FOOTNOTES TO “BLOOD-COVENANTING”

[Lucifer, Vol. I, No. 3, November, 1887, pp. 216-225]

[The writer, Gerald Massey, a learned Egyptologist, sends a scholarly review of a work by H. Clay Trumbull, D.D., entitled The Blood-Covenant; a Primitive Rite and its Bearing on Scripture. This work contains a mass of data from a wide range of` sources on the very ancient rite of covenanting by the inter-transfusion of blood. The reviewer takes exception with Dr. Trumbull’s interpretation that the root-idea of this covenanting was that of an “inter-union of the spiritual natures by the inter-commingling of blood for the sake of an inter-communion with deity.” He says: “Dr. Trumbull claims the Egyptians as witnesses to the truth of his interpretation. But so far from their highest conception of ‘a union with the Divine nature’ being an inter-flowing and interfusion of blood, the soul of blood was the very lowest, that is the first, in a series of seven souls! Their highest type of the soul was the sun that vivified for ever, called Atmu, the Father Soul. . . . . All through, the writer is apt to confuse the past with the present, and eager to read the present into the past.” To this paragraph, H. P. B., has appended the following two footnotes:]

The Theosophists are reminded that the “seven souls” are what we call the “seven principles” in man. “Blood” is the principle of the Body, the lowest in our septenary, as the highest is “Atma,” which may well be symbolized by the Sun; Atma being the light and life in man, as the physical sun is the light and life of our solar system.

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The arcane doctrine teaches that the “blood” rites are as old as the Third-Root race, being established in their final form by the Fourth Parent race in commemoration of the separation of androgynous mankind, their forefathers, into males and females. Mr. G. Massey is a strict scholar, who holds only to that which is made evident to him, and ignores the Occultistic division of

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mankind into Races, and the fact that we are in our Fifth-Root race, and would, of course, refuse to carry mankind back into pre-Tertiary times. Yet his researches and the fruit of his life-labour, corroborate, by their numberless new facts revealed by him, most wonderfully, the teachings of the “Secret Doctrines.”

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