Black Cats and Evil Eyes (2 page)

To understand the superstitions collected in this book in context, we must imagine ourselves in a world vastly
different from our own. Those beliefs that date back to
antiquity evolved in an era steeped in the mythology of a pantheon of gods with human flaws vying with each other for power, and where Fate might triumph over even the most formidable deity. Humans
saw themselves as pawns in the games of the gods and powerless in the face of their own predetermined destinies. Ritual governed their lives not so much because they were superstitious, but because
that was the custom of their day.

The many beliefs that took hold during the Middle Ages, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, did so against a backdrop of extremism unrecognizable even in this post 9/11 age. The
often hysterical fear of witchcraft that swept through Europe (and later America) plays a central role in the histories of many of the superstitions examined here. One particularly resonant
medieval manuscript offers an illuminating insight into the beliefs of those times.
The Gospelles of Dystaues
, or
Distaff Gospels
, written in 1470 and translated into English in 1507, documented
for the first time the wisdom of French peasant women. The book illuminates, for example, our distrust of giving a knife as a gift, our belief that a pregnant woman should be given what she craves
and our fear that a howling dog is an omen of death. The women’s testimonies were documented before the persecution of wise women as witches began in earnest, so they detailed the charms and
remedies they used with a freedom that is heart-breaking in light of the torture and murder of the witch hunts that followed.

The problem these ‘old wives’ faced was that their beliefs fell outside the accepted religious framework of their time. For all its rituals and belief in the supernatural, the
medieval Church would not tolerate this ‘other’ kind of
wisdom, and this was in keeping with religious authorities throughout history. Even the Ancients made a
distinction between religious ritual and superstitious practice. The first-century Roman poet Ovid describes many of the mores of his day and uses the word ‘superstition’ in much the
same, faintly pejorative, way we do today to refer to those practices that were viewed as excessively credulous, whimsical or irrational.

This is one of the most fascinating things about looking back over the superstitions that have their origins in folklore. On the whole, they started out not as superstitions but as practices
that were in keeping with the religious code or social norms of the time. They have come to be seen as superstitious only as our understanding of the world has deepened. If you carried a
rabbit’s foot to ward off digestive trouble in Roman times, for example, you did so because it was what your physician recommended. If you carried one in the 1600s, like the diarist Samuel
Pepys, you might have done so because although you knew it was mere ‘fancy’, it had worked for a respected friend and seemed also to have the desired effect on you. If you carry one
today it’s probably attached to some sort of ‘good luck’ key ring in the shape of a four-leaf clover with a horseshoe dangling from it, and you hold on to it either because your
grandmother gave it to you on her deathbed or because you are extremely superstitious.

Following the same pattern of development, it’s easy to see how the religious observances of the ancient Romans became the superstitions of the early Middle Ages, and how the
Devil-defeating practices of the medieval peasant became the derided old wives’ tales of the rationalist eighteenth century. What is really remarkable is that the seismic cultural shifts that
have taken place over
the centuries haven’t eradicated superstition entirely. In fact, if you take superstition to include beliefs in the supernatural beyond the
religious norm of the time, we are much more superstitious now than we were two hundred years ago, when the combination of scientific achievement and authorized religion kept the vast majority of
people’s beliefs within the mainstream. People have since begun to turn back to ancient healing methods like acupuncture, reiki and reflexology, and to the plant cures first used in Classical
times. Twenty-first-century spiritualism and neo-paganism in all its forms are on the rise, and – in the West, at least – conventional religion plays the smallest role it ever has in
human history.

Perhaps in this post-scientific-revolution era we are more accepting of the idea that not everything is within our understanding, which makes learning about the superstitions held by previous
generations so appealing. We know about self-determination and that luck is just a string of probability equations, but we can’t help but feel that there’s something more to it. We know
what happens to our bodies when they’re buried and how age and diseases cause us to die, and yet many of us still have faith in some kind of afterlife or rebirth of the soul. No matter how
certainly we know that the spirits of the damned aren’t lurking under ladders hoping that we might sneeze at just the right moment for them to take possession of our bodies, something makes
us change our path and look around for someone to say ‘Bless you.’

Horseshoes can be found hanging above the doors of homes across the world and are thought to ward off evil. One source of this belief in the Western world is described in
The True Legend of St Dunstan and the Devil
, written in 1871 by Edward G. Flight, which tells the story of a first-century blacksmith monk who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury and
one of England’s best-loved saints. Legend has it that during his days in the foundry, Dunstan was asked by a man to make some horseshoes for his own feet. As Dunstan prepared the man’s
feet for shoeing, he noticed that they were cloven hoofed and realized with horror that his customer was the Devil. Exhibiting a fearlessness befitting a future saint, he drove the nails into the
soft centre of the hoof, causing the Devil so much agony that from that day on he didn’t dare to go near a horseshoe.

