EVOLUTION OF CEREMONIAL GOVERNMENT. 653 



gods, circumcision was forbidden, and those who, persevering in it, 

 refused obedience to these foreign gods, were slain ; while contrari- 

 wise Mattathias and his friends, loyal to the god of their fathers, and 

 rebelling against foreign rule and worship, are said to have gone 

 " round about, and pulled down the altars : and what children soever 

 they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised those they circum- 

 cised valiantly." Moreover Hyrcanus, having subdued the Idumeans, 

 made them submit to circumcision as a condition of remaining in their 

 country; and Aristobulus similarly imposed the mark on the con- 

 quered people of Iturea. 



Quite congruous are certain converse facts. Mariner states that 

 Tooitonga (the great divine chief of Tonga) is not circumcised, as all 

 other men are : being unsubordinated, he does not bear the badge of 

 subordination. And with this I may join a case in which whole tribes 

 belonging to a race ordinarily practising circumcision are uncircum- 

 cised where they are unsubordinated. Naming certain Berbers in 

 Morocco as thus distinguished, Rohlfs says: "These uncircumcised 

 tribes inhabit the Rif Mountains. . . . All the Rif mountaineers eat 

 wild-boar, in spite of the Koran law." 



Besides mutilations entailing some loss of flesh, bone, skin, or hair, 

 there are mutilations which do not imply a deduction at least not a 

 permanent one. Of these we may take, first, one which sacrifices a 

 liquid part of the body, though not a solid part. 



Bleeding as a mutilation has an origin akin to the origins of other 

 mutilations. Did we not find that some uncivilized tribes, as the Sa- 

 moyeds, drink the warm blood of animals did we not find among ex- 

 isting cannibals, such as the Feejeeans, proofs that savages drink the 

 blood of still-living human victims it would seem incredible that 

 from taking the blood of a vanquished enemy was derived the cere- 

 mony of offering blood to a ghost, and to a god. But when to ac- 

 counts of horrors like these we join accounts of kindred ones which 

 savages commit, such as that among the Amaponda Caffres "it is 

 usual for the ruling chief, on his accession to the government, to be 

 washed in the blood of a near relative, generally a brother, who is 

 put to death on the occasion;" and when we infer that, before the 

 rise of civilization, the sanguinary tastes and usages now exceptional 

 were probably general, we may suspect that from the drinking of 

 blood by conquering cannibals there arose some kinds of blood-offer- 

 ings at any rate, those of blood taken from immolated victims. Pos- 

 sibly some offerings of blood from the bodies of living- persons are to 



tf CD O 1 



be thus accounted for ; but those which are not are explicable as se- 

 quences of the widely-prevalent practice of establishing a sacred bond 

 of mutual obligation between living persons by partaking of each 

 other's blood the derived conception being that those who give some 

 of their blood to the ghost of the man just dead and lingering near 



