Only Human Blood Feeds the Trees

What many farmers and gardeners know is that blood can enrich soil. While blood sacrifices were often for gods or personal use (as in the search for immortality), the blood was also often added to groves in religious rites and sometimes to crops as offerings to help increase yields.

Sometimes the blood sacrifice was also given in exchange for gifts from a sacred tree, such as taking of mistletoe from the sacred oak.

In my books, The Goddess Aped and The Lost Whore of Babylon, however, one area where there is divergence is on the type of blood used. The vampyre recognize that blood is the life and often this involved ritual. Eve replicated this process in her own rituals.

But Aphrodite preferred to use the sacred blood of menstruation in the rituals between mates or in personal rituals in her temples.

Since vampire fed on blood, they did not need to sacrifice for crops but many reasoned that the practice kept humans alive and healthy as a possible food source.

Others felt the number of people needed to bleed for a crop or grove posed their own risk to the potential human food supply for the vampyre. So it was ordered that those sacrifices happen annually to match certain holidays, rather than weekly or monthly.

Eventually the practice of sacrifice for crops was outlawed by most groups and religions, along with an end to cannibalism and headhunting.

In my book, Gold ‘n Silver, humans attempt to take my gifts and my life as a sacrifice. However, they take the gifts for themselves and their own gain. So the sacrifice is to them and for their benefit as humans proclaiming themselves to be gods. They, themselves, gave nothing but also claimed that the sacrifice was to their Christian God. Unfortunately, that claim cannot be true since their God, as detailed in the Bible, only accepted sacrifices mandated by the heavens (that did not necessarily benefit anyone) or of the self in the form of prayer, worship, giving up worldly items, etc. And as I did not belong to any of them, neither did my possessions. It was not a sacrifice to be made. Also, there is the little matter of my being a vampyre and goddess. We cannot cleanse human sin or appease their gods. Nor do angels atone further for their transgressions.

God does not send humans to punish. God sends angels or enacts the punishment.

Their will and beliefs are not to be imposed on those who do not suffer from original sin. But even the Bible says that each must come to God on their own. What these groups did flew in the face of the beliefs held by all of them. They were simply acting from a place of pure greed and desire.