9. Primitive basis of kinship.
The primitive idea of kinship rested on this participation in the sacrificial meal, and not on blood-relationship. “In ancient times the fundamental obligations of kinship had nothing to do with degrees of relationship, but rested with absolute and identical force on every member of the clan. To know that a man’s life was sacred to me and that every blood-feud that touched him involved me also, it was not necessary for me to count cousinship with him by reckoning up to our common ancestor; it was enough that we belonged to the same clan and bore the same clan-name. What was my clan was determined by customary law, which was not the same in all stages of society; in the earliest Semitic communities a man was of his mother’s clan, in later times he belonged to the clan of his father. But the essential idea of kinship was independent of the particular form of the law. A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering. This point of view is expressed in the Semitic tongues in many familiar forms of speech. In case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, ‘The blood of M or N has been spilt,’ naming the man; they say, ‘Our blood has been spilt.’ In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is, ‘I am your bone and your flesh.’ Both in Hebrew and in Arabic ‘flesh’ is synonymous with ‘clan’ or kindred group.”[27] Similarly in India a Hindu speaks of any member of his subcaste or clan as his bhai or brother.
“Indeed, in a religion based on kinship, where the god and his worshippers are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and that of kinship are identical. The sanctity of a kinsman’s life and the sanctity of the godhead are not two things but one; for ultimately the only thing which is sacred is the common tribal life or the common blood which is identified with the life. Whatever being partakes in this life is holy, and its holiness may be described indifferently as participation in the divine life and nature, or as participation in the kindred blood.”[28]