of themselves and thereby converted him from an enemy into an ally; they established, in the strictest sense of the words, a blood-covenant with him. The Aricara Indians also drank the blood of their slain foes and proclaimed the deed by the mark of a red hand on their faces.[118.3] The motive for this practice may have been, as with the Maoris, a desire to appropriate and so disarm the ghost of an enemy. In antiquity some of the Scythians used to drink the blood of the first foes they killed; and they also tasted the blood of the friends with whom they made a covenant, for “they take that to be the surest pledge of good faith.”[118.4] [Sidenote: Homicides supposed to go mad unless they taste the blood of their victim.] The motive of the two customs was probably the same. “To the present day, when a person of another tribe has been slain by a Nandi, the blood must be carefully washed off the spear or sword into a cup made of grass, and drunk by the slayer. If this is not done it is thought that the man will become frenzied.”[118.5] So {119} among some tribes of the Lower Niger “it is customary and necessary for the executioner to lick the blood that is on the blade”; moreover “the custom of licking the blood off the blade of a sword by which a man has been killed in war is common to all these tribes, and the explanation given me by the Ibo, which is generally accepted, is, that if this was not done, the act of killing would so affect the strikers as to cause them to run amok among their own people; because the sight and smell of blood render them absolutely senseless as well as regardless of all consequences. And this licking the blood is the only sure remedy, and the only way in which they can recover themselves.”[119.1] So, too, among the Shans of Burma “it was the curious custom of executioners to taste the blood of their victims, as they believed if this were not done illness and death would follow in a short time. In remote times Shan soldiers always bit the bodies of men killed by them in battle.”[119.2] Strange as it may seem, this truly savage superstition exists apparently in Italy to this day. There is a widespread opinion in Calabria that if a murderer is to escape he must suck his victim’s blood from the reeking blade of the dagger with which he did the deed.[119.3] We can now perhaps understand why the matricide Orestes was thought to have recovered his wandering wits as soon as he had bitten off one of his fingers. By tasting his own blood, which was also that of his victim, since she was his mother, he might be supposed to form a blood-covenant with the ghost and so to convert it from a foe into a friend. [Sidenote: Various precautions taken by manslayers against the ghosts of their victims.] The Kabyles of North Africa think that if a murderer leaps seven times over his victim’s grave within three or seven days of the murder, he will be quite safe. Hence the fresh grave of a murdered man is carefully guarded.[119.4]