The Doorway Threshold: Why Crossing It Is Actually a Ritual

Bowing before a doorway. Kissing it. Touching it with your hand as you walk in. Or, the opposite, avoiding stepping on it, taking off your shoes before crossing it, or having someone carry you over it. Cultures far removed from one another developed some ritual gesture for that same strip of floor, barely a few inches wide.

French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep devoted a section of The Rites of Passage (1909) to explaining why. His answer has nothing to do with loose superstitions and everything to do with what a threshold actually is. A century later, the psychology of memory has found, by a very different route, that walking through a door isn’t entirely neutral for the brain either.

A threshold belongs neither here nor there

Van Gennep classified the rituals that accompany any change of state into three types: rites of separation (leaving the previous situation behind), rites of transition (the crossing itself) and rites of incorporation (joining the new situation). He also called them preliminal, liminal and postliminal, from the Latin limen, which means precisely “threshold”.

The doorway threshold is, for Van Gennep, the purest physical example of transition. It belongs neither to the space inside nor to the space outside, and for the instant someone occupies it, that person “wavers between two worlds”, in his own words.

That’s why, he says, “crossing the threshold” isn’t a simple physical movement. It means joining a new world: another family’s home at a wedding, a religious community at an ordination, the world of the dead at a funeral.

Why blood was spilled on the door

Precisely because the threshold isn’t a neutral place, many cultures documented by Van Gennep treat it as a point that needs protection or purification before it can be crossed.

• In some traditions the threshold was sprinkled with blood or lustral water.
• The doorposts and the lintel were smeared with blood or perfumes.
• In other cases sacred objects (sacra) were hung on or nailed to the doorframe.

Van Gennep notices something that often gets lost when these rituals are read one by one: the whole framework of the door, the threshold, the posts and the lintel, forms a single ritual unit. If the specific rites differ from one culture to another, it is “for immediate technical reasons”; the underlying logic is the same.

The guardians who inherited the threshold

When that sacred character develops on a large scale, according to Van Gennep, the door is no longer enough on its own and needs custodians.

In Egypt and the Assyro-Babylonian world, that role fell to winged dragons, sphinxes and monstrous figures carved beside the gates of temples and palaces. In China, to monumental statues on either side of the entrance. In these cases, Van Gennep notes, the door and the threshold “pass into the background”: prayers and offerings are no longer addressed to the threshold but to its guardians.

The threshold doesn’t lose its symbolic charge: it hands it over to something with a shape of its own, easier to depict and to fear.

The threshold has its own before and after

Van Gennep insists on a nuance that is often overlooked: the rites performed on the threshold don’t make up the whole ceremony. They are flanked by two others.

Before touching the threshold, purification rites are common: washing, cleansing, symbolically leaving the previous space behind. Right after crossing it come the rites of incorporation, such as the offering of salt or a meal shared with those who already live in that space. Threshold rites, then, are not “rites of union”: they are the hinge of a three-step sequence that begins before reaching the door and ends well after it.

Offering salt or bread to someone entering a house for the first time, a custom still alive in various cultures, belongs to that third step: the incorporation that closes what the threshold had left suspended.

Why the bride is carried in

Alongside the rituals that honor the threshold (touching it, kissing it, bowing before it), there is the opposite strategy: avoiding contact with it.

Van Gennep documents the custom of taking off one’s shoes before crossing a threshold, or of taking a step long enough not to tread on it. He also cites W. Crooke’s study The Lifting of the Bride (Folk-Lore, 1902), which records across different cultures the custom of carrying the bride into her new home.

Within Van Gennep’s framework, touching the threshold reverently and avoiding it altogether answer the same premise: that exact spot is too charged to be crossed neutrally. The fact that carrying the bride has survived in present-day weddings in many countries, long after any conscious explanation was lost, shows how a rite can keep its form and forget its reason.

From your front door to a country’s border

The most unexpected thing about Van Gennep’s theory is how well it explains phenomena that, at first glance, have nothing to do with a door.

Between territories there used to be what he calls a neutral zone: a strip that didn’t fully belong to either side, like the border “marches” of medieval Europe. To illustrate it, he draws on an episode recorded by the American writer Henry Clay Trumbull: when General Ulysses Grant landed at Assiout, in Egypt, an ox was sacrificed and its head and body were placed on either side of the gangway, so that Grant had to pass between them, over the spilled blood.

