LECTURE II.
SUGGESTIONS AND PERVERSIONS OF THE RITE.
Apart from, and yet linked with, the explicit proofs of the rite of blood-covenanting throughout the primitive world, there are many indications of the root-idea of this form of covenanting; in the popular estimate of blood, and of all the marvelous possibilities through blood-transference. These indications, also, are of old, and from everywhere.
To go back again to the earlier written history of the world; it is evident that the ancient Egyptians recognized blood as in a peculiar sense life itself; and that they counted the heart,—as the blood-source and the blood-centre,—the symbol and the substance of life. In the Book of the Dead, the deceased speaks of his heart,—or his blood-fountain,—as his life; and as giving him the right to appear in the presence of the gods: “My heart was my mother; my heart was my mother; my heart was my being on earth; placed within me; returned to me by the chief gods, placing me before the gods”[190] [in the presence of the gods]. In the process of embalming, the heart was always preserved with jealous care;[191] and sometimes it was embalmed by itself in a sepulchral vase.[192] It was the heart—as the life, which is the blood—that seems to have been put into the scales of the divine Judge for the settling of the soul’s destiny;[193] according to all the Egyptian pictures of the judgment. Throughout the Book of the Dead, and in all the sacred teachings and practices of the ancient Egyptians, with reference to human life and human destiny, the heart is obviously recognized as the analogon of blood, and blood as the analogon of life. Moreover, the life, which is represented by the blood and by the heart, appears to be counted peculiarly the gift and the guarded treasure of Deity, and as being in itself a resemblance to, if not actually a part of, the divine nature.[194]
Even of the lower animals, the heart and the heart’s blood were counted sacred to the gods, and were not to be eaten by the Egyptians; as if life belonged only to the Giver of life, and, when passing out from a lower organism, must return, or be returned, only to its original Source.
When the soul stands before the forty-two judges, in the Hall of the Two Truths, to give answer concerning its sins, one of its protesting avowals, as recorded in the Book of the Dead, is: “Oh Glowing Feet, coming out of the darkness! I have not eaten the heart;”[195] In my earthly life-course, I have not committed the sacrilege of heart-eating. Yet, of the sacrificial offering of “a red cow,” as prescribed in the Book of the Dead, “of the blood squeezed from the heart, one hundred drops,”[196] make a portion for the gods. In one of the tombs of Memphis, there is represented a scene of slaughtering animals. As the heart of an animal is taken out, the butcher who holds it says,—as shown by the accompanying hieroglyphics,—“Take care of this heart;”[197] as if that were a portion to be guarded sacredly. “Keep thy heart with all diligence [or, as the margin has it, “above all thou guardest”]; for out of it are the issues of life.”[198] It may, indeed, have been from the lore of Egypt that Solomon obtained this proverb of the ages, to pass it onward to posterity with his stamp of inspiration.
It would even seem that the blood of animals was not allowed to be eaten by the Egyptians; although there has been a question at that point, among Egyptologists. Wilkinson thinks that they did employ it in cooking;[199] but this is only his inference from a pictured representation of the blood being caught in a vessel, when an animal is slaughtered for the table. On the other hand, that same picture shows the vessel of blood being borne away, afterwards, on uplifted hands;[200] as it would have been if it were designed for a sacred libation. Again, the other picture, reported by Birch, as showing the butcher’s care of the heart, represents the blood as “collected in a jar with a long spout”; such as was used for sacred libations.[201] It is evident that blood was offered to the gods of Egypt in libation, as was also wine.[202] Indeed the common Egyptian word for blood (inline illustration, senf) is regularly followed by the determinative of outpouring (inline illustration). The word tesher, “red,” is sometimes used as a synonym for senf; in this case (and in this only) the determinative of outpouring is added to the hieroglyphics for tesher. Moreover, among the forty-two judges, before whom the dead appears, he who is “Eater of Blood” comes next in order before the “Eater of Hearts”;[203] as if blood-eating, like heart-eating, were a prerogative of the gods.
If proof were still wanting that, in ancient Egypt, it was the heart which was deemed the epitome of life, and that the heart had this pre-eminence because of its being the fountain of blood—which is life—that proof would be found in “The Tale of the Two Brothers”; a story that was prepared in its present form by a tutor of the Pharaoh of the exodus, while the latter was yet heir presumptive to the throne. This story has been the subject of special study by De Rougé, Chabas, Maspero, Brugsch, Birch, Goodwin, and Le Page Renouf. It is from the latter’s translation, that I draw my facts for this reference.[204]
Anpu and Bata were brothers. Bata’s experience with the wife of Anpu was like that of Joseph in the house of Potiphar. He was true, like Joseph. Like Joseph, he was falsely accused, his life was sought, and his innocence was vindicated. Then, for his better protection, Bata took his heart out from his body, and put that in a safe place, while he made his home near it. To his brother he had said:
“I shall take my heart, and place it in the top of the flower of the cedar, and when the cedar is cut down it will fall to the ground. Thou shalt come to seek it. If thou art seven years in search of it, let not thy heart be depressed, and when thou hast found it thou shalt place it in a cup of cold water. Oh, then I shall live (once more).”
After a time the cedar, through the treachery of Bata’s false wife, was cut down. As it fell, with the heart of Bata, the latter dropped dead. For more than three years Anpu sought his brother’s heart; then he found it. “He brought a vessel of cold water, dropped the heart into it, and sat down according to his daily wont. But when the night was come, the heart absorbed the water. Bata [whose body seems to have been preserved—like a mummy—all this time] trembled in all his limbs, and continued looking at his elder brother, but his heart was faint. Then Anpu took the vessel of cold water which his brother’s heart was in. And when the latter [Bata] had drunk it up, his heart rose in its place; and he became as he had been before. Each embraced the other, and each one of them held conversation with his companion.”
The revivified Bata was transformed into a sacred bull, an Apis. That bull, by the treachery, again, of Bata’s wife, was killed. “And as they were killing him, and he was in the hands of his attendants, he shook his neck, and two drops of blood fell upon the two door-posts of His Majesty [in whose keeping was the sacred bull]; one was on the one side of the great staircase of His Majesty, the other upon the other side; and they grew up into two mighty persea trees, each of which stood alone.” Thus the blood was both life and life-giving, and the heart was as the very soul of its possessor, in the estimation of the ancient Egyptians.
In primitive America also, as in ancient Egypt, the blood and the heart, were held pre-eminently sacred. Among the Dakotas, in North America, the heart of the deer and of other animals killed in hunting, was offered to the spirits.[205] In Central America and in South America, it was the blood and the heart of the human victims offered in sacrifice, which were counted the peculiar portion of the gods.[206] In description of a human sacrifice among the Nahuas of Central America,[207] a Mexican historian says: “The high priest then approached, and with a heavy knife of obsidian cut open the miserable man’s breast. Then, with a dexterity acquired by long practice, the sacrificer tore forth the yet palpitating heart, which he first offered to the sun, and then threw at the feet of the idol. Taking it up, he again offered it to the god, and afterwards burned it; preserving the ashes with great care and veneration. Sometimes the heart was placed in the mouth [of the idol] with a golden spoon. It was customary also to anoint the lips of the image, and the cornices of the door with the victim’s blood.”[208]
Of the method among the Maya nations,[209] south of the Gulf of Mexico, a Spanish historian[210] says: “The bleeding and quivering heart was held up to the sun, and then thrown into a bowl prepared for its reception. An assistant priest sucked the blood from the gash in the chest, through a hollow cane; the end of which he elevated towards the sun, and then discharged its contents into a plume-bordered cup held by the captor of the prisoner just slain. This cup was carried around to all the idols in the temples and chapels, before whom another blood-filled tube was held up, as if to give them a taste of the contents. This ceremony performed, the cup was left at the palace.”
Yet another record stands: “The guardian of the temple ... opened the left breast of the victim, tore out the heart, and handed it to the high priest, who placed it in a small embroidered purse which he carried. The four [assisting] priests received the blood of the victim in four jicaras or bowls, made from the shell of a certain fruit; and descending, one after the other, to the court yard, [they] sprinkled the blood with their right hand in the direction of the cardinal points [of the compass]. If any blood remained over, they returned it to the high priest, who placed it, with the purse containing the heart, in the body of the victim, through the wound that had been made; and the body was interred in the temple.”[211]
Commenting on these customs in Central America, Réville—the representative comparative-religionist of France—says: “Here you will recognize that idea, so widely spread in the two Americas, and indeed almost everywhere amongst uncivilized peoples [nor is it limited to the uncivilized], that the heart is the epitome, so to speak, of the individual—his soul in some sense—so that to appropriate his heart is to appropriate his whole being.”[212] What else than this gave rise to the thought of preserving the heart of a hero, or of a loved one, as a symbol of the living presence of the dead? It was by his heart, that King Robert Bruce was to lead his army to the Holy Land; and how many times, in history, have men bequeathed their hearts to those dear to them, as the poet Shelley’s heart was preserved by his friends, and by them given to Mrs. Shelley.
In the Greek and Roman sacrifices, it was the blood of the victim, which, as the life of the victim, was poured out unto the gods, as unto the Author of life.[213] Moreover, there is reason for supposing that the heart was always given the chief place, as representing the very life itself, in the examination and in the tasting of the “entrails” (σπλάγχνα, splangkhna) in connection with the sacrifices of those classic peoples.[214] An indication of this truth is found in a statement by Cicero, concerning the sacrifices at the time of the inauguration of Cæsar: “When he [Cæsar] was sacrificing on that day in which he first sat in the golden chair, and made procession in the purple garment, there was no heart among the entrails of the sacrificial ox. (Do you think, therefore, that any animal which has blood can exist without a heart?) Yet he [Cæsar] was not terrified by the phenomenal nature of the event, although Spurinna declared, that it was to be feared that both mind [literally ‘counsel’] and life were about to fail him [Cæsar]; for both of these [mind and life] do issue from the heart.”[215]
Similarly it has been, and to the present day it is, with primitive peoples everywhere. Blood libations were made a prominent feature in the offerings in ancient Phoenicia,[216] as in Egypt. In India, the Brahmans have a saying, in illustration of the claim that Vishnu and Siva are of one and the same nature: “The heart of Vishnu is Sivâ, and the heart of Sivâ is Vishnu; and those who think they differ, err.”[217] The Hindoo legends represent the victim’s heart as being torn out and given to the one whom in life he has wronged.[218] In China, at the great Temple of Heaven, in Peking, where the emperors of China are supposed to have conducted worship without material change in its main features for now nearly three thousand years,[219] the blood of the animal sacrifice is buried in the earth[220] while the body of the sacrificial victim is offered as a whole burnt offering.[221]
The blood is the life; the heart as the fountain of blood is the fountain of life; both blood and heart are sacred to the Author of life. The possession, or the gift, of the heart or of the blood, is the possession, or the gift, of the very nature of its primal owner. That has been the world’s thought in all the ages.
The belief seems to have been universal, not only that the blood is the life of the organism in which it originally flows, but that in its transfer from one organism to another the blood retains its life, and so carries with it a vivifying power. There are traces of this belief in the earliest legends of the Old World, and of the New; in classic story; and in medical practices as well, all the world over, from time immemorial until the present day.
For example, in an inscription from the Egyptian monuments, the original of which dates back to the early days of Moses, there is a reference to a then ancient legend of the rebellion of mankind against the gods; of an edict of destruction against the human race; and of a divine interposition for the rescue of the doomed peoples.[222] In that legend, a prominent part is given to human blood, mingled with the juice of mandrakes[223]—instead of wine—prepared as a drink of the gods, and afterwards poured out again to overflow and to revivify all the earth. And the ancient text which records this legend, affirms that it was in conjunction with these events, that there was the beginning of sacrifices in the world.
An early American legend has points of remarkable correspondence with this one from ancient Egypt. It relates, as does that, to a pre-historic destruction of the race, and to its re-creation, or its re-vivifying, by means of transferred blood. Every Mexican province told this story in its own way, says a historian; but the main features of it are alike in all its versions.
When there were no more men remaining on the earth, some of the gods desired the re-creation of mankind; and they asked help from the supreme deities accordingly. They were then told, that if they were to obtain the bones, or the ashes of the former race, they could revivify those remains by their own blood. Thereupon Xolotl, one of the gods, descended to the place of the dead, and obtained a bone (whether a rib, or not, does not appear). Upon that vestige of humanity, the gods dropped blood drawn from their own bodies; and the result was a new vivifying of mankind.[224]
An ancient Chaldean legend, as recorded by Berosus, ascribes a new creation of mankind to the mixture by the gods of the dust of the earth with the blood that flowed from the severed head of the god Belus. “On this account it is that men are rational, and partake of divine knowledge,” says Berosus.[225] The blood of the god gives them the life and the nature of a god. Yet, again, the early Phœnician, and the early Greek, theogonies, as recorded by Sanchoniathon[226] and by Hesiod,[227] ascribe the vivifying of mankind to the outpoured blood of the gods. It was from the blood of Ouranos, or of Saturn, dripping into the sea and mingling with its foam, that Venus was formed, to become the mother of her heroic posterity. “The Orphics, which have borrowed so largely from the East,” says Lenormant,[228] “said that the immaterial part of man, his soul [his life], sprang from the blood of Dionysus Zagreus, whom ... Titans had torn to pieces, partly devouring his members.”
Homer explicitly recognizes this universal belief in the power of blood to convey life, and to be a means of revivifying the dead. When Circé sent Odysseus,
she directed him, in preparation, to
and after that to slay the sacrificial sheep. But Circé’s caution was:
Odysseus did as he was directed. The bloodless shades flocked about him, as he sat there guarding the life-renewing blood; but even those dearest to him, he forbade to touch that consecrated draught.
Then, came the prophecy, from the blood-revivified seer.
The wide-spread popular superstition of the vampire and of the ghoul, seems to be an outgrowth of this universal belief, that transfused blood is re-vivification. The bloodless shades, leaving their graves at night, seek renewed life, by drawing out the blood of those who sleep; taking of the life of the living, to supply temporary life to the dead. This idea was prevalent in ancient Babylon and Assyria.[230] It has shown itself in the Old World and in the New,[231] in all the ages; and even within a little more than a century, it has caused an epidemic of fear in Hungary, “resulting in a general disinterment, and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies.”[232]
An added force is given to all these illustrations of the universal belief that transferred blood has a vivifying power, by the conclusions of modern medical science, concerning the possible benefits of blood-transfusion.[233] On this point, one of the foremost living authorities in this department of practice, Dr. Roussel, of Geneva, says: “The great vitality of the blood of a vigorous and healthy man has the power of improving the quality of the patient’s blood, and can restore activity to the centres of nervous force, and the organs of digestion. It would seem that health itself can be transfused with the blood of a healthy man”;[234] death itself being purged out of the veins by inflowing life. And in view of the possibilities of new life to a dying one, through new blood from one full of life, this writer insists, that “every adult and healthy man and woman should be ready to offer an arm, as the natural and mysteriously inexhaustible source of the wonder-working elixir.”[235] Blood-giving can be life-giving. The measure of one’s love may, indeed, in such a case, be tested by the measure of his yielded blood.[236]
Roussel says, that blood transfusion was practised by the Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the Syrians, in ancient times;[237] and he cites the legend, that before Naaman came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy,[238] his physicians, in their effort at his cure, took the blood from his veins, and replaced it with other blood. Whatever basis of truth there may be in this legend, it clearly gained its currency through the prevailing conviction that new blood is new life. There certainly is ample evidence that baths of human blood were anciently prescribed as a cure for the death-representing leprosy; as if in recognition of this root idea of the re-vivifying power of transferred blood.
Pliny, writing eighteen centuries ago, concerning leprosy, or elephantiasis, says[239]: “This was the peculiar disease of Egypt; and when it fell upon princes, woe to the people; for, in the bathing chambers, tubs were prepared, with human blood, for the cure of it.” Nor was this mode of life-seeking confined to the Egyptians. It is said that the Emperor Constantine was restrained from it, only in consequence of a vision from heaven.[240]
In the early English romance of Amys and Amylion, one of these knightly brothers-in-arms consents, with his wife’s full approbation, to yield the lives of his two infant children, in order to supply their blood for a bath, for the curing of his brother friend’s leprosy.[241] In this instance, the leprosy is cured, and the children’s lives are miraculously restored to them; as if in proof of the divine approbation of the loving sacrifice.
It is shown, indeed, that this belief in the life-bringing power of baths of blood, to the death-smitten lepers, was continued into the Middle Ages; and that it finally “received a check from an opinion gradually gaining ground, that only the blood of those would be efficacious, who offered themselves freely and voluntarily for a beloved sufferer.”[242] There is something very suggestive in this thought of the truest potency of transferred life through transferred blood! It is this thought which finds expression and illustration in Longfellow’s Golden Legend. In the castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine, Prince Henry is sick with a strange and hopeless malady. Lucifer appears to him in the garb of a traveling physician, and tells him of the only possible cure for his disease, as prescribed in a venerable tome:
Elsie, the lovely daughter of a peasant in the Odenwald learns of the Prince’s need, and declares she will give her blood for his cure. In her chamber by night, her self-surrendering prayer goes up:
Her father, Gottlieb, consents to her life-surrender, saying to the Prince:
And Elsie adds:
The proffered sacrifice is interfered with before its consummation; but its purposed method shows the estimate which was put, from of old, on voluntarily yielded life for life.
There is said to be an Eastern legend somewhat like the story of Amys and Amylion; with a touch of the ancient Egyptian and Mexican legends already cited. “The Arabian chronicler speaks of a king, who, having lost a faithful servant by his transformation into stone, is told that he can call his friend back to life, if he is willing to behead his two children, and to sprinkle the ossified figure with their blood. He makes up his mind to the sacrifice; but as he approaches the children with his drawn sword, the will is accepted by heaven for the deed, and he suddenly sees the stone restored to animation.”[243] This story, in substance, (only with the slaying and the resuscitating of the children, as in the English romance,) appears in Grimm’s folk-lore tales, under the title of “Faithful John”;[244] but whether its origin was in the East or in the North, or in both quarters, is not apparent. Its reappearance East, North, and West, is all the more noteworthy.
In the romances of King Arthur and his knights, there is a story of a maiden daughter of King Pellinore, a sister of Sir Percivale, who befriends the noble Sir Galahad, and then accompanies him and his companions on their way to the castle of Carteloise, and beyond, in their search for the Holy Grail.
“And again they went on to another castle, from which came a band of knights, who told them of the custom of the place, that every maiden who passed by must yield a dish full of her blood. ‘That shall she not do,’ said Galahad, ‘while I live’; and fierce was the struggle that followed; and the sword of Galahad, which was the sword of King David, smote them down on every side, until those who remained alive craved peace, and bade Galahad and his fellows come into the castle for the night; ‘and on the morn,’ they said, ‘we dare say ye will be of one accord with us, when ye know the reason for our custom?’ So awhile they rested, and the knights told them that in the castle there lay a lady sick to death, who might never gain back her life, until she should be anointed with the blood of a pure maiden who was a king’s daughter. Then said Percivale’s sister, ‘I will yield it, and so shall I get health to my soul, and there shall be no battle on the morn.’ And even so was it done; but the blood which she gave was so much that she might not live; and as her strength passed away, she said to Percivale, ‘I die, brother, for the healing of this lady.’ ... Thus was the lady of the castle healed; and the gentle maiden, [Percivale’s sister,] ... died.”[245]
In the old Scandinavian legends, there are indications of the traditional belief in the power of transferred life through a bath of blood. Siegfried, or Sigurd, a descendant of Odin, slew Fafner, a dragon-shaped guardian of ill-gotten treasure. In the hot blood of that dragon, he bathed himself, and so took on, as it were, an outer covering of new life, rendering himself sword-proof, save at a single point where a leaf of the linden-tree fell between his shoulders, and shielded the flesh from the life-imparting blood.[246] On this incident it is, that the main tragedy in the Nibelungen Lied pivots; where Siegfried’s wife, Kriemhild, tells the treacherous Hagan of her husband’s one vulnerable point:
Even among the blood-reverencing Brahmans of India, there are traces of this idea, that life is to be guarded by the outpoured blood of others. In the famous old work, “Kalila wa-Dimna,” there is the story of a king, named Beladh, who had a vision in the night, which so troubled him that he sought counsel of the Brahmans. Their advice was, that he should sacrifice his favorite wife, his best loved son, his nephew, and his dearest friend, in conjunction with other valued offerings to the gods. “It will be necessary for you, O King,” they said, “when you have put to death the persons we have named to you, to fill a cauldron with their blood, and sit upon it; and when you get up from the cauldron, we, the Brahmans, assembled from the four quarters of the kingdom, will walk around you, and pronounce our incantations over you, and we will spit upon you, and wipe off from you the blood, and will wash you in water and sweet-oil, and then you may return to the palace, trusting in the protection of heaven against the danger which threatens you.”[248]
Here, the king’s offering to the gods, was to be of that which was dearest to him; and the bath of blood was to prove to him a cover of life. King Beladh wisely said, that if that were the price of his safety he was ready to die. He would not prolong his life at such a cost. But the story shows the primitive estimate of the life-giving power of blood, among the Hindoos.
In China, also, blood has its place as a life-giving agency. A Chinese woman, on the Kit-ie River, tells a missionary, of her occasional seasons of frenzy, under the control of spirits, and of her ministry of blood, at such seasons, for the cure of disease. “Every year when there is to be a pestilence, or when cholera is to prevail, she goes into this frenzy, and cuts her tongue with a knife, letting some drops of her blood fall into a hogshead of water. This [homœopathically-treated] water, the people drink as a specific against contagion.” Its sacred blood is counted a shield of life. “With the rest of the blood, she writes charms, which the people paste [as words of life] upon their door-posts, or wear upon their persons, as preventives of evil.”[249]
Receiving new blood as a means of receiving new life, seems to have been sought interchangeably, in olden time, in various diseases, by blood lavations, by blood drinking, and by blood transfusion. It is recorded that, in 1483, King Louis XI., of France, struggled for life by drinking the blood of young children, as a means of his revivifying. “Every day he grew worse,” it is said; “and the medicines profited him nothing, though of a strange character; for he vehemently hoped to recover by the human blood which he took and swallowed from certain children.”[250] Again there is a disputed claim, that, in 1492, a Jewish physician endeavored to save the life of Pope Innocent VIII., by giving him in transfusion the blood of three young men successively. The Pope was not recovered, but the three young men lost their lives in the experiment.[251] Yet blood transfusion as a means of new life to the dying was not always a failure, even in former centuries; for the record stands, that “at Frankfort, on the Oder, the surgeons Balthazar, Kaufman, and Purmann, healed a leper, in 1683, by passing the blood of a lamb into his veins.”[252]
Even to-day, in South Africa, “when the Zulu King is sick, his immediate personal attendants, or valets, are obliged to allow themselves to be wounded; that a portion of their blood may be introduced into the king’s circulation, and a portion of his into theirs.”[253] In this plan, the idea seems to be, that health may have power over disease, and that death may be swallowed up in life, by equalizing the blood of the one who is in danger, and of the many who are in strength and safety. Moreover among the Kafirs those who are still in health are sometimes “washed in blood to protect them against wounds”;[254] as if an outer covering of life could be put on, for the protection of their life within. Transfused human blood is also said to be a common prescription of the medicine-men of Tasmania, for the cure of disease.[255]
And so it would appear, that, whatever may be its basis in physiological science, the opinion has prevailed, widely and always, that there is a vivifying power in transferred blood; and that blood not only represents but carries life.
It was a primeval idea, of universal sway, that the taking in of another’s blood was the acquiring of another’s life, with all that was best in that other’s nature. It was not merely that the taking away of blood was the taking away of life; but that the taking in of blood was the taking in of life, and of all that that life represented. Here, again, the heart, as the fountain of blood, and so, as the centre and source of life, was preeminently the agency of transfer, in the acquiring of a new nature.
