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THE COMPACT OF FAUST.

95

"Once, with the book, there was a pen offered him, and an inkhorn with liquor in it that looked like blood." Another New England writer on witchcraft says that "the witch as a slave binds herself by vow, to believe in the Devil, and to give him either body or soul, or both, under his handwriting, or some part of his blood." 2

It is, evidently, on this popular tradition, that Goethe's Faust covenants in blood with Mephistopheles.

MEPHISTOPHELES.

"But one thing!-accidents may happen; hence

A line or two in writing grant, I pray."

[blocks in formation]

"A scrap is for our compact good.

Thou under-signest merely with a drop of blood."

"Blood is a juice of very special kind." 3

Even "within modern memory in Europe," there have been traces of the primitive rite of covenanting

1 Cited in Drake's The Witchcraft Delusion in New England, I., 187; 214.

II.,

2 Ibid., I., xviii. See, also, Appendix, infra.

3 Faust, Swanwick's translation, Part I., lines 1360-1386.

with God by the proffer of one's blood. In the Russian province of Esthonia, he who would observe this rite, “had to draw drops of blood from his fore finger," and at the same time to pledge himself in solemn covenant with God. "I name thee [I invoke thee] with my blood, and [I] betroth thee [I entrust myself to thee] with my blood,"-was the form of his covenanting. Then he who had given of his blood in self-surrendering devotedness, made his confident supplications to God with whom he had thus covenanted; and his prayer in behalf of all his possessions was: "Let them be blessed through my blood and thy might.'

"1

Thus, in ancient Egypt, in ancient Canaan, in ancient Mexico, in modern Turkey, in modern Russia, in modern India, and in modern Otaheite; in Africa, in Asia, in America, in Europe, and in Oceanica: Blood-giving was life-giving. Life-giving was loveshowing. Love-showing was a heart-yearning after union in love and in life and in blood and in very being. That was the primitive thought in the primitive religions of all the world.

1 See Tylor's Primitive Culture, II., 402; citing Boecler's Ehsten Abergläubische Gebräuche, 4.

LECTURE II.

SUGGESTIONS AND PERVERSIONS OF

THE RITE.

II.

SUGGESTIONS AND PERVERSIONS OF

THE RITE.

I. SACREDNESS OF BLOOD AND OF THE HEART.

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 rootidea 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

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