Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/257

 The Lifting of the Bride. 241

cases of the girl who is going to graft vines, whose hair must not touch the ground, and of the healing water of Scotland — " if it once touches the ground its healing virtue is gone." ^ The other possible solution, that the lifting over the threshold may depend on the idea that the bride is by virtue of her state of taboo in a condition of impurity, and that it would be offensive to the threshold spirit and conse- quently dangerous to herself to touch the sacred stone, seems on the whole less probable. As the bride is touched and kissed by the persons who take part in the " petting-stone " rite, the idea that she is in a state of ceremonial impurity does not seem tenable. The suggestion of Mr. Craw^ley that the lifting is associated with " sexual taboo," " woman's shyness, timidity, and modesty, accentuated by the physio- logical sensibility w^hich resists physical subjugation," seems still less likely.^ It seems questionable how far such feelings are potential in savage life ; and in the case of the threshold lifting, the ceremonial character of the rite tends perhaps to increase the difficulty of accepting this sug- gestion.

In some cases, again, the idea of luck may have influenced the practice. It may have been considered essential to the happiness of the bride's married life that when she enters for the first time the house in which she is to spend the rest of her days she should tread on, or be lifted over, a sacred stone. For the same reason it was considered essential that in crossinor the threshold the bride and brides^room should do so right foot foremost, an idea which is as old as the Grihyasiitra of India.^ In Wiltshire up to quite recent times it was the rule that the bride's feet should not touch

' Folk-Lore, xii., 196; xi., 448. A cloak was also spread for the girl to kneel upon. The idea seems to be that the earth might get the benefit of the " virtue " which is wanted elsewhere.

- Mystic Rose, 350.

^ Folklore Congress Report, 273 ; Journal Anthropoligical Society Bombay, i., 294 ; Lobel, Hochzeitsbraiiche in der Tiirkci, 143, 171, seq. For the last reference I am indebted to Mr, Hartland.

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