Blood and Soil: From The First Kings to Gaza
How divine blood became a claim to land, why the soil had to be "fed," and how the oldest aristocratic myth turns slaughter into “cleansing.”
Every ruling class has a story about its blood.
Not a story about its armies, which can be defeated, or its treasuries, which can be emptied. Those justifications come later, once the regime has learned to speak the careful language of administration. The first story a ruling family tells is older and stranger, and it almost never changes. The king’s line carries power in the body, passed down through the blood like an inheritance written into the flesh, and that inheritance places him nearer to heaven than the people he rules.
This is the bloodline myth, and it is one of the oldest political technologies on earth. For most of recorded history, rulers did not justify their power by winning an election or governing well. They placed their families inside the order of heaven. The king’s body became the visible proof of an invisible claim: that power moved through blood, that ancestry carried authority, and that rule was not merely seized by force but inherited from the gods.
This is why ancient kings spent so much effort telling you who their fathers were, tracing the line back past the human record and into the company of gods. Genealogy was not flattery. Genealogy was government.
I have written before about the other half of this, the blood that gets offered up the altar, the long sacrificial ladder that runs from the bull to the lamb to the bread and wine. This piece is about the blood that stays in the body and makes a claim, the conviction that one family’s veins carry a right the rest of us are born without.
It is also, as you will see, the thread that runs straight from the first god-kings to the gas chamber, to the shores of Gaza, and to the question this piece is really about.
If spilled blood was believed to consecrate the ground, to feed it and bind a people to it, then why would a regime that wanted a land slaughter the people already living on it? The answer is the darkest thing the bloodline myth has to teach, and it is the reason the it still kills.
Kingship Descended From “Heaven”
The clearest early statement of the idea survives on a clay prism, in a text scholars call the Sumerian King List, which the Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen first edited into its standard form. The list opens with a line that tells you everything about how Mesopotamian power understood itself. After the kingship descended from heaven, it begins, the kingship was in Eridu. Rule arrives from above. It is lowered into the world like something handed down through a gap in the sky, and the men who hold it are the recipients of a cosmic transfer rather than the winners of a human contest.
The detail that matters most about this document is not the mythology. It is the purpose. The King List took shape as a political-literary tradition around the Ur III and early Isin periods, and the best-known near-complete copy, the Weld-Blundell Prism, dates to the early second millennium BCE. It was composed to do a job: to establish that the city of Ur held a kingship passed down in unbroken succession from the gods themselves, through a line of cities and rulers, directly to the dynasty paying the scribes. The list is an instrument, a genealogy commissioned by power to make its own authority look like the structure of the universe rather than the outcome of the last war.
That is the first move, and every later version of the bloodline myth is a variation on it. Power relocates the source of its legitimacy beyond any rival’s reach. A man who rules because he is strong can be overthrown by someone stronger. A man who rules because kingship descended from heaven has moved the argument out of politics and into cosmology, where the only question left is whether the ruled have any right to resist the order of creation itself.
Egypt made the same move with even less hesitation. Pharaoh was the living Horus, the son of Ra, the single point at which the divine order touched the human state, and the royal body was the hinge on which the alignment of heaven and earth turned. This is why succession mattered with an intensity that can look, from the outside, like madness. The divine birth scenes on temple walls, the royal marriages that kept the line concentrated, the mortuary cults that tended the dead king’s journey, all of it served one function, to guarantee that the bloodline did not break. If the line failed, the order it carried might fail with it. The continuity of one family had been made into the continuity of the cosmos.
Rome, which liked to imagine itself more rational than the eastern monarchies it absorbed, did the same thing in its own idiom. The family of Julius Caesar claimed descent from Venus, through Aeneas, the Trojan prince who carried his household gods out of the burning city and into the founding destiny of Rome. This was not decoration. It was a weapon. Augustus, who understood the uses of theology better than any politician who ever lived, took the murdered Caesar and had him declared a god, which made Augustus himself divi filius, son of the deified, a phrase he stamped onto coins across the empire. The old forms stayed in place, the senate still met, the offices kept their ancient names, and underneath them legitimacy had quietly become dynastic and sacred. That is how a republic learns to kneel without admitting it has become a monarchy.