Herodotus tells us of this idea in the far East, twenty-four centuries ago. When a Scythian, he said, killed his first man in open warfare, he drank in his blood, as a means of absorbing his fairly acquired life; and the heads of as many as he slew, the Scythian carried in triumph to the king;[256] as the American Indian bears away the scalps of his slain, to-day. Modern historians, indeed, show us other resemblances than this, between the aboriginal American and the ancient Scythian.
The Jesuit founder of the Huron Mission to the American Indians, “its truest hero, and its greatest martyr,” was Jean de Brébeuf. After a heroic life among a savage people, he was subjected to frightful torture, and to the crudest death. His character had won the admiration of those who felt that duty to their gods demanded his martyrdom; and his bearing under torture exalted him in their esteem, as heroic beyond compare. “He came of a noble race,” says Parkman,[257]—“the same [race], it is said, from which sprang the English Earls of Arundel; but never had the mailed barons of his line confronted a fate so appalling, with so prodigious a constancy. To the last he refused to flinch, and ‘his death was an astonishment to his murderers.’” “We saw no part of his body,” wrote an eye witness,[258] “from head to foot, which was not burned [while he was yet living], even to his eyes, in the sockets of which these wretches had placed live coals.” Such manhood as he displayed under these tortures, the Indians could appreciate. Such courage and constancy as his, they longed to possess for themselves. When, therefore, they perceived that the brave and faithful man of God was finally sinking into death, they sprang toward him, scalped him, “laid open his breast, and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant an enemy; thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage. A chief then tore out his heart, and devoured it.”
Not unlike this has been a common practice among the American Indians, in the treatment of prisoners of war. “If the victim had shown courage,” again says Parkman, concerning the Hurons, “the heart was first roasted, cut into small pieces, and given to the young men and boys, who devoured it, to increase their own courage.”[259] So, similarly, with the Iroquois.[260] And Burton says of the Dakotas:[261] “They are not cannibals, except when a warrior, after slaying a foe, eats, porcupine-like, the heart or liver, with the idea of increasing his own courage.” Schomburgk, writing concerning the natives of British Guiana, says: “In order to increase their courage, and [so their] contempt of death, the Caribs were wont to cut out the heart of a slain enemy, dry it on the fire, powder it, and mix the powder in their drink.”[262]
The native Australians find, it is said, an inducement to bloodshed, in their belief—like that of the ancient Scythians—that the life, or the spirit, of the first man whom one slays, enters into the life of the slayer, and remains as his helpful possession thereafter.[263] The Ashantee fetishmen, of West Africa, apparently acting on a kindred thought, make a mixture of the hearts of enemies, mingled with blood and consecrated herbs, for the vivifying of the conquerors. “All who have never before killed an enemy eat of the preparation; it being believed that if they did not, their energy would be secretly wasted by the haunting spirits of their deceased foes.”[264] The underlying motive of the bloody “head-hunting” in Borneo, is the Dayak belief, that the spirits of those whose heads are taken are to be subject to him, who does the decapitating. The heads are primarily simply the proof—like the Indian’s scalps—that their owner has so many lives absorbed in his own.[265]
A keen observer of Fellâheen life in Palestine has reported:[266] “There is an ugly expression used among the fellâheen of South Palestine, in speaking of an enemy slain in war—‘Dhabbahhtho bisnâny’ (‘I slew him with my teeth’)[267]; and it is said that there have been instances of killing in battle in this fashion by biting at the throat. In the Nablous district (Samaria), where the people are much more ferocious, the expression is, ‘I have drunk his blood’; but that is understood figuratively.”
An ancient Greek version of the story of Jason, telling of that hero’s treatment of the body of Apsyrtos—whom he had slain—says: “Thrice he tasted the blood, thrice [he] spat it out between his teeth;” and a modern collator informs us, that the scholiast here finds “the description of an archaic custom, popular among murderers.”[268] This certainly corresponds with the Semitic phrases lingering among the Fellâheen of Palestine.
In the old German epic, the Nibelungen Lied, it is told of the brave Burgundians, when they were fighting desperately in the burning hall of the Huns, that they were given new courage for the hopeless conflict, by drinking the blood of their fallen comrades; which “quenched their thirst, and made them fierce.”[269] With their added life, from the added blood of heroes, they battled as never before.