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PARTICULAR attention
has been recently directed to this subject of Blood-Covenant by the
experiences of explorers in Africa, who appear to have discovered in
that Dark Land some of the primitive facts the gory ghost of which has
long haunted our European mind in the Eschatological phase.
Stanley, an especial. sufferer from the practice, denounces
the blood-brotherhood as a beastly cannibalistic ceremony. "For
the fiftieth time my poor arm was scarified and my blood shed for the
cause of civilization." As the writer of this book observes: "The
blood of a fair proportion of all the first families of equatorial
Africa now courses in Stanley's veins; and if ever there was an American
citizen who could pre-eminently appropriate to himself the national
motto 'E pluribus unum,' Stanley is the man."
In his book, Dr. Trumbull has collected a mass of data from a
wide range of sources to illustrate what he terms the "Primitive rite
of covenanting by the inter transfusion of blood."
Dr. Trumbull is anxious to make the efficacy of the rite
depend upon the recognition of a vivifying virtue in the blood itself,
as the essence of life. But such recognition appears to have been
remote enough from the Primitive thought. The Aborigines were not
Jews or Christians. They gave of their life without always
thinking of the exact equivalent or superior value received. They
gave it as the witness to the troth they plighted and the covenant which
they intended to keep. His theory of interpretation is that there
was a dominating and universal conviction that the "blood is the life;
that blood-transfer is soul-transfer, and that blood-sharing, human or
divine-human, secures an inter-union of natures; and that a union of
the human nature with the divine is the highest ultimate attainment
reached out after by the most primitive, as well as the most
enlightened, mind of humanity."
His collection of facts may serve a most useful purpose as
eye-openers to other people (and for other facts to follow), just as
they appear to have been to himself. The book is interesting, if
not profound; and nothing that follows in this article is intended to
decry it, or to prevent the readers of LUCIFER from looking into it if
they do not feel too great a "scunner" at sight of the gilded-gory
illustration on the cover. But the work is written by one who
talks to us out of a window of Noah's Ark, and who still seems to think
the Hebrew Bible is the rim of the universe. We value and
recommend the book solely for its facts, not for its theories, nor for
its bibliolatry.
In all studies of this kind which make use of the word
"Primitive," it is the fundamental facts that we first need; and next a
first-hand acquaintanceship with all the facts, so that we may do our
own thinking for ourselves and strike our light within by which we can
read the facts without, as the primary and essential procedure in the
endeavour to attain the truth.
Also the facts may be genuine and honestly presented, yet the
interpretation may be according to an inadequate or a "bogus" theory.
The truth is that no bibliolator can be trusted to interpret the past of
our race now being unveiled by evolution. He is born and begotten
with the blinkers on. His mode of interpretation is to get behind
us, to lay the hands upon our eyes in front, and ask us to listen whilst
he gives us his views of the past! But the non-evolutionist cannot
interpret the past from lack of a true standpoint with regard to the
beginnings or rather the processes of becoming. He can begin
anywhere and at any time short of the starting-point. There is
nothing for it but to break away, and turn round to see for ourselves
whether the traditionary vision of the Blinkerists be true or false.
The facts alone are the final determinatives of the Truth. But we
must have the whole of them and not a few, whether judiciously or
Jesuitically selected to support a Christian theory. Whereas, the
object and aim of this work the bias of the writer, and the trend of his
arguments, are all on the line of showing or suggesting that the
blood-covenant was the result of some innate instinct or divine
revelation which prefigured and foreshadowed, and may be taken to
indicate and authorize, the Christian scheme of atonement, and the
remission of sin by the shedding of innocent blood. The writer
asserts that this primitive symbolism was "made a reality in Jesus
Christ," in whom "God was to give of his blood in the blood of his Son
for the revivifying of the sons of Abraham in the Blood of the Eternal
Covenant." But it can be demonstrated that the covenant by
blood did not commence where Dr. Trumbull begins—with a religious
yearning God-ward for the establishing of a brotherhood between the
human nature and the Divine. The root-idea was not that of an "
inter-union of the spiritual natures by the inter-commingling of blood
for the sake of an inter-communion with deity." That, at least,
was by no means the "primitive rite," which the blood-covenant is
here called. The many forms of the blood-covenant can only be
unified at the root, i.e., in the beginning, not at the end.
They are not to be understood apart from the primitive language of
signs; as in Tattoo, the very primitive biology of the early observers,
and the most primitive sociology of the Totemic times.
Time was, and may be still, when the blood-covenant would
often serve as the one protection against being killed and eaten.
Even the cannibals will not partake of their own Totemic brothers.
Also the covenant was extended to certain animals which were made of kin
and held to be sacred as brothers of the blood.
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.[1]
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.[2]
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 rebirth, 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 = out, 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.
The reason for phallic localization is to be sought in the
fact that the young men not only entered the Brotherhood by the baptism
of blood, they were also received into the higher ranks of the fathers,
and sworn in to live an orderly, legal and cleanly life, henceforth, as
the pro-creators and loyal preservers of the race.
But this was not the only clue directly derived from nature.
There is another reason why blood should have become the sacred sign of
a covenant. Amongst many primitive races blood, or the colour red,
is the symbol of Tapu, the sign of sanctity. The bones of
the dead were covered with red ochre as a means of protection by the
most widely scattered races in the world. The stamp of a red hand
on the building, or a crimson daub upon the gravestone will render them
sacred. The Kaffirs will wash their bodies with blood as a
protection against being wounded in battle. The colour of
robin-redbreast still renders him tapu or sacred to English
children.
Blood having become a sign of that which is true and sacred,
on account of the Covenant, it is then made the symbol of all that is
sacred. It can be used for the purpose of anointing the living or
the dead, can be the seal of the marriage or other ceremonies and rites
of, covenanting. It is the primæval token of tapu.
As I have elsewhere shown, blood was sworn by as the type of
that which was true, the primary one of the typical Two Truths of Egypt.
It was so in all the mysteries, and is so to-day, including the
mysteries of Masonry. I have suggested the derivation of the
masonic name from the Egyptian Sen = son, for blood and
brotherhood. The working Mason in Egyptian is the makh (makht)
by name.
Makh means to work, inlay by rule and measure. We see that
makh modifies into mâ for measure, and for that which is just
and true.
Mâ-sen = Mason, would denote the true
brotherhood ; and as sen is also blood, the true brotherhood as
the blood-brotherhood would be the masons in the mystical or occult
sense. Red is the colour of Mâ or Truth personified, and
sen is blood. Blood is sworn by because it is the colour of
truth, or the true colour. Now in old English the word seng
means both "blood" and "true." Here, then, we find the origin of
the oath, which constitutes the supreme expression in the vocabulary of
our English roughs, when they use the oath of the blood-covenant, and
swear by the word "bloody!" When they wax emphatic, every thing
they say becomes "bloody true." This is the exact equivalent of
"seng it is" for "it is true." According to the primitive
mysteries, this mode of swearing, or establishing the covenant, was
sacred whilst kept piously secret, and it becomes impious when made
public or profane. Such mysteries were very simply natural at
first, and it was this primitive simplicity and nearness to nature which
demanded the veil to protect them from the gaze of the later
consciousness. Time was when the English felon would carry a red
handkerchief with him to the scaffold, and hold it in his hand as a
signal that he had betrayed no secrets, but died "bloody true," or true
blood.
These customs were symbolical, but there is a hint of the
blood-covenant beyond them—a hint received direct from Nature
herself—call it revelation if you please. In the first rude ethics
we find that the time for the sexes to come together was recognised by
the intimation of nature, made in her own sign-language at the period of
feminine pubescence. Nature gave the hint, and a covenant was
established. Henceforth, the child that could not enter that
covenant would be protected from brutal assault, and was allowed, or
rather compelled, to run about unclothed in token of her exemption.
It is here in the swearing-in and covenanting of the sexes at the time
of pubescence that we discover another real and most secret, i.e.,
sacred root of the rite.
The self-revelation made by nature to primitive man was very
primitive in its kind. She not only demonstrated that the blood
was the life, or that the life passed away with the letting out of the
blood, but in another domain, which our author has not entered, she
showed that blood was, and how it was, the future life. Blood was
the primary witness to the future life which the child received from the
mother. It was the token of the time when the female could become
the bearer of that future life which took flesh and form in her blood.
The blood-covenanting of the primitive races is still a part
of the most elaborate system of making presents, which are the express
witnesses of proffered troth and intended fealty. The most precious or
sacred things are parted from in proof. The best is given on
either side. And in the offering of blood, they were giving their
very life, that in which the best attains supremacy. But these
primitive rites can never be truly read except by those who are deeply
grounded in the fact, and well acquainted with the evidence, that
sign-language was primordial, that gestures preceded verbal speech, and
acting was an earlier mode of representing than talking. Primitive
men could only
do that which we can say. In Egyptian that which is
said is done. And in these primitive customs and
religious rites we see the early races of men performing in pantomime
the early drama of dumb or inarticulate humanity. And it seems as
if this primitive language could produce an impression and reach a
reality that are unapproachable by means of words. The
significance of the teaching went all the deeper when it was incised in
the flesh and branded into the blood. For example, what a terrific
glimpse of reality is revealed by the fact that the Malagasy make their
sign of a blood-covenant by an incision in the skin that covers the
bosom, and this opening with its utterance of blood is called ambavfo,
the "mouth of the heart." Thus the covenant is made in the blood, which
is the very life, uttering itself with the mouth of the heart. In
Egyptian the covenant, the oath, and the life, have the same name of
Ankhu; and the greatest oath was to swear by the life or the blood
of the Pharaoh. The primitive mode was to slash the flesh and let
the hot blood spout and speak for itself with the "mouth of the heart,"
the utterance of the living letter and red seal of the wound, as true
witness.
No verbal covenant or written record of the modern races has
ever had the full force and effect of these modes of covenanting amongst
the primitive people of the past. The moderns do not keep their
word with anything like the inviolable sanctity of the aborigines; when
once they are sworn to fealty, the covenant is almost never broken.
Few things in poetry are more pathetic than the story related of Tolo, a
chief of the Shastika Indians on the Pacific Coast. In the year
1852 he entered into a tribal treaty with Colonel McKee and was desirous
of making a covenant for life in some way that could not possibly be
violated. Instead of exchanging blood he proposed a transfer of
their own two personal names. Henceforth he was to be known as
McKee, and the Colonel as Tolo. But the treaty was discarded, the
covenant was not kept by the American Government. In reply, the
Indian cast off the title of McKee and refused to resume his own
tarnished and degraded name of Tolo! He considered that his very
identity was lost by this mode of losing his good name! I doubt whether
1,800 years of Christianity have evolved in the later races of men a
consciousness of truth, probity, and loyalty, so quick and profound as
that!
The writer of this book remains stone-blind to its own
teachings with regard to the doctrine of survivals, and of the past
persisting as a pattern for the present. To quote his own words,
he rejoices in the "blessed benefits of the covenant of blood,"
and is still a fervent supporter of the great delusion inculcated by the
gospel of ruddy gore. The doctrine is fundamentally the same
whether the Greek murderer was cleansed from his guilt by the filthy
purification of pig's blood or the modern sinner is supposed to be
washed white in the Blood of the Lamb.
As I had already written in my "Natural Genesis," "the
religious ritual of the moderns is crowded like a kitchen-midden with
the refuse relics of customs that were natural once, and are now clung
to as if they were supernatural in their efficacy because their origin
has been unknown. Indeed, the current masquerade in these
appurtenances of the past is as sorry a sight to the archaic student as
are the straw crowns and faded finery of the kings and queens whose
domain is limited to the lunatic asylum." Dr. Trumbull endorses
the doctrine that "Mortals gave the blood of their first-born sons in
sacrifice to the Supreme Being, then the Supreme Being gave the blood of
his first-born male in sacrifice" for men; and there you have the
covenant of blood in its final form!
It is true that first-born children were offered in sacrifice
just as the first take of fish was returned to the waters with a lively
sense of future favours from the Typhonian power thus propitiated, but
where is the sense of talking about the thought of an intercommunion
with the divine nature through a blood-union with God as a concept in
the mind of primitive man? It is true the recognized
nature-powers, or devils of physical force, were invoked with blood, but
what was the status of these powers when the beasts of blood were their
representatives on earth, and the blood, which is the life, was given to
the Serpent, for instance, as the likeness of life itself because it
sloughed its own skin and manifested the enviable power of self-renewal?
The profounder and more fundamental our researches, the more clearly
does it become apparent that we have been victimised by the unsuspected
survival of the past in the present, and that the veriest leavings of
primitive man have been palmed off upon us by the ignorant as sacred
mysteries and revelations guaranteed to be original and divine.
