APPENDIX.

IMPORTANCE OF THIS RITE STRANGELY UNDERVALUED.

It seems strange that a primitive rite like the blood-covenant, with its world-wide sweep, and its manifold applications to the history of sacrifice, should have received so little attention from students of the latter theme. Nor has it been entirely ignored by them; although its illustrations have, in this connection, been drawn almost entirely from the field of the classic writers, where its religious aspects have a minor prominence; and, as a result, the suggestion of any real importance in the religious symbolism of this rite has been, generally, brushed aside without its receiving due consideration.

Thus, in The Speaker’s Commentary,—which is one of the more recent, and more valuable, scholarly and sensible compends of sound and thorough biblical criticism,—there are references to the rite of human blood-covenanting in its possible bearing on the blood-covenanting of God with Israel before Mount Sinai,[666] after this sort: “The instances from classical antiquity, adduced, as parallels to this sacrifice of Moses, by Bähr, Knobel, and Kalisch, in which animals were slaughtered on the making of covenants, are either, those in which the animal was slain to signify the punishment due to the party that might break the covenant (Hom. Il., III., 298; XIX., 252; Liv. Hist., I., 24; XXI., 45); those in which confederates dipped their hands, or their weapons, in the same blood (Æsch. Sept. c. Theb., 43; Xenoph. Anab., II., 2, § 9); or those in which the contracting parties tasted each other’s blood (Herodot. [Hist.] I., 74; IV., 74; Tac. Annal., XII., 47). All these usages are based upon ideas which are but very superficially related to the subject; they have indeed no true connection whatever with the idea of sacrifice as the seal of a covenant between God and man.”[667]

When the entire history of man’s outreaching after an inter-union of natures with his fellow-man and with his God, is fairly studied, in the light thrown on it by the teachings of the divine-human Being, who gave of his own blood for the consummation of the longed-for divine-human inter-union, it will be more clearly seen, whether it were the relation of the primitive rite itself to the idea of sacrifice, or the study of that relation, which was “very superficial,” as a cause of its popular overlooking.

The closest and most sacred form of covenant ever known in the primitive world, was that whereby two persons covenanted to become one, through being partakers of the same blood. At Sinai, when Jehovah would covenant with Israel, a common supply of substitute blood—proffered by Israel and accepted by Jehovah—was taken; and one-half of it was cast upon the altar, Godward, while the other half of it was cast Israelward, upon the people.[668] The declaration of Moses to Israel, then, was: “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you;” or, as that declaration is repeated, in Hebrews: “This is the blood of the covenant which God covenanted to you-ward.”[669] And from that time forward, the most sacred possession of Israel,—above which hovered the visible sign of the presence of Jehovah,—was the casket which contained the record of that blood-made covenant; and it was toward the mercy-seat cover of that Covenant Casket, that House of the Covenant, that the symbolic blood of atonement through new life was sprinkled, in the supreme renewals of that covenant by Israel’s representative year by year.

Even the Speaker’s Commentary says, of this mutual blood-sharing by Israel and Jehovah at Sinai: “The blood thus divided between the two parties to the covenant signified the sacramental union between the Lord and his people.”[670] Of the blood which was to be poured out on Calvary, Jesus said: “This is my blood of the [new] covenant, which is shed for many.”[671] And of the sacramental union which could be secured, between his trustful disciples and himself, by tasting his blood, and by being nourished on his flesh, he said: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.”[672] It really looks as if there were more than a superficial relation between the fact of an absolute inter-union of two natures through an inter-flow of a common life, in the rite of blood-covenanting, and the sacramental union between the Lord and his people, which was typified in the blood-covenant at Sinai, and which was consummated in the blood-covenant at Calvary.

Herbert Spencer, indeed, seems to have a clearer conception than the Speaker’s Commentary, of the relation of human blood-covenanting, to the inter-union of those in the flesh, with spiritual beings. He perceives that the primitive offerings of blood over the dead, from the living person, are, in some cases, “explicable as arising from the practice of establishing a sacred bond between living persons by partaking of each other’s blood: the derived conception being, that those who give some of their blood to the ghost of a man just dead and lingering near [and of course, the principle is the same when the offering of blood is to the gods, thereby] effect with it a union, which on the one side implies submission, and on the other side friendliness.”[673] This admission by Mr. Spencer covers the essential point in the argument of this entire volume.

LIFE IN THE BLOOD, IN THE HEART, IN THE LIVER.

Among all primitive peoples, the blood has been deemed the representative of life. The giving of blood has been counted the giving of life. The receiving of blood has been counted the receiving of life. The sharing of blood has been counted the sharing of life. Hence, the blood has always been counted the chief thing in any sacrificial victim proffered to the gods; and whatever was sought through sacrifice, was to be obtained by means of the blood of the offering. Even though no specific reference to the blood be found in the preserved descriptions of one of the earlier sacrifices,—as, for example, the Akkadian sacrifice of the first-born (page 166, supra), the very fact that the offering made was of a life, and that blood was recognized as life, is in itself the proof that it was the blood which gave the offering its value.

Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, who was thoroughly familiar with both Egyptian and biblical antiquities, was impressed by the “striking resemblance” of many of the religious rites of the Jews to those of Egypt, “particularly the manner in which the sacrifices were performed;”[674] and he points out the Egyptian method of so slaying the sacrificial ox, that its blood should be fully discharged from the body; a point which was deemed of such importance in the Jewish ritual.[675] Of the illustration of this ceremony given by Wilkinson from an ancient Egyptian painting,[676] the Speaker’s Commentary says: “There is no reason to doubt that this picture accurately represents the mode pursued in the court of the [Jewish] Tabernacle.”[677]

Almost as universal as the recognition of the life in the blood, has been the identification of the heart as the blood-centre and the blood-fountain, and so as the epitome of the life itself. Says Pierret,[678] the French Egyptologist, concerning the preeminence given to the heart, by the ancient Egyptians: “The heart was embalmed separately in a vase placed under the guardianship of the genius Duaoumautew [rather, Tuau-mut-ef, or, Reverencer of his Mother. ‘My heart was my mother.’ See page 99, supra] without doubt because this organ, indispensable to the resurrection, could not be replaced in the body of a man, until it had been weighed in the scale of the balance of the Osirian judgment (Todtenbuch, cxxv.); where representing the acts of the dead, it ought to make equilibrium with the statue of the goddess Truth [Maat]. (See the framed papyri in the funereal hall of the Museum of the Louvre.) Indeed the favorable sentence is thus formulated: ‘It is permitted that his heart be in its place.’ It is said to Setee I., in the temple of Abydos: ‘I bring thee thy heart to thy breast; I put it in its place.’ The heart, principle of existence and of regeneration, was symbolized by the scarabæus: it is for this reason that the texts relative to the heart were inscribed upon the funereal scarabæuses, which at a certain epoch were introduced into the body of the mummy itself, to replace the absent organ.”

The idea that the heart is in itself life, and that it can even live apart from the body, is found all the world over. References to it in ancient Egypt, in India, and in primitive America, have already been pointed out (pages 100-110, supra). It shows itself, likewise, in the folk-lore of the Arctic regions, and of South Africa, as well as of the Norseland. In a Samoyed tale, “seven brothers are in the habit of taking out their hearts and sleeping without them. A captive damsel, whose mother they have killed, receives the extracted hearts, and hangs them on the tent-pole, where they remain till the following morning. One night her brother contrives to get the hearts into his possession. Next morning, he takes them into the tent, where he finds the brothers at the point of death. In vain do they beg for their hearts, which he flings on the floor. ‘And as he flings down the hearts, the brothers die.’”[679] According to a Hottentot story, “the heart of a girl, whom a lion has killed and eaten, is extracted from the lion, and placed in a calabash filled with milk [the ‘heart’ and ‘milk’; or blood and bread, life and its nourishment (See pages 10-12, 261 f., supra)]. ‘The calabash increased in size; and, in proportion to this, the girl grew again inside [of] it.’”[680] “In a Norse story, a giant’s heart lies in an egg, inside a duck, which swims in a well, in a church, on an island;”[681] and this story is found in variations in other lands.[682] So, again, in a “Russian story, a prince is grievously tormented by a witch who has got hold of his heart, and keeps it perpetually seething in a magic cauldron.”[683]

This same idea is found in the nomenclature of the Bible, and in the every day speech of the civilized world of the present age. In more than nine hundred instances, in our common English Bible, the Hebrew or the Greek word for “heart,” as a physical organ, is applied to man’s personality; as if it were, in a sense, synonymous with his life, his self, his soul, his nature. In every phase of man’s character, of man’s needs, or of man’s experiences, “heart” is employed by us as significant of his innermost and realest self. He is “hard-hearted,” “tender-hearted,” “warm-hearted,” “cold-hearted,” “hearty,” or “heartless.” His words and his conduct are “heart-touching,” “heart-cheering,” “heart-searching,” “heart-piercing,” “heart-thrilling,” “heart-soothing,” or “heart-rending;” and they are a cause, in others, of “heart-burning,” “heart-aching,” “heart-easing,” or “heart-expanding.” At times, his “heart is set upon” an object of longing, or again “his heart is in his mouth” because of his excited anxiety. It may be, that he shows that “his heart is in the right place,” or that “his heart is at rest” at all times. The truest union of two young lives, is where “the heart goes with the hand” in the marriage covenant.

And so, all the world over, from the beginning, primitive man, in the lowest state of savagery and in the highest stage of civilization, has been accustomed to recognize the truth, and to employ the symbolisms of speech, which are in accordance with the latest advances of physiological and psychological science, and with the highest spiritual conceptions of biblical truth, in our nineteenth Christian century, concerning the mental, the moral, and the religious needs and possibilities of the human race. Man as he is needs a “new heart,” a new nature, a new life; and that need can be supplied by the Author of life, through that regeneration which is indicated, and which, in a sense, is realized in new blood which is pure at the start, and which purifies by its purging inflow. The recognition of this truth, and the outreaching of man in its direction, are at the basis of all forms of sacrifice in all the ages. And this wonderful attainment of primitive man everywhere, we are asked to accept as man’s mere natural inheritance from the sensory quiverings of his ancestral tadpole!

“The knowledge of the ancients on the subject [of blood as the synonym of life] may, indeed, have been based on the mere observation that an animal loses its life when it loses its blood,” says the Speaker’s Commentary. But it does seem a little strange, that none of the ancients ever observed that man is very liable to lose his life when he loses his brains, and that few animals are actively efficient for practical service without a head; whereas both men and the lower animals do lose blood freely without death resulting.

It is true that in many parts of the world the liver was made prominent as seemingly a synonym of life; but this was obviously because of the popular belief that the liver was itself a mass of coagulated blood. The idea seems to have been that as the heart was the blood-fountain, the liver was the blood-cistern; and that, as the source of life (or of blood, which life is,) was at the heart; so, the great receptacle of life, or of blood, was the liver. Thus, in the classic myth of Prometheus, the avenging eagle of Jupiter is not permitted to gnaw upon the life-giving heart itself of the tortured victim, but upon the compacted body of life in the captive’s liver; the fountain of life is not to be destroyed, but the cistern of life is to be emptied daily of all that it had received from the out-flowing heart during the preceding night. And in the symbolism of these two organs, the ancients seem to have been agreed, that “The heart is the seat of the soul [thumos (θυμός) the nobler passions]; the liver [is the seat] of desire;”[684] or, as again it is phrased, “The seat of the soul is unquestionably the heart, even as the liver is the seat of emotion.”[685]

Burton has called attention to the fact that among the Arabs, “the liver and the spleen are both supposed to be ‘congealed blood,’” and that the Bed´ween of the Hejaz justify their eating of locusts, which belong to an “unclean” class of animals, and of liver which represents forbidden blood, by this couplet:

He has also noted that the American Indian partakes of the liver, as well as of the heart of a fallen enemy, in order to the assimilating of the enemy’s life;[687] and he finds many correspondences between the desert dwellers of America and of Arabia. “The [American] ‘brave,’” he says, “stamps a red hand upon his mouth to show that he has drunk the blood of a foe. Of the Utaybah ‘Harami,’ it is similarly related, that after mortal combat, he tastes the dead man’s gore.”[688]

Even in modern English, the word “liver” has been thought by many to represent “life” or “blood.” Thus, in one of our dictionaries we are told that the word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian verb “to live,” “because [the liver is] of so great importance to life, or animal vitality.”[689] In another, its derivation is ascribed to lopper, and lapper, “to coagulate,” “from its resemblance to a mass of clotted blood.”[690]

Among the aborigines of America the prominence given to the blood and to the heart was as great, and as distinctly marked, as among the peoples of ancient Egypt, or any other portion of the far East. This truth has been brought out most fully by the valuable personal researches of Mr. Frank H. Cushing, of the Smithsonian Institution, into the mythology and sociology of the Zuñis of New Mexico. From his reports it would appear that, according to the priests of that people, “all true fetiches [or, material symbols of spiritual existences] are either actual petrifactions of the animals they represent, or were such originally”—according as the present form of the fetish is natural, or is mechanically fashioned. These rude stone images of the animals of prey, “which are of course mere concretions or strangely eroded rock forms,” are supposed to be the shriveled and distorted remains of beings which were long ago turned to stone. Within these fetishes the heart of the original animal still exists; (“his heart still lives, even though his person be changed to stone”;) and it needs for its sustenance the blood, or the “life fluid,” of the game which was, from the beginning, the ordinary prey of that animal. Hence each fetish is pleased to hear the prayers and to give success to the hunting of its present possessor, in order to the obtaining of the life fluid which is essential to its nourishing.

These prey fetishes of the Zuñis belong to the Prey-God Brotherhood, and when not in use they are guarded by the “Keeper of the Medicine of the Deer.” Before they are employed in a hunt, there is an assembly for their worship; and, after ceremonial prayer to them for their assistance, they are taken out for service by members of the Brotherhood to which they belong. “The fetich is then placed in a little crescent-shaped bag of buckskin which the hunter wears suspended over the left breast (or, heart) by a buckskin thong, which is tied above the right shoulder.” When the trail of the animal hunted is discovered by the hunter, he finds a place where the animal has lain down, and there he makes an oblation by depositing his offering “in exactly the spot over which the heart of the animal is supposed to have rested.” Then he brings out his fetish and with certain ceremonies and invocations he puts it on the track of the prey.

“As soon as the animal is dead, he [the hunter] lays open its viscera, cuts through the diaphragm, and makes an incision in the aorta, or in the sac which incloses the heart. He then takes out [of its bag] the prey fetich, breathes on it, and addresses it thus: ... ‘Si! My father, this day of the blood [literally of the ‘life fluid’] of a game-being, thou shalt drink, ([shalt] water thyself). With it thou shalt enlarge (add unto) thy heart.’ He then dips the fetich into the blood which the sac still contains, continuing meanwhile the prayer, as follows: ... ‘Likewise, I, a “done” being [a living human being], with the blood [the “life-fluid,” which is] the flesh of a raw being (game animal), shall enlarge (add unto) my heart.’ Which [prayer] finished, he scoops up, with his hand, some of the blood and sips it; then tearing forth the liver, ravenously devours a part of it [as the blood-flesh, or, the blood which is the flesh], and exclaims, ‘É-lah-kwá!’ (Thanks).” After all this, he deposits a portion of the clot of blood from within the heart, commingled with various articles, in a grave digged on the spot where the animal has died; repeating, as he does this, a prayer which seems to show his belief that the slain animal still lives in this buried heart-blood. Again, when the game is at the hunter’s home, the women “lay on either side of its body, next to the heart, an ear of corn (significant of renewed life), and say prayers” over it. Finally “the fetich is returned to the Keeper of the Deer Medicine, with thanksgiving and a prayer, not unlike that uttered on taking it forth.”[691]

In these ceremonies, it is evident that the Zuñis, like the Orientals, recognize the blood as the life, the heart as the epitome of life, the liver as a congealed mass of blood, and the transference of blood as the transference of life. Moreover, there is here a trace of that idea of the revivifying, by blood-bathing, of a being that had turned into stone; which is found in the legends of Arabia, and of the Norseland (See page 119 f., supra). Is there not, indeed, a reference to this world-wide figure of the living stone, in the Apostle’s suggestion, that those who were counted as worthless stones by an ignorant world are vivified by the renewing blood of Christ, and so are shown to be a holy people? “As new born babes [renewed by the blood of Christ], long for the spiritual milk [the means of sacred nourishment] which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation; if ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious [if, indeed, ye have been made alive by the touch of his blood]: unto whom coming, [unto Him who is] a Living Stone rejected indeed of men, but with God [who knows the possibilities of that Stone], precious,—ye also, as living stones [as new blood-vivified petrifactions], are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up holy sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”[692]

There is another gleam of this idea of the stones vivified by blood, in a custom reported from among the Indians of British Columbia, in a private letter written by a careful observer of Indian habits and ceremonies. When the Indian girls arrived at the years of womanhood they were accustomed, there as in many other parts of the world, to pass through a formal initiation into a new stage of existence. Going apart by themselves, at some distance from their settlements, they would lacerate their bodies, in order that blood might flow freely; and, laying a series of stones in a row, they would walk over them, allowing their blood to fall upon them. The young woman who could cover the largest number of stones with her blood, had the fairest prospect in life, in the line of a woman’s peculiar mission. This certainly would be a not unnatural thought as an outgrowth of the belief that stones anointed with freely surrendered blood, can be made to have life in themselves.

It is much the same in war as in the hunt, among the Zuñis. “As with the hunter, so with the warrior; the fetich is fed on the life-blood of the slain.”[693] And here, again, is a link of connection between cannibalism and religious worship. Another illustration of the preeminence given to the heart, as the epitome of the very being itself, is the fact that the animals pictured on the pottery of these people, and of neighboring peoples, commonly had the rude conventional figure of a heart represented in its place on each animal; as if to show that the animal was living, and that it had a living soul.[694]

At the other side of the world, as it were, in Borneo, there is given similar preeminence, as among the Zuñis, to the blood as the life, to the liver as a representative of blood, and to the heart as the epitome of the life. “The principal sacrifice of the Sakarang Dayaks,” says Mr. St. John, “is killing a pig and examining its heart, which is supposed to foretell events with the utmost certainty.” This custom seems to have grown out of the idea that the heart of any God devoted organism, as the embodiment of its life is closely linked with the Author of all life; who is the Disposer of all events. A human heart is naturally deemed preferable to a pig’s; but the latter is the common substitute for the former. Yet, “not many years ago,” one of the Sakarang chiefs put to death a lad “of his own race,” remarking, as he did so: “It has been our custom heretofore to examine the heart of a pig, but now we will examine a human one.”[695] The Kayans, again, examine “the heart and liver,” as preliminary to covenant-making.[696] Among the Dayaks, the blood of a fowl sacrificed by one who is supposed to be in favor with the gods, has peculiar potency when sprinkled upon “the lintels of the doors.”[697] And a house will be deserted by its Dayak inhabitants, “if a drop of blood be seen sprinkled on the floor, unless they can prove whence it came.”[698]

An incidental connection of this recognition of the blood as the life, with the primitive rite of blood covenanting, is seen in one form of the marriage rite among the Dayaks.[699]—In the rite of blood-covenanting itself, as consummated between Mr. St. John and Siñgauding, a cigarette stained with the blood of the covenanting parties was smoked by them mutually (See page 51, supra). In the marriage covenant, a cigar and betel leaf prepared with the areca nut are put first into the mouth of the bride by the bridegroom, and then into the mouth of the bridegroom by the bride; while two fowls are waved over their heads by a priest, and then killed; their blood being “caught in two cups” for examination, instead of for drinking.[700]

So, whether it be the heart as the primal fountain of blood, or the liver as the great receptacle of blood, or the blood itself in its supposed outflowing from the heart through the liver, that is made prominent in the rites and teachings of primitive peoples, the root-idea is still the same,—that “as to the life of all flesh, the blood thereof is all one with the life thereof;”[701] and that as a man is in his blood, so he is in his nature; that his “good blood” or “his bad blood,” his “hot blood” or his “cold blood,” will be evidenced in his daily walk; for that which shows out in his outer life is “in the blood” which is his inner life; and that in order to a change of his nature there must in some way be a change of his blood. Hence, the universal outreaching of the race after new blood which is new life. Hence, the provisions of God for new life through that blood which is the Life.

TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS.

A belief in the transmigration of souls, from man to the lower animals, and vice versâ, has been found among various peoples, in all the historic ages. The origin of this belief has been a puzzling question to rationalistic myth-students. Starting out, as do most of these students, with the rigid theory that man worked himself slowly upward from the lowest savagery, without any external revelation, they are confronted with primitive customs on every side which go to show a popular belief in soul-transmigration, and which they must try to account for within the limits of their unproven theory. The result is, that they first presuppose some conception in the primitive man’s mind of spiritual things, and then they conveniently refer all confusing facts to that presupposed conception. “Animism” is one of the pet names for this resolvent of grave difficulties. And when “Animism” is supplemented by “Fetishism,” “Zoolatry,” and “Totemism,” the requisite number of changes is secured for the meeting of any number of perplexing facts in the religious belief of primitive man everywhere.

As a matter of simple fact, man’s conception of spiritual existences is not accounted for by the “scientists.” And the claim that such a conception was innate in primitive man, or that it was a natural growth in man’s unaided progress, is at the best but an unproved theory. In the early part of this century, there were thousands of deaf-mutes in the United States, who had never been educated by the system which is now so effective for that class in the community. This gave a rare opportunity of learning the normal spiritual attainments of unsophisticated man; of man uninfluenced by external revelation or traditions. Nor was this opportunity unimproved for a good purpose. When the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet (himself a philosophical scientist) introduced the system of deaf-mute instruction into this country, he made a careful examination into the intelligence of all the deaf mutes brought under his care, on this point of spiritual conceptions. His declaration was, that he never found a person who, prior to specific instruction, had any conception of the nature or the existence of God. A single illustration of Mr. Gallaudet’s experiences in this line will suffice for the entire series of them. A young girl of sixteen years of age, or so, who proved to be of far more than ordinary intelligence and mental capacity, had been brought up in a New England Christian home. She had been accustomed to bow her head when grace was said at the daily meals, to kneel in family prayer, and to attend church regularly, from early childhood; yet she had no idea of God, no thought of spiritual existences of any sort whatsoever, until she was instructed in those things, in the line of her new education.[702] A writer on this subject, who differed with Mr. Gallaudet in his conclusions from these facts, added: “This testimony is confirmed by that of all the teachers of the deaf and dumb, and the fact must be admitted.”[703] Until some human being can be found with a conception of spiritual existences, without his having received instruction on that point from those who went before him, the claim—in the face of such facts as these—that primitive man ever obtained his spiritual knowledge or his spiritual conceptions from within himself alone, or without an external revelation to him, is an unscientific assumption, in the investigation of the origin of religions in the world.

But, with man’s conception of spiritual things, already existing[704] (however he came by it), and with the existing belief that the blood is the life, or the soul, or the nature, of an organism, the idea of the transmigration of souls as identical with the transference of blood, is a very natural corollary. The blood being the life, or the soul, of man and of beast, if the blood of man passes into the body of a beast, or the blood of a beast passes into the body of a man, why should it not be inferred that the soul of the man, or of the beast, transmigrated accordingly? If the Hindoo, believing that the blood of man is the soul of man, sees the blood of a man drunk up by a tiger, is it strange that he should look upon that tiger as having within him the soul of the Hindoo, which has been thus appropriated? If the South African supposes that, by his drinking the blood or eating the heart of a lion, he appropriates the lion’s courage,[705] is it to be wondered at that when he sees a lion licking the blood and eating the heart of a South African, he should infer that the lion is thereby the possessor of whatever was distinctive in the Zulu, or the Hottentot, personality?

Indeed, as has been already stated, in the body of this work, there is still a question among physiologists, how far the transference of blood from one organism to another carries a transmigration of soul (of the psyche, not of the pneuma).[706] However this may be, the popular belief in such transmigration is fully accounted for, by the recognized conviction that the blood is the soul.

In this view of the case, there is an added force in the Mosaic prohibition—repeated as it is in the Apostolic Encyclical—of the eating, or drinking, of the blood of the lower animals; with the possibility of thereby being made a partaker of the lower animal nature. And what fresh potency is given to Elijah’s prophecy against Ahab and Jezebel, by this conception of the transference of nature by the transference of blood! “Thus saith the Lord [to Ahab] Hast thou killed [Hast thou taken the blood of Naboth?], and also taken possession [of Naboth’s vineyard]?... Thus saith the Lord, In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth, shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.... And of Jezebel also spake the Lord, saying, The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the ramparts of Jezreel.” The blood, the life, the soul of royalty, shall become a portion of the very life of the prowling scavenger dogs of the royal city. And it came to pass accordingly, to both Ahab and Jezebel.[707]

THE BLOOD-RITE IN BURMAH.

Mention is made, in the text of this volume,[708] of the fact that the primitive rite of blood-covenanting is in practice all along the Chinese border of the Burman Empire. In illustration of this truth, the following description of the rite and its linkings, is given by the Rev. R. M. Luther, of Philadelphia, formerly a missionary among the Karens, in Burmah. This interesting sketch was received, in its present form, at too late a date for insertion in its place in the text; hence its appearance here.

“The blood-covenant is well known, and commonly practised among the Karens of Burmah. There are three methods of making brotherhood, or truce, between members of one tribe and those of another.

“The first is the common method of eating together. This, however, is of but little binding force, being a mere agreement to refrain from hostilities for a limited time, and the truce thus made is liable to be broken at the briefest notice.

“The second method is that of planting a tree. The parties to this covenant select a young and vigorous sapling, plant it with certain ceremonies, and covenant with each other to keep peace so long as the tree lives. A covenant thus made is regarded as of greater force than that effected or sealed by the first method.

“The third method is that of the blood-covenant, properly so-called. In this covenant the chief stands as the representative of the tribe, if it be a tribal agreement; or, the father as the representative of the family, if it be a more limited covenant. The ceremonies are public and solemn. The most important act is, of course, the mingling of the blood. Blood is drawn from the thigh of each of the covenanting parties, and mingled together. Then each dips his finger into the blood and applies it to his lips. In some cases, it is said that the blood is actually drunk; but the more common method is that of touching the lips with the blood-stained finger.[709]

“This covenant is of the utmost force. It covers not merely an agreement of peace, or truce, but also a promise of mutual assistance in peace and in war. It also conveys to the covenanting parties mutual tribal rites. If they are chiefs, the covenant embraces their entire tribes. If one is a private individual, his immediate family and direct descendants are included in the agreement.

