Iakov Levi
The
Taboo of the Threshold
May
31, 2005
In that day, I will
punish all those who leap over the threshold, who fill their master's house
with violence and deceit.
(Zephaniah 1:9)
Doors. The child
sees, just as the man does, in everything he learns and experiences doors:
but to the former they are entrances, to the latter only through -
ways. (F.Nietzsche, II Human All Too Human , 281)
In Zoppi e altri mutilati
I have mentioned Theodor
Reik’s article “The Doorkeepers”*, in which the author deals
with the taboo, common to many peoples, of treading on the threshold. Reik
shows that the reason for the taboo is that treading is unconsciously
interpreted as an aggressive and contemptuous act towards the owner of the
house.
I shall add that, as Freud has shown in Symbolism in Dreams (1915
- 17), a house represents the maternal body. Therefore, the threshold, like the
flaming sword defending the gates of the Garden of Eden, is the penis of the
Father which inhibits the entrance to the mother’s body. Treading on the
threshold is an aggressive act of castration, perpetrated on the father’s
genital. (For treading as an anal sadistic act of castration Cf. Caravaggio and La Madonna del serpente).
In this context, it is worth mentioning the practice of many children to
avoid treading on certain stones of the pavement - while walking on the streets
- particularly avoiding the lines between the slabs. There is also a game in
which children draw squares on the pavement with a chalk, and then they leap
between them, carefully avoiding to tread on the dividing lines.
Some months ago, during a visit to the Mosque of Akko, I had the chance
to watch the following scene:
In the courtyard, as in every Mosque, there is a rounded structure with
many taps (Kas - Kaas). The worshipers wash there their feet. Then, in
order to enter into the Mosque, they have to walk a few steps.
Between the Kas and the threshold of the Mosque, some wooden
planks are laid, on which the worshipers walk swiftly. When they reach the
threshold itself, they leap beyond, avoiding to touch it.
The manifest rationalization of this ritual is that the worshipers want to
avoid littering their just washed feet, before entering the sacred place.
However, they could well walk on the pavement, which is always very clean, as
the worshipers do in
Therefore, the latent reason for the wooden planks, and then the leaping
beyond the threshold, is not to avoid littering the feet, but to perform the
rite of the leap beyond the threshold, namely, to build some kind of
springboard which emphasizes the taboo and the inhibition of treading on the
threshold.
It is also worth mentioning that the name of the Mosque is El – Jazzar.
It is the name of the terrible and cruel governor of
The Mosque, which as every church and temple symbolizes the maternal
body, belongs, therefore, to El – Jazzar - the cutting one - which is the
image of the castrating father. The taboo of the threshold, in the Mosque
bearing the name of “the cutting one”, assumes, in this way, a
further relevance.
In religious rites, every gesture and act contains a latent
significance. “To wash the feet” has a latent sense, which is more
profound than just “arriving at the service” with clean feet. In
the
As Freud has shown in Symbolism in Dreams (1915 - 17), feet and
hands are a penis – substitute. The feet which are washed during
religious rites are, therefore, not the real ones, but the symbol of the
aggressive and incestuous drive. The feet are those of Oedipus, lame and
patricide, “by the inflated legs”. This sinful and
aggressive member must be symbolically purified with water from its aggressive
and incestuous drives, before being allowed to approach the
* in Dogma and Compulsion, International Universities Press,
The Kaas of the Mosque
