Black Cats and Evil Eyes

by Chloe Rhodes

  NEVER OPEN AN UMBRELLA INDOORS

  This is one of the most commonly recited superstitions of our age and the evidence suggests that it is of comparatively recent origin, as umbrellas weren’t widely used until the nineteenth century. Fans of speculation and conjecture might appreciate the following unverified offer of explanation: the earliest umbrellas were used as sunshades rather than to keep the rain off and in ancient Egypt, where such parasols were used for this purpose, ceiling-less temples were constructed for the worship of the sun gods. Some sources have it that raising an umbrella inside such a temple was a direct affront to the gods and a rejection of the sun’s blessing, for which there was a hefty price to pay.

  As there is no documentary evidence of this belief in the numerous collections of superstitions made in the years between the fall of the ancient civilizations and the nineteenth century, it seems that an alternative explanation is more likely, if less beguiling. One of these is the possibility that the umbrella, along with other upturned items in the home including lucky horseshoes hung in the open-end-up position (see Horseshoes), could be used as resting places for mischievous fairies and pixies. Some word-of-mouth reports of this superstition include stories of goblins living in folded umbrellas who might be released into the home if you opened one indoors, and these kinds of superstition were commonly handed down through the generations with small modifications to allow them to fit the living arrangements of the day.

  The exact nature of the misfortune due to rain down on you if you do open an umbrella inside varies from era to era and place to place. These days it’s mostly just considered ‘bad luck’, but in the late 1800s opening one and holding it directly above your head was said to be a sign of a forthcoming death. A version of the superstition that appeared in a compendium of American folklore published two decades ago suggests that by opening an umbrella beneath a roof, the guilty party forfeits the protection that the house has to offer. Most superstitious homeowners took care to ensure that their house was protected from the influence of evil spirits through the placement of a talisman or ‘lucky’ charm at the entrance, but opening an umbrella within it created a kind of independent realm, existing under its own jurisdiction and lacking the blessings required to keep you safe within it.

  FRIDAY 13TH IS AN UