# Lecouteux, *Tradition of Household Spirits*, 2000 > [!cite] > Lecouteux, Claude. *The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices*. Translated by Jon E. Graham. Inner Traditions, 2000. --- ‘In the case of a religious edifice \[i.e. churches in Europe], it is obvious that the entities that would find lodging there would refuse to be neighbors to creatures of another religion, who were considered to be demons and pagans. Every building should therefore be erected in a magically pure place, which is to say one without a supernatural owner, whether it is a spirit, a demon, or a dead soul. This notion can be found in the Far East in a similar form. In China, for example, appeal was made to a geomancer to determine if the spot lent itself to construction because it was especially important not to build on the tail of a telluric dragon.’ [[Lecouteux, Tradition of Household Spirits, 2000|(Lecouteux 2000, 19)]] ^31f2e5 ‘In many places, including southern China, three tiles are removed from the roof in order to ease the passing of the dying person. This allows his or her soul to take flight; this custom was condemned by Bernardino of Siena in the fourteenth century. In England, the ridge tile was called the “soul window”. In central Russia, roofs were sometimes decorated with two small horses that would be removed when it was learned that a sorcerer was on his deathbed, as this would facilitate his death. The Scandinavian sagas tell us that revenants scale the roofs and seek to bang or knock on them as they wanted someone to let them in. We should compare this detail with a belief recorded by Plutarch—that a person believed the dead could only return to his former home through a hole that had been made in the wall—and a German custom of removing the body of a suicide from the house through the roof. All the evidence indicates that the roof is connected to ideas about the beyond.’ [[Lecouteux, Tradition of Household Spirits, 2000|(Lecouteux 2000, 39)]] ^d66016