The primitive idea of kinship rested on this participation in the
sacrificial meal, and not on blood-relationship. "In ancient times the
fundamental obligations of kinship had nothing to do with degrees of
relationship, but rested with absolute and identical force on every
member of the clan. To know that a man's life was sacred to me and
that every blood-feud that touched him involved me also, it was not
necessary for me to count cousinship with him by reckoning up to our
common ancestor; it was enough that we belonged to the same clan and
bore the same clan-name. What was my clan was determined by customary
law, which was not the same in all stages of society; in the earliest
Semitic communities a man was of his mother's clan, in later times he
belonged to the clan of his father. But the essential idea of kinship
was independent of the particular form of the law. A kin was a group of
persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called
a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common
life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living
whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which
no member could be touched without all the members suffering. This
point of view is expressed in the Semitic tongues in many familiar
forms of speech. In case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say,
'The blood of M or N has been spilt,' naming the man; they say,
'Our blood has been spilt.' In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims
kinship is, 'I am your bone and your flesh.' Both in Hebrew and in
Arabic 'flesh' is synonymous with 'clan' or kindred group." [360]
Similarly in India a Hindu speaks of any member of his subcaste or
clan as his bhai or brother.
"Indeed, in a religion based on kinship, where the god and his
worshippers are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and that
of kinship are identical. The sanctity of a kinsman's life and the
sanctity of the godhead are not two things but one; for ultimately the
only thing which is sacred is the common tribal life or the common
blood which is identified with the life. Whatever being partakes in
this life is holy, and its holiness may be described indifferently
as participation in the divine life and nature, or as participation
in the kindred blood." [361]