The Greeks staged this danger long before Rome perfected it. In the oldest surviving image of a ruler walking a crimson path, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, first performed in 458 BCE, the returning conqueror is met by his wife, who has unrolled a swath of blood-red cloth from his chariot to the palace door and urges him to walk it. Agamemnon hesitates, and he is right to, because to tread the crimson is to claim an honor reserved for gods, the hubris that calls down ruin on a mortal who forgets he is one. Clytemnestra goads him until his pride wins, and the moment he steps onto the cloth he has sealed the death that waits for him inside. Scholars have long noted that the dye she calls a gushing of purple carries the suggestion of blood, the daughter he sacrificed to begin the war and the men he killed to win it. A path the color of blood, an honor that belongs to the gods, and a man who walks it because he has come to believe the distinction no longer applies to him. It is the whole bloodline claim in a single act, and the reason kings, and later celebrities, walk a red carpet to this day.
The Blood and the Land
A claim to divine blood was never only a claim about lineage. It was also a claim about land. The god-king did not merely carry heaven in his veins. He carried a sanctioned right to rule a particular stretch of earth. Blood and ground became one political theology: the ruler’s body, the god’s authority, and the land itself bound together in a single claim.
The Sumerian King List does not say that kingship descended from heaven in the abstract. It says the kingship descended from heaven and then it was in Eridu, in Kish, in Ur, named cities, specific soil, the divine mandate always landing on a map. Pharaoh’s body did not keep the cosmos aligned in general. It kept Egypt aligned, the Nile and the black land and the borders of the kingdom. The family of Caesar traced its descent from Venus through Aeneas, who carried the gods of Troy to the soil of Italy, which made the Roman claim to that peninsula a matter of divine inheritance rather than conquest. Sacred blood is how a ruling line converts the brute fact that it took the land into the serene assurance that the land was always meant to be its own.
This is the deep structure beneath the idea of a promised land, which is one of the most durable political theologies ever devised.
A promised land is soil that a god has deeded to a chosen bloodline, in advance, by covenant, so that arriving and taking it reads as homecoming rather than invasion, and the people already living there become, by definition, occupiers of ground that was never truly theirs.
The promise does the work that no army could do alone, because it transforms a territorial seizure into the fulfillment of a sacred plan, and it tells the chosen that the earth itself has been waiting for them.
The phrase that the twentieth century made infamous, blood and soil, Blut und Boden, was a late and poisonous flowering of this very old root. The doctrine held that a people’s blood carried a mystical bond to its ancestral land, that the German peasant rooted in German earth was the truest expression of the nation, and that this bond between race and soil was the foundation of the right to rule and to expand.
The deeper pattern is much older than the Nazis. Across ancient kingship, Roman descent myth, covenantal land theology, and later doctrines of divine right, power repeatedly fused blood, sacred origin, and territory into a single claim. Blut und Boden was not the origin of that structure. It was a modern racial mutation of it. What the regime added was a racial mutation, the fusion of the ancient blood-and-land claim with nineteenth-century pseudoscience about purity and contamination, and it is precisely that addition that turned an aristocratic legitimacy myth into a machinery of extermination. To see how, you have to look at what the older traditions actually believed about blood spilled on the ground.
Three Things Blood Does to the Ground
Here is the contradiction I promised at the start, and it rewards a pause, because the answer exposes the mechanism at the heart of the worst thing human beings do to one another. If blood spilled on the earth consecrates it, if the offering feeds the land and binds the offerer to it, then why would a regime that wants a territory slaughter the people already on it? Would their spilled blood not consecrate the ground to them, or at least leave a debt the killers would have to carry?
The contradiction dissolves once you see that the ancient mind did not have one idea about blood and the ground. It had three.