“I never heard of the blood-covenant being broken. I do not remember to have inquired particularly on this point, because the way in which the blood-covenant was spoken of, always implied that its rupture was an unheard-of thing. It is regarded as a perfectly valid excuse for any amount of reckless devotion, or of unreasoning sacrifice on behalf of another, for a Karen to say: ‘Thui p’aw th’coh li;’ literally, ‘The blood,—we have drunk it together.’ An appeal for help on the basis of the blood-covenant is never disregarded.

“A few of our missionaries have entered into the blood-covenant with Karen tribes; though most have been deterred, either from never having visited the ‘debatable land’ where the strong arm of British rule does not reach, or else, as in most instances, from a repugnance to the act by which the covenant is sealed. In one instance, at least, where a missionary did enter into covenant with one of these tribes, the agreement has been interpreted as covering not only his children, but one who was so happy as to marry his daughter. In an enforced absence of fifteen years from the scene of his early missionary labors nothing has been at once so touching and so painful to the writer, as the frequent messages and letters asking ‘When will you come back to your people?’ Yet, mine is only the inherited right above mentioned.

“The blood-covenant gives even a foreigner every right which he would have, if born a member of the tribe. As an instance, the writer once shot a hawk in a Karen village, just as it was swooping down upon a chicken. He was surprised to find, an half-hour afterward, that his personal attendant, a straightforward Mountain Karen, had gone through the village and ‘collected’ a fat hen from each house. When remonstrated with, the mountaineer replied, ‘Why, Teacher, it is your right,—that is our custom,—you are one of us. These people wouldn’t understand it if I did not ask for a chicken from each house, when you killed the hawk.’

“In the wilder Karen regions, it is almost impossible to travel unless one is in blood-covenant with the chiefs, while on the other hand one is perfectly safe, if in that covenant. The disregard of this fact has cost valuable lives. When a stranger enters Karen territory, the chiefs order the paths closed. This is done by tying the long elephant grass across the paths. On reaching such a signal, the usual inquiry in the traveling party is, ‘Who is in blood-covenant with this tribe?’ If one is found, even among the lowest servants, his covenant covers the party, on the way, as far as to the principal village or hill fortress. The party goes into camp, and sends this man on as an ambassador. Usually, guides are sent back to conduct the party at once to the chief’s house. If no one is in covenant with the tribe, and the wisp of grass is broken and the party passes on, the lives of the trespassers are forfeited. A sudden attack in some defile, or a night surprise, scatters the party and drives the survivors back the way they came. It is said by the Karens that Mr. Cooper, the famous English explorer of China and Thibet, was killed ‘because he had broken the grass.’ A day’s delay for the blood-covenant would have saved his life, and given him time to complete his most important labors. The men who killed him would have been his devoted body-guard, ready and willing to give their lives in defence of his. If the Karen account of his death is true, it is most unfortunate that he entered the Karen country from China (where the blood-covenant does not now prevail), and so was ignorant of the fact that by so slight a concession to Karen custom he could obtain a guarantee of safe conduct for at least a thousand miles.”

Another account of the blood-covenant rite in Burmah is kindly furnished to me, by the Rev. Dr. M. H. Bixby, of Providence, Rhode Island; who was also for some years a missionary among the Karens. He says:

“In my first journey over the mountains of Burmah, into Shanland, toward Western China, I passed through several tribes of wild Karens among whom the practice of ‘covenanting by blood’ prevailed.

“‘If you mean what you say,’ said the old chief of the Gecho tribe to me, referring to my professions of friendship, ‘You will drink truth with me.’ ‘Well, what is drinking truth?’ I said. In reply, he said: ‘This is our custom. Each chief pierces his arm—draws blood—mingles it in a vessel with whisky, and drinks of it; both promising to be true and faithful to each other, down to the seventh generation.’

“After the chiefs had drunk of the mingled blood and whisky, each one of their followers drunk of it also, and were thereby included in the covenant of friendship.

“A company of Shans laid a plot to kill me and my company in Shanland, for the purpose of plunder. They entered into covenant with each other by drinking the blood of their leader mingled with whisky, or a kind of beer made from rice.

“Those wild mountain tribes have strange traditions which indicate that they once had the Old Testament Scriptures, although now they have no written language. Some of the Karen tribes have a written language, given them by the missionaries.

“The covenant, also, exists in modified forms, in which the blood is omitted.”

BLOOD-STAINED TREE OF THE COVENANT.

In various parts of the East, a tree is given prominence in the rite of blood-covenanting. In Burmah, as above shown, one mode of covenanting is by the mutual planting of a tree.[710] In Timor, a newly planted fig-tree is made to bear a portion of the blood of the covenant, and to remain as a witness to the sacred rite itself.[711] In one portion of Central Africa, a forked palm branch is held by the two parties, at their entering into blood-friendship;[712] and, in another region, the ashes of a burned tree and the blood of the covenanting brothers are brought into combination, in the use of a knotted palm branch which the brothers together hold.[713] And, again, in Canaan, in the days of Abraham, the planting of a tree was an element in covenant making; as shown in the narrative of the covenant which Abraham cut with Abimelech, at Beer-sheba.[714]

It may, indeed, be fair to suppose that the trees at Hebron, which marked the dwelling-place of Abraham were covenant-trees, witnessing the covenant between Abraham and the three Amorite chiefs; and that therefore they have prominence in the sacred story. “Now he [Abram] dwelt by [or, in: Hebrew, beëlonay (בְּאֵלֹנֵי)] the [four] oaks [or, terebinths], of Mamre, the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother of Aner; and these [three it was who] were confederate [literally, were masters of the covenant] with [the fourth one] Abram.”[715] This rendering certainly gives a reason for the prominent mention of the trees at Hebron, in conjunction with Abram’s covenant with Amorite chieftains; and it accords with Oriental customs of former days, and until to-day. So, also, it would seem that the tree which witnessed[716] the confirmation, or the recognition, of the covenant between another Abimelech, and the men of Shechem and the men of Beth-millo, by the pillar (the symbol of Baal-bereeth)[717] in Shechem,[718] was a covenant-tree, after the Oriental custom in sacred covenanting.

There is apparently a trace of the blood-covenanting and tree-planting rite of primitive times, in the blood-stained “Fiery Cross” of the Scottish Highlands, with its correspondent Arabian symbol of tribal covenant-duties in the hour of battle. Von Wrede, describing his travels in the south-eastern part of Arabia, tells of the use of this symbol as he saw it employed, as preliminary to a tribal warfare. A war-council had decided on conflict. Then, “the fire which had burned in the midst of the circle was newly kindled with a great heap of wood, and the up-leaping flames were greeted with loud rejoicing. The green branch of a nŭbk tree [sometimes called the ‘lote-tree,’ and again known as the ‘dôm,’ although it is not the dôm palm][719] was then brought, and also a sheep, whose feet were at once tied by the oldest shaykh. After these preparations, the latter seized the branch, spoke a prayer over it, and committed it to the flames. As soon as every trace of green had disappeared, he snatched it from the fire, again said a short prayer, and cut with his jembeeyeh [his short sword] the throat of the sheep, with whose blood the yet burning branch was quenched. He then tore a number of little twigs from the burnt branch, and gave them to as many Bed´ween, who hastened off with them in various directions. The black bloody branch was then planted in the earth.... The little twigs, which the shaykh cut off and gave to the Bed´ween, serve as alarm signals, with which the messengers hasten from valley to valley, calling the sons of the tribe to the impending war [by this blood-stained symbol of the sacred covenant which binds them in brotherhood]. None dare remain behind, without loss of honor, when the chosen [covenant] sign appears at his encampment, and the voice of its bearer calls to the war.... At the conclusion of the war [thus inaugurated], the shaykhs of the propitiated tribe return the branches to the fire, and let them burn to ashes.”[720]

How strikingly this parallels the use and the symbolism of the Fiery Cross, in the Scottish Highlands, as portrayed in The Lady of the Lake. Sir Roderick Dhu would summon Clan Alpine against the King.

Lifting up this fragment of the tree from the grave of the patriarch of the Clan,[721] the old priest sounded anathemas against those who should be untrue to their covenant obligations as clansmen, when they recognized this symbol of their common brotherhood.

“At sight of the Fiery Cross,” says Scott, “every man, from sixteen years old to sixty, capable of bearing arms, was obliged instantly to repair, in his best arms and accoutrements, to the place of rendezvous.... During the civil war of 1745-6, the Fiery Cross often made its circuit; and upon one occasion it passed through the whole district of Breadalbane, a tract of thirty-two miles, in three hours.”[723]

BLOOD-DRINKING.

