life. The receiving of blood has been counted the receiving of life. The sharing of blood has been counted the sharing of life. Hence, the blood has always been counted the chief thing in any sacrificial victim proffered to the gods; and whatever was sought through sacrifice, was to be obtained by means of the blood of the offering. Even though no specific reference to the blood be found in the preserved descriptions of one of the earlier sacrifices,-as, for example, the Akkadian sacrifice of the first-born (page 166, supra), the very fact that the offering made was of a life, and that blood was recognized as life, is in itself the proof that it was the blood which gave the offering its value.

Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, who was thoroughly familiar with both Egyptian and biblical antiquities, was impressed by the "striking resemblance" of many of the religious rites of the Jews to those of Egypt, "particularly the manner in which the sacrifices were performed; and he points out the Egyptian method of so slaying the sacrificial ox, that its blood should be fully discharged from the body; a point which was deemed of such importance in the Jewish ritual.2 Of the illustration of this ceremony given by Wilkinson from an ancient Egyptian painting, the Speaker's Commentary says: "There is no reason to doubt that this picture accurately represents the mode pursued in the court of the [Jewish] Tabernacle."

3

Almost as universal as the recognition of the life in the blood has been the identification of the heart as the blood-centre and the bloodfountain, and so as the epitome of the life itself. Says Pierret,5 the French Egyptologist, concerning the pre-eminence given to the heart by the ancient Egyptians: "The heart was embalmed separately in a vase placed under the guardianship of the genius Duaoumautew [rather, Tuau-mut-ef, or, Reverencer of his Mother. My heart was my mother.' See page 99, supra] without doubt because this organ,

1 Anc. Egypt., III., 4II.

3 Anc. Egypt., II., 32.

2 See pages 245 f., supra.

4 Note on Lev. chap. 17. "Coeur."

5 Dictionnaire d'Archéologie Égyptienne, s. v.

indispensable to the resurrection, could not be replaced in the body of a man, until it had been weighed in the scale of the balance of the Osirian judgment (Todtenbuch cxxv.); where representing the acts of the dead, it ought to make equilibrium with the statue of the goddess Truth [Maat]. (See the framed papyri in the funereal hall of the Museum of the Louvre.) Indeed the favorable sentence is thus formulated: It is permitted that his heart be in its place.' It is said to Setee I., in the temple of Abydos: 'I bring thee thy heart to thy breast; I put it in its place.' The heart, principle of existence and of regeneration, was symbolized by the scarabæus: it is for this reason that the texts relative to the heart were inscribed upon the funereal scarabæuses, which at a certain epoch were introduced into the body of the mummy itself, to replace the absent organ."

The idea that the heart is in itself life, and that it can even live apart from the body, is found all the world over. References to it in ancient Egypt, in India, and in primitive America, have already been pointed out (pages 100-110, supra). It shows itself, likewise, in the folk-lore of the Arctic regions, and of South Africa, as well as of the Norseland. In a Samoyed tale, "seven brothers are in the habit of taking out their hearts and sleeping without them. A captive damsel, whose mother they have killed, receives the extracted hearts, and hangs them on the tent-pole, where they remain till the following morning. One night her brother contrives to get the hearts into his possession. Next morning, he takes them into the tent, where he finds the brothers at the point of death. In vain do they beg for their hearts, which he flings on the floor. And as he flings down the hearts, the brothers die.'" According to a Hottentot story, "the heart of a girl, whom a lion has killed and eaten, is extracted from the lion, and placed in a calabash filled with milk [the heart' and 'milk'; or blood and bread, life and its nourishment (See pages 10-12, 261 f., supra)]. The cala

1 In substance from Castren's Ethnologische Vorlesungen über die Altaischen Völker, p. 174, as cited in Ralston's Russian Folk Tales, p. 122.

bash increased in size; and, in proportion to this, the girl grew again inside [of] it.'" 1 "In a Norse story, a giant's heart lies in an egg, inside a duck, which swims in a well, in a church, on an island; "2 and this story is found in variations in other lands.3 So, again, in a "Russian story, a prince is grievously tormented by a witch who has got hold of his heart, and keeps it perpetually seething in a magic cauld

ron." 4

This same idea is found in the nomenclature of the Bible, and in the every-day speech of the civilized world of the present age. In more than nine hundred instances, in our common English Bible, the Hebrew or the Greek word for "heart," as a physical organ, is applied to man's personality; as if it were, in a sense, synonymous with his life, his self, his soul, his nature. In every phase of man's character, of man's needs, or of man's experiences, "heart" is employed by us as significant of his innermost and realest self. He is "hard-hearted," "tenderhearted," "warm-hearted," "cold-hearted," "hearty," or "heartless." His words and his conduct are "heart-touching," "heart-cheering," "heart-searching," "heart-piercing," "heart-thrilling," "heart-soothing," or "heart-rending;" and they are a cause, in others, of " heartburning," 'heart-aching," "heart-easing," or "heart-expanding." At times, his "heart is set upon" an object of longing, or again "his heart is in his mouth" because of his excited anxiety. It may be, that he shows that "his heart is in the right place," or that "his heart is at rest at all times. The truest union of two young lives, is where "the heart goes with the hand" in the marriage covenant.

99 66

And so, all the world over, from the beginning, primitive man, in the lowest state of savagery and in the highest stage of civilization, has

1 From Bleek's Reynard the Fox in South Africa, p. 55; as cited Ibid., p. 123,

note.

2 From Asbjornsen and Moe, No. 36, Dasent, No. 9, p. 71, as cited Ibid., p. 120.

3 See references to Köhler's Orient und Occident, II., 99–103, Ibid., p. 123, note. 4 From Khudyakof, No. 110, as cited Ibid., p. 124.

been accustomed to recognize the truth, and to employ the symbolisms of speech, which are in accordance with the latest advances of physiological and psychological science, and with the highest spiritual conceptions of biblical truth, in our nineteenth Christian century, concerning the mental, the moral, and the religious needs and possibilities of the human race. Man as he is needs a "new heart," a new nature, a new life; and that need can be supplied by the Author of life, through that regeneration which is indicated, and which, in a sense, is realized in new blood which is pure at the start, and which purifies by its purging inflow. The recognition of this truth, and the outreaching of man in its direction, are at the basis of all forms of sacrifice in all the ages. And this wonderful attainment of primitive man everywhere, we are asked to accept as man's mere natural inheritance from the sensory quiverings of his ancestral tadpole!

"The knowledge of the ancients on the subject [of blood as the synonym of life] may, indeed, have been based on the mere observation that an animal loses its life when it loses its blood," says the Speaker's Commentary. But it does seem a little strange, that none of the ancients ever observed that man is very liable to lose his life when he loses his brains, and that few animals are actively efficient for practical service without a head; whereas both man and the lower animals do lose blood freely without death resulting.

It is true that in many parts of the world the liver was made prominent as seemingly a synonym of life; but this was obviously because of the popular belief that the liver was itself a mass of coagulated blood. The idea seems to have been that, as the heart was the bloodfountain, the liver was the blood-cistern; and that, as the source of life (or of blood, which life is,) was at the heart, so the great receptacle of life, or of blood, was the liver. Thus, in the classic myth of Prometheus, the avenging eagle of Jupiter is not permitted to gnaw upon the life-giving heart itself of the tortured victim, but upon the compacted body of life in the captive's liver; the fountain of life is not to

be destroyed, but the cistern of life is to be emptied daily of all that it had received from the out-flowing heart during the preceding night. And in the symbolism of these two organs, the ancients seem to have been agreed, that " The heart is the seat of the soul [thumos (Ovμós) the nobler passions]; the liver [is the seat], of desire; " 1 or, as again it is phrased, "The seat of the soul is unquestionably the heart, even as the liver is the seat of emotion." 2

Burton has called attention to the fact that among the Arabs "the liver and the spleen are both supposed to be congealed blood,'" and that the Bed'ween of the Hejaz justify their eating of locusts, which belong to an “unclean” class of animals, and of liver which represents forbidden blood, by this couplet:

"We are allowed two carrions, and two bloods,

The fish and locust, the liver and the spleen." 3

He has also noted that the American Indian partakes of the liver, as well as of the heart of a fallen enemy, in order to the assimilating of the enemy's life; and he finds many correspondences between the desert dwellers of America and of Arabia. "The [American] 'brave,'" he says, stamps a red hand upon his mouth to show that he has drunk the blood of a foe. Of the Utaybah Harami,' it is similarly related, that, after mortal combat, he tastes the dead man's gore." 5

66

Even in modern English, the word "liver" has been thought by many to represent "life" or "blood." Thus, in one of our dictionaries we are told that the word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian verb "to live," "because [the liver is] of so great importance to life, or animal vitality." In another, its derivation is ascribed

"6

1 Timæus of Locri, cited in Liddell and Scott's Greek Eng. Lex., s. V. "Hepar." See also page 108 f., supra.

2 Pollux's Onomasticon, II., 4, 226.

3 Pilgrim. to Mec. and Med., p. 376.

4 See page 128, supra.

5 Pilgrim. to Mec. and Med., p. 378. See also page 129 f., supra.