Van Gennep reads this rite, and others like it (passing between two branches, between an object cut in two, or under an arch), as variations of the same gesture: formally leaving one world to enter another. The same structure repeats on a smaller scale in the gate of a city or a neighborhood and in the porch of a temple (the pronaos, the narthex, the vestibule), until it shrinks to a single stone, a beam or a threshold. Crossing a border between the blood of an ox and crossing the threshold of a room are, for the logic that produces these rituals, the same kind of act.

That same logic of marking a transition with a small ritual shows up in other collective shifts of state, like the transformations a local festival brings with it.

From Van Gennep to Victor Turner: liminality

Half a century later, British anthropologist Victor Turner took up Van Gennep’s transition phase and turned it into a concept of its own: liminality. In his essay “Betwixt and Between” (1964, collected in The Forest of Symbols, 1967), he described people in the liminal phase, such as initiates in the rites of passage of the Ndembu of Zambia, as beings who are “neither here nor there”, having already lost their former status and not yet holding the new one.

In The Ritual Process (1969), Turner added an observation that reaches beyond the door: those who go through that phase together tend to experience an intense equality and bond, which he called communitas. Ordinary hierarchies are suspended for as long as the passage lasts. The idea has since been applied to experiences as different as pilgrimages, festivals and the first year of college.

The physical threshold, on this reading, is the smallest, most everyday version of something societies organize on a grand scale.

What the psychology of memory found in doorways

Almost everyone has lived this scene: you head to the kitchen for something and, as you walk through the door, you forget what you came for. In 2011, Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin took it into the lab.

In their experiments, participants picked up objects and carried them from one table to another, in virtual environments and in real rooms. Those who walked through a doorway remembered the object they had just put down less well than those who covered the same distance within a single room. Returning to the original room through several doors didn’t improve recall, which pointed to the doorway itself rather than the change of context.

The explanation they propose is that of event boundaries: the mind divides experience into episodes, and a doorway works as a signal that one is ending and another is beginning. What belongs to the previous episode gets filed away and becomes somewhat less accessible.

The effect, though, is more fragile than the headlines suggest. In 2021, Jessica McFadyen and her team put it to the test in four experiments and only found more errors after walking through doors in one specific condition: in virtual reality and with working memory already busy with another task. The careful conclusion is that a door can act as a boundary between episodes when the mind is short on resources, not that crossing it erases memories.

Even with that caution, the parallel is interesting. What Van Gennep described as a cultural margin between two worlds finds a modest echo in the way memory slices time into scenes.

What’s left of all this today

Hardly anyone, walking into their own home, thinks about Babylonian dragons or medieval neutral zones. But the low-key gestures are still there: knocking before going in even when the door is open, greeting guests “at the door” instead of waiting for them seated, wiping your shoes or taking them off before entering someone else’s home.

None of these gestures needs a religious explanation to survive anymore. They have become manners and habit. What they keep is the exact place and moment: the instant when you leave one space and don’t yet belong to the next.

That may be Van Gennep’s most lasting contribution. Before it was a strip of floor, the threshold was an idea about change: no important step is taken all at once, and between the before and the after there is an interval that deserves a rite of its own. Turner turned it into social theory, and the psychology of memory has found a small reflection of it in the lab.

Sources

• Van Gennep, A. (1909). Les rites de passage. Émile Nourry. (English translation: The Rites of Passage, University of Chicago Press, 1960). Chapter II, “Le passage matériel”.
• Crooke, W. (1902). The Lifting of the Bride. Folk-Lore, XIII, pp. 226-251.
• McFadyen, J., Nolan, C., Pinocy, E., Buteri, D. and Baumann, O. (2021). Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation. BMC Psychology, 9, 41. DOI
• Radvansky, G. A., Krawietz, S. A. and Tamplin, A. K. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(8), 1632-1645. DOI
• Trumbull, H. C. (1896). The Threshold Covenant: Or, the Beginning of Religious Rites. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
• Turner, V. (1967). Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage. In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press.
• Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine.