The Blood-covenant takes many forms besides that of the blood-brotherhood, which are not to be explained by this writer’s theory of exchange.
When the blood of an African woman accidentally spurted into the eye of Dr. Livingstone, she claimed him for her blood relation, without there being any exchange of blood for blood.
Dr. Trumbull claims the Egyptians as witnesses to the truth of his interpretation. But so far from their highest conception of “a union with the Divine nature” being an inter-flowing and interfusion of blood, the soul of blood was the very lowest, that is the first, in a series of seven souls!
Their highest type of the soul was the sun that vivified for ever called Atmu, the Father Soul.[[53]] The bases of natural fact which lie at the foundation of the Blood-covenant, preceded any and all such ideas as those postulated by the writer as being extant from the first, such as “a longing for oneness of life with God;” an “out-reaching after inter-union and inter-communion with God.” There was no conception of a one God extant in the category of human consciousness when the rites of a blood-covenant were first founded. There could be no atonement where there was no sense of sin or a breaking of the law. All through, the writer is apt to confuse the past with the present, and eager to read the present into the past.[[54]]
The real roots of matters like these are to be found only in certain facts of nature which were self-revealing, and not in the sphere of concepts and causation! And it is only when we can reach the natural genesis of primitive customs and fetishtic beliefs, and trace their lines of descent, that we can understand and interpret their meaning in the latest symbolical and superstitious phase of religious rites. Nothing can be more fatally false than to interpret the physics of the past by means of modern metaphysic, with the view of proving that certain extant doctrines of delusion are the lineal descendants of an original Divine revelation, which has been bound up in two Testaments for the favoured few.
The blood-covenant is undoubtedly a primitive rite; but the author of this work does not penetrate to its most primitive or significant phases. These are not to be read by the light of Hebrew revelation, but by the light of nature if at all. Many primitive customs and rites survived amongst the Semites, but they themselves were not amongst the aboriginal races of the world. We have to get far beyond their stage to understand the meaning of the myths, legends, rites, and customs, that were preserved by them as sacred survivals from the remoter past. The symbolical and superstitious phases of custom cannot be directly explained on the spot where we may first meet with them in going back. In becoming symbolical they had already passed out of their primary phase, and only indirectly represent the natural genesis of the truly primitive rite. I have spent the best part of my life in tracking these rites and customs to their natural origin, and in expounding the typology and symbols by which the earliest meaning was expressed.
What then was the root-origin of a blood-covenant? The primary perceptions of primitive or archaic men included the observation that they came from the mother, and first found themselves at her breast.
Next they saw that the child was fleshed by the mother, and formed from her blood, the flow of which was arrested to be solidified, and take form in their own persons. Thus the red amulet which was worn by the Egyptian dead, was representative of the blood of Isis, who came from herself, and made her own child without the fatherhood, when men could only derive their blood and descent from the mother. This amulet was put on by her, says Plutarch, when she found herself enceinte with Horus, her child, who was derived from the mother alone, or was traced solely to the blood of Isis. Primitive men could perceive that the children of one mother were of the same blood. This, the first form of a blood-brotherhood, was the first to be recognised as the natural fact. Uterine brothers were blood-brothers. The next stage of the brotherhood was Totemic; and the mode of extending the brotherhood to the children of several mothers implies, as it necessitated, some form of symbolic rite which represented them as brothers, or as typically becoming of the one blood. Here we can track the very first step in sociology which was made when the typical blood-brotherhood of the Totem was formed in imitation of the natural brotherhood of the mother-blood. The modes and forms of the Covenant can be identified by the Totemic mysteries, some of which yet survive in the crudest condition. The brotherhood was entered at the time of puberty; that is, at the time of re-birth, when the boy was re-born as a man, and the child of the mother attained the soul of the fatherhood, and was permitted to join the ranks of the begetters. The mystery is one with that of Horus, child of the mother alone, who comes to receive the soul of the father in Tattu, the region of establishing the son as the father, which is still extant in the mysteries, and the symbolism of Tattoo.
This re-birth was enacted in various ways by typically re-entering the womb. One of these was by burial in the earth, the tomb or place of re-birth being the image of the maternal birth-place all the world over. Thus when the Norsemen or other races prepared a hole under the turf, and buried their cut and bleeding arms to let the blood flow, and commingle in one as the token of a covenant, they were returning typically to the condition of uterine twins, and the act of burial for the purpose of a re-birth was a symbolical mode of establishing the social brotherhood upon the original grounds of the natural brotherhood of blood. Thus the blood-covenant did not originate in the set transfusion or inter-fusion of blood. In the Totemic mysteries the pubescent lad was admitted by the shedding of his blood, with or without any interchange. The blood itself was the symbol of brotherhood, and the shedding of it was the seal of a covenant.
Nor was this merely because flesh was formed of blood, or the first men were made of the mystical red soil, as with the aarea of the Tahitians, or the red earth of the Adamic man. Most of these primitive rites, the Blood-Covenant included, had their starting-point from the period of puberty. It was at this time the lads who were not brothers uterine were made brothers of the Totem at what was termed the festival of young-man-making. The proper period for circumcision, or cutting and sealing, as still practised by the oldest aborigines, is the time of puberty, the natural coming of age. It is then they enter the Totemic Brotherhood. Now in Egyptian, the word khet or khut = cut, means to cut and to seal. Khetem is to enclose, bind, seal, and is applied to sealing. The same root passes into Assyrian and Hebrew as Khatan, Katam or Chatan, with the same meaning. In Arabic, Khatana is to circumcise. Cutting and sealing are identical as the mode of entering into a Blood-Covenant. Circumcision was one form of the sealing, but there were various kinds of cuts employed, and different parts of the body were scarified and tattooed. In the primary phase, then, the blood-brotherhood was established by the shedding of blood; the register was written in blood, and instead of the covenant being witnessed by the seal of red wax, it was stamped in blood.