In Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber discusses some of the roots of wedding traditions like this. In ancient times, weddings were seen as debts between different families or clans. The first thing like money in human history was actually a set of tokens for what amount to life-debts. If your family was responsible for the death of someone else's family member, your family owed their family a life-debt. If a man from your family married a woman from theirs, you owed them a life-debt for the family member you are taking from their family into yours. These life-debts were to be paid with either marrying your own children off to them later, or outright letting them raise some of the grandkids.
In the event that one wanted to marry without already being owed a life-debt by that family, the marriage could go forward, but was tainted with some form of "illegitimacy", because it was a marriage into a debt, rather than a repayment. Those were the marriages that had to be staged as though they were a kidnapping, so that the parents of the bride, if they weren't repaid with grandkids or bribes soon enough, had leverage to reclaim their daughter if they so chose, claiming that it wasn't a "real marriage".
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And on a different note, the "threshold" itself is a reference to the old practice of lining house floors with wheat stalks, called "thresh", and placing a block on the outside of the door to keep all the thresh in... a thresh-holder, if you will. By tradition, the threshold is the point where you are legally considered inside the house.
NWSiaCB said: And on a different note, the "threshold" itself is a reference to the old practice of lining house floors with wheat stalks, called "thresh", and placing a block on the outside of the door to keep all the thresh in... a thresh-holder, if you will. By tradition, the threshold is the point where you are legally considered inside the house.
Is that from the same book? If it is, it's safe to assume the book is riddled with similar disinformation.
I'm happy to accept, but I'm the kind to take down both love and tanks with a single shot...So are you prepared to carry me across the threshold into your house?
