Releasing the house

The word sits on the house

A pregnant woman in Marian’s Bucovina may be called grea, îngreunată, însărcinată, în altă stare. Among those names sits neslobodă, unfree. After the birth the house needs the same releasing. Chapter VIII is called slobodirea casei, the releasing of the house.

In most places, he writes, the rite is done on the day the child is born. The priest blesses water, censes, lays the stole on the woman’s head, reads the prayers of purification for her, the midwife and the other women who stood at the birth, and sprinkles the house crosswise. From the Banat, I. Popovici and Elia Popă send him the short form: the house is sprinkled with holy water, “and then anyone is allowed to enter it.”

Marian calls the woman who has given birth nepoată. It is the midwife’s word, not a kinship term. Until her prayer is read she is unclean. For forty days she does not cross the farm boundary. A midwife who enters another house before her own purification prayer “pollutes the whole village.” No Christian midwife, he writes, dares it.

The releasing of the house is done thus: the house is sprinkled with holy water, and then anyone is allowed to enter it.

Who may pass the door

The house opens on thresholds of time. The child stays inside. Choose a threshold.

The child lies under the table

Before it is shown, it is kept low. The father lifts it from the ground and gives it to the mother.

The husband is allowed into his wife’s room for the whole of the labour. Marian also hears of women who cannot give birth until the husband comes. Most men still stay out. They are not wanted, or they are too tender. After the bath the midwife waits for the father, offers him a glass, and if the child is a boy she takes his cap and hangs it above the lying-in woman. Until he buys it back, the cap stays there.

Only then does she show him the child. It is under the table or the bench. The father stoops, lifts it, kisses it and gives it to the mother. Marian recognises the Roman lifting: the father who takes the infant from the ground acknowledges it. The comparison is his. The village fact is narrower. The child has been bathed, the water thrown, the house is not yet free for the village, and the infant stays under the furniture until someone takes it up.

The midwife shows him the child that lies under the table or the bench, that is, where she had put it a little earlier.

The pot must be new

The first bath is made in a pot that has not yet served. The water is thrown on flowers. The child is not taken outdoors that day.

Some midwives put the pot on the fire before the birth. The pot is new so the child will have a clear voice, “as the new pot sounds.” The water is tepid, cooler rather than boiling, so the life will not seethe. Into the trough go basil from Holy Cross day, silver coins, peony, honey, bread, sugar, an egg, sweet milk, holy water. Each object has a fate to give: to be dear as silver, sweet as honey, good as bread.

After the wash the midwife blows a cross over the water and spits in it, to drive off the strigoaice. Then the swaddling: band, cloths, nappies, a small quilt, a cap with a red sign on the brow. The first bath-water is thrown on flowers, so the child will draw people as they do, or at the foot of a walnut, apple or pear, so it will grow and bear. It is not thrown after sunset. Once bathed, the child is not taken out that same day.

Two openings

The house door is released on the day of birth. The church threshold waits forty days.

Where the releasing is delayed until the woman can walk, the midwife takes a vessel of water and a bunch of basil to the priest. She returns, gives the mother three sips, sprinkles her, washes her hands and face, “so that she may be clean, and only then does she eat and drink, for otherwise the lying-in woman is unclean.” The remaining water goes into the child’s baths, enough for three, five or nine.

Above the door some midwives hang a red sign: a scrap of yarn, a ribbon, a red hair. A menstruating woman does not enter for a week, some say six, lest the child take the rash called roșață. If she enters anyway she must say so. Otherwise the mother is “terribly angry.” In Wallachia a bran cross is made in the middle of the house and at the door. Whoever comes in says: “Lay hold of this house of bran, and do not touch the child.”

Until the fortieth day the lying-in woman is in no way allowed to go out or to be caught by evening beyond the boundary of her household.

The name arrives at the font

If the infant is healthy, the parents “do not baptise it in haste, but leave it until the eighth day.” Some wait until the mother is up. If it is weak they baptise it as soon as they can, so it will not die unbaptised, will not grow as a pagan. In some Transylvanian villages they keep it two or three days, or until a feast. In Macedonia it is usually the seventh, on a Sunday.

