In Uganda, the father of twins, for some time after their birth, became taboo (abiding by the prohibition): among other things, he is forbidden to kill anyone or look at blood.
When on the Pelauan Islands (Palau), during a raid, someone's head was cut off, the relatives of the murdered had to follow certain instructions: to sit locked up, not eat raw meat and chew betel nut, over which the sorcerer had previously cast a spell.
After that, the soul of the deceased is sent, allegedly in search of the killer in the country of the enemy. These prohibitions are probably based on the widespread belief that the soul or spirit of an animal is in its blood.
Some of the tribes of the Indians of North America, due to strict religious sanctions, strictly abstained from eating the blood of any animal, because it contains his life and soul.
The Jewish hunters released blood from the killed prey and covered it with dust. They did not touch the blood in the belief that it contained the soul or life of an animal.
In the Bible, the holy book of Jews and Christians, the strict prohibition on eating blood is repeated many times. “And eat no blood in all your dwellings, either from birds or from livestock. And whoever eats some blood, that soul will be cut off from his people”(Lev. 7: 26-27).
There is a widespread prescription according to which the blood of the supreme ruler should not be shed on the ground. Therefore, when it is necessary to put to death the ruler himself or one of the members of his family, they invent such a method of execution in which the royal blood would not fall on the ground.
When Kublai Khan (Kublai, grandson of Genghis Khan) defeated his uncle Nayyan, who rebelled against him, and took him prisoner, he ordered Nayyan to be wrapped in a carpet and tossed him until he died, “because he did not want to spill the blood of a representative of his khan's clan on the earth or to expose it to the sky and the sun."
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Monk Rikold mentions such a Tatar rule: “In order to seize the throne, one Khan will put another to death, but he will carefully ensure that the latter's blood is not shed. Tatars consider shedding the blood of the great khan on the earth as an extremely obscene deed; therefore the victim is strangled in one way or another”.
A similar opinion was held by the royal court in Burma, where a special method of execution was applied to the princes of blood, without bloodshed.
A negative attitude towards the shedding of royal blood is nothing more than a special case of aversion to bloodshed in general, especially to the shedding of blood on the ground. The Venetian traveler Marco Polo says that in his time people detained on the streets of Khanbalik (modern Beijing) at untimely hours were arrested; if they were found guilty of a crime, they were beaten with sticks.
People sometimes died from this punishment, but the Chinese resorted to it to avoid bloodshed, since their bakshi say that it is wrong to shed human blood.
The people of western Sussex believed that the land on which human blood was shed was cursed and would remain forever barren.
When some primitive peoples shed the blood of a tribesman, they do not allow it to fall on the ground, but substitute the bodies of other members of the tribe under it.
In some of the Australian tribes, boys who are to undergo circumcision are put on top of several tribesmen lying in a row so that the blood will drain onto them and not onto the ground.
In the same place, when a tooth is knocked out of a young man during the initiation ceremony, he is seated on the man's shoulders; it is prohibited to wipe the blood of a young man flowing onto a man's chest.
The Africans of the Lettuka tribe in Central Africa carefully scraped off the ground with an iron spatula, on which a drop of blood fell during childbirth, poured it into a pot, where there was water, with which they washed the woman in labor, and hid it all in a fairly deep hole dug on the left side of the house.
If a drop of blood falls to the ground, you, as is customary in West Africa, must diligently cover it, scrub the stain and tamp the ground. If blood got on the edge of the boat or on a tree, these places had to be cut down. These African customs are observed so that the blood does not fall into the hands of sorcerers and they do not use it for bad purposes.
The fear of spilling blood on the earth is generally explained by the belief that the soul dwells in it, and that by virtue of this, the land on which the blood falls must necessarily become taboo, or sacred.
In New Zealand, anything on which even one drop of the supreme chief's blood falls becomes taboo, or sacred. For example, a group of natives in a beautiful new boat comes to visit the leader, and he, stepping on the side of the boat, skips his leg, and the blood will drain into the boat in a thin stream - the boat immediately becomes the sacred property of the leader. The owner of the boat jumps out of it, drags the boat ashore opposite the chief's house and leaves there.
One day the leader, entering the missionary's house, hit his head on the crossbar, and he was bleeding. According to the natives, if this happened in the past, the house would remain with the leader.
From D. Fraser's book "The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion"