Another item of evidence that the blood-covenant in its primitive form was a well-known rite in primitive Europe, is a citation by Athenæus from Poseidonios to this effect: “Concerning the Germans, Poseidonios says, that they, embracing each other in their banquets, open the veins upon their foreheads,[724] and mixing the flowing blood with their drink, they present it to each other; esteeming it the farthest attainment of friendship, to taste each other’s blood.”[725] As Poseidonios was earlier than our Christian era, this testimony shows that the custom with our ancestors was in no sense an outgrowth, nor yet a perversion, of Christian practices.

In Moore’s Lalla Rookh, the young maiden, Zelica, being induced by Mokanna, the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, to accompany him to the charnel-house, pledged herself to him, body and soul, in a draught of blood.

It was after this, that he reminded her of the binding force of this blood-covenant:

And her bitter memory of that covenant-scene, in the presence of the “bloodless ghosts,” was:

Although this is Western poetry, it had a basis of careful Oriental study in its preparation; and the blood-draught of the covenant is known to Persian story and tradition.

One of the indications of the world-wide belief in the custom of covenanting, and again of life seeking, by blood-drinking, is the fact that both Jews and Christians have often been falsely charged with drinking the blood of little children, at their religious feasts. This was one of the frequent accusations against the early Christians (See Justin Martyr’s Apol., I., 26; Tertullian’s Apol., VIII., IX.) And it has been repeated against the Jews, from the days of Apion down to the present decade. Such a baseless charge could not have gained credence, but for the traditional understanding that men were wont to pledge each other to a close covenant by mutual blood-drinking.

COVENANT-CUTTING.

It is worthy of note that when the Lord enters into covenant with Abraham by means of a prescribed sacrifice (Gen. 15 : 7-18), it is said that the Lord “cut a covenant with Abram”; but when the Lord calls on Abraham to cut a covenant of blood-friendship, by the rite of circumcision (Gen. 17 : 1-12), the Lord says, for himself, “I will make [or I will fix] my covenant between me and thee.” In the one case, the Hebrew word is karath (כָּרַת) “to cut”; in the other, it is nathan (נָתַן) “to give,” or “to fix.” This change goes to show that the idea of cutting a covenant includes the act of a cutting—of a cutting of one’s person or the cutting of the substitute victim—as an integral part of the covenant itself; that a covenant may be made, or fixed, without a cutting, but that the term “cutting” involves the act of cutting.

Thus, again, in Jeremiah 34 : 18, there is a two-fold reference to covenant-cutting; where the Lord reproaches his people for their faithlessness to their covenant. “And I will give [to destruction] the men that have transgressed my covenant, which have not performed the words of the covenant which they made [literally, ‘cut’] before me [in my sight] when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof.” In this instance, there is in the Hebrew, a pun, as it were, to give added force to the accusation and reproach. The same word ’abhar (עָבַר) means both “to transgress” and “to pass over” [or, “between”], so that, freely rendered, the charge here made, is, that they went through the covenant when they had gone through the calf; which is another way of saying that they cut their duty when they claimed to cut a covenant.

The correspondence of cutting the victim of sacrifice, and of cutting into the flesh of the covenanting parties, in the ceremony of making blood-brotherhood, or blood-friendship, is well-illustrated in the interchanging of these methods in the primitive customs of Borneo.[726] The pig is the more commonly prized victim of sacrifice in Borneo. It seems, indeed, to be there valued only next after a human victim. In some cases, blood-brotherhood is made, in Borneo, by “imbibing each other’s blood.” In other cases, “a pig is brought and placed between the two [friends] who are to be joined in brotherhood. A chief addresses an invocation to the gods, and marks with a lighted brand[727] the pig’s shoulder. The beast is then killed, and after an exchange of jackets,[728] a sword is thrust into the wound, and the two [friends] are marked with the blood of the pig.” On one occasion, when two hostile tribes came together to make a formal covenant of brotherhood, “the ceremony of killing a pig for each tribe” was the central feature of the compact; as in the case of two Kayans becoming one by interchanging their own blood, actually or by a substitute pig. And it is said of the tribal act of cutting the covenant by cutting the pig, that “it is thought more fortunate if the animal be severed in two by one stroke of the parang (half sword, half chopper).” In another instance, where two tribes entered into a covenant, “a pig was placed between the representatives of [the] two tribes; who, after calling down the vengeance of the spirits on those who broke the treaty, plunged their spears into the animal [‘cutting a covenant’ in that way], and then exchanged weapons.[729] Drawing their krises, they each bit the blade of the other [as if ‘drinking the covenant’],[730] and so completed the affair.” So, again, “if two men who have been at deadly feud, meet in a house [where the obligations of hospitality restrain them], they refuse to cast their eyes upon each other till a fowl has been killed, and the blood sprinkled over them.”

In every case, it is the blood that seals the mutual covenant, and the “cutting of the covenant” is that cutting which secures the covenanting, or the inter-uniting, blood. The cutting may be in the flesh of the covenanting parties; or, again it may be in the flesh of the substitute victim which is sacrificed.

BLOOD-BATHING.

In the Midrash Rabboth (Shemoth, Beth, 92, col. 2.) there is this comment by the Rabbis, on Exodus 2 : 23: “‘And the king of Egypt died.’ He was smitten with leprosy.... ‘And the children of Israel sighed.’ Wherefore did they sigh? Because the magicians of Egypt said: ‘There is no healing for thee save by the slaying of the little children of the Israelites. Slay them in the morning, and slay them in the evening; and bathe in their blood twice a day.’ As soon as the children of Israel heard the cruel decree, they poured forth great sighings and wailings.” That comment gives a new point, in the rabbinical mind, to the first plague, whereby the waters of the Nile, in which royalty bathed (Exod. 2 : 5), were turned into blood, because of the bondage of the children of Israel.

A survival of the blood-baths of ancient Egypt, as a means of re-vivifying the death-smitten, would seem to exist in the medical practices of the Bechuana tribes of Africa; as so many of the customs of ancient Egypt still survive among the African races (See page 15, supra). Thus, Moffat reports (Missionary Labours, p. 277) a method employed by native physicians, of killing a goat “over the sick person, allowing the blood to run down the body.”

BLOOD-RANSOMING.

Among other Bible indications that the custom of balancing, or canceling, a blood account by a payment in money, was well known in ancient Palestine, appears the record of David’s conference with the Gibeonites, concerning their claim for blood against the house of Saul, in 2 Samuel 21 : 1-9. When it was found that the famine in Israel was because of Saul’s having taken blood—or life—unjustly from the Gibeonites, David essayed to balance that unsettled account. “And the Gibeonites said unto him, It is no matter of silver or gold between us and Saul, or his house; neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel;” which was equivalent to saying: “Money for blood we will not take. Blood for blood we have no power to obtain.” Then said David, “What ye shall say, that will I do for you.” At this, the Gibeonites demanded, and obtained, the lives of the seven sons of Saul. The blood account must be balanced. In this case, as by the Mosaic law, it could only be by life for life.

In some parts of Arabia, if a Muhammadan slays a person of another religion, the relatives of the latter are not allowed to insist on blood for blood, but must accept an equivalent in money. The claim for the spilled blood is recognized, but a Muhammadan’s blood is too precious for its payment. (See Wellsted’s Travels in Arabia, I., 19.)

It is much the same in the far West as in the far East, as to this canceling of a blood-debt by blood or by other gifts. Parkman (Jesuits in No. Am., pp. lxi.-lxiii.; 354-360) says of the custom among the Hurons and the Iroquois, that in case of bloodshed the chief effort of all concerned was to effect a settlement by contributions to the amount of the regular tariff rates of a human life.

Another indication that the mission of the goel was to cancel the loss of a life rather than to avenge it, is found in the primitive customs of the New World. “Even in so rude a tribe as the Brazilian Topanazes,” the Farrer (citing Eschwege, in Prim. Man. and Cust., p. 164), “a murderer of a fellow tribesman would be conducted by his relations to those of the deceased, to be by them forthwith strangled and buried [with his forfeited blood in him], in satisfaction of their rights; the two families eating together for several days after the event as though for the purpose of [or, as in evidence of] reconciliation,”—not of satisfied revenge.

Yet more convincing than all, in the line of such proofs that it is restitution, and not vengeance, that is sought by the pursuit of blood in the mission of the goel, is the fact that in various countries, when a man has died a natural death, it is the custom to seek blood, or life, from those immediately about him; as if to restore, or to equalize, the family loss. Thus, in New South Wales, “when any one of the tribe dies a natural death, it is usual to avenge [not to avenge, but to meet] the loss of the deceased by taking blood from one or other of his friends,” and it is said that death sometimes results from this endeavor (Angas’s Sav. Life, II., 227). In this fact, there is added light on the almost universal custom of blood-giving to, or over, the dead. (See, e. g. Ellis’s Land of Fetish, pp. 59, 64; Stanley’s The Congo, II., 180-182; Angas’s Sav. Life, I., 98, 331; II., 84, 89 f.; Ellis’s Polyn. Res., I., 527-529; Dodge’s Our Wild Indians, p. 172 f.; First An. Rep. of Bureau of Ethn., pp. 109, 112, 159 f., 164, 183, 190.)

