House – Symbol

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House – Symbol

THE DOORSILL

There is one more element connected with a strong symbolical meaning – the doorsill. As a place of access in the house, which dispenses the outside world from the inner, was an important and especially respected element. The bride, when she steps above it at the bridegroom’s house, for the first time, according the custom of Mijak’s attend to step with the right leg, and not to reach it16F.
Čajkanović 17F fairly extensive descries the mortuary custom’s, in which we could find the remainder of earlier entombing the dead one in the doorsill of the house. It was an very old custom, which is found in many nations in Paleolithic and Neolithic period, but it’s arrears we can find in a civilized period of Greece and Rome. We can find the rudimentary arrears of this custom at the Slavs. They buried theirs small, nonage sacrament children in the house doorsill. In Serbia it’s remarked more ceremonial custom, associate with the dead, performed on the house’s doorsill, claws built in the doorsill, which in essential present the dead one’s body. The same meaning has the custom of built in the measure of the dead one, taken with the red thread, and many more. According the national animistic custom, this way of funeral, is the reflection of the whish the soul to stay in the house, defended from the outside antagonistic powers, apropos it defense’s the domestic one from the evil ghosts. The place of burial, apropos theirs faith, in essence is the place of further abode of the soul, on her anchoring. That is the place, in the same time, for the living one to contact with him, or to make a gift in his honor.
Funeral in the doorsill, apposite under the floor of the house, in essence present the whish – the soul of the dead one to stay in the house, was too strong engraved in the conscience. Because of that they made their gravestones and sarcophaguses as houses, the same as the Slav’s wooden gravestones, which was cremate with the defunct and Etrurian’s urns. This kind of tradition, in exclusive strong form existed at the Slavs. The research shows that even in the periods when the defunct was cremated, they ware put in the small objects in the form of a house. In the period when they started to bury them, they ware buried under the wooden gravestones in the form of a house. This custom was alive after the Christianize, and at the East Slavs till past age. This kind of models was called “domovini”18F At the South Slavs we could find this custom in the Medieval monuments, which was erected, on the territory of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina called “stećci.” They represent the continuousness of this custom, with theirs basic form – gravestone in the form of a house, and according the engraved which was very archaic. Burial the deceased in the position of a fetus, in archaic period, expresses theirs faith that the mother-earth would regenerate him and reanimate again. In the next periods, they keep this faith, with the deferent position of the departed one, but we could find this wish in the form of the gravestone. Because the archetype of the Goddess Mother is the house, burying in side or under her, or her model, they tooth that the departed would reanimate.

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16. Kličkova V., Georgieva M., The same, pp.161
17. Čajkanović V., Mit i religija u srba, pp.101-107
18. Ribakov B.A., Jazichestvo drevnya Rusi, pp.86-120

AuthorMelanija Šerdenkovska
2018-08-21T17:24:02+00:00 October 1st, 1998|Categories: Essays, Blesok no. 05, Literature|0 Comments