The baptismal name is given by the parents, or the godparents, or the priest after the saint of the day. Until then the child is the newborn, unbaptised. It is not left alone. At the head of the cradle they put a knife, scissors, a broom, a fire-iron, the tongs. Iron stands in for a person. After baptism, a Banat correspondent writes, it may stay alone: it has been given into the knowledge of the heavenly Father and has a guardian angel.

The fate-women come on unpaired nights, the third, fifth and seventh, or in the first three nights, or only on the eighth. Parents leave door and windows, set out flour, salt, bread, coins. Rodini, the women’s gift-visits, last “from the day the child was born until after its baptism. After it is baptised, no one goes in rodini any more.”

On the church threshold

At forty days the mother’s first journey is to church. She does not go in. She waits on the step.

A day or two before, she bathes. In the morning she washes, puts on her cleanest clothes, and tucks under the child’s band a scrap of salt and a scrap of bread. At the church she does not pass inside at once. The priest comes out. She stands with the child in her arms, kneeling on the threshold, for the forty-day prayer. Then the priest takes the child from her and makes the sign of the cross before the doors: “Let the servant of God N. be churched.”

A boy may be taken into the sanctuary and touched to the four sides of the holy table. A girl is only blessed before the icons. In Suceava county, Marian writes, neither is taken into the altar. After the prayer the mother enters holding the stole. Some women, home again, give a small meal, glad to have left the “cage”: the ban on walking without that prayer.

Marian adds short analogies. Among the ancient Greeks a woman did not go to the temple until forty days after a birth. Among the Jews the interval is forty or eighty, according to the child’s sex. The custom, he writes, passed into the Christian church as the prayer of purification. The village fact remains another thing: the church step is the second opening. The first was the house door.

Arriving at the church she does not go inside at once, but waits at its threshold until the priest comes out to read her the prayer of forty days.

A reception, twice

Arnold van Gennep published Les rites de passage in 1909, seventeen years after Göbl. His shape, separation, margin, aggregation, fits the 1892 material without having read it. The house is the liminal place. The child is held apart from the world while unbaptised, under the table, with iron at the head of the cradle. Aggregation is staged: the releasing of the house for the village, baptism for the name, churching for the woman and for the child who “takes a beginning of entering the church.”

Robert Hertz, in 1907, described a double burial. The birth material asks for a double reception. First the house, sprinkled, receives the village. Then the church, from the threshold, receives mother and child. Hertz did not write that. It is his observation turned onto the 1892 facts, not a quotation from him.

The funeral pair from the same year, Înmormântarea la români, sends the dead along a road of cloth. Here a door is opened so the village may come in. The child stays in the house until it has a name, witnesses, and a prayer of forty days.

What was counted

The text is the Academy edition of 1892, Lito-tipografia Carol Göbl, Bucharest. The printed contents, p. 441, list twenty-five chapters. Numbered pages run to 441. The Wikimedia scan, from Google Books, has 465 image files, including library boards. Quotations are given in present-day spelling. The words follow the 1892 text.

“Most lands inhabited by Romanians” is Marian’s judgement, not a census. Releasing on the same day is the rule he sets at the start of chapter VIII. The variants sit beside it: Transylvania after six weeks, some places after the woman is up. Forty days and six weeks are, in the book, the same churching interval. The eighth day at baptism is the rule for a healthy child; a weak child is baptised sooner.

The page does not reconstruct a named village and does not describe birth today. Nepoată remains Marian’s word for the lying-in woman. Van Gennep and Hertz stand after the facts, not in front of them.

Sources

• Simion Florea Marian, Nascerea la Români, Göbl, 1892. PDF, Wikimedia Commons.
• The same volume, Internet Archive, nascerealaromni00marigoog.
• Linen on the threshold. The funeral pair, also Marian 1892.

Van Gennep, Les rites de passage, Paris, 1909. Hertz, “Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort”, Année sociologique, 1907. Bolintineanu, Călătorii la românii din Macedonia, 1863, cited by Marian at p. 133.