SUGGESTIONS AND PERVERSIONS OF THE RITE.
II.
SUGGESTIONS AND PERVERSIONS OF THE RITE.
1. SACREDNESS OF BLOOD AND OF THE HEART.
Apart from, and yet linked with, the explicit proofs of the rite of blood-covenanting throughout the primitive world, there are many indications of the root-idea of this form of covenanting; in the popular estimate of blood, and of all the marvelous possibilities through blood-transference. These indications, also, are of old, and from everywhere.
To go back again to the earlier written history of the world; it is evident that the ancient Egyptians recognized blood as in a peculiar sense life itself; and that they counted the heart,—as the blood-source and the blood-centre,—the symbol and the substance of life. In the Book of the Dead, the deceased speaks of his heart,—or his blood-fountain,—as his life; and as giving him the right to appear in the presence of the gods: “My heart was my mother; my heart was my mother; my heart was my being on earth; placed within me; returned to me by the chief gods, placing me before the gods”[190] [in the presence of the gods]. In the process of embalming, the heart was always preserved with jealous care;[191] and sometimes it was embalmed by itself in a sepulchral vase.[192] It was the heart—as the life, which is the blood—that seems to have been put into the scales of the divine Judge for the settling of the soul’s destiny;[193] according to all the Egyptian pictures of the judgment. Throughout the Book of the Dead, and in all the sacred teachings and practices of the ancient Egyptians, with reference to human life and human destiny, the heart is obviously recognized as the analogon of blood, and blood as the analogon of life. Moreover, the life, which is represented by the blood and by the heart, appears to be counted peculiarly the gift and the guarded treasure of Deity, and as being in itself a resemblance to, if not actually a part of, the divine nature.[194]