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.