These covenant belts often bore, interwoven with different colored wampum beads, symbolic figures, such as two hands clasped in friendship, or two figures with hands joined. As the belts commonly signalized tribal covenants, they were not worn by a single individual; but were sacredly guarded in some tribal depository; yet their form and their designation indicate the origin of their idea. There is still preserved, in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the wampum belt which is supposed to have sealed the treaty of peace and friendship between William Penn and the Indians. It contains two figures, wrought in dark colored beads, representing “an Indian grasping with the hand of friendship the hand of a man evidently intended to be represented in the European costume, wearing a hat.”[736] Still more explicit in its symbolism, is the royal belt of the primitive kings of Tahiti. Throughout Polynesia, red feathers, which had been inclosed in a hollow image of a god, were considered not only as emblematic of the deities, but as actually representing them in their personality (Ellis’s _Polyn. Res._, I., 79, 211, 314, 316; II., 204; _Tour thro’ Hawaii_, p. 121). “The inauguration ceremony [of the Tahitian king], answering to coronation among other nations, consisted in girding the king with the _maro ura_, or sacred girdle of red feathers; which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but _identified him with their gods_ [as by oneness of blood]. The _maro_, or girdle, was made with the beaten fibres of the ava; with these a number of _ura_, red feathers, taken from the images of their deities [where they had, seemingly, represented the blood, or the life, of the image], were interwoven; ... the feathers [as the blood] being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.” In lieu of the king’s own blood, in this symbolic ceremony of inter-union, a human victim was sacrificed, for the “fastening on of the sacred maro.” “Sometimes a human victim was offered for every fresh piece added to the girdle [blood for blood, between the king and the god]; ... and the girdle was considered as consecrated by the blood of those victims.” The chief priest of the god Oro formally invested the king with this “sacred girdle, which, the [blood-representing] feathers from the idol being interwoven in it, was supposed to impart to the king a power equal to that possessed by Oro.” After this, the king was supposed to be a sharer of the divine nature of Oro, with whom he had entered into a covenant of blood-union (Ellis’s _Polyn. Res._, II., 354-360).