns, leaving her alone and to her own devices. She grew bored and took an interest in the occult, routinely inviting supposed alchemists, witches, and sorcerers to her castle. She’d also make use of a torture device left behind by her husband; while it was previously used to extract information from prisoners (by way of ripping away their flesh) Elizabeth started using it for fun.
Elizabeth Bathory believed bathing in and drinking blood would restore her youth and beauty.
When Elizabeth was 43, her husband died and she wanted another lover. The only problem was, she believed her looks had faded and this enraged her. As rage became her default mood, Elizabeth was prone to especially violent outbursts, which resulted in her striking a servant girl one day after a minor oversight, causing the girl’s blood to land on her skin. Elizabeth came to be convinced that where the blood landed, her skin looked younger. This belief, plus her faith in magic, and encouragement from her alchemists would send the countess spiraling.
Elizabeth would send her helpers and sorcerers to hunt for suitable virgin girls at night. They were chained by the ankles to the castle rafters when they were caught, and when it came time for Elizabeth’s bath, their throats would be slit while they were still alive, and the Countess’ bath would be filled with their blood.
If one particularly beautiful girl was caught, Elizabeth would drink the blood directly from a golden flask, and as her hunger for depravity grew, she would drink the blood as it fell in streams from the hanging body.
As Elizabeth realized that the blood had no effect on her skin, she chalked it up to the fact that it was peasant blood, and it was merely defective. There was better blood to be found in girls from cultured families. In her search for youth, she started an academy at the castle where she would take on 25 students at a time who would come to meet the same demise as the girls before them.
As the rituals became more routine for Elizabeth, she grew more careless. Four drained bodies were thrown from the castle walls, where they would come to be identified by the villagers. Word of the atrocities committed by Elizabeth would reach the Hungarian emperor, and she was eventually locked away in a cupboard inside her own castle, never to be seen again until her death four years later.
Modern Elites and Their Uses for Blood
Although horror stories like the one around The Blood Countess are (thankfully) rare, modern elites still pursue youth and beauty. In their search for that, blood seems to be one probable avenue.
Back in 2013, Kim Kardashian took the plunge and got a “vampire facial” on Kourtney & Kim Take Miami. The procedure involves the patient getting a laser treatment, followed by a micro-needling process in which the skin is perforated with near microscopic holes, according to Dr. Sam Lam. This reportedly applies platelet-rich plasma to the patient’s skin (abstracted from their own blood), and the benefits include reducing the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles while improving skin tone and texture.
Despite Kim saying the procedure was so painful she would never do it again, it seems to be a relatively popular/mainstream procedure today, with many medical spas offering it and Cosmopolitan even writing pieces about it long after Kim shared her experience.
Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly drink each other’s blood for ritualistic purposes.
Other celebrities turn to blood for more occult reasons – kind of like a diet version of the Hungarian Blood Countess.
Megan Fox and her fiancé Colson Baker (better known as Machine Gun Kelly) are very public about their uses for each other’s blood, including drinking each other’s blood at their engagement. Baker wears a pendant with a drop of Megan Fox’s blood around his neck, and as weird as this is, he and Fox are not the first contemporary couple to do this: Angelina Jolie and her former husband Billy Bob Thornton did it first. The reason why Baker wears the pendant is unclear, but some occult beliefs say that if you carry around someone’s blood, it gives you power over them and their emotional state. Maybe the couple is taking having a piece of their lover to a new, grotesque level.
Fox has also said she and her fiancé drink each other’s blood “for ritualistic purposes only.” For context, she’s into the occult, practices astrology, and reportedly believes she “manifested” her fiancé from the time she was a young child.
Furthermore, since 2017 the super rich have been known to "inject blood from teenagers in order to gain 'immortality'". Now, this may sound like some bizarre conspiracy theory, but there's legitimate evidence to support these claims. Even more concerning is how far exactly these elites will go to get their hands on this precious, young blood. According to BBC, "there’s the murky ethics of buying blood that young people might have thought they were donating to those in medical need, and using it for expensive, experimental treatments."
These concerns may seem worlds away, but in reality, they hit closer to home than we think. In the viral article, "Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will" released just last year, Adam Piore stated, "In 2016, a former Stanford Medical School student named Jesse Karmazin, opened up Ambrosia, a clinic in Monterey, California, offering to infuse clients with the blood of donors between the ages of 16 and 25 for $8000 a liter."
With this information readily available, Newsweek poses some very valid questions, "Will poor young people be coerced into selling their blood to elderly billionaires? Will magical anti-aging pills become the province of the Park Avenue and Hollywood rich, like facelifts, hair plugs and botox injections? Will the rest of us senile peasants be forced to watch them age backwards as we are left to wither and die?"
Closing Thoughts
As weird as celebrities can be and as morbid and grotesque as the origins of blood treatments could be, there’s potentially some merit to using blood as a health treatment and to even reverse the effects of aging. It was revealed in studies conducted in 2011 and 2014 that when elderly mice were given blood from younger mice, it had a restorative effect on the brain. This of course isn’t to condone Elizabeth Bathory’s actions or the cryptic and egocentric reason behind why the super rich are investing their money, but it seems blood really is an avenue worthy of exploration and study (if truly for the benefit of all, not solely the elites).
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