The first is consecration. Blood deliberately offered, by the right people, in the right rite, feeds the earth and seals a bond, which is the logic of the foundation sacrifice buried beneath a wall and the libation poured at an altar. The blood is a gift the community controls, and it creates belonging.
The second is pollution, what the Greeks called miasma. Blood spilled wrongly, the blood of the murdered, the blood of a slain kinsman, anything shed outside a sanctioned rite, consecrates nothing. It contaminates. In the book of Genesis the blood of the murdered Abel cries out to God from the ground, and the earth that has opened its mouth to receive that blood is cursed so that it will no longer yield its strength. Spilled wrongly, blood does not buy the land. It poisons it, and leaves a debt that must be answered before the ground can be clean again.
The genocidal regime needs a third operation, and it is purification. The victims are not figured as a sacrifice whose blood will consecrate the coveted ground, because that would hand them a claim to it. They are figured as the pollution itself. Their very presence on the land is recast as the thing defiling soil that rightfully belongs to the chosen blood, so killing them is framed not as an offering, and not even, in the perpetrator’s mind, as murder. It is framed as cleansing, the scouring of a contaminant off sacred earth so the rightful line can finally possess it clean. The ancient command in the Hebrew Bible to devote an enemy population entirely to destruction, the herem, runs on this logic, killing reframed as a sacred and authorized act rather than a polluting one, because a god has commanded it.
For that third operation to work, the perpetrator has to solve a problem, and the solution is the most important thing in this entire essay. If the victims are human, then killing them is the wrongful bloodshed that pollutes the land and damns the killer, the blood of Abel crying from the ground. So the victims cannot be allowed to remain human. They have to be redefined, before the killing and during it, as something whose death does not count as the shedding of human blood at all. This is the precise and terrible function of dehumanization. It is load-bearing ritual and psychological work, the thing that makes the rest of the machinery run.
The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has written the standard modern study of this process, argues that genocidal regimes go further than comparing their victims to animals. They come to experience them as a kind of counterfeit human, a creature that wears a human form while lacking a human essence, which is far more dangerous than ordinary contempt, because a counterfeit human is an object of disgust and dread at once.
The historical record of the twentieth century shows the mechanism with documentary clarity. Nazi propaganda did not portray the Jewish population as a rival nation to be defeated in honorable war. It portrayed them, with relentless consistency, as vermin, as lice, as rats, as a source of plague. A 1941 poster plastered across German-occupied Poland showed lice swarming over a man’s body beneath the words declaring that Jews are lice and they spread typhus. The propaganda film The Eternal Jew cut directly between images of Jewish people and swarms of rats pouring from a sewer. German physicians, lending the authority of medicine to the campaign, pushed the claim that Jews were carriers of epidemic disease.
Once a population has been successfully reclassified as vermin, the apparatus of extermination becomes, in the perpetrator’s framework, a matter of public hygiene rather than murder, disinfection rather than killing, pest control rather than the shedding of human blood.
The chemical used to murder more than a million people at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, was a commercial pesticide, an insecticide developed to kill literal vermin. At the camps it served both purposes, deloused the prisoners' clothing to kill typhus-bearing lice, then murdered the prisoners themselves, and that is not a grotesque coincidence. It is the metaphor of dehumanization collapsing into method, the moment the figure of speech becomes the technique. The victims could be killed without, in the killers’ theology, polluting the sacred soil, because the killers had first persuaded themselves that what they were destroying was not human blood at all. It was infestation. The land was not being stained. It was being cleansed.
That is the answer to the contradiction, and it is the most important thing the blood-and-soil idea has to teach. The genocidal mind holds all three logics together through a single act of redefinition:
The state authorized blood consecrates the ground.
The innocent’s blood, wrongly shed, would pollute it and damn me.
The enemy’s blood must therefore be reclassified as no blood at all, the fluid of vermin rather than the life of a person, so that spilling it cleanses rather than curses.
