Bloodborne's Coherent Center
Note: This essay explores the distinction between Old Blood and Good Blood, the role of wombs as transformative vessels in Bloodborne's theology, and the three central figures (Laurence, Gehrman, Maria) whose relationships to womb-mysteries structure the entire game. It discusses trans identity, bodily transformation, dissection culture, and the Moon Presence as a possible manifestation of Oedon.
Fandom frequently conflates "Old Blood," "Good Blood," and "holy medium" into a single undifferentiated concept. This flattening erases critical distinctions that explain the Healing Church's theology, the role of wombs in blood refinement, and the tragedy at the game's center.
Alfred's dialogue makes clear that the holy medium is the source of blood, not the blood itself. He describes the medium as something that leads to or provides the discovery of bloodâa vessel, a conduit, a generative organ through which blood is accessed and refined. The medium is the womb. The blood is what flows from it.
The holy medium = the womb (the vessel)
Old Blood = the catalyst (what Laurence found)
Good Blood = the output (what Laurence produces)
These are not synonyms. They are distinct substances with different origins, properties, and roles in the narrative.
Old Blood is what Laurence foundâthe ancient, primal, transformative substance discovered inside Queen Yharnam's dissected body at Byrgenwerth. Specifically, it is the essence or blood contained within Mergo, her stillborn fetus.
Mergo is implied to be male (the dead prince, the heir who never lived). His corpse, preserved in the womb of his dissected mother, contains the Old Blood: a substance with profound transformative properties, capable of altering bodies and consciousness in ways that blur the boundary between human and Great One.
This is what Willem warns Laurence against: "Fear the old blood." Willem knows what Laurence found inside Queen Yharnam. He knows the Old Blood is dangerous, that its transformative power does not stop once begun. He fears what will happen if Laurence uses it on himself.
Good Blood is what Laurence produces after using the Old Blood on himself. It is the refined outputâhis own blood, now sacred, now healing, now capable of "making men by the blood."
Laurence, as a trans man with a womb, processes the Old Blood (masculine-coded, primal, from the dead prince Mergo) through his feminine biology (his menstrual cycle, his womb as vessel). The result is Good Blood: the sacred menstrual blood that becomes the foundation of the Healing Church's theology.
This is the blood shared through blood ministration. This is the blood the Church is built upon. This is the gift Laurence gave to humanityâand the curse that followed, because the transformation the Old Blood began in him never stopped.
The transformation structure is:
Old Blood (Mergo, masculine, primal)
â processed through â
Womb (Laurence's feminine biology, the holy medium)
â produces â
Good Blood (sacred menstrual output, healing, transformative)
Laurence bridges masculine and feminine. He takes primal masculine essence (the Old Blood from a dead prince) and processes it through his womb, producing sacred feminine output (menstrual blood made holy). This is why the Communion runeâthe Healing Church's most central symbolâdepicts a bleeding vulva with an eye. The Church's theology is built on menstruation, not phallic masculinity.
Three figures stand at the center of Bloodborne's narrative, bound together by their relationships to womb-mysteries. These three are visually encoded in the Oedon rune: three human figures arranged around a central void or womb-shape, representing their entanglement with the formless, generative, unanswerable riddle at the game's heart.
Laurence is a trans man whose womb becomes the holy mediumâthe vessel through which Old Blood is transformed into Good Blood. His body is the source of the Healing Church's theology. His menstrual blood, refined through the Old Blood's influence, is what the Church calls sacred.
He embodies Oedon. His formless consciousness (possibly what Oedon representsâpure voice, pure presence, disconnected from physical form) exists alongside his bleeding womb-body. He is both masculine (his identity, his transformation via Old Blood) and the generative vessel (his womb, his menstrual output as Good Blood).
The Church is built on him. Blood Saintsâfemale figures who refine blood through their own bodiesâare mimicking what Laurence did: processing blood through wombs, continuing the sacred cycle he began.
Gehrman is Ahab. He is the harpoon-wielder (his name suggests "spear-man," the leader of the hunt), the hunter obsessed with womb-mysteries he cannot let go of. He hunted Kosâthe ghost-whale (ă´ăźăš, GĹsu, meaning "Ghost"), who is Queen Yharnam's ascended womb made flesh in the Nightmare. He experimented with umbilical cords in the Old Workshop, trying to force the formless (Oedon) into manifestation.
He pursues Oedon. He stands before the womb-riddle like Oedipus before the Sphinx, like Ahab before the white whale, demanding it yield its secrets. He dissects, he hunts, he violates the sacred in the name of understanding.
