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The Germanic person did not automatically become a member of the human community (the family, the Sib) at birth and did not necessarily depart from it at death. A “ritual investment” was necessary in order to become a member of the community in the first case and to remain one in the second. Other transitional times in a person’s life had to be accompanied by rites or accomplished through rites. Initiation into the Männerbund was ultimately a transition into a new system of social ties that granted access to a spiritual reality that was distinct from the world of normal experience. Marriage likewise signified a transition into a new system of social ties and a reception into an extended Sib network. Resettlement and land-taking represented a transition from home ground to a foreign territory, from a realm of familiar powers to one of unfamiliar or even frightening ones. This was a departure from the external conditions to which an individual was accustomed and an entrance in to a sphere of new conditions with hard-to-foresee consequences.
A newborn child did not automatically become a member of the community (family, Sib) simply through the act of birth. To become a member of the community required a specific rite. The child was lifted from the ground, set on the father’s knee (lap setting), and sprinkled with water (water consecration). The child received a name and, along with this “name fastening” (Old Icelandic nafn-festr), a gift. Water was considered an element of life; contact with water first conferred on the child life in its true sense: life in the community. A boy often received the name of his grandfather or, if his father had already died, that of his father. In any case it was thought that the deceased ancestor whose name the newborn received was reborn (Old Icelandic endr-borinn) in the child.
