Note 183 — Chapter XLV · REGARD FOR THE DEAD

Idem, quoted by Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 341 sq. Among the Bhuiyâr, a Dravidian tribe in South Mirzapur, each house has two doors, one of which is only used by menstruous women; and when such a woman has to quit the house “she is obliged to creep out on her hands and knees so as to avoid polluting the house thatch by her touch” (Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces, ii. 87). Among the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia meat was only taken into the hunting lodge through a hole in the back of the structure, because the common door was used by women and women were regarded as unclean (Teit, ‘Thompson Indians,’ in Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, ‘Anthropology,’ i. 347). In other instances ordinary people are prohibited from using a door through which a sacred person has passed, obviously because contact with his sanctity is looked upon as dangerous. In some of the South Sea Islands, where the first-born, whether male or female, was especially sacred, no one else was allowed to pass by the door through which he or she entered the paternal dwelling (Gill, Life in the Southern Isles, p. 46). “In some parts of the Pacific, the door through which the king or queen passed in opening a temple was shut up, and ever after made sacred” (Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 328). Ezekiel (xliv. 2 sq.) represents the Lord as saying:—“This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the Lord, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut. It is for the prince; … he shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate, and shall go out by the way of the same.” Among the Arabs in olden days those who returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca entered their houses not by the door but by a hole made in the back wall (Palmer, in Sacred Books of the East, vi. 27, n. 1). This practice was forbidden by Muhammed (Koran, ii. 185).