THE COVENANT-REMINDER.

It has already been shown, that the blood-stained record of the covenant of blood, shielded in a leathern case, is proudly worn as an armlet or as a necklace, by the Oriental who has been fortunate enough to become a sharer in such a covenant; and that there is reason for believing that there are traces of this custom, in the necklaces, the armlets, the rings, and the frontlets, which have been worn as the tokens of a sacred covenant, in well-nigh all lands, from the earliest days of Chaldea and Egypt down to the present time. There is a confirmation of this idea in the primitive customs of the North American Indians, which ought not to be overlooked.

The distinctive method by which these Indians were accustomed to confirm and signalize a formal covenant, or a treaty, was the exchange of belts of wampum; and that these wampum belts were not merely conventional gifts, but were actual records, tokens, and reminders, of the covenant itself, there is abundant evidence. In a careful paper on the “Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans,” in one of the reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, of the Smithsonian Institution, the writer[731] says: “One of the most remarkable customs practiced by the Americans is found in the mnemonic use of wampum.... It does not seem probable ... that a custom so unique and so widespread could have grown up within the historic period, nor is it probable that a practice foreign to the genius of tradition-loving races could have become so well established and so dear to their hearts in a few generations.... The mnemonic use of wampum is one, which, I imagine, might readily develop from the practice of gift giving and the exchange of tokens of friendship, such mementoes being preserved for future reference as reminders of promises of assistance or protection.... The wampum records of the Iroquois [and the same is found to be true in many other tribes] were generally in the form of belts [as an encircling and binding token of a covenant], the beads being strung or woven into patterns formed by the use of different colors.” Illustrations, by the score, of this mnemonic use of the covenant-confirming belts, or “necklaces,”[732] as they are sometimes called, are given, or are referred to, in this interesting article.

In the narrative of a council held by the “Five Nations,” at Onondaga, nearly two hundred years ago, a Seneca sachem is said to have presented a proposed treaty between the Wagunhas and the Senecas, with the words: “We come to join the two bodies into one”; and he evidenced his good faith in this endeavor, by the presentation of the mnemonic belts of wampum. “The belts were accepted by the Five Nations, and their acceptance was a ratification of the treaty.”[733] Lafitau, writing of the Canadian Indians, in the early years of the eighteenth century, says: “They do not believe that any transaction can be concluded without these belts;” and he mentions, that according to Indian custom these belts were to be exchanged in covenant making; “that is to say, for one belt [received] one must give another [belt].”[734] And a historian of the Moravian Missions says: “Everything of moment transacted at solemn councils, either between the Indians themselves, or with Europeans, is ratified and made valid by strings and belts of wampum.”[735] “The strings,” according to Lafitau, “are used for affairs of little consequence, or as a preparation for other more considerable presents”; but the binding “belts” were as the bond of the covenant itself.

These covenant belts often bore, interwoven with different colored wampum beads, symbolic figures, such as two hands clasped in friendship, or two figures with hands joined. As the belts commonly signalized tribal covenants, they were not worn by a single individual; but were sacredly guarded in some tribal depository; yet their form and their designation indicate the origin of their idea.

There is still preserved, in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the wampum belt which is supposed to have sealed the treaty of peace and friendship between William Penn and the Indians. It contains two figures, wrought in dark colored beads, representing “an Indian grasping with the hand of friendship the hand of a man evidently intended to be represented in the European costume, wearing a hat.”[736]

Still more explicit in its symbolism, is the royal belt of the primitive kings of Tahiti. Throughout Polynesia, red feathers, which had been inclosed in a hollow image of a god, were considered not only as emblematic of the deities, but as actually representing them in their personality (Ellis’s Polyn. Res., I., 79, 211, 314, 316; II., 204; Tour thro’ Hawaii, p. 121). “The inauguration ceremony [of the Tahitian king], answering to coronation among other nations, consisted in girding the king with the maro ura, or sacred girdle of red feathers; which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with their gods [as by oneness of blood]. The maro, or girdle, was made with the beaten fibres of the ava; with these a number of ura, red feathers, taken from the images of their deities [where they had, seemingly, represented the blood, or the life, of the image], were interwoven; ... the feathers [as the blood] being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.” In lieu of the king’s own blood, in this symbolic ceremony of inter-union, a human victim was sacrificed, for the “fastening on of the sacred maro.” “Sometimes a human victim was offered for every fresh piece added to the girdle [blood for blood, between the king and the god]; ... and the girdle was considered as consecrated by the blood of those victims.” The chief priest of the god Oro formally invested the king with this “sacred girdle, which, the [blood-representing] feathers from the idol being interwoven in it, was supposed to impart to the king a power equal to that possessed by Oro.” After this, the king was supposed to be a sharer of the divine nature of Oro, with whom he had entered into a covenant of blood-union (Ellis’s Polyn. Res., II., 354-360).

Thus it seems that a band, as a bond, of a sacred covenant is treasured reverently in the New World; as a similar token, of one kind, or another, was treasured, for the same reason, in the Old World. Yet, in the face of such facts as these, one of the notable rationalistic theological writers on Old Testament manners and customs, in the latest edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, coolly ascribes the idea of the Jewish phylacteries to the superstitious idea of a pagan “amulet.” He might indeed, with good reason, have ascribed the idea of the pagan amulet itself to a perversion of that common primitive idea of the binding bond of a sacred covenant, which shows itself in the blood-friendship record of Syria, in the red covenant-cord of China and India, in the divine-human covenant token of ancient Egypt, in the red-feather belt of divine-royal union, in the Pacific Islands, in the wampum belt of America, and in the evolved wedding-covenant ring, or amulet, of a large portion of the civilized world. But that would hardly have been in accordance with the fashionable method of the modern rationalistic theologian; which is, to fix on some later heathenish perversion of a primitive sacred rite, and then to ascribe the origin of all the normal uses of that primitive rite, to its own later perversions.

Yet another indication that the binding circlet of the covenant-token stands, among primitive peoples, as also among cultivated ones, as the representative, or proof, of this very covenant itself, is found in a method of divorce prevailing among the Balau Dayaks, of Borneo. It has already been shown (page 73, supra) that a ring of blood is a binding symbol in the marriage covenant in some parts of Borneo. It seems, also, that when a divorce has been agreed on by a Balau couple, “it is necessary for the offended husband to send a ring to his wife, before the marriage can be considered as finally dissolved; without which, should they marry again, they would be liable to be punished for infidelity.”[737] This practice seems to have grown out of the old custom already referred to (page 73 f.), of the bride giving to the bridegroom a blood-representing ring in the marriage cup. Until that symbolic ring is returned to her by the bridegroom, it remains as the proof of her covenant with him.

This connection of the encircling ring with the heart’s blood, is of very ancient origin, and of general, if not of universal, application. Wilkinson (Anc. Egypt., III., 420) cites Macrobius as saying, that “those Egyptian priests who were called prophets, when engaged in the temple near the altars of the gods, moistened [anointed] the ring-finger of the left hand (which was that next to the smallest) with various sweet ointments, in the belief that a certain nerve communicated with it from the heart.” He also says, that among the Egyptian women, many finger rings were worn, and that “the left was considered the hand peculiarly privileged to wear these ornaments; and it is remarkable that its third finger [next to the little finger] was considered by them, as by us, par excellence the ring finger; though there is no evidence [to his knowledge] of its having been so honored at the marriage ceremony.” Birch adds (Ibid., II., 340), that “it is very difficult to distinguish between the ring worn for mere ornament, and the signet [standing for the wearer’s very life] employed to seal [and to sign] epistles and other things.” The evidence is, in fact, ample, that the ring, in ancient Egypt, as elsewhere, was not a mere ornament, nor yet a superstitious amulet, but represented one’s heart, or one’s life, as a symbol and pledge of personal fidelity.

In South Australia, the rite of circumcision is one of the steps by which a lad enters into the sphere of manhood. This involves his covenanting with his new god-father, and with his new fellows in the sphere of his entering. In this ceremony, the very ring of flesh itself is placed “on the third finger of the boy’s left hand” (Angas’s Sav. Life, I., 99). What stronger proof than this could be given, that the finger-ring is a vestige of the primitive blood-covenant token?

An instance of the use of a large ring, or bracelet, encircling the two hands of persons joining in the marriage covenant, is reported to me from the North of Ireland, in the present century. It was in the county Donegal. The Roman Catholic priest was a French exile. In marrying the people of the poorer class, who could not afford to purchase a ring, he “would take the large ring from his old-fashioned double-cased watch, and hold it on the hands, or the thumbs, of the contracting parties, while he blessed their union.”

Yet another illustration of the universal symbolism of the ring, as a token of sacred covenant, is its common use as a pledge of friendship, even unto death. The ring given by Queen Elizabeth to the unfortunate Earl of Essex, is an instance in point. Had that covenant-token reached her, her covenant promises would have been redeemed.

There is an old Scottish ballad, “Hynd Horn,”—perhaps having a common origin with the Bohemian lay on which Scott based The Noble Moringer,[738]—which brings out the idea of a covenant-ring having the power to indicate to its wearer the fidelity of its giver; corresponding with the popular belief to that effect, suggested by Bacon.[739] Hynd Horn has won the heart of the king’s daughter, and the king sends him over the sea, as a means of breaking up the match. As he sets out Hynd Horn carries with him a symbol of his lady-love’s troth.

Seven years went by, and then the ring-gems grew “pale and wan.” Hynd Horn hastened back, entered the wedding-hall disguised as a beggar, sent the covenant-ring to the bride in a glass of wine; and the sequel was the same as in The Noble Moringer.

At a Brahman wedding, in India, described by Miss H. G. Brittan (in “The Missionary Link,” for October, 1864; cited in Women of the Orient, pp. 176-179) a silver dish, filled with water, (probably with water colored with saffron, or with turmeric, according to the common custom in India,) “also containing a very handsome ruby ring, and a thin iron bracelet,” was set before the father of the bride, during the marriage ceremony. At the covenanting of the young couple, “the ring was given to the groom; the bracelet to the bride; then some of the [blood-colored?] water was sprinkled on them (See page 194, supra), and some flowers [were] thrown at them.” Here seem to be combined, the symbolisms of the ring, the bracelet, and the blood, in a sacred covenanting.

HINTS OF BLOOD-UNION.

From the very fact that so little attention has been given to the primitive rite of blood-covenanting, in the studies of modern scholars, there is reason for supposing that the rite itself has very often been unnoticed by travelers and missionaries in regions where it was practiced almost under their eyes. Indeed, there is proof of this to be obtained, by comparing the facts recorded in this volume with the writings of visitors to the lands here reported from. Hence, it is fair to infer, that more or less of the brotherhoods or friendships noted among primitive peoples, without any description of the methods of their consummating, are either directly based on the rite of blood-covenanting, or are outgrowths and variations of that rite; as, for example, in Borneo, blood-tasting is sometimes deemed essential to the rite, and again it is omitted. It may be well, therefore, to look at some of the hints of blood-union among primitive peoples, in relationships and in customs where not all the facts and processes involved, are known to us.

Peculiarly is it true, that wherever we find the idea of an absolute merging of two natures into one, or of an inter-union or an inter-changing of two personalities in loving relation, there is reason for suspecting a connection with the primitive rite of inter-union through a common blood flow. And there are illustrations of this idea in the Old World and in the New, all along the ages.

It has already been mentioned (page 109, supra) that, in India, the possibility of an inter-union of two natures, and of their inter-merging into one, is recognized in the statement that “the heart of Vishnu is Sivâ, and the heart of Sivâ is Vishnu”; and it is a well-known philosophical fact that man must have an actual basis of human experience for the symbolic language with which he illustrates the nature and characteristics of Deity.

In the most ancient portion of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead,[741] there is a description of the inter-union of Osiris and Rā, not unlike that above quoted concerning Sivâ and Vishnoo. It says, that “Osiris came to Tattu (Mendes) and found the soul of Rā there; each embraced the other, and become as one soul in two souls”[742]—as one life in two lives; or, as it would be phrased concerning two human beings united in blood-friendship, “one soul in two bodies”; a common life in two personalities. Again it is said in an Egyptian sacred text, “Rā is the soul of Osiris, and Osiris is the soul of Rā.”[743]

An exchange of names, as if in exchange of personalities, in connection with a covenant of friendship, is a custom in widely diverse countries; and this custom seems to have grown out of the idea of an inter-union of natures by an inter-union of blood; even if it be not actually an accompaniment of that rite in every instance. It is common in the Society Islands,[744] as an element in the adoption of a “tayo,” or a personal friend and companion (See page 56, supra). It is to be found in various South Sea islands, and on the American continent.

Among the Araucanians, of South America, the custom of making brothers, or brother-friends, is called Lacu. It includes the killing of a lamb and dividing it—“cutting” it—between the two covenanting parties; and each party must eat his half of the lamb—either by himself or by such assistance as he chooses to call in. None of it must be left uneaten. Gifts also pass between the parties; and the two friends exchange names. “The giving [the exchanging] of a name [with this people] establishes between the namesakes a species of relationship which is considered almost as sacred as that of blood, and obliges them to render to each other certain services, and that consideration which naturally belongs to relatives.”[745]

It is related of Tolo, a chief of the Shastika Indians, on the Pacific coast, that when he made a treaty with Col. McKee, an American soldier, in 1852, for the cession of certain tribal rights, he was anxious for some ceremony of brotherhood, that should give binding sacredness to the mutual covenant. After some parleying, he proposed the formal exchange of names, and this was agreed to. Thenceforward he desired to be known as “McKee.” The American colonel was now “Tolo.” But after a while the Indian found that, as in too many other instances, the terms of the treaty were not adhered to by the authorities making it. Then he discarded his new name, “McKee,” and refused to resume his former name, “Tolo.” He would not answer to either, and to the day of his death he insisted that his name, his identity, was “lost.”[746]—There is a profound sentiment underneath such a course, and such a custom, as that.

So fully is the identity of one’s name and one’s life recognized by primitive peoples, that to call on the name of a dead person is generally supposed to summon the spirit of that person to the caller’s service. Hence, among the American Indians, if one calls the dead by name, he must answer to the dead man’s goel. He must surrender his own blood, or pay blood-money, in restitution of the life—of the dead—taken by him. (First An. Rep. of Bureau of Ethnol., p. 200.)

Even Herbert Spencer sees the correspondence of the blood-covenant and the exchange of names. He says: “By absorbing each other’s blood, men are supposed to establish actual community of nature. Similarly with the ceremony of exchanging names.... This, which is a widely-diffused practice, arises from the belief that the name is vitally connected with its owner.... To exchange names, therefore, is to establish some participation in one another’s being.”[747] Hence, as we may suppose, came the well-nigh universal Oriental practice of inter-weaving the name of one’s Deity with one’s name, as a symbolic evidence of one’s covenant-union with the Deity. The blood-covenant, or the blood-union, idea is at the bottom of this.

Another custom, having a peculiar bearing upon this thought of a new name, or a new identity, through new blood, is the rite of initiation into manhood, by the native Australians. During childhood the Australian boys are under the care of their mothers, and they bear names which designate the place and circumstances of their birth. But when the time comes for them to put away childish things,[748] they are subjected to a series of severe and painful tests, to prove their powers of physical and mental endurance, preparatory to their reception of a new name, as indicative of a new life. A rite resembling circumcision is one step in their progress. During these ceremonies, there is selected for each lad a sponsor (or godfather) who is a representative of that higher life into which the lad seeks an entrance. One of the latest steps in the long series of ceremonies, is the choosing and conferring, by the sponsor, of the lad’s new name, which he is to retain thenceforward during his life. With a stone-knife, the sponsor opens a vein in his own arm, and causes the lad to drink his warm-flowing blood. After this, the lad drops forward on his hands and knees, and the sponsor’s blood is permitted to form a pool on his back, and to coagulate there. Then the sponsor cuts, with his stone-knife, broad gashes in the lad’s back, and pulls open the gaping wounds with the fingers. The scars of these gashes remain as permanent signs of the covenant ceremony.[749] And encircling tokens of the covenant[750] are bound around the neck, each arm, and the waist, of the young man; who is now reckoned a new creature[751] in the life represented by that godfather, who has given him his new name, and has imparted to him of his blood.[752]

That the transfusion of blood in this ceremony is the making of a covenant between the youth and his sponsor, and not the giving him blood in vivification, is indicated in another form of the same rite of manhood-initiation, as practised in New South Wales. There, the youth is seated upon the shoulders of his sponsor; while one of his teeth is knocked out. The blood that flows from the boy’s lacerated gum in this ceremony is not wiped away, but is suffered to run down upon his breast, and thence upon the head of his sponsor, whose name he takes. This blood, which secures, by its absorption, a common life between the two, who have now a common name, is permitted to dry upon the head of the man and upon the breast of the boy, and to remain there untouched for several days.

In this New South Wales ceremonial, there is another feature, which seems to suggest that remarkable connection of life with a stone, which has been already referred to (page 307, supra); and yet again to suggest the giving of a new name as the token of a new life. A white stone, or a quartz crystal, called mundie, is given to each novitiate in manhood, at the time he receives his new name. This stone is counted a gift from deity, and is held peculiarly sacred. A test of the young man’s moral stamina is made by the old men’s trying, by all sorts of persuasion, to induce him to surrender this possession, when first he has received it. This accompaniment of a new name “is worn concealed in the hair, tied up in a packet, and is never shown to the women, who are forbidden to look at it under pain of death.” The youths receiving and retaining these white stones, with their new names, are termed “Kebarrah, from keba, a rock, or stone.” (Angas’s Savage Life, II., 221.) That the idea of a sacred covenant, a covenant of brotherhood and friendship, is underneath these ceremonies, is indicated by the fact, that when the rites of Kebarrah are celebrated, even “hostile tribes meet in peace; all animosity between them being laid aside during the performance of these ceremonies.” “To him that overcometh, [saith the Spirit,] ... I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it” (Rev. 2 : 17). The Rabbis recommend the giving secretly of a new name, as a means of new life, to him who is in danger of dying. (See Seph. Hakhkhay., p. 37 f. and note.)

