“Sallust, the historian of Catiline’s conspiracy against Rome, says: ‘There were those who said at that time that Catiline at this conference, when he inducted them into the oath of partnership in crime, carried round in goblets human blood mixed with wine, and that, after all had tasted of it with an imprecatory oath, as is men’s wont in solemn rites, he opened to them his plans.’ Florus, a later Latin historian, describing this conspiracy, says: ‘There was added the pledge of the league—human blood—which they drank as it was borne round to them in goblets.’ And yet later Tertullian suggests that it was their own blood, mingled with wine, of which the fellow-conspirators drank together. ‘Concerning the eating of blood and other such tragic dishes,’ he says, ‘you read that blood drawn from the arms and tasted by one another was the method of making covenant among certain nations.’ “As far back even as the fifth century before Christ we find an explicit description of this Oriental rite of blood-covenanting. ‘Now, the Scythians,’ says Herodotus, ‘make covenants in the following manner, with whomsoever they make them: Having poured out wine into a great earthen drinking-bowl, they mingle with it the blood of those making covenant, striking the body with a small knife or cutting it slightly with a sword. Thereafter they dip into the bowl sword, arrows, axe, and javelin. But while they are doing this they utter many invokings, and afterward not only those who make the covenant, but those of their followers who are of the highest rank, drink off the wine mingled with blood.’ “Again, Herodotus says of this custom in his day: ‘Now, the Arabians reverence in a very high degree pledges between man and man. They make these pledges in the following way: When they wish to make pledges to one another, a third man, standing in the midst of the two, cuts with a sharp stone the inside of the hands along the thumbs of the two making the pledges. After that, plucking some woollen from the garments of each of the two, he anoints with the blood seven stones as the “heap of witness” which are set in the midst. While he is doing this he invokes Dionysus and Urania. When this rite is completed, he that has made the pledges introduces the stranger to his friends, or the fellow-citizen to his fellows if the rite was performed with a fellow-citizen. “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. 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.