Continually we find that our errors of belief are based upon very simple
truths that have been misunderstood through a misinterpretation of
primitive matters and modes of representation by means of modern
ignorance. The blood-covenant of the aboriginal races has
undoubtedly survived and culminated as Christian in the frightful
formula, "Without blood there is no remission of sin." Not merely
the blood of beasts or human creatures this time, but the ruddy life and
ichor of a supposed Divine Being, who was made flesh on purpose to pour
out the blood for Almighty vengeance to lap in the person of a gory
ghost of God. One of the seven primal powers in Egypt was
represented by the hawk, because it drank blood. One of the Seven
in Akkad was the vampire. And this type of blood-drinking has been
divinised at last as the Christian God.
Pindar says: "It is impossible for me to call one of the
blessed gods a cannibal." But the Christian scheme makes the Only
God a cannibal, who offers the flesh and blood of his own Son and Very
Self as sacrificial food made sacred for his followers. Such a god
is, in two senses, chimerical. How natural an accompaniment
is the picture of the Crucified Christ to the Zuni saying, "My Father,
this day shalt thou refresh thyself with blood!" Such a doctrine
is but an awful shadow of the primitive past—the shadow, so to say, of
our old earth in the very far-off past—that remains to eclipse the light
of Heaven to-day, and darken the souls of men in the present through the
survival of savage spiritualism in its final Christian phase, where the
extant doctrines are little more than an ignorant perversion of the most
primitive knowledge.
It is in this final and not in the primitive phase that we
shall identify the irrationalty, the impiety, the disgusting grossness
of Mythology under the surface of theological varnish and veneer.
The only senselessness is in the survival of Myths without their sense.
Lastly, it is observable that in the genuine rite the
covenant-makers always bled directly and suffered each for
themselves. Later on we find that other victims were substituted
by purchase, by fraud, or by force; hence the blood-covenant by proxy.
Now the Christian scheme is that which culminated in the blood-covenant
and atonement by proxy. "His offspring for his life he gave,"
is said of an Akkadian ruler who sacrificed his own son as an expiatory
offering to save himself from the consequences of his own sin. And
this doctrine of the despicable, this type of the fatherhood, is
elevated to the status of divinity by Dr. Trumbull. To quote his
own words, the inspired author of the narrative found in the Hebrew
Genesis shows "Abel lovingly and trustfully reaching out toward God with
substitute
blood!"
And there began for the Historic Christians that vast
perversion of a primitive custom which culminated at last in the
Christian doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, based upon the mythology of
the Old Testament being literalized in the New. Now we have the
ludicrous spectacle of salvation by means of a rite which has lost all
the manhood, all the morality, all the meaning, that was put into it by
the despised races of uncivilized men.
The eucharistic rite is incredibly primitive when really
understood. The bread and wine of the Christian sacrament still
represent the male spirit and the female source of life. The
"Blood of Jesus," which was to be "drink indeed," is identical with the
"Blood of Bacchus," which preceded historic Christianity, and has been
substituted for the human or animal blood of the earlier mysteries.
Imbibing the blood of the Christ did not originate in any historic or
personal transaction. Also the blood of Christ, or Mithras, or
Horus, employed in drinking the covenant, was preceded by the blood of
Charis. In some of the Gnostic mysteries we have the proof that
the first form of the saving blood was feminine, not masculine at all.
Irenæus presents us with a picture of profound interest from the
anthropological point of view.
He tells us how Marcus performed the eucharistic rite with
the blood of Charis, instead of the blood of Christ. He handed
cups to the women and bade them consecrate these in his presence.
Then, by the use of magical incantation, "Charis was thought to drop her
own blood into the cup" thus consecrated. (B. 1. 13, 2.)
There is but one known fact in natural phenomena which will
fitly account as Vera Causa for a monthly Sacrament, celebrated
every twenty-eight days, or thirteen times to the year; which fact was
commemorated by the Blood-Covenant of Charis (Vide "Nat. Gen." V.
ii. section 12, for proofs). This kind of blood-covenant can be
paralleled in the Yain or Yonian mysteries of India.
When rightly understood, the eucharist is a survival of the
"beastly cannibalistic ceremony," whether considered as the blood of
Charis or the blood of Christ, or partaken of as the red Tent wine or
the " bloody wafer" of Rome.
We welcome Dr. Trumbull's contribution on the subject,
although he has but "breathed a vein" of it, because these rites and
customs have to be unveiled, and when they are at last exposed in all
the simplicity of naked nature the erroneous ideas read into them, the
delusive inferences drawn from them, the false illusions painted upon
the veil that concealed the truth about them, will be doomed to pass
away. To explain the true is the only effectual mode of exploding
the false.
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