High sills, or thresholds, so that one must step over, and not on, them, are in the houses of Finland, and in the houses of many Finns in the United States.[[25]] The same was true of many Teutonic houses.[[26]]
To shake hands across a threshold, instead of crossing it, is said, in Finland, to ensure a quarrel.[[27]] To step over a threshold is, in Lapland, to bring one under the protection of the family within, and of its guardian deity.[[28]] The same is true among the Magyars.[[29]]
The ancient Pythagoreans quoted various maxims, supposed to be from the sayings of their great founder, as teaching important lessons for all time. In these maxims there were indications of a peculiar reverence for the threshold and doorway. Thus: “He who strikes his foot against the threshold should go back;” it were unsafe to pursue a movement so inauspiciously begun. And, again: “The doors should be kissed fondly by those who enter or depart.”[[30]]
“Treading on the threshold was ... tabooed by the Tatars.”[[31]] Again, on the other side of the globe, in Samoa, to spill water on the door-step, or threshold, when food is brought in, is a cause of anger to the protecting deity of the family. It may drive him away.[[32]]
In Europe and in America it is by many counted an ill omen to tread upon the threshold of the door on entering a house. To the present day, in portions of Scotland, the idea popularly prevails, that to tread directly upon the boundary lines of division between ordinary flagstones is to endanger one’s soul; hence the very children are careful to avoid stepping upon those lines, in their walking across the courtyards or along the streets, in their every-day passing.
Many a person in the United States, who knows nothing of any superstition connected with this, avoids, if possible, stepping on, instead of over, the cracks or seams of a board walk, or even the seams of a carpet.
All these customs seem to be a survival of the feeling that the threshold is sacred as the primitive altar.
Apart from the reverence for the threshold demanded of those who pass over it, there is an obvious sanctity of the threshold recognized in the placing of images and amulets underneath it, and in the sacrifices and offerings placed on it, as a means of guarding the dwelling within.
In the building of private houses, as well as temples, and city gateways, in ancient Assyria, images of various kinds and sizes, “in bronze, red jasper, yellow stone, and baked earth, ... are buried beneath the stones of the threshold, so as to bar the entrance to all destructive spirits.” Invocations are graven upon these figures.[[33]]
Herodotus mentions[[34]] that, in the annual feast in honor of the god Osiris, “every Egyptian sacrifices a hog before the door of his house” on the evening before the festival. Osiris was the god who was the judge of the soul after death, and who in a peculiar sense stood for the truth of the life to come. Every Egyptian desired, above all, to be in loving covenant with Osiris, and when he would offer a welcoming sacrifice to him, he did so before the door of his own house, as before the primitive family altar. That it was the blood poured out at the threshold which was the essential act of covenanting in this sacrifice to Osiris, is evidenced in the fact that the animal sacrificed was not eaten in the family of the sacrificer, but was carried away by the swineherd who furnished it.