The real roots of matters like these are to be found only in certain facts of nature which were self-revealing, and not in the sphere of concepts and causation! And it is only when we can reach the natural genesis of primitive customs and fetishtic beliefs, and trace their lines of descent, that we can understand and interpret their meaning in the latest symbolical and superstitious phase of religious rites. Nothing can be more fatally false than to interpret the physics of the past by means of modern metaphysic, with the view of proving that certain extant doctrines of delusion are the lineal descendants of an original Divine revelation, which has been bound up in two Testaments for the favoured few. The blood-covenant is undoubtedly a primitive rite; but the author of this work does not penetrate to its most primitive or significant phases. These are not to be read by the light of Hebrew revelation, but by the light of nature if at all. Many primitive customs and rites survived amongst the Semites, but they themselves were not amongst the aboriginal races of the world. We have to get far beyond their stage to understand the meaning of the myths, legends, rites, and customs, that were preserved by them as sacred survivals from the remoter past. The symbolical and superstitious phases of custom cannot be directly explained on the spot where we may first meet with them in going back. In becoming symbolical they had already passed out of their primary phase, and only indirectly represent the natural genesis of the truly primitive rite. I have spent the best part of my life in tracking these rites and customs to their natural origin, and in expounding the typology and symbols by which the earliest meaning was expressed. What then was the root-origin of a blood-covenant? The primary perceptions of primitive or archaic men included the observation that they came from the mother, and first found themselves at her breast.