The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

by Richard B. Westbrook

“Although now comparatively rare, in view of its responsibilities and of its indissolubleness, this covenant is sometimes entered into by confidential partners in business or by fellow-travelers; again, by robbers on the road, who would themselves rest fearlessly on its obligations, and who could be rested on within its limits, however untrustworthy they or their fellows might be to any other compact. Yet, again, it is the chosen compact of loving friends—of those who are drawn to it only by mutual love and trust.

“There are, indeed, various evidences that the the of blood-covenanting is reckoned in the East even a closer tie than that of natural descent—that a ‘friend’ by this tie is nearer and is dearer, ‘sticketh closer’ than a ‘brother’ by birth. We in the West are accustomed to say that ‘ blood is thicker than water,’ but the Arabs have the idea that blood is thicker than a mother’s milk. With them, any two children nourished at the same breast are called ‘milk-brothers’ or ‘sucking brothers;’ and the tie between such is very strong.

“Lucian, the bright Greek thinker, writing in the middle of the second century of our era, is explicit as to the nature and method of this covenant as then practised in the East: ‘And this is the manner of it: Thereupon, cutting our fingers, all simultaneously, we let the blood drop into a vessel, and, having dipped the points of our swords into it, both of us holding them together, we drink it. There is nothing which can loose us from one another after that.’

“Yet, a little while earlier than Lucian, Tacitus gives record of this rite of blood-brotherhood as practised in the East. He makes an explanation: ‘It is the custom of Oriental kings, as often as they come together to make covenant, to join right hands, to tie the thumbs together, and to tighten them with a knot. Then, when the blood is thus pressed to the finger-tips, they draw blood by a light stroke and lick it in turn. This they regard as a divine covenant, made sacred, as it were, by mutual blood or blended lives.’

“Sallust, the historian of Catiline’s conspiracy against Rome, says: ‘There were those who said at that time that Catiline at this conference, when he inducted them into the oath of partnership in crime, carried round in goblets human blood mixed with wine, and that, after all had tasted of it with an imprecatory oath, as is men's wont in solemn rites, he opened to them his plans.’ Florus, a later Latin historian, describing this conspiracy, says: ‘There was added the pledge of the league—human blood—which they drank as it was borne round to them in goblets.’ And yet later Tertullian suggests that it was their own blood, mingled with wine, of which the fellow-conspirators drank together. ‘Concerning the eating of blood and other such tragic dishes,’ he says, ‘you read that blood drawn from the arms and tasted by one another was the method of making covenant among certain nations.’

“As far back even as the fifth century before Christ we find an explicit description of this Oriental rite of blood-covenanting. ‘Now, the Scythians,’ says Herodotus, ‘make covenants in the following manner, with whomsoever they make them: Having poured out wine into a great earthen drinking-bowl, they mingle with it the blood of those making covenant, striking the body with a small knife or cutting it slightly with a sword. Thereafter they dip into the bowl sword, arrows, axe, and javelin. But while they are doing this they utter many invokings, and afterward not only those who make the covenant, but those of their followers who are of the highest rank, drink off the wine mingled with blood.’

“Again, Herodotus says of this custom in his day: ‘Now, the Arabians reverence in a very high degree pledges between man and man. They make these pledges in the following way: When they wish to make pledges to one another, a third man, standing in the midst of the two, cuts with a sharp stone the inside of the hands along the thumbs of the two making the pledges. After that, plucking some woollen from the garments of each of the two, he anoints with the blood seven stones as the “heap of witness” which are set in the midst. While he is doing this he invokes Dionysus and Urania. When this rite is completed, he that has made the pledges introduces the stranger to his friends, or the fellow-citizen to his fellows if the rite was performed with a fellow-citizen.

“Going back, now, to the world’s most ancient records in the monuments of Egypt, we find evidence of the existence of the covenant of blood in those early days. So far was this symbolic thought carried that the ancient Egyptians spoke of the departed spirit as having entered into the nature, and, indeed, into the very being, of the gods by the rite of tasting blood from the divine arm.

“‘The Book of the Dead,’ as it is commonly called, is a group, or series, of ancient Egyptian writings representing the state and the needs and the progress of the soul after death. A copy of this funereal ritual, ‘more or less complete according to the fortune of the deceased, was deposited in the case of eveiy mummy. ‘As the Book of the Dead is the most ancient, so it is undoubtedly the most important of the sacred books of the Egyptians;’ it is, in fact, ‘according to Egyptian notions, essentially an inspired work;’ hence its contents have an exceptional dogmatic value. In this book there are several obvious references to the rite of blood-covenanting. Some of these are in a chapter of the ritual which was found transcribed in a coffin of the eleventh dynasty, thus carrying it back to a period prior to the days of the patriarchs.

“‘Give me your arm; I am made as ye,’ says the departed soul, speaking to the gods. Then, in explanation of this statement, the pre-historic gloss of the ritual goes on to say: ‘The blood is that which proceeds from the member of the Sun after he goes along cutting himself,’ the covenant blood which unites the soul and the god is drawn from the flesh of Ra when he has cut himself in the rite of that covenant. By this covenant-cutting the deceased becomes one with the covenanting gods. Again, the departing soul, speaking as Osiris—or as the Osirian, which every mummy represents—says: ‘I am the soul in his two halves.' This was at least two thousand years before the days of the Greek philosopher. How much earlier it was recognized does not appear.