I think the baby makes more sense than most of the other options (not that I'm advocating any of them). The baby becomes the soul of the house, and if it's honoured and remembered with respect and love (which seems part of the same tradition), I imagine that the idea is that it will be 'raised' to know no different - it will always think of the house as its body, and its inhabitants as its family. It's one of the reasons you get so many ghost/horror stories about houses where things start going wrong when the last of the family line dies out - clocks stopping at the moment of death/animosity towards new families moving in etc. The roots of those stories are in this practice. A baby was preferred over a dumb but loyal animal for obvious reasons, I think, and if young enough it would've died quickly without much struggle. I mean. Relatively speaking. Oh hell, you know what I mean. And a baby will have the blind trusting love of a child, but the strength of the supernatural. So many early cultures believed that the world of the dead mirrored the world of life, so it seemed not unreasonable to imagine that the child would grow up, I suppose, on the other side, or straddling the boundaries. There's a logic to it.
Also, a child was probably cheaper than salt. I'm just saying. Salt was expensive and in very short supply back in the day.
Didn't they call those nuns anchoresses or something?
Also, a child was probably cheaper than salt. I'm just saying. Salt was expensive and in very short supply back in the day.
Didn't they call those nuns anchoresses or something?
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