Ichor, Life Blood of the Immortals

It is fair to say that gods are a little different. Whilst most creation myths have mankind created in the image of their immortal, divine benefactors, that image is rarely more than skin deep.

True, sometimes gods are wildly different, but in these cases it is usually to make a point about their godhood. The Hindu and Egyptian pantheons for instance have multiple animal-headed gods because, in part, these gods are said to be associated with aspects of these animals. You can bet that the Egyptian god of the Nile looks like a crocodile, for instance.

But even when the gods appear mortal outwardly, this is not their true form. Greek gods, for example, were shapeshifters all, and while Zeus could appear as a mortal man and walk amongst his people (and the less said about what he was doing that for, the better) he could also appear as a bull, or a swan, or a golden shower (not like that).

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But the gods, above all, were emphatically not like us. They do not eat food and drink, instead their meals consist of nectar and ambrosia. And under their skin, in whatever passes for their circulatory system, they did not have blood, but something altogether weirder: ichor.

Today the word generally holds science fiction associations with alien and inhuman life, and this is exactly why. Above all, it was this fluid which set the gods apart, and much can be learned about why they were so different and what precisely they were, under their human guise.

What was ichor, then? And what did it mean to be a Greek god?

The Ethereal Fluid

Firstly, what were the properties of ichor? For one, it was not of this earth, but specifically described as “ethereal”, the defining thing which meant that the Greek gods were “alive” in a totally different sense to man. It was in some respects the divine essence of the Greek gods: they were ichor, and the form which made them familiar to mankind was not their true being.

But it was not only the gods who had ichor running through their veins. After all, it was not only the gods who were considered immortal in Greek myth: the Titans, primordial ancestors and enemies of the Gods of Olympus, also bled ichor. This emphasizes the key link between ichor and immortality. It is not just the divine who are immortal, but all those who bleed ichor. 

Ichor was also extremely dangerous, deadly to humans. Anyone who touched the liquid would be poisoned and die upon that instant. And the fact that this is mentioned tells you something else about the immortals of Greek mythology: they could bleed.

Not just the Titans and other immortal monsters, either. We have stories of mortal men fighting gods in combat, and while besting them was almost always a step too far the gods could be, and sometimes were, wounded.

We are told as much in specifics in Homer’s Iliad, when the goddess Aphrodite rushes to protect Aeneas, hero of Troy from a brutal attack from the Greek Diomedes. This drives Diomedes into a rage and he turns on Aphrodite, slicing at her wrist. 

As the goddess recoils in pain, ichor springs forth from her wrist, driving back Diomedes. And Homer, helpfully, interjects and offers a quick gloss as to what is going in here which is both instructive and unexpectedly revealing. 

Ichor is, according to the Iliad, specifically linked to the gods’ diet. They eat ambrosia and drink nectar, and this is why they bleed ichor, which Homer describes literally as the same thing, as “ambrosia.” Homer goes further, making a specific link between the diet, the blood, and the gods’ immortality, suggesting that were the gods to eat as humans do they would bleed as humans do, and die from injuries as they do.

These are interesting facts, particularly in that they suggest a route to godhood were you to stick to the right diet. But there is something even more telling underneath this, and it comes from the word Homer uses: the liquid is described as “ambroton.”

This is a word with a double meaning. “A” means without and “brotos” means blood or other bodily fluids, the implication being that the wound was “without blood.” But “A” and the similar word “borotos” means “without mortality” and we might just have, in the moment of Homer’s cleverness, the source of the legend of ichor.

This special fluid elsewhere gives life to lifelessness, animating great mechanical monsters and other dread beings. One of the oldest of Greek myths, predating the golden age of Homer, comes from the Minoans of ancient Crete and talks of Talos, the giant.

Talos was a construct of sorts, made of bronze and powered by a single tube of ichor which ran along his spine. He guarded the island of Crete and was a match even for Jason and the Argonauts.

It took the cunning of the witch Medea to finally defeat him, along with her knowledge of the gods and their ichor. Medea was able to remove a nail from Talos’s back, like a stopper from a bottle, and when the ichor gushed out onto the ground the bronze giant died.

The implications of this are profound in terms of Greek mythology and the relative power of their gods. We have seen that the gods can be injured, and we have seen that beings of ichor can, if so injured, bleed to death. Does this affect the gods, too? Are they, like Tolkien’s elves, long lived but ultimately mortal beings?

The answer is “sort of.” As mentioned above, the gods are not simply non-ageing humans with a different body chemistry. The link between ambrosia, ichor and the gods is not so much a link as a singularity. The life force of gods was ambrosia, and the magical substance which was called ambrosia going in and ichor coming out was in some way the gods themselves.

It seems that, at least for the Greeks, mankind was not created in the image of the gods at all. The gods chose to look like us, to be sure, but they were very different entities indeed.

Header Image: Ichor is often portrayed as a golden liquid, ethereal and very different to mortal blood. Source: Ann Wuyts / CC BY 2.0.