Going back, now, to the world’s most ancient records, in the monuments of Egypt, we find evidence of the existence of the covenant of blood, in those early days. Even then, it seems to have been a custom to covenant by tasting the blood from another’s arm; and this inter-transference of blood was supposed to carry an inter-commingling, or an inter-merging, of natures. So far was this symbolic thought carried, that the ancient Egyptians spoke of the departed spirit, as having entered into the nature, and, indeed, into the very being, of the gods, by the rite of tasting blood from the divine arm. “The Book of the Dead,” as it is commonly called, or “The Book of the Going Forth into Day,”--(“The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day,”[153])--is a group, or series, of ancient Egyptian writings, representing the state and the needs and the progress of the soul after death.[154] A copy of this Funereal Ritual, as it is sometimes called, “more or less complete, according to the fortune of the deceased, was deposited in the case of every mummy.”[155] “As the Book of the Dead is the most ancient, so it is undoubtedly the most important of the sacred books of the Egyptians;”[156] it is, in fact, “according to Egyptian notions, essentially an inspired work;”[157] hence its contents have an exceptional dogmatic value. In this Book of the Dead, there are several obvious references to the rite of blood-covenanting. Some of these are in a chapter of the Ritual which was found transcribed in a coffin of the Eleventh Dynasty; thus carrying it back to a period prior to the days of Abraham.[158] “Give me your arm; I am made as ye,” says the departed soul, speaking to the gods.[159] Then, in explanation of this statement, the pre-historic gloss of the Ritual goes on to say: “The blood is that which proceeds from the member of the Sun, after he goes along cutting himself;”[160] the covenant blood which unites the soul and the god is drawn from the flesh of Rā, when he has cut himself in the rite of that covenant. By this covenant-cutting, the deceased becomes one with the covenanting gods. Again, the departed soul, speaking as Osiris,--or as the Osirian, which every mummy represents,[161]--says: “I am the soul in his two halves.” Once more there follows the explanation: “The soul in his two halves is the soul of the Sun [of Rā], and the soul of Osiris [of the deceased].” Here is substantially the proverb of friendship cited by Aristotle, “One soul in two bodies,” at least two thousand years before the days of the Greek philosopher. How much earlier it was recognized, does not yet appear.