Note 256.4 — Chapter XII · TOTEMISM—THE BLOOD COVENANT—CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH SALIVA.

The ritual of other peoples deviates yet more from the type. The cannibal Bondjos of Africa merely put red ochre on the arms and rub them together.256.4 Two men of the Limbu, a Bengali tribe of Mongolian descent, contract brotherhood by a ceremony at which a Brahman, or, when the parties are Buddhists, a Lama, presides and reads mantras or mystic formulæ, while the two friends thrice exchange rupees, handkerchiefs or scarves, and daub each other between the eyebrows with a paste made of rice and curds. And the description of the performance holds good of the Muriari and other tribes of the same province.256.5 In other parts of the world the rite further degenerates into the mere rubbing of noses, or the striking of one another’s breasts with an exchange of names.257.1 Our hand-shaking is a pledge of goodwill and fidelity which, we can hardly doubt, points to the same course of ceremonial decay. The exchange of names, practised so frequently among savage peoples by intimate friends, has no different effect. For the name being part of the person, to confer it upon another and to take that other’s name in exchange is to effect union as close as the mixture of one another’s blood. Among the Abruzzians in Italy, as I mentioned just now, the blood-rite is not yet extinct. It is practised in a milder form by two girls who wish to swear eternal friendship after the manner of maidens. Taking each other by the hand and repeating certain prescribed rhymes, in which they pray with emphasis that the one who breaks the bond may go straight to hell, each of them pulls a hair from her own head and puts it on the other’s. Thenceforth they salute one another as “Gossip,” and may safely make one another the recipient of the most sacred confidences.257.2