Black Cats and Evil Eyes (16 page)

This superstition, still well known today, has its origins in the medieval belief that ringing bells had mysterious powers. Bells had been used in
religious rituals since the classical era and their sound was thought by the Romans to scare away evil spirits. They also formed an important part of Jewish religious ceremonies, for which robes
adorned with bells around the hem were worn to ward off any evil spirits lurking around the high priest’s ankles. In the tenth century, churches and monasteries across Europe rang bells to
call the monks to prayer, to mark the moment when a monk died and during funerals, which forged a link between pealing bells and death.

During the Great Plague of 1665 church bells rang almost constantly as they marked death after death. In the city of Tournai in Belgium, the bells were kept chiming from dawn till dusk as the
plague struck, and when the townsfolk claimed victory over the disease they put it down to the power of the bells, which they thought had cleared the miasma.

From the fourteenth century onwards most towns and villages had their own clocks with a bell to chime the hour and it was in this superstitious era that stories about the prophetic power of
bells originated. Folklore from almost every European country tells of bells chiming between the hours to alert people to the dangers of approaching
storms, parish fires or
rampaging highwaymen. In Britain, babies born as the bells were chiming were known as ‘chime children’ and were thought to possess healing powers, be able to see spirits and have
immunity from witchcraft. If the bell chimed while a hymn was being sung it was said to be a sign of an imminent death (
see
If a Broken Clock Suddenly Chimes, There Will Be a Death in the
Family
).

Speaking as the bell chimed was seen as bad luck because of these connections to death; it was thought to attract the attention of evil spirits and mean that whoever had interrupted the chimes
would be the next to die. In the twentieth century this idea blended with the many mystical conventions about weddings to produce a belief that if wedding vows are made during the chiming of a
clock the groom will soon die. These days the severity of the superstition has thankfully lessened and chatting through the chimes will just bring run-of-the-mill bad luck.

Yule was the midwinter solstice celebrated by the Germanic pagans; it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘geol’ and in the Northern Hemisphere
falls on 21 or 22 December. For our early Scandinavian ancestors, the harsh winter conditions and months of darkness made the shortest days of the year hard to bear: food was scarce, the cold was
deadly and life seemed to be ebbing from their world. For them there was no sense of certainty that the sun would return and many of the rites they practised were performed in the hope that they
would appease the elements and bring a return of warmth and sunshine.

The burning of the yule log brought comfort during the depths of midwinter and provided the only source of light or heating. Usually made from a block of oak or beech, the
yule log was burned all across Europe, including Russia and Siberia and even in the warmer Mediterranean. The fire was kept burning for several weeks until the days began to lengthen
and during this period family and friends would gather together to tell stories, dance and sing in celebration of the return of the sun.

Christmas began to be celebrated on 25 December in the fourth century
AD
, and over time many of the pagan solstice traditions were absorbed by the Christian Church. From the eighteenth century
onwards the yule log was traditionally lit on Christmas Eve, when it was left undisturbed in the grate all night, after which it was kept burning until Twelfth Night. The charred remains of the log
were thought to possess special powers and they were used in a range of rituals designed to bring good fortune in the coming year. In France and Germany ashes from the yule were stirred into
cows’ feed to help them calve. In the Baltic states, the ashes are dug into the soil around fruit trees to make them more productive, and in the UK a drink made from mixing the burned wood
with water was used as a cure for consumption. The belief that the blackened log should be kept in the house to prevent lightning strikes came from the old belief in sympathetic magic, a form of
large-scale homeopathy where keeping a thoroughly burnt-out log meant the rest of the house was safe from burning.

According to the earliest version of this superstition, which appears in print from the late 1700s, it is not only good luck for a baby to cry at its
christening, but utterly essential. If it remained silent it was an omen that it would not live for long, and with infant mortality rates at around four hundred deaths per thousand births in the
early eighteenth century, any hint that a child might not survive was taken seriously. Crying as the holy water was sprinkled was seen as so important that it was quite common for a nurse or mother
to pinch a baby, or at least rouse it from sleep, to make sure that it made the right noises at the crucial moment.

