652 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



who have vanquished them continue to present the usual proofs of 

 their prowess, there must arise the circumcision of living captives, 

 who thereby become marked as subjugated persons. A further re- 

 sult is obvious. As the chief and the king are propitiated by bring- 

 ing them these trophies taken from their foes, and, as the primitive 

 belief is that a dead man's ghost is pleased by whatever pleased 

 the man when alive, there will naturally follow a presentation of 

 such trophies to the ghost of the departed ruler. And then where in 

 a highly-militant society governed by an absolute despot, divine by 

 descent and nature, who, owning the entire population, requires them 

 all to bear this badge of servitude, and who, dying, has his dreaded 

 ghost anxiously propitiated, we may expect that the offering of these 

 trophies taken from enslaved enemies to the king will develop into 

 the offering of like trophies taken from each generation of male citi- 

 zens to the god in acknowledgment of their slavery to him. Hence, 

 when Movers tells us that among the Phoenicians circumcision was 

 " a sign of consecration to Saturn," and when proof is given that of 

 old the people of San Salvador circumcised " in the Jewish manner, 

 offering the blood to an idol," we are shown just the results to be an- 

 ticipated as eventually arising. 



That this interpretation applies to the custom as made known to 

 us in the Bible, there is clear evidence. We have already seen that 

 the ancient Hebrews, like the modern Abyssinians, practised the form 

 of trophy-taking which necessitates this mutilation of the dead ene- 

 my ; and, as in the one case, so in the other, it follows that the van- 

 quished enemy, not slain, but made prisoner, will by this mutilation 

 be marked as a subject person. That circumcision was among the 

 Hebrews the stamp of subjection, all the evidence proves. On learn- 

 ing that among existing Bedouins, as Mr. Palgrave shows, the only 

 conception of God is that of a powerful living ruler, the sealing by 

 circumcision of the covenant between God and Abraham becomes a 

 comprehensible ceremony. There is furnished an explanation of the 

 fact that, in consideration of a territory to be received, this mutila- 

 tion, submitted to by Abraham, implied that " the Lord " was " to be 

 a god unto " him ; as also the fact that the mark was to be borne not 

 by him and his descendants exclusively, as favored individuals, but 

 also by slaves not of his blood. And, on remembering that in primi- 

 tive beliefs the returning double of the dead potentate is believed to 

 be indistinguishable from the living potentate, we get an interpreta- 

 tion of the otherwise strange tradition narrated in Exodus concerning 

 God's anger with Moses for not circumcising his son : " And it came 

 to pass by the way in the inn that the Lord met Moses, and sought to 

 kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin 

 of her son, and cast it at his feet." That circumcision among the 

 Jews was a mark of subordination to Jahveh is further implied by the 

 facts that under the foreign ruler Antiochus, who brought in foreign 



