Among the Battas, in Sumatra, the more solemn form of their oath is, "May my harvest fail, my cattle die, and may I never taste salt again, if I do not speak the truth."[222]
Among the Dyaks of Borneo, when a question arises between disputants for which there is no ordinary mode of settlement, each litigant is given a lump of salt, which the two drop into water simultaneously, and he whose lump dissolves soonest is adjudged the loser.[223]
In the Kenyah tribe in Borneo, the ceremony of naming a child is made much of. Guests assemble on the occasion. After the more private ceremony, participated in by a favored few, every guest present is given a package of salt and some ginger root, as wedding-cake is given in many lands, for a souvenir of the occasion.[224]
A custom among Slavic peoples of presenting bread and salt to a ruler at the threshold of his domain, as he comes on a visit, would seem to combine the two ideas of hospitality and of worship. When the Emperor of Russia visits one of his provinces, or subject cities, he is met at its threshold by its representative rulers, as his loyal subjects, with bread and salt served on a golden or a silver-gilt placque. In the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg there are hundreds of these suspended over the doorways and on the walls, which placques were thus presented to different emperors on the occasion of such visits.
When the Grand Duke Alexis visited America in 1872, he was received in this way by the wife of the Russian Minister at Washington. "As the Grand Duke entered the Legation, Madame de Catacazy carried a silver salver on which was placed a round loaf of plain black bread, on the top of which was imbedded a golden salt-cellar."[225] This was obviously more than a symbol of welcome to the home of the embassy. The Grand Duke came as a ruler and lord to his own, and his own received him loyally, with symbols of reverent submission. It was more like the threshold covenant of the East, when blood is poured out from an offered body at the doorway of a house, as one who would be honored as well as welcomed comes in.
Some years later there was an account in the London Court Journal of the making in Paris of an ornate golden dish for a similar use in Roumania. The burghers of Bucharest were arranging to present on this dish bread and salt to Princess Marie of Edinburgh, when she should make her first entrance into their city as their future queen. The dish was of gold worked in a purely Renaissance design, its edge being an openwork pattern of interlaced ears of corn and branches of laurel. In the center was the salt-cellar, shaped like an open tulip, and resting upon four graceful stalks.
In the days of Queen Elizabeth of England it was a custom of officials of the palace to rub bread and salt on the plates of the dining-table before each royal meal.[226]
Among the Kookies of the Hill Tribes in India, "whenever they send any message of consequence to each other, they always put in the hand of the bearer of it a small quantity of salt, to be delivered with the message as expressive of its importance."[227] This would seem to indicate a life-and-death matter in the message.
An old English custom of having a salt-cellar at a certain point on the family table, and of seating those present above or below it, gave rise to the phrase "sitting below the salt" as indicative of an inferior position at the household table. As salt was a symbol of hospitality and of covenanted union, he who was within the scope of salt-sharing at a table was in a very different position from one who was outside of it.