The Blood Covenant: A Primitive Rite and its Bearings on Scripture

by H. Clay Trumbull

Yet again, a prisoner of war would be selected to represent one of the gods, and so to be partaken of, in inter-communion through his blood. He would receive the name of the god; and for a longer or a shorter time,—“sometimes a year, sometimes six months, and sometimes less,”—he would be ministered to, and would receive honors and reverence as a god. Then he would be offered in sacrifice. His heart would be presented to the god. His blood would be employed reverently—as was the case with all sacrifices—in token of covenanting. His flesh would be eaten by the worshipers of the god whom he represented.[369] This “rite of dressing and worshiping the sacrifices like the deities themselves, is related as being performed at the festivals of many gods and goddesses.”[370]

A remarkable illustration of the unity of the race, and of the universal sweep of these customs in conjunction with the symbolism of the blood-covenant, is found in the similarity of this last named Central American practice, with a practice charged upon the Jews by Apion, as replied to by Josephus. The charge is, that “Antiochus found, upon entering the temple [at Jerusalem], a man lying upon a bed, with a table before him, set out with all the delicacies that either sea or land could afford.” This captive’s story was: “I am a Greek, and wandering up and down in quest of the means of subsistence, was taken up by some foreigners, brought to this place, and shut up.... They gave me to understand, that the Jews had a custom among them, once a year, upon a certain day prefixed, to seize upon a Grecian stranger, and when they had kept him fattening one whole year, to take him into a wood, and offer him up for a sacrifice according to their own form, taking a taste of his blood, with a horrid oath to live and die sworn enemies to the Greeks.”[371] Baseless as was this charge against the Jews, its very framing indicates the existence in the East,—possibly among the Phœnicians,—in days prior to the Christian era, as well as in pre-historic times in the West, of the custom of seeking inter-communion with God, or with the gods, by the tasting of the blood of a substitute human victim, offered in sacrifice to God, or to the gods.

At the two extremes of the world, to-day, among the primitive Bed´ween of the Desert of Arabia, and among the primitive Indians of the prairies of North America, there lingers a trace of this world-wide idea, that the body of an offering covenanted to God by its blood, can be a means of inter-communion with God in its eating. Both the Bed´ween and the Indians connect in their minds the fact of sacrificing and of feasting; and they speak of the two things interchangeably.

An Arab, when he makes a feast, speaks of sacrificing the animal which is the main feature of that feast. I saw an Arab wedding at Castle Nakhl, on the Arabian Desert. The bridegroom sacrificed a young dromedary in honor of the occasion, and to furnish, as it were, the sacramental feast. The blood of the victim was poured out unto the Lord, by being buried in the earth—as the Chinese bury the blood of their sacrifices in the Temple of Heaven. Portions of the dromedary were eaten by all the guests, and a portion was sent to the stranger encamping near them. And that is the common method of Arab sacrificing and feasting.

There is much of similarity in the ways of the Arabs and of the Indians. The Indian feasts are largely feasts of inter-communion with the gods. Whether it were the human victim, of former times, whose blood was drunk and whose heart was eaten, as preliminary to the feasting on his entire remains;[372] or, whether it be the preserved hearts and tongues of the buffaloes, which now form the basis of some of the sacred feasts of the Indians;[373]—the idea of divine-human inter-communion was and is inseparable from the idea of the feast. The first portion of the feast is always proffered to the spirits, in order to make it, in a peculiar sense, a sacred feast. Then, each person having a part in the feast is expected to eat the full share assigned to him;[374] unless indeed he be permitted to carry a remainder of it away “as sacred food” for the benefit of the others.[375]

And so the common root-idea shows itself, in lesser or in larger degree, all the world over, and in all the ages. It is practically universal.

One of the many proofs that the idea of a blood-covenanting sacrifice is that of a loving inter-communion between man and God, or the gods, is the fact that the animals offered in sacrifice are always those animals which are suitable for eating, whether their eating is allowed at other times than when sacrificed, or not. “Animals offered in sacrifice [at the Temple of Heaven, in China],” says Dr. Edkins, “must be those in use for human food. There is no trace in China of any distinction between clean and unclean animals, as furnishing a principle in selecting them for sacrifice. That which is good for food is good for sacrifice, is the principle guiding in their selection.”[376] The same principle has been already noted as prevailing in the sacrifices of India, Assyria, and Egypt; although in these last named countries many animals which are “good for food” are not “in use for human food” except as they are served up at the table of the gods.[377] In the primitive New World it was the same as in the primitive Old World. Referring to the sacrifices in ancient Peru, Réville says, “It should be noted that they only sacrificed edible animals, which [as he would understand it] is a clear proof that the intention was to feed the gods”;[378] and it certainly seems a clear proof that the intention was to feed the worshipers who shared the sacred food.

That this sharing of the proffered and accepted sacrifice, in divine-human inter-communion, was counted a sharing of the divine nature, by the communicant, seems evident, as widely as the world-wide custom extended. The inter-union was wrought by intermingled blood; the inter-communion gave a common progress to the common nature. The blood gave common life; the flesh gave common nourishment. “Almost everywhere,” says Réville,[379] “but especially among the Aztecs, we find the notion, that the victim devoted to a deity, and therefore destined to pass into his substance, and to become by assimilation an integral part of him, is already co-substantial with him, has already become part of him; so that the worshiper in his turn, by himself assimilating a part of the victim’s flesh, unites himself in substance with the divine being. And now observe [continues this student in the science of comparative religion] that in all religions the longing, whether grossly or spiritually apprehended, to enter into the closest possible union with the adored being, is fundamental. This longing is inseparable from the religious sentiment itself, and becomes imperious wherever that sentiment is warm; and this consideration is enough to convince us that it is in harmony with the most exalted tendencies of our nature, but may likewise, in times of ignorance, give rise to the most deplorable aberrations.” This observation is the more noteworthy, in that it is made by so pronounced a rationalist as Réville.

It would even seem to be indicated, by all the trend of historic facts, that cannibalism—gross, repulsive, inhuman cannibalism—had its basis in man’s perversion of this outreaching of his nature (whether that outreaching were first directed by revelation, or by divinely given innate promptings) after inter-union and inter-communion with God; after life in God’s life, and after growth through the partaking of God’s food, or of that food which represents God. The studies of many observers in widely different fields have led both the rationalistic and the faith-filled student to conclude, that in their sphere of observation it was a religious sentiment, and not a mere animal craving,—either through a scarcity of food, or from a spirit of malignity,—that was at the bottom of cannibalistic practices there; even if that field were an exception to the world’s fields generally. And now we have a glimpse of the nature and workings of that religious sentiment which prompted cannibalism wherever it has been practised.