A 2000-Year History Written in Blood
Why the Epstein case is simply another chapter in a millennia-long history of ritual murder and why you are allowed to look at it.
There exists a practice so old that it may predate the spoken word itself, a tradition buried beneath the veneer of civilization like rot beneath fresh paint. It is the practice of human ritual sacrifice, and it has never stopped. Not truly. Not in any century that has passed since the first recorded instance, and almost certainly not in the centuries before anyone thought to write it down. What follows is not comfortable reading. It is not intended to be. But the historical record, particularly the visual record preserved across nearly a thousand years of European art, tells a story so persistent, so grotesquely consistent in its themes and imagery, that to ignore it requires a kind of willful blindness that borders on complicity.
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The question that burns at the center of this investigation is deceptively simple: why does the entire canon of Western art history contain, at regular and unrelenting intervals, detailed depictions of the torture and ritual murder of Christian children? Not allegorical depictions. Not symbolic martyrdom rendered in soft pastels and gentle halos. Visceral, anatomically explicit, painstakingly rendered scenes of infants and young children being bled, pierced, skinned, and crucified by groups of adults operating with what can only be described as ceremonial precision. These are not marginal works tucked away in obscure collections. They are famous. They were widely distributed. They shaped public consciousness across entire continents. And they keep appearing, century after century, with a thematic consistency that cannot be explained away as coincidence or artistic fashion.
Consider the sheer labor involved in creating a single work of visual art before the AI slop age. Anyone who has ever worked with their hands to produce an original piece, who has spent months in total concentration rendering a high-quality image that captures not just a scene but the emotional and spiritual weight of that scene, understands that an artwork of this nature is not produced casually. It is an excavation. A commitment of the deepest kind. Every brushstroke, every carved line in a woodblock, every mixed pigment is a deliberate choice in service of a message.
So when you encounter not one, not a handful, but an entire recurring genre spanning centuries and crossing national borders, all depicting the same essential horror with the same essential elements, you are forced to ask what message was considered so urgent that generation after generation of skilled craftspeople dedicated their finest abilities to preserving it.
The earliest foundational case is that of William of Norwich, a boy whose death in 1144 in Norwich, England, constitutes the first fully documented governmental investigation into ritualized child murder. A monk named Thomas of Monmouth produced a written account claiming that William had been crucified in deliberate mockery of Jesus Christ, that his murder was ritual performance carried out by a secretive cabal. This account ignited something volcanic among Christian fathers in the region, who armed themselves and moved collectively to root out those they believed responsible.
A fifteenth-century panel painting by an unknown artist depicts the death of William in explicit detail. Another fifteenth-century English panel portrays him as a martyr with nails driven into his head, a deliberate visual echo of the crucifixion. A separate work from the 1500s extends the visual narrative into the next century.
From Norwich, the pattern spread. Gloucester in 1168. Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. Each case generated its own body of documentation, its own wave of public fury, and eventually its own artistic record.
But it was the case of Simon of Trent in 1475 that became the most widely depicted and arguably the most consequential. The Martyrdom of Saint Simon of Trent, a woodcut from Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, produced in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, depicts a child being tortured and bled by a group of figures in a detailed, almost diagrammatic scene. The blood is shown being collected, not spilling randomly but gathered with purpose into vessels.
The Beatus Simon Martyr, a colored woodcut from around 1479, also from Nuremberg. The Simonino di Trento, an oil painting by Altobello Melone dated 1521. The martyrdom of Werner of Oberwesel, rendered in the eighteenth century. The Miracle of the Host from 1468. Blood libel frescoes in Saint Paul’s Church. A late sixteenth-century painting of Simon of Trent from 1590. The ritual murder festival painting series in the Cathedral of Sandomierz in Poland by Charles de Prevot, an entire decorative program inside a functioning cathedral dedicated to graphic depictions of ritualized child murder. These are murals on the walls of a house of worship, visible to every congregant for centuries.
The artistic record maintains, with remarkable consistency, a set of core visual elements: the child victim, the group of adult perpetrators acting in concert, the instruments of prolonged torture, and above all, the collection of blood. The blood is always being collected. It is always the blood of the young. And it is always, implicitly or explicitly, intended for consumption.
What the artworks communicate is a degree of cruelty that defies ordinary criminality. These are not quick deaths. The artists consistently portray processes designed to maximize suffering, to methodically inflict pain upon infants while keeping them alive as long as possible. The skinning of newborns. The tearing of small bodies limb from limb. The deliberate withholding of death. This is liturgical violence. It has structure. It has purpose. And that purpose is the harvesting of something from the suffering itself, something carried in the blood that is made more potent by the extremity of the terror and pain that precedes its extraction.
The individuals depicted are consistently portrayed not as common criminals but as members of organized, secretive groups operating with access to resources and protected spaces. What the art record describes is organized child trafficking conducted by networked groups of elites whose motivations are ceremonial. The violence is the ceremony. The blood is the sacrament. And the operation functions as an inversion of Christian liturgy, a calculated blasphemy deriving its power from its opposition to the dominant spiritual framework.
In 1989, a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show described, on camera, being forced as a young person to participate in rituals in which babies were sacrificed. When asked what the purpose was, the answer was immediate: power. The media did not pursue it. The footage exists. The word spoken, power, is the same answer the art record has been providing for a millennium.
Now imagine a scenario that sounds like fiction but which the documentary record suggests actually happened on American soil—before anyone knew about Epstein. Imagine that the United States government became aware that children were being trafficked, not merely trafficked but abused ritualistically and systematically within networks reaching into the highest corridors of power. Imagine the victims testified. They named names. They provided flight logs, locations, dates, photographs. And imagine that every single one of them was destroyed for it.
Lawrence E. King Jr. managed the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in northern Omaha, Nebraska, a small institution established to serve the local Black community. He earned sixteen thousand dollars a year. He spent ten thousand a month on travel and entertainment alone. He wore silk suits, hosted private jet parties, sang the national anthem at Republican conventions, had luxury clothing flown in from Europe, and maintained rental properties in both Omaha and Washington, D.C.
In 1988, the National Credit Union Administration conducted an audit and found the books hollowed out. Missing funds. Phony loans. Shell companies. Forty million dollars in assets and a manager living like royalty on a poverty wage. The auditors were looking for embezzlement. What they found instead was a trapdoor into something that no one in an official capacity was prepared to confront.
