Black Cats and Evil Eyes (17 page)

The notion that such a charm could also ward off evil comes from the separate medieval belief that rabbits, whose young are born with their eyes open, had the
power of
second sight, so could warn people if evil spirits approached. Their renowned reproductive success also made them a symbol of fertility, which was always seen as a blessing. Saying ‘white
rabbits’ three times on the first morning of the month was also said to bring good luck.

Many of the rituals enacted at the start of the New Year have their roots in the Druid midwinter festival celebrations, which traditionally took place towards the end of
December to mark the end of the dark days and the return of the sun. Today’s fireworks and party poppers replace the singing and bell ringing used in centuries gone by to clear the air of
evil spirits ready for the entrance of the New Year. The custom of drinking heavily stems from the Anglo-Saxon custom of
wassailing
, the passing on of good cheer and blessings by drinking from a
shared bowl of ale.

The idea that the first person over the threshold on New Year’s Day had to be male is first noted in 1805, and by 1845 the records include the fact that he must also be
of a dark complexion. It was seen as unlucky if he was fair and a sign of impending doom if he should be a redhead (
see
Never Choose a Redhead as a Bridesmaid
. . .). And while this
is fairly recent compared with other New Year rituals, it seems to originate from a much older belief that your fortune could be affected for good or ill by the kind of person you met on the
morning of any important day, such as that of a christening, wedding or the start of a long journey. The superstition appeared in this form as early as 1303 in the Middle English manuscript
Handlyng Synne
by the Gilbertine monk Robert Manning, also known as Robert de Brunne. His book was a rhyming confessional manual adapted from the
Maneul des Péchés
(‘Handbook of
Sins’) usually ascribed to the Anglo-Norman author William of Waddington between 1250 and 1270, and which provides a rare insight into the mindset of the minor clergy and peasantry of the
early fourteenth century.

Once it was established, the idea that a dark-haired man should be the first person you meet became so firmly entrenched that in Scotland it was common for suitable men to be hired by local
households to pay a visit just after midnight to ensure good luck for the coming year.

As with many of the superstitions surrounding death, this one has its roots in a combination of Christian correctness and pagan ritual. In the
pre-Christian era funerals were seen as beacons for evil spirits drawn by the possibility that they might be able to take possession of the corpse, so every effort was made to appease them. One
method for this was to dress in old clothes that wouldn’t incite their envy.

African-American tradition in the Deep South of the US said that funeral clothes or the fabric used to make them should be borrowed rather than new, because wearing new clothes would make the
avenging spirit that had caused the death jealous and more likely to bring about the death of another member of the family.

There was also the possibility that the spirit of the person being buried might be envious, having so recently had their life and their ability to enjoy worldly possessions taken from them. This
might cause their spirit to haunt anyone wearing new clothes (or shoes, since they would never walk the earth again.) The risk of being haunted by the ghost of the recently deceased was also the
reason why black was chosen as the colour of mourning; it was believed that black clothes could confuse the ghost into seeing the wearer as a shadow, rather than a living person who could
be haunted or whose body was ripe for possession.

Christianity, meanwhile, taught that for the faithful, death marked the beginning of a new eternal life, and the dressing of corpses in new clothes for burial seems also to have influenced the
development of this superstition. As the seventeenth-century English scholar Joseph Bingham explains: ‘We clothe the dead in new garments, to signify or represent beforehand their putting on
the new Clothing of Incorruption.’ So everyone attending the funeral, still mired in the sins of the earthly world, had to wear old clothes to differentiate themselves from the heaven-ready
person in the coffin.

There were a number of popular variations on the theme; some claimed new clothes would wear out quickly if worn to a funeral, while others said the person wearing them would be dead by the time
they wore out. These days the custom of wearing black as a mark of respect is still firmly adhered to at traditional church funerals.

Ear piercing is thought to be one of the oldest forms of human adornment; the oldest mummified human to be discovered by archaeologists, estimated at more
than five thousand years old, has both ears pierced, and earrings are mentioned in the Old Testament and in Greek mythology. Some sources suggest that the reason sailors wear earrings is linked to
ancient Greek stories about Charon, the ferryman who carried the souls of the dead across the river Styx to Hades and who had to be paid for his trouble in gold. Usually gold coins were placed in
the mouths of dead bodies at burial but sailors, at risk of dying at sea and fearful of arriving without the means to pay for their passage, pierced their ears with gold rings that they could use
instead.

Parallel stories exist in Christian folklore, according to which sailors wore gold earrings in the hope that they
would be used to pay for a Christian burial if their
bodies washed up on a foreign shore. Some sailors believed piercing their ears gave them better eyesight, while others used earrings as symbols of their experience at sea; they were said to add a
gold piercing every time they traversed the globe or crossed the equator, and a black pearl earring was said to show that they had survived a shipwreck.

Because they faced almost constant peril at sea, sailors have traditionally been among the most superstitious of groups and almost every aspect of their lives, from the people on board ship to
the clothes and jewellery they wore, were laced with ritual. In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance there were no nautical maps to help them navigate or weather forecasts to warn them of
storms. Many sailors in this period were at sea for war, risking their lives in battle, and those who sailed for trade were at almost as great a risk from piracy. Any protection they could find in
the form of amulets or talismans against misfortune were made the most of, and the gold earring eventually came to be seen as a kind of charm against drowning. Since ear piercing was almost
universal among sailors, there must have been many who proved its failings as a means of protection, but the wrath of the sea was well enough respected that few would dare to test it and the
tradition continues to this day.

As this collection demonstrates, superstitions abound in every field of life, but they are present in the greatest numbers and adhered to with the most
vehemence by people who feel themselves to be at the mercy of chance. Seafaring people – especially those who took to the waves in the days when most of the oceans of the world were unmapped
and weather forecasting was limited to the appearance of clouds – ran a higher risk than most that life might suddenly be snatched from them, which helps explain why even those superstitions
of which the origins are unclear exerted such a powerful hold.

The idea that it was unlucky to have women on board ship is thought to date back to the earliest days of seafaring and continued to be acted upon until well into the twentieth century. When
Captain Collingwood, an Admiral of the Royal Navy who partnered Nelson in the Napoleonic wars, discovered in 1808 that there was a woman on board a ship in his squadron, he wrote in a letter to his
colleague Admiral Purvis: ‘I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel,’ and ordered that she be sent home at the first available
opportunity.

There is, however, little evidence that this drastic
step was often taken. In the Age of Sail, which spanned from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, women did
board ships in great numbers, and not just as passengers. Some were officially welcomed on board as the wives or mistresses of captains. Some, including many prostitutes, were smuggled aboard by
officers or seaman and a few boarded ships disguised as men so they could work alongside the sailors undetected. This may have been allowed because even the most superstitious of sailors would have
also been familiar with the belief that a naked woman could save lives at sea by calming the waves. This idea appears in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
:

In the Middle Ages cuttings of hair and nails were thought to embody the essence of a person even after they were separated from the body because they
appeared to grow in a way that seemed to suggest they had a life of their own. This made them useful to witches, who were thought to be able to inflict pain on an individual simply by cursing a
sample of their hair or using their nail clippings in a spell, but it also made them valuable as an offering in times of dire need. Sacrificing a living part of yourself was seen as a way of
appeasing the gods in the hope that they would allow you to go on living.

This belief is ancient in origin and can be found described in a first-century Latin work of fiction
The Satyricon
, attributed to Roman author Petronius. The central character Encolpius
and his lover Giton have their heads shaved at sea and their companion Hesus interprets their actions as a bad omen because of the superstition practised by sailors on the verge of being drowned of
offering their hair to the gods in return for their lives. Hesus says ‘
audio enim non licere cuiquam mortalium in nave neque ungues neque capillos deponere, nisi cum pelago ventus
irascitur
.’ (‘For I hear that it is not permitted to any mortal on board a ship to cut his nails or hair except while the wind and sea rage.’) It is later revealed that Hesus
was right to be fearful of the omen because their ship is then hit
by a storm in which another of their companions is killed.

Greek legend also provides another possible source of the superstition: as symbols of life and growth, cuttings of nails and hair were used as votive offerings to Persephone, the Goddess of
Spring, and it was thought that to offer these to her while at sea would anger Poseidon, the God of the Sea, and incite him to cause a storm.

Ravens, along with crows and other corvids (which include magpies), appear in the folklore of many European cultures; in Norse mythology a pair of ravens, Huginn and Midgard,
are the familiars of the Norse god Odin and fly across the world gathering news to take back to him. In Irish legend the Morrigan, a goddess of battle, often took the form of a raven, while in
medieval country lore they were usually seen as omens of death. Their jet-black feathers linked them to the night, which was dominated by witches, demons and the Devil. They were in fact often
suspected of being witches who had taken on the form of a bird to allow them to spy on those they planned to harm, and seeing one perched on the roof of a house in which
someone was sick was taken as a sure sign the patient would never recover. The earliest superstitious beliefs relating to ravens held them to be prophetic, though not necessarily sinister, as this
extract from Virgil’s
Eclogues
, from around 40
BC
, describes: ‘If a timely raven on my left hand . . . had not warned me at all costs to cut short this
last dispute, neither your friend Moeris nor Menalcas himself would be alive today.’