Is blood sacrifice morally wrong?
Jun 24, 2022 4:26 pm
Demonic rituals: bad idea?
Neither Kit Melbourne nor Susan Stillwater are into killing people to power blood magic rituals (even though Susan sort of does it accidentally at the end of Alternate Susan.) Killing people or animals in sacrifices for dark ends is a pretty common trope in fantasy and horror, and in most novels, only the bad guys lead the victim to an altar to cut their still-beating heart out. I explored this a little bit in Warlock's Blood, but I really haven't got the mechanics of it ironed out. How exactly does it work, and why is it a bad idea?
For Kit, it just feels wrong, but if you asked her why, she wouldn't be able to explain it. Felix is opposed to it because he was soured on the practice when some warlocks killed his friend. I eat meat and will heartlessly set mouse traps because I don't want filthy disease vectors in my house. (My cats are more decorative than functional, bless their hearts.) Yet, I still remember being psychologically unable to mercy-kill a sick chicken.
One reason it might be wrong is that if you're slaying victims to appease a dark entity, you're both attracting the attention of evil spirits and desensitizing yourself to murdering animals. This is based on the theory that you're offering the sacrifice as a gift to something that enjoys death. You put out seeds, you're gonna get birds. Put out cat food, you'll get stray cats and maybe foxes or coyotes. Start murdering sacrificial animals, you're probably not attacting some Hallmark-card guardian angel.
If the death itself is what powers the spell, then it's not significantly less ethical than eating meat and considerably more ethical than trophy hunting or shooting crows, (which is just plain evil and if you do that you're dead to me.) Unless the spell itself uses the animal's soul as fuel and by sacrificing it, the guinea pig can't go to guinea pig heaven or you're thwarting it's opportunity to be reincarnated into a chinchilla. If that's the case, that's pretty mean. Maybe that chinchilla could have eventually obtained enlightenment and you ruined it.
So my question now: what's the true cost of this dark practice? Is it addictive? Do you get posessed by a demon? Do they put a photo of you and a sign that says "do not sell hamsters to this person" at all the pet stores in town? Or maybe it's like telling the take-out guy "yes" when he asks if you want the single-use plastic forks even though you know you have real forks at home and are just going to throw the plastic ones away; We know that it's objectively terrible but there's no real punishment.
So this is what I've been thinking about this week: Why is blood magic a bad idea? When my character makes her ill-advised choices, I want to entertain you by describing the exact way in which she steers the fully loaded tractor trailer of her life into the giant simmering lake of what the fuck have I done.
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Gratuitous Cat Picture
They enjoy spending time in the catio.
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