Dehumanization is the hinge the whole horror turns on, the thing that lets a man believe he is purifying the earth while he commits the oldest and most polluting crime his own tradition names. Strip the dehumanizing language away and the killing reverts to what it is, the wrongful shedding of human blood, and the soil it soaks into cries out exactly as Abel’s did.
The same mechanism is visible now in Gaza, which is why the language around Palestinians matters so much. Before a people can be starved, displaced, bombed, or spoken of as a demographic problem to be managed, they must first be moved out of the moral category of the fully human. Palestinians have said this plainly, that they are treated not as persons with homes and ancestors and children and graves and claims upon the land, but as obstacles, numbers, threats, regrettable matter in the way of someone else’s historical destiny.
Dehumanizing language does the work ahead of time, so the killing feels like hygiene when it comes.
Amnesty International placed that experience at the center of the title of its December 2024 report, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman,” and its secretary general, Agnès Callamard, presented the organization’s conclusion that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In September 2025 the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, chaired by the former international judge Navi Pillay, reached the same conclusion, finding that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts named in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Israel rejects those findings, and the case before the International Court of Justice remains unresolved. The older pattern, though, is already in plain view. The land is made sacred, the blood is made into destiny, and the people standing on the wrong side of that story are described as something less than human.
The Blood That Was Believed to Carry Life
It would be comfortable to treat all of this as symbolism, as a useful fiction that ancient people half-believed and modern people have outgrown. The trouble is that the belief was never only symbolic. Blood, in the ancient mind, was not a metaphor for life. It was the physical vehicle of it, the literal medium in which the animating force of a living thing was carried, and that conviction produced practices far stranger and more concrete than any genealogical claim.
The Romans believed that the blood of a dying gladiator could be drunk to cure epilepsy, and they meant it with complete medical seriousness. Pliny the Elder, the great naturalist of the first century, recorded that epileptics drank the blood of gladiators as though it were the draught of life itself, and the encyclopedist Celsus described the practice without much objection, the sufferer drinking the hot blood straight from the cut throat of a slain man. Pliny went further in one passage, describing the spectacle with something close to disgust, the epileptic absorbing a man’s warm blood while he still breathed and drawing the living soul straight out of the wound. Vitality lived in the blood, and if you could take another person’s blood into your body you could take their life-force with it. When gladiatorial combat was banned in the late empire, the blood of executed criminals was understood to carry the same power, and the practice simply moved to the foot of the scaffold.
This was not a Roman peculiarity that died with Rome. The historian Richard Sugg, of Durham University, has documented how the consumption of human blood, flesh, bone, and fat persisted in Europe as respectable medicine straight through the Renaissance and into the eighteenth century, practiced by the kings and physicians and natural philosophers at the center of European learning rather than by savages on some distant shore.
Charles the Second of England distilled human skull into a tincture known as the King’s Drops and was fond enough of it to brew his own. His father, Charles the First, after the executioner’s axe came down, was himself turned into corpse medicine by people who collected what they could from the scaffold. The blood of the executed, the fat of the hanged, the powdered skull of the long-dead, all of it was swallowed by the educated and the powerful in the conviction that the life and vigor of one body could be transferred into another. The belief that animated the gladiator’s cup never disappeared. It put on a physician’s coat.
For centuries, European medicine openly prescribed the human body as a therapeutic substance. Blood, fat, bone, skull, and mummified flesh were used as remedies by physicians and patients who believed they were practicing the science of their day. The powerful did not need a secret ritual to consume the dead. They had apothecaries, medical texts, and respectable theories of cure.