There are two contradictory explanations for this belief; the first, common by the mid-nineteenth century, was that it was a sign that the child was too good for an earthly life and that it
belonged instead with God in heaven, where, presumably, nobody cries. The second, more sinister and seemingly more widely held, was that crying was a sign that the Devil had been ousted. An entry
in an 1853 edition of
Notes and Queries
explains the theory:

When this superstition was first in circulation in the sixteenth century, it was thought that grown men as well as babies could be the victim of a
cat’s appetite for carbon dioxide. The English author William Baldwin makes reference to the notion in his satire
Beware the Cat
in 1561: ‘That cat . . . got to his mouth and drew so
his breath that she almost stifled him.’

Cats were believed to be the familiars of witches (
see
Black Cats
), whose influence was so greatly feared in this period that any unexplained illness or ailment was put
down to their evil work. Witches were also said to be able to take the form of nocturnal animals and often appeared as cats so that they could slip into people’s homes without
being noticed.

The precise origin of the idea that cats suck the breath of humans is difficult to pinpoint, but there was a perception that because of their links to witchcraft, cats preferred stale air that
had been through someone’s lungs to fresh air. Another possibility is that it was a misinterpretation of the cat’s own behaviour that earned it its sinister reputation for breath
sucking. Eyewitness accounts of this happening, which at the time were taken as proof of the cat’s evil intent, describe cats sitting on people’s chests as they sleep. This suggests
that the cat’s natural desire for warmth and companionship, often to be found by sitting on a warm body, might have been behind the belief. This may then have been cemented by reports of
unfortunate cases where a cat might have smothered a child by curling up with it in such a way that it blocked its airways as it slept.

Either way, the belief had a strong enough hold that it lasted well into the twentieth century and is still half-believed by the most superstitious among us today, at least enough to make us
shut the door of a baby’s room if the cat is about, just to be on the safe side.

This superstition has its origins in the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. The phrase first appears in print in
Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
by
the third-century Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius, who attributes it to Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Diogenes’s work was translated into Latin in 1432 by the
Italian theologian Ambrogio Traversari, whose version made the phrase well known in Latin as
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum
(‘Of the dead, nothing unless good.’)

English translations of Latin aphorisms were popular in the Middle Ages, when they gave a comfortingly ancient sense of order to an otherwise chaotic world. They fitted easily within the already
well-established set of rules and rituals, which, coupled with the dictates of the Church, provided a moral framework for medieval life. This one, in particular, chimed with popular views about the
importance of respecting the dead, whose souls were believed to stay in close contact with those they had left behind.

Before funeral homes housed ‘the remains’ of the dead, corpses were kept at home until they were buried, and the soul of the person was thought to hover around until that time. Even
after a funeral the soul of the deceased was felt to be accessible simply by visiting the graveside. Benches were often placed among the graves so that people could sit and talk to the dead as if
they were still readily able to hear them. This meant that they also believed that if
someone said anything disrespectful, it would be heard by that person’s spirit,
which would then haunt whoever had bad-mouthed them.

These days we stick to the tradition of respecting the dead, more out of a desire to protect their memory than because we think they can hear us, although we are just as likely to say, ‘I
know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but . . .’ as a precursor to a bit of posthumous disparagement.

Rabbits’ feet are well known as good-luck charms and were carried on the person or placed beside babies’ cradles to ward off evil spirits, but belief in a
‘lucky rabbit’s foot’ dates only from twentieth-century America and is in fact a blend of two much older superstitions. The idea of carrying a foot
as a
charm came from the belief that the foot of a rabbit or hare worked as a cure for rheumatism and digestive problems like colic and gout. This idea had its roots in medieval medicine, when the only
remedies available came from plants and animals, but prevailed well into the superstition-laden sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The English diarist Samuel Pepys carried a hare’s foot as a cure for his recurrent abdominal pains, as the following illuminating entry from 20 January describes: