Even the spilling of salt, which is so dreaded in primitive thought, may, it is said, be rendered harmless if the person who was guilty of the mishap will carefully gather up the spilled salt with the blade of a knife, and throw it over his left shoulder, with an appropriate invocation.[253]
It is deemed dangerous to give away salt to a stranger; for because salt is as blood and as life, one must be careful lest he put his blood and his life in the power of an enemy.[254] Salt is essential to the preservation of human life; at the same time, salt is the destruction of human life if it be in too great quantity or proportion. Thus the seeming contradiction is only in seeming.
XV
MEANS OF A MERGED LIFE
All life is from the Author and Source of life. Only as two persons become partakers of a common life by each and both sharing in that which is in itself life, can they become one in the all-inclusive Life. Having life from the Source of life, they can merge their common possession in each other, and in that common Source. Such merging in a common life, with an appeal to and by the approval of God, or the gods, has been the root-idea of covenanting, in one way or another, from time immemorial, among all peoples, the world over.
In primitive thought, and in a sense in scientific fact, the blood is the life and the life is in the blood; hence they who share in each other's blood are sharers in a merged and common life. Covenanting in this way with a solemn appeal to God, or to the gods, has been a mode of sacred union from the earliest dawn of human history. Two thus covenanting are supposed to become of one being; the one is the other, and the two are one. Every form of sacrifice, Jewish, Egyptian, Assyrian, or ethnic, is in its primal thought either an evidence and a reminder of an existing covenant between the offerer and the Deity approached, or an appeal and an outreaching for a covenant to be consummated.[255]