It would seem, moreover, as if the sanctity of the threshold as the primitive altar were, in many places, in the course of time transferred to the family hearth. In the primitive tent the household fire was at the entrance way, as it is in the tents of the East to-day. Where Arabs have camped on an Eastern desert, the place of the shaykh’s tent can always be known by the blackened hearthstones at its entrance, or threshold, where he welcomed guests to the hospitality of his tribe and family by the sharing of bread and salt, or by the outpouring of the blood of a slaughtered lamb or kid.
If, indeed, the earliest dwelling of man was a cave, rather than a tent, the household fire was still at its entrance; and the threshold was the hearthstone. When, in the progress of building-changes, the hearthstone was removed to the center of the building, or of the inner court, its sanctity went with it, as the place of the family fire. Thus, for example, in Russia, the Domovoi, or household deity, who is honored and invoked at the threshold, “is supposed to live behind the stove now, but in early times he, or the spirits of the dead ancestors, of whom he is now the chief representative, were held to be in even more direct relations with the fire on the hearth; as were the Penates of the Romans, who were sometimes spoken of as at the threshold, and again as at the hearth.”[57]
A recognition of the peculiar sacredness of the threshold is shown, in different lands, by the popular unwillingness to have the dead carried over it on the way to burial. In India, the body of one dying in certain phases of the moon can in no wise be carried over the threshold. The house wall must be broken for its removal.[58] When Chinese students are attending the competitive examinations for promotion, they are shut up in rooms until their work is completed. If one of them dies at such a time, “the body is removed over the back wall, as the taking out openly through the front door would be regarded as an evil omen.”[59]
In the capital of Korea there is a small gate in the city wall known as the “Gate of the Dead,” through which alone a dead body can be carried out. But no one can ever enter through that passage-way.[60]