The impulse did not end with the Enlightenment. A few years ago a startup called Ambrosia, named for the food the Greek gods ate to stay immortal, began selling transfusions of young donors' plasma to older clients for eight thousand dollars a liter, until the FDA warned in 2019 that the treatment was unproven and possibly dangerous, and the company stopped. Interest in parabiosis, the transfusion of young blood into older bodies to slow aging, ran wider than one clinic, with Peter Thiel reported among the wealthy figures said to be curious about it. The science behind the longevity claims was always thin, and the reporting traded heavily in rumor, so I pass it on as exactly that. What is not rumor is the shape of the desire, the oldest shape in this entire story. The man who has accumulated everything except more time reaches, as his ancestors reached, for the blood of the young, in the conviction that life itself can be drawn out of one body and poured into another. The gladiator's draught, the king's distilled skull, the billionaire's transfusion. The vessel changes, but the hunger does not.
The Myth Only Works Because You Supply It
Sacred legitimacy is not manufactured by the ruler alone. A man cannot simply announce that his blood descends from heaven and have the announcement become true. The myth requires witnesses. It requires scribes to record the lineage, priests to bless it, courtiers to repeat it, and a population willing to look at a family and see, in place of an ordinary family, something closer to destiny. A crown is a piece of worked metal until enough people agree that it confers the right to command. A bloodline is reproduction until enough people agree that ancestry contains authority.
This is why it sustains over time. It does not live only in the palace. It lives in the imagination of everyone watching the palace. It survived the fall of monarchy by moving indoors and changing its clothes. The modern world did not abolish the idea of sacred blood. It learned to launder the same idea through the language of merit. The old king said his blood descended from the gods. The modern heir says he earned his place, and sometimes he did. Often, though, what he inherited was the atmosphere in which power feels natural: the rooms, the schools, the introductions, the confidence, and the unspoken permission to command. The vocabulary became pedigree, legacy, old family, good breeding, and the surname carved over the library door. The divine right of kings became the cultural right of elites, and the coronation became an admissions decision.
The myth does more than tell you the ruler is exceptional. In the same motion, it tells you that you are ordinary. If his blood descends from heaven, yours does not. If his family was born for command, then your ambition starts to feel like presumption. Somewhere in childhood, you begin to hear a voice asking who you think you are. That voice may arrive through a parent, a teacher, a neighborhood, or a room where everyone else seems to know how to stand and speak. Beneath all those ordinary carriers is something older, a political theology that has been speaking for five thousand years, teaching the many to lower themselves before the few without being told.
That is the real theft, and it was never only the wealth. It was the permission. The ruling line claimed more than descent from gods. It claimed the right to decide what kind of person is allowed to approach the center of things at all, then handed everyone else a set of stories about humility, station, realism, good sense, and knowing one’s place.
What Breaks the Spell?
The bloodline myth is not defeated by proving that the blood is ordinary, because the blood was always ordinary, and proving it changes nothing. It is defeated only when ordinary people stop granting sacred authority to those who have inherited nothing more than proximity to power. The spell breaks when the aura breaks. The king becomes a man. The dynasty becomes a family. The ancient and sacred line becomes what it always was, which is a sequence of people who were born where they were born and then paid a great many scribes to make the accident look like providence.
This is the magic at the center of it. A child is born into a particular family, and that is biology. The priests arrive and announce that the birth was chosen, and that is theology. The scribes record the lineage, and that is history. The army enforces the succession, and that is politics. The people repeat the story until it feels like the natural order of things, and that is culture, and by the time the child becomes king the psyop has already done almost all of its work, quietly, inside the minds of the people who will kneel.
Which is why memory has always been a political battlefield. Genealogy decides whose ancestors become monuments and whose vanish into unmarked graves and parish records and silence. The ruling family did not invent ancestry, because every human being has it. What the ruling family did was monopolize its public power, arranging matters so that only one lineage was permitted to be sacred and everyone else was taught that their own dead were merely the dead. The recovery I am pointing to is not a fantasy lineage of your own, not the desperate hunt for a famous ancestor to make your life feel weighty. It is something harder and more serious, the refusal to believe that you need a dynasty’s permission to stand inside history at all.
You do not need divine blood to matter. You need memory, and the knowledge that the blood was never the point. The blood was the story they told so that you would forget you were ever entitled to tell your own.
