adoption

70:3.6In the early ages each tribe was sur­rounded by con­cen­tric cir­cles of in­creas­ing fear and sus­pi­cion; hence it was once the cus­tom to kill all strangers, later on, to en­slave them. The old idea of friend­ship meant adop­tion into the clan; and clan mem­ber­ship was be­lieved to sur­vive death—one of the ear­li­est con­cepts of eter­nal life.

70:3.7The cer­e­mony of adop­tion con­sisted in drink­ing each other’s blood. In some groups saliva was ex­changed in the place of blood drink­ing, this be­ing the an­cient ori­gin of the prac­tice of so­cial kiss­ing. And all cer­e­monies of as­so­ci­a­tion, whether mar­riage or adop­tion, were al­ways ter­mi­nated by feast­ing.

70:3.8In later times, blood di­luted with red wine was used, and even­tu­ally wine alone was drunk to seal the adop­tion cer­e­mony, which was sig­ni­fied in the touch­ing of the wine cups and con­sum­mated by the swal­low­ing of the bev­er­age. The He­brews em­ployed a mod­i­fied form of this adop­tion cer­e­mony. Their Arab an­ces­tors made use of the oath taken while the hand of the can­di­date rested upon the gen­er­a­tive or­gan of the tribal na­tive. The He­brews treated adopted aliens kindly and fra­ter­nally. “The stranger that dwells with you shall be as one born among you, and you shall love him as your­self.”

87:3.3The cus­tom of adopt­ing chil­dren was to make sure that some­one would pro­vide of­fer­ings af­ter death for the peace and prog­ress of the soul. The sav­age lived in fear of the ghosts of his fel­lows and spent his spare time plan­ning for the safe con­duct of his own ghost af­ter death.

66:7.5The Prince’s staff lived to­gether as fa­thers and moth­ers. True, they had no chil­dren of their own, but the fifty pat­tern homes of Dala­ma­tia never shel­tered less than five hun­dred adopted lit­tle ones as­sem­bled from the su­pe­rior fam­i­lies of the An­donic and San­gik races; many of these chil­dren were or­phans. They were fa­vored with the dis­ci­pline and train­ing of these super­par­ents; and then, af­ter three years in the schools of the Prince (they en­tered from thir­teen to fif­teen), they were el­i­gi­ble for mar­riage and ready to re­ceive their com­mis­sions as emis­saries of the Prince to the needy tribes of their re­spec­tive races.

74:7.11The schools, in fact ev­ery ac­tiv­ity of the Gar­den, were al­ways open to vis­i­tors. Un­armed ob­servers were freely ad­mit­ted to Eden for short vis­its. To so­journ in the Gar­den a Uran­tian had to be “adopted.” He re­ceived in­struc­tions in the plan and pur­pose of the Adamic be­stowal, sig­ni­fied his in­ten­tion to ad­here to this mis­sion, and then made dec­la­ra­tion of loy­alty to the so­cial rule of Adam and the spir­i­tual sov­er­eignty of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.