India woke up to bloodcurdling news on Monday morning. Karnataka Police has arrested a man for allegedly slitting the throat of his friend and drinking his blood after he suspected that the latter was having an affair with his wife.
The incident emerging from Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur saw the accused, identified as Vijay, slitting Maresh’s throat and drinking his spilled blood. Surprisingly, Maresh survived the attack on his life and filed a police complaint, leading to the arrest.
According to the police, Vijay – the accused – asked Maresh to meet him over his suspicions of his friend having an affair with his wife. On 19 June, the two met in a nearby forest where he slit Maresh’s throat and drank his blood. The incident, according to a News18 report, was captured on camera by a passerby near a crossing in Chintamani Taluk.
But shockingly, this isn’t the first time that such a case has come to light in India. There have been past instances of vampirism in India and people have been arrested for this crime. We take a closer look at what exactly is vampirism and why people indulge in it.
Vampirism in India
The practice of drinking blood is called vampirism and is quite widespread across the world. According to experts, human vampires, or “real vampires,” as scholars typically call them are of two types – sanguinarians, those who get part of their nourishment from human and animal blood, and there’s the psychic vampires, who drain other people’s psychic energy.
Some experts believe that vampirism is a clinical problem and have named the disorder as Renfield’s Syndrome. It is described as a compulsive need to drink blood. However, studies on this disorder remain very less.
There have been quite a few instances of people drinking other’s blood in India. In 2019, a 27-year-old man killed his mother and proceeded to drink her blood. The accused, identified as Dilip Yadav, later revealed that he was influenced by tantric practices and often spoke of performing human sacrifice.
There’s also the case of a 33-year-old woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly who killed her neighbour’s 10-year-old son and drank his blood in 2017. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for her crime, which she committed believing that it would help her conceive a child.
In the same year, another case was reported from Odisha. A man was arrested for slitting the throat of a Class III girl and attempting to drink her blood.
In 2014, came the horrific case of baby killer and blood drinker Lakshmikanta Karmakar. The 55-year-old tantric of Saltora village in West Bengal was sentenced to death after it emerged that he had killed a baby by beheading and then drank its blood from its decapitated head.
Years before this in 2011, a man in Madhya Pradesh was also arrested for allegedly drinking the blood of his wife after withdrawing it through a syringe, because she was unable to meet his dowry demand.
Blood drinking across the world
But such instances are not specific to India alone. There have been some rather infamous cases of people being caught of drinking another person’s blood. For instance, in 2013, it was found that a 23-year-old man in Turkey was suffering from “vampirism” after he was caught several times trying to stab people and drink their blood. The man became addicted to drinking human blood after he started slicing his own arms, chest and stomach with razor blades, and gathering the blood in a cup so he could drink it, doctors say.
American celebrity and Transformers actor Megan Fox has also revealed that she and her partner Machine Gun Kelly drink each other’s blood. Speaking to Glamour UK, she had said last year, “I guess to ‘drink’ each other’s blood might mislead people, or people are imagining us with goblets and we’re like Game of Thrones, drinking each other’s blood. It’s just a few drops, but yes, we do consume each other’s blood on occasion for ritual purposes only.”
In America’s New Orleans, there’s a “real vampire” community where people allegedly need to consume each other’s blood to “feel healthy”.
Reason behind blood drinking
The practice of drinking another’s blood is ancient and according to Richard Sugg, a historian, the earliest documented cases of consuming human blood come from ancient Rome.
Thomas DeLoughery, an Oregon Health & Science University haematologist, in an article published by Atlas Obscura, said that most historical cultures likely deduced a connection between blood and vitality by observing the effects of blood loss. “You get fatigued, pale, and weak — and if you lose too much you die,” he says. “So it may seem logical that ingesting blood would make one stronger.”
Also read: Can young blood stop people from getting old?
There are several reasons why people indulge in drinking another person’s blood. Some believe as Thomas DeLoughery explained that there are health benefits to drinking blood.
There are others who are obsessed with the mysticism around vampires. Popular culture has depicted them as cool looking and beautiful and drinking a person’s blood has a sex kink factor to it. Imagine, the movies such as Twilight, or serials such as Vampire Diaries and True Blood.
In India, many people have indulged in the practice based on advice given by tantriks and owing to the influence of black magic.
Hazards of drinking blood
And despite the many who do drink blood citing health benefits, doctors and medical experts deem this practice dangerous for one’s health.
Dr Leo Nissola, an immunotherapy scientist and cancer researcher, told Salon that there was absolutely no reason why one would want to be consuming human blood. “Drinking someone else’s blood that hasn’t been screened or that hasn’t been tested for sexually transmitted disease, and other illnesses, can potentially put you at risk,” he said.
This view was also shared by Dr Shikha Jain, an haematology and oncology physician at the University of Illinois–Chicago. She was quoted as saying, “There are a lot of reasons why it’s not safe to drink other people’s blood, especially individuals you don’t know, they may be blood-borne, they might have viruses or other infections that might put you at risk. There are different infectious diseases that can be transmitted through bodily fluids.”
Besides passing on diseases, drinking blood could cause the stomach lining to decay; it could cause a person to vomit. It can cause bleeding at times.
Giulia Guerrini, a health practitioner at digital pharmacy Medino, told HuffPost UK that drinking blood could also lead to conditions such as haemochromatosis, which occurs when you intake too much iron. “Haemochromatosis can cause damage to your endocrine glands, heart, joints, liver and pancreas, as well as dehydration and low blood pressure. It can also cause fluid to accumulate in your lungs,” she said.
The bottom line is that despite the many dangers associated with drinking blood, some people will find an excuse to put it in their mouths.
With inputs from agencies
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