Note 253.2 — Chapter XII · TOTEMISM—THE BLOOD COVENANT—CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH SALIVA.

But we have seen that an entirely different modification of the rite early took place. The actual drinking of the blood was dropped in favour of mixing it by inoculation,253.2 or outwardly upon the bleeding flesh. Among the Norsemen in later times the blood was drawn from each party and simply allowed to flow together in their footprints.253.3 Herodotus describes the covenant among the Arabs on the borders of Egypt. Blood was drawn with a sharp stone from the thumb of either party. With a shred of each person’s robe it was then smeared upon seven sacred stones, with an invocation to the divinities Orotal and Alilat, whom the historian identifies with Dionysos and Urania.253.4 Professor Robertson Smith commenting on the passage observes that the smearing on the stones “makes the gods parties to the covenant, but evidently the symbolical act is not complete unless at the same time the human parties taste each other’s blood.” And he surmises that “this was actually done, though Herodotus does not say so. But,” he admits, “it is also possible that in the course of time the ritual had been so far modified that it was deemed sufficient that the two bloods should meet on the sacred stone.”254.1 I cannot help thinking that what we have learnt in the course of our previous inquiries may help us to the solution of the difficulty. When Abruzzian girls hide their hairs in some secret place of the sanctuary on vowing eternal friendship, they seem at first sight to be performing an act parallel to that recorded of the Arabs; and if so we need not suspect that Herodotus has omitted any feature of the rite. Probably, however, the true explanation does not lie here. We may suppose that the shreds torn by the master of the ceremonies from either garment were roughly tied or twisted together into a wisp, which was then dipped into the flowing blood of both persons, and the blood thus mingled after the fashion of many tribes before it was painted on the stones; or, in the alternative, that the shred from the garment of the one person was dipped in the blood of the other. We have had abundant evidence that a man’s clothes are deemed a part of himself, and that what is done to them is done to him. To dip a portion of my clothes in my friend’s blood, therefore, is to unite me to him, to make him my blood-brother, without the necessity of tasting his blood, or even of literally mixing our blood together. In either way the act would be complete, and the historian’s accuracy justified. Even less than this is necessary among other nations. A man is deemed a blood-brother if the blood of another touch him only by accident and without any outpouring of his own blood. So Dr. Livingstone involuntarily contracted blood-relationship with a Balonda woman in opening a tumour in her arm, by the spurting of some of her blood in his eye.255.1 Similarly in the Irish saga of The Wooing of Emer we find Cuchulainn becoming the blood-brother of Devorgoil by sucking from her wound the stone that had struck her from his sling.255.2 An Abruzzian prescription for epilepsy is for some one on the first attack of the disease to strike the patient on the ear with something of iron, so that the blood flows. The operator becomes the “gossip” (compare o comare) of the person thus cured. Here it seems to suffice if the blood simply touch the instrument used: a much degraded form of the rite, comparable with that in the Icelandic story of the fairy cow, and with the practice of scoring a witch. In a variant remedy, however, a person unacquainted with the patient bites the ear until the blood flows.255.3