Again, in a form of marriage ceremony in Tahiti, there is a hint of this universal idea of inter-union by blood. An observer of this ceremony, in describing it says: “The female relatives cut their faces and brows[753] with the instrument set with shark’s teeth,[754] received the flowing blood on a piece of native cloth, and deposited the cloth, sprinkled with the mingled blood of the mothers of the married pair, at the feet of the bride. By the latter parts of the ceremony, any inferiority of rank that might have existed was removed, and they were [now] considered as equal. The two families, also, to which they respectively belonged, were ever afterwards regarded as one [through this new blood-union].”[755] Had these mothers mingled and interchanged their own blood before the births of their children, the children—as children of a common blood—would have been debarred from marriage; but now that the two children were covenanting to be one, their mothers might interchange their blood, that the young couple might have an absolute equality of family nature.

There are frequent references by travelers to the rite of brotherhood, or of close friendship, in one part of the world or another, with or without a description of its methods. Thus of one of the tribes in Central Africa it is said: “The Wanyamuezi have a way of making brotherhood, similar to that which has already been described, except that instead of drinking each other’s blood, the newly made brothers mix it [their blood] with butter on a leaf, and exchange leaves. The butter is then rubbed into the incisions, so that it acts as a healing ointment at the same time that blood is exchanged.[756] The ceremony is concluded by tearing the leaves to pieces and showering the fragments on the heads of the brothers.”[757] The Australians, again, are said to have “the custom of making ‘Kotaiga,’ or brotherhood, with strangers. When Europeans visit their districts, and behave as they ought to do, the natives generally unite themselves in bonds of fellowship with the strangers; each selecting one of them as his Kotaiga. The new relations are then considered as having mutual responsibilities, each being bound to forward the welfare of the other.”[758] Once more, in Feejee, two warriors sometimes bind themselves to each other by a formal ceremony, and although its details are not described, a missionary writer says of it: “The manner in which they do this is singular, and wears the appearance of a marriage contract; and the two men entering into it are spoken of as man and wife, to indicate the closeness of their military union. By this mutual bond, the two men pledge themselves to oneness of purpose and effort, to stand by each other in every danger, defending each other to the death, and if needful to die together.”[759]

With the American Indians, there are various traces of the blood-brotherhood idea. Says Captain Clark, in his work on the Indian Sign Language: “Among many tribes there are brothers by adoption, and the tie seems to be held about as sacredly as though created by nature.”[760] Stephen Powell, writing of the Pacific Coast Indians, gives this tie of brotherhood-adoption yet more prominence, than does Clark. He says: “There is an interesting institution found among the Wyandots, as among some other of our North American tribes, namely, that of fellowship. Two young men agree to be perpetual friends to each other, or more than brothers. Each reveals to the other the secrets of his life, and counsels with him on matters of importance, and defends him from wrong and violence, and at his death is chief mourner.”[761] This certainly suggests the relation of blood-brotherhood; whether blood be intermingled in the consummation of the rite, or not.

Colonel Dodge tells of a ceremony of Indian-brotherhood, which includes a bloody rite, worthy of notice in this connection. He says: “A strong flavor of religious superstition attaches to a scalp, and many solemn contracts and binding obligations can only be made over or by means of a scalp;” for is it not the representative of a life? In illustration of this, he gives an incident which followed an Indian battle, in which the Pawnees had borne a part with the whites against the Northern Cheyennes. Colonel Dodge was sitting in his tent, when “the acting head-chief of the Pawnees stalked in gravely, and without a word.” The Colonel continues: “We had long been friends, and had on several occasions been in tight places together. He sat down on the side of my bed, looked at me kindly, but solemnly, and began in a low tone to mutter in his own language, half chant, half recitative. Knowing that he was making ‘medicine’ [that he was engaged in a religious exercise] of some kind, I looked on without comment. After some moments, he stood erect, and stretched out his hand to me. I gave him my hand. He pulled me into a standing position, embraced me, passed his hands lightly over my head, face, arms, body, and legs to my feet, muttering all the while; embraced me again, then turned his back upon me, and with his face toward heaven, appeared to make adoration. He then turned to embrace and manipulate me again. After some five minutes of this performance, he drew from his wallet a package, and unrolling it, disclosed a freshly taken [and therefore still bloody] scalp of an Indian. Touching me with this [blood-vehicle] in various places and ways, he finally drew out his knife, [and ‘cutting the covenant’ in this way, he] divided the scalp carefully along the part [the seam] of the hair, and handing me one half, embraced me again, kissing me on the forehead. ‘Now,’ said he in English, ‘you are my brother.’ He subsequently informed me that this ceremony could not have been performed without this scalp.”[762]

Here seems to be an illustration of cutting the covenant of blood-brotherhood, by sharing the life of a substitute human victim. It is much the same in the wild West as in the primitive East.

So simple a matter as the clasping of hands in token of covenant fidelity, is explicable, in its universality, only as a vestige of the primitive custom of joining pierced hands in the covenant of blood-friendship. Hand-clasping is not, by any means, a universal, nor is it even the commonest, mode of friendly and fraternal salutation among primitive peoples. Prostrations, embracings, kissings, nose-rubbings, slappings of one’s own body, jumpings up and down, the snappings of one’s fingers, the blowing of one’s breath, and even the rolling upon one’s back, are all among the many methods of primitive man’s salutations and obeisances (See, e. g., Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, II., 16-19). But, even where hand clasping is unknown in salutation, it is recognized as a symbol of the closest friendship. Thus, for example, among tribes of North American Indians where nose-rubbing is the mode of salutation, there is, in their widely diffused sign language, the sign of clasped, or inter-locked, hands, as indicative of friendship and union. (First An. Rep. of Bureau of Ethnol., pp. 385 f., 521, 534 f.) So again, similarly, in Australia (Ibid., citation from Smith’s Aborigines of Victoria, II., 308). In the Society Islands, the clasping of hands marks the marriage union, and marks a loving union between two brothers in arms; although it has no place in ordinary greetings (Ellis’s Polyn. Res., II., 11, 492, 569). And so, again, in other primitive lands.

There seems, indeed, to be a gleam of this thought in Job 17 : 3:

The Hebrew word taq’a[763] (תָּקַע) here translated “strike,” has also the meaning “to pierce” (Judg. 4 : 21) and “to blow through,” or “to drive through” (Num. 10 : 3); and Job’s question might be freely rendered; Who is there that will pierce [or that will clasp pierced] hands with me, in blood-friendship? Thus, suretyship grew out of blood-covenanting.

Again, in Zechariah 13 : 6, where the prophet foretells the moral reformation of Judah, there is a seeming reference to the pierced hands of blood-friendship. When one is suspected of being a professional prophet, by certain marks of cuttings between his hands, he declares that these are marks of his blood-covenant with his friends. “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds [these cuttings] between thine hands? Then he shall answer, [They are] these [cuttings] with which I was wounded [or stricken, or pierced] in the house of my friends [in the covenant of friendship].” If, indeed, the translation of the Revisers, “between thine arms,” were justified, the cuttings would still seem to be the cuttings of the blood-covenant (See pages 13, 45, supra).

It is a noteworthy fact, that among the Jews in Tunis, near the old Phœnician settlement of Carthage, the sign of a bleeding hand is still an honored and a sacred symbol, as if in recognition of the covenant-bond of their brotherhood and friendship. “What struck me most in all the houses,” says a traveler (Chevalier de Hesse-Wartegg) among these Jews, “was the impression of an open bleeding hand, on every wall of each floor. However white the walls, this repulsive [yet suggestive] sign was to be seen everywhere.”

How many times, in the New Testament epistles, does the idea show itself, of an inter-union of lives, between Christ and his disciples, and between these disciples and each other. “We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another” (Rom. 12 : 5). “We are members of his body” (Eph. 5 : 30). “We are members one of another” (Eph. 4 : 25). “Know ye not that your bodies are members of Christ?” (1 Cor. 6 : 15). “Ye are the body of Christ, and severally [are] members thereof” (1 Cor. 12 : 27).

It is in this truth of truths, concerning the possibility of an inter-union of the human life with the divine, through a common inter-bloodflow, that there is found a satisfying of the noblest heart yearnings of primitive man everywhere, and of the uttermost spiritual longings of the most advanced Christian believer, in the highest grade of intellectual and moral enlightenment. No attainment of evolution, or of development, has brought man’s latest soul-cry beyond the intimations of his earliest soul-outreaching.