When the blood of an African woman accidentally spurted into the eye of Dr. Livingstone, she claimed him for her blood relation, without there being any exchange of blood for blood. 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.[53] The bases of natural fact which lie at the foundation of the Blood-covenant, preceded any and all such ideas as those postulated by the writer as being extant from the first, such as “a longing for oneness of life with God;” an “out-reaching after inter-union and inter-communion with God.” There was no conception of a one God extant in the category of human consciousness when the rites of a blood-covenant were first founded. There could be no atonement where there was no sense of sin or a breaking of the law. All through, the writer is apt to confuse the past with the present, and eager to read the present into the past.[54] ----- Footnote 53: 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.—ED. Footnote 54: 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 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.” (ED.) -----