[73] Ibid. p. 265.
[74] Ibid. p. 124 sqq.
Yet another practice has been adduced as evidence of the supreme importance which the primitive clan is supposed to attach to unity in blood—the so-called blood-covenant. The members of a clan, Mr. Hartland observes, may not be all descended from a common ancestry. Though descent is the normal, the typical cause of kinship and a common blood, kinship may also be acquired. “To acquire kinship, the blood of the candidate for admission into the kin must be mingled with that of the kin. In this way he enters into the brotherhood, is reckoned as of the same stock, obtains the full privileges of a kinsman.”[75] As Professor Robertson Smith puts it, “he who has drunk a clansman’s blood is no longer a stranger but a brother, and included in the mystic circle of those who have a share in the life-blood that is common to all the clan.”[76] Mr. Hartland gives us a short account of the rite:—“It is sufficient that an incision be made in the neophyte’s arm and the flowing blood sucked from it by one of the clansmen, upon whom the operation is repeated in turn by the neophyte. Originally, perhaps, the clansmen all assembled and partook of the rite; but if so, the necessity has ceased to be recognised almost everywhere. The form, indeed, has undergone numberless variations…. But, whatever may be the exact form adopted, the essence of the rite is the same, and its range is world-wide.” Then there follows a list of peoples from various quarters of the world among whom it is said to prevail.[77]
[75] Hartland, op. cit. ii. 237.
[76] Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 315.
[77] Hartland, op. cit. 237 sqq.
From this the reader undoubtedly gets the impression that the mingling of blood is a frequently practised ceremony of adoption, by which a person is admitted into a strange clan. But the facts stated by the chief authorities on the subject, to whom Mr. Hartland refers, prove nothing of the kind. In most cases with which we are acquainted the mingling of blood is a form of covenant between individuals, although an engagement with a chief or king naturally embraces his subjects also; and sometimes the covenanters are tribes or kingdoms. But of the “world-wide” adoption rite there is hardly a single instance which corresponds to Mr. Hartland’s description. He admits himself that “in the same measure as the clan relaxed its hold upon the individual members, blood-brotherhood assumed a personal aspect, until, having no longer any social force, it came to be regarded as merely the most solemn and binding form of covenant between man and man.”[78] His account of the blood-covenant is, in fact, only an inference based on the assumption that the existing rite is a survival from times when the clan was literally one body and the individual nothing but an amputated limb. But to regard the present blood-covenant as a survival of a previous rite of adoption into the clan is not justified by facts. So far as I know, there is no record of a blood-covenant among savages of the lowest type, unless the aborigines of Australia be included among them; and in Australia it is certainly not a ceremony of adoption. Among the Arunta it is intended to prevent treachery: “if, for example, an Alice Springs party wanted to go on an avenging expedition to the Burt country, and they had with them in camp a man of that locality, he would be forced to drink blood with them, and, having partaken of it, would be bound not to aid his friends by giving them warning of their danger.”[79] This instance is instructive. The Australian native is obliged to help those with whom he has drunk blood against his own relatives, nay, against members of his own totem group. So also “the tie of blood-covenanting is reckoned in the East even a closer tie than that of natural descent,”[80] and the same was the case among the ancient Scandinavians.[81] I do not see how Mr. Hartland’s theory can account for this.
[78] Ibid. ii. 240.
[79] Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 461.
[80] Trumbull, Blood Covenant, p. 10.