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Asclepius, the illegitimate child of a beautiful maiden and the god of light, Apollo, has one of the juiciest backstories in classical mythology. He’d not even been born yet when his mother was slain by his father, who’d become enraged upon learning she had been unfaithful. Apollo snatched the baby from her womb and sent his son to be raised by a centaur named Chiron. From the half-man/half-horse, Asclepius received his medical training, learning to mix elixirs, use incantations, and perform surgeries. From his aunt Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom, he received his most powerful potion: blood from the veins of Medusa, the snake-haired Gorgon whose face turned beholders to stone. A single drop of her blood could either kill or cure a human. If drawn from the left side of the Gorgon’s body, the blood brought instant death; if from the right side, it miraculously restored life. This duality was an especially prescient invention of ancient mythmakers, for we now understand in cellular detail how blood can both bear disease with deadly efficiency and save a person’s life, as with vaccinations or transfusions. Indeed, Asclepius revived a man named Hippolytus by giving him the precious fluid, which may now be viewed as the earliest—albeit mythical—instance of a blood transfusion.

Asclepius—no fool he—realized there was profit to be made from Gorgon’s blood: gold, specifically, which he demanded in exchange for raising the dead. This unethical practice infuriated Zeus, king of the gods, who sent down a thunderbolt, killing the doctor. No matter. Zeus cooled down, realized the overall good Asclepius had brought to humankind, and raised him to godhood. Asclepius went on to father five daughters, all personifications of healing, including Panacea, the divine cure-all. She reigns to this day, in the private domain of my household at least, as the goddess of minor kitchen mishaps. I invoke her name as I wind a Band-Aid around my finger.

In practice, ancient physicians believed that blood was the dwelling place of the “Vital Spirit” that animated human beings—the stream in which emotion, character, and intelligence swam. This life force was thought to be circulated by the heart, which was falsely assumed to function as the body’s governing organ (what we now know as the role of the brain). The Roman poet Virgil offered a metaphysical slant. Noting that veins under the skin looked purple, a color lost when blood was shed and a person died, he concluded that the blood must therefore house the human soul—the purpurea anima, or “purple soul,” as he wrote in The Aeneid. It was a reverential perspective almost beyond imagination today, when blood is widely considered hazardous waste material.

I find Virgil’s conception marvelous, even though, truth be told, my own veins look aquamarine, not purple. The notion that blood is intricately linked with the soul has a deep resonance for me, above and beyond the fact of my strict Catholic upbringing. Blood, I’ve found, leaves mnemonic markers at each milestone or phase in life, a way to retrace one’s journey. Look back, you’ll see. The marks, whether literal or metaphorical, may not be visible at first, like fingerprints before they’re dusted, but then, upon second inspection, when the light is shone just so, your whole life looks spectacularly stained in red.

We’re born in blood. Our family histories are contained in it, our bodies nourished by it daily. Five quarts run through each of us, on average, along some sixty thousand miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries. Blood permeates religion, as it does the nightly news. Action films are bathed in it. Love songs and poems testify to its thunder. Modern medicines can thin it out, thicken it up, or redirect it to sexually interesting places. With the first shaving nick or menstrual period, blood initiates us into adulthood. It makes us blush, bruise, and go pale. It may leave a trace when a woman’s virginity is lost, and a drenching while giving birth. Blood is used to describe a range of emotions: It quickens,