The story is not finished, because the promised land is not a museum piece. The belief that a chosen few are owed a clean stretch of ground somewhere beyond the reach of the world's troubles is as alive now as it was when Herzl, casting about for a refuge in 1896, framed the choice for a homeless people as Palestine or the Argentine. Argentina keeps reappearing in the imagination of the powerful as exactly this kind of elsewhere, a place to begin again beyond the collapse they themselves can see coming. Peter Thiel has reportedly bought a home in Buenos Aires and enrolled his children in school there, one move among many by a class of men who speak with total certainty that the future belongs to them while quietly arranging their exits from the world they are busy reshaping for everyone else. The vocabulary is sovereign diversification and family relocation now, where it used to be covenant, and the structure underneath has not changed since the first king claimed the sky. A chosen blood, a promised land, and a door out the rest of us were never meant to walk through. That door is where I am going next.
Today was the map. Saturday is the case file.
This week’s paid investigation takes the pattern out of the ancient world and into the modern exit class. The bloodline claim did not die when the monarchies fell. It learned to keep records, fund foundations, name buildings, buy land, and call the escape hatch “sovereign diversification.” On Saturday I follow the documents: the families still building doors out of the world they helped make, the Argentina connection, and the promised land the powerful are quietly buying their way into right now.
The H Files is a reader-supported investigation. Free subscribers get the public map. Paid subscribers get the case files, the source trails, the Sunday Discord, and more.
Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including her forthcoming book, Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.
Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn
Sources and Further Reading
Aeschylus. Agamemnon. In The Oresteia. First performed 458 BCE. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 1979.
Amnesty International. “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. London: Amnesty International, December 4, 2024.
Celsus, Aulus Cornelius. De Medicina. Translated by W. G. Spencer. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935.
Grabowski, Jan. “German Anti-Jewish Propaganda in the Generalgouvernement, 1939–1945: Inciting Hate through Posters, Films, and Exhibitions.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 381–408.
Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. Assyriological Studies 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.
Moog, Ferdinand Peter, and Axel Karenberg. “Between Horror and Hope: Gladiator’s Blood as a Cure for Epileptics in Ancient Medicine.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12, no. 2 (2003): 137–143.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. See Book 28 on the blood of gladiators.
Smith, David Livingstone. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011.
Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015.
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL). University of Oxford. Translation of “The Sumerian King List.”
United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Geneva: UN Human Rights Council, September 16, 2025.
United States Food and Drug Administration. “Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., and Director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., Cautioning Consumers Against Receiving Young Donor Plasma Infusions.” February 19, 2019.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Defining the Enemy.” Holocaust Encyclopedia and propaganda holdings, including the 1941 “Jews are lice; they cause typhus” poster from German-occupied Poland.Thanks for reading The H Files! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Your grasp of history, symbology, and ancient politics is truly remarkable. Thank you. I’ve always been intrigued by the bloodline claims of the Merovingian kings, who were ousted for obvious reasons (their narrative did not align with that of Rome).
I see the Palestinians as human beings and therefore see that land to be cursed for Israelis for all of time! The ghosts will be rampant there. They will never cleanse the land with the blood of their so called “Amalek.” The Israelites are crazed people with hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of souls who are permitted,by sacred law to haunt the perpetrators (Israeli Zionists) for all eternity. But they can try and convince a more educated people that they hence forth are cleansing Palestinian land to become Israeli land. There are thousands of videos and photographs that are out there, and this genocide is being recoded in live time. Israel has already lost the war, and they also lost the propaganda war. They merely have the power the Bilkionaires have to sell more weapons. They are running away already to the land the former Nazis ran off to, after World War II because even Peter Theil sees the writing on the wall. This was beautifully structured, historically accurate, and well analyzed. It is the methodology of all Colonozers, someday these people all shall sit on the same chair they themselves tortured others with: the blood and the land. Thank you Dr. Lynn.