The protective power of the horseshoe, however, pre-dates not only St Dunstan but Christianity itself. Hindu texts use the Sanskrit word ‘Yoni’ to describe the sacred temple or womb,
representative of the Goddess Shakti, which was believed to be the origin of all life
and is depicted in ancient stone carvings, paintings, and architecture as a
downward-pointing horseshoe. It was also an important pagan symbol, representing the crescent moon and the ancient moon goddesses Artemis and Diana. In Arabic countries the horseshoe is
incorporated into amulets that protect against the Evil Eye (
see
here
), while in British, Celtic and Germanic folklore a horseshoe nailed above the door was used to defend
homes from witchcraft.

In the West, as the more secular idea of bringing ‘good luck’ has taken precedence over the need to ward off evil, the positioning of the horseshoe has become significant. In the UK
and the US they’re most often hung with the open end up, to stop the good luck from falling out, though folklore traditionalists warn that this encourages trouble-making pixies to use them as
seats, so open end up but tilted slightly is optimal. In the rest of the world the open end is usually down, mirroring the shape of the sacred womb. Whichever way a horseshoe is hung, more luck can
be gleaned by keeping it in place with seven screws.

This tradition comes from a nursery rhyme that we commonly recite as ‘See a penny, pick it up; all day long you’ll have good luck.’

In fact the original rhyme featured pins, not pennies: ‘See a pin and pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. See a pin and let it lie, you’ll feel want before you
die.’ This may in turn be derived from the old English proverb ‘He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound’, which was first recorded in print in Samuel
Pepys’s
Diary
in 1668.

It is one of many ancient sayings to promote the notion that it’s worth taking trouble over small things. People who used the rhyme in the 1600s would also have been fearful of leaving a
pin on the ground because of their associations with witchcraft.

Pins were thought to have been used to bind a spell in place or to fix a desire – for good or ill, to an object that represented the person on whom the spell was being cast.
If you didn’t pick up the pin, a witch might find it instead and use it in a spell against you.

Pins were also used in hexes, which could be performed to reverse the effects of damaging spells, often held responsible for the misunderstood medical ailments that afflicted citizens of the
seventeenth century. Urinary infections, for example, were frequently ‘treated’ by placing pins representative of the patient’s pain into a glass ‘witch bottle’ along
with a sample of their urine. The mixture would be boiled to transfer the pain from the victim of the spell back to the witch. The bottle would then be buried or bricked up into the walls of the
person’s home to defend them against future curses.

The superstition had more mundane foundations too as pins were an essential tool for needlework, which was a necessity rather than a hobby in the seventeenth-century home.

The switch from pin to penny seems to have occurred in early nineteenth-century America and may have simply been a linguistic slip, although the appearance of the words ‘In God We
Trust’ on American pennies is believed in some quarters to have transformed a castaway coin into a token of luck from the Good Lord for those who believe in him.

This superstition is one of the most widely adhered to of the modern age and one of many that have been appropriated over time by the Church. While many of the beliefs we might
call superstitions today have their roots in the practice of religion, the Church itself holds that superstition is sinful, marking a deviation from worship of one God and giving credence to the
occult.

The practice of walking around ladders, however, is deemed not to warrant the label of superstition since it is done in the interests of preserving something the Bible itself calls sacred. A
ladder placed on level ground and leaning against a wall forms a triangular shape and the triangle was sacred because it represented the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Walking through the centre of a triangle was akin to breaking the Holy Trinity and violating God, which was blasphemous and therefore sinful. In fact, the triangle has been symbolic of life since
ancient Egyptian times and disrupting a sacrosanct symbol
was seen by the earliest civilizations as tempting fate. Even in our secular age it seems like an unnecessary risk to
walk under a ladder from which a pot of paint or scaffolder who’s lost his balance might easily fall.

There is an alternative source for this superstition however – the medieval gallows. Until the late 1800s the ‘short drop’ method was used for hangings, which meant that
prisoners were hanged from a cart or simply made to step off a ladder with the hangman’s noose around their neck, which usually resulted in death by strangulation. Later, when new drop
gallows were introduced, which caused a quicker death by breaking the prisoner’s neck, ladders were propped against them so that prisoners could climb the scaffold ready for the drop. These
were used again by the executioner when the bodies were collected. It was widely believed that the souls of those who’d been executed loitered under the ladder (since their crimes made them
unfit for heaven) so it was inviting misfortune of the most grisly kind to walk underneath one and mingle with them.