And he is cursed by proximity to wombs: his boyfriend (Laurence) has a sacred womb that becomes the Church's foundation. His student (Maria) lacks a womb and is destroyed by his hunt for Kos (the ghost-whale's womb). He is, as one might say, truly cursed with wombsânot as objects of sexual desire, but as the unanswerable mysteries that consume his life and destroy everyone he loves.
Maria is a trans womanâflat-chested (anatomical evidence visible in her character model and the Doll's matching body), elegant in presentation, memorialized in the Dream as the Doll: her truest feminine self, wearing the dress-up attire that was made for her but that she never received in life.
She is destroyed by Oedonâor more precisely, by Gehrman's pursuit of womb-mysteries. She followed him into the hunt that killed Kos, not knowing the full scope of his obsession. When she discovered what he had doneâwhen she saw the ghost-whale dissected, violated, taken apart in the name of understandingâit shattered her. She could not continue as a hunter. She threw the Rakuyo into the well and, in the Nightmare, became the head of the Research Hall, blocking the path to the Fishing Hamlet in eternal penance.
Maria lacks the womb Gehrman hunts. She is the woman who wanted femininity (the dress-up attire, the hair ornament Gehrman made for her) but whose role as a hunter made that presentation unsustainable. The Dollâher idealized self in the Dreamâwears what Maria wanted to wear, embodies what Maria wanted to be. When the Doll receives the hair ornament and cries, it is because some part of Maria recognizes the gift that was always meant for her.
The Oedon rune depicts three human figures arranged around a central shape that resembles a womb or void. This is not abstract symbolismâit is a direct visual representation of Laurence, Gehrman, and Maria, the three figures whose lives are defined by their relationships to womb-mysteries.
Center figure: Gehrman (the pursuer, standing before the riddle)
Left and right: Laurence and Maria (man with womb, woman without womb)
All three bound to Oedonâthe formless, generative mystery they cannot escape
Oedon is associated with quickening, with formlessness, with wombs and generation. The name itself is a clear reference to Oedipusâthe figure who stands before the Sphinx, facing the riddle of existence, intelligent and ignorant at the same time. In Moby-Dick, Ahab is repeatedly connected to Oedipus: standing before the severed whale's head, demanding "tell us the secret thing that is in thee," using his staff as both walking tool and weapon (echoing Oedipus' staff as both aid and the instrument with which he killed his father).
Gehrman is Ahab and Oedipus. Laurence embodies the riddle (formless consciousness, bleeding womb). Maria is destroyed by the pursuit. All three are encoded in the rune because all three are trapped in relationship to the mystery Oedon represents.
Oedon is formless. This is stated explicitly in the gameâOedon has no physical body, existing only as voice, presence, influence. Yet the Moon Presence clearly does have a body: skeletal, feminine-coded, with long limbs and a graceful, predatory movement. It binds Gehrman to the Hunter's Dream, trapping him as the Dream's eternal host.
The question is: are Oedon and the Moon Presence the same being?
The answer is both yes and no. They are not literally identical, but the Moon Presence may be Oedon's corrupted manifestationâthe formless forced into physical form through Gehrman and Laurence's experiments with umbilical cords in the Old Workshop.
In the Old Workshopâthe original workshop, now abandonedâthere are dissection tools on a table and an umbilical cord (one of the Third Umbilical Cords you can collect in the game). This suggests Gehrman and Laurence were experimenting: trying to commune with Great Ones, trying to understand them, trying to make the formless manifest.
Umbilical cords are described as objects of communion with Great Ones, items that grant insight into their nature. What if Gehrman and Laurence used these cords in an attempt to summon or contact Oedon directlyâto force the formless mystery into a shape they could see, study, dissect?
The Moon Presence's characteristics align with Oedon's associations, but twisted:
The Moon Presence does not behave like other Great Ones in the game. Ebrietas, the Amygdalae, the Brain of Mensisâthese are encountered as existing beings with their own agendas. The Moon Presence, however, is specifically and personally bound to Gehrman. It traps him. It keeps him as host. It does not wander or exist independentlyâit is tied to the Dream, and the Dream is tied to Gehrman.
Why?
Because Gehrman (and possibly Laurence) created it. They forced Oedonâformless, generative, freeâinto physical manifestation through their umbilical cord experiments. The result was the Moon Presence: Oedon's body, but corrupted, warped by the act of being forced into flesh against its nature.
And as punishmentâor simply as consequenceâthe Moon Presence binds Gehrman to the Dream. He tried to make the formless manifest so he could dissect it, understand it, control it. He succeeded. And it trapped him eternally.
If you consume three Third Umbilical Cords before the game's final encounter, you gain the ability to resist the Moon Presence's embrace. You can fight it, kill it, and ascend into a Great One yourself (taking the form of an infant slugâa new beginning, a true transformation rather than entrapment).
This makes sense if the Moon Presence is Oedon's corrupted body. By consuming the cords, you are communing with Oedon directlyâwith the formless, not the corrupted manifestation. You succeed where Gehrman and Laurence failed: you achieve true communion without forcing the formless into flesh, without violating its nature. The cords grant you strength to reject the Moon Presence (the corrupted form) and ascend through proper communion with the true Oedon (the formless).
The sequence of events that leads to Laurence's transformation, the founding of the Healing Church, and the scourge of beasts can be reconstructed as follows:
Laurence, Gehrman, Maria, Caryll, Micolash, and others study at Byrgenwerth under Master Willem's guidance. They seek communion with Great Ones, insight into the cosmos, evolution beyond human limitation. They conduct expeditions into the Chalice Dungeons, retrieving Pthumerian corpses and artifacts for study and dissection.
During one of these expeditions, they discover Queen Yharnamâeither as a corpse or possibly still alive (the ambiguity mirrors the Kos hunt, where it is unclear whether the ghost-whale was killed upon discovery or found already dead). Critically, she is pregnant. This is the first time the Byrgenwerth scholars have encountered a pregnant woman in the dungeons.
They bring her body to the surface and begin dissection. This is standard practiceâcorpses are harvested for materials, for study, for insight. But Queen Yharnam is different.
As they take Queen Yharnam apart, her organs do not behave as normal organs. They becomeâor reveal themselves asâGreat Ones. Her body was not simply containing these beings; it was generating them, or her flesh was the substrate from which they emerged. The pregnant womb, it seems, is a cosmic generator, a vessel capable of producing entities that transcend human comprehension.
Mergo, her stillborn fetus, is studied separately. He is the dead prince, the heir who never lived. And within him, they discover the Old Blood.
The substance within Mergo's corpse exhibits transformative properties. Initial testing confirms thisâlikely in controlled laboratory conditions, not through reckless self-experimentation. The scholars are methodical. They understand what they have found is potent and dangerous.
But Laurence, driven by curiosity or ambition or the desire for transformation, volunteers to use the Old Blood on himself. Willem warns him: "Fear the old blood." Do not do this. The transformation will not stop once begun.
Laurence refuses to heed the warning.
The Old Blood transforms Laurence into what the Church will come to call the "living holy medium." His body changes in ways he desiresâmore masculine presentation, androgynous featuresâbut critically, he retains his womb. His female reproductive biology remains, and through it, the Old Blood is processed and refined.
His menstrual blood is no longer ordinary. It is now Good Blood: sacred, healing, capable of curing illness and granting transformation to those who receive it. The Old Blood's power flows through him, filtered through his womb, emerging as something new.
This is the philosophical split with Willem. Willem seeks eyesâlining the brain with eyes, achieving insight through mental/spiritual communion with the cosmos. Laurence seeks bloodâtransformation through the body, healing through sharing his sacred essence. The two part ways. Laurence leaves Byrgenwerth and goes to Yharnam.
In Old Yharnam, Laurence begins sharing his blood freely. Blood ministration becomes a miracle: people are cured of ailments, transformed toward what they wish to become, "made men by the blood." Gehrman is at his side during this periodâpartner, protector, the First Hunter who guards the one whose blood is now sacred.
A church forms around Laurence. Not because he demands worship, but because people see him as a living saint, a prophet, the source of a transformative gift. The Healing Church is born from his body, his blood, his willingness to share what he has become.
But the transformation does not stop. The Old Blood continues to work on Laurence. Slowly, over time, he begins to show signs of beasthood: horns growing, body changing, the beast-tendency manifesting. And those who receive his bloodâthose who partake in blood ministrationâbegin to transform as well. The first Beast Patients appear in Old Yharnam.
Laurence is the first beast. Not simply the first Cleric Beast (though he is that as well, in the Nightmare), but the original source of the scourge. The beast-transformation is the Old Blood's influence, and it spreads through Laurence's Good Blood. Every person who receives blood ministration is receiving a diluted version of the Old Blood's transformative curse.
The Church becomes alarmed. The source of their salvation is becoming the source of their doom. Laurence himself is transformingâmore beast-like with each passing year. If he completes the transformation, if he becomes fully beast, what happens to the Church? What happens to the gift?
Laurence resists the Church's attempts to industrialize his body, to control the blood supply, to turn him into a factory for Good Blood production. He will not be reduced to that. He will not let them turn the gift into a mechanism of control.
The Church sends Bradorâthe assassin, the one who wears the beast hide, likely the central figure among the three statues on the Surgery Altarâto kill Laurence. They cannot let him transform fully. They cannot let the source become the scourge incarnate.
Brador kills him. Laurence is brought to the Surgery Altar, and the three figures (Brador and two assistants) begin the dissection: carving him "bone from bone," extracting the Good Blood directly from his corpse, preserving what they can of the sacred substance even as they butcher the body that produced it.
But Laurence does not simply die. His consciousness fragments, becomes formlessâpossibly becoming part of what Oedon is (the formless Great One, voice without body). His guilt, his trauma, his unfinished transformation coalesce into the Nightmare: the Hunter's Dream, the city of Yharnam as guilt-architecture, the voices of self-accusation that whisper through the streets.
In the Nightmare, his transformation completes. He becomes the Cleric Beastâthe first and most tragic of all beasts, the form he was heading toward in life, now made eternal in death.
The game's openingâwhere the player character lies on an operating table, receives a blood transfusion, and is surrounded by strange ghostly Messengersâis not the player's surgery. It is Laurence's memory of being dissected.
You are entering his Nightmare. The blood transfusion you see is his blood being extracted. The operating table is the Surgery Altar. The moment his consciousness splitsâbody destroyed, mind becoming the Dreamâis the entry point into the nightmare-city he has created.
You wake in Iosefka's Clinic because the cycle continues. The Church still experiments, still seeks ascension, still transforms bodies in search of communion with Great Ones. You are caught in the loop of Laurence's trauma, reliving the blood ministration cycle endlessly.
After Laurence's death, the Church continues his work through Blood Saintsâfemale figures who refine blood through their own bodies, mimicking the womb-process Laurence embodied. They are Laurence-substitutes, continuing the sacred menstrual output now that the original source is gone. The blood is further refined in hope to get rid of the beastly outcomes.
Meanwhile, the School of Mensis splits off to focus on the original source: Mergo, Queen Yharnam, the Old Blood itself. Micolash and his followers seek direct communion with Great Ones, bypassing Laurence's mediation, attempting to contact Mergo's consciousness in the Nightmare. They do not seek healing. They seek ascension, evolution, transcendenceâeven if it costs their sanity and their humanity.
Without this frameworkâwithout understanding the distinction between Old Blood and Good Blood, without recognizing the role of wombs as transformative vessels, without seeing Laurence, Gehrman, and Maria as the three figures bound to Oedon's mysteryâBloodborne becomes incoherent.
Fandom's version produces:
Nothing connects. The game becomes a collection of Gothic aesthetic elements, trope-matching, and moral judgments projected onto characters whose actual roles remain obscure.
With the womb-triad, everything coheres:
The Church is built on Laurence's sacred menstrual blood (Good Blood produced through his womb).
Gehrman's Ahab-like hunt for womb-mysteries (Kos, Queen Yharnam, Oedon) destroys Maria and traps him eternally via the Moon Presence.
Maria is a trans woman memorialized as her truest feminine self (the Doll), honored by Gehrman even as his pursuit of womb-riddles broke her.
Oedon binds all three: Laurence embodies it, Gehrman pursues it, Maria is destroyed by it.
The Communion rune (bleeding vulva with eye) is the Church's core symbol because the Church's theology is menstrual, not phallic. Blood Saints refine blood through their wombs because they are continuing what Laurence did. The Surgery Altar is where Laurence was dissected because his bodyâhis womb, his Good Bloodâwas the source the Church could not let go.
The Old Blood (masculine, primal, from the dead prince Mergo) was processed through Laurence's womb (feminine biology, the holy medium) to produce Good Blood (sacred menstrual output, the Church's gift). This is the transformation at the game's heart: masculine catalyst through feminine vessel, producing the substance that both heals and curses.
Bloodborne is not random. It is not a collection of Gothic tropes and eldritch references stitched together for atmosphere. It is a coherent narrative about bodies, transformation, gender, the violation of sacred mysteries, and the consequences of trying to force the formless into flesh.
At its center are three figures:
These three are encoded in the Oedon rune. They are bound to the mystery of generation, formlessness, and the womb as cosmic vessel. Their relationships to this mysteryâembodiment, pursuit, destructionâstructure the entire game.
The womb-triad is not tunnel vision. It is not over-interpretation. It is the coherent center that makes Bloodborne's symbolism, theology, and tragedy legible.
Everything else radiates from this: the blood system, the beast scourge, the Healing Church's rise and corruption, the Nightmare's architecture, the player's role as a hunter entering Laurence's guilt-city and reliving his trauma.
Old Blood (the catalyst) â Womb (the holy medium) â Good Blood (the gift and the curse)
Laurence embodies the mystery. Gehrman pursues the mystery. Maria is destroyed by the mystery.
All three are bound. All three are Oedon's.
The game makes sense. It has always made sense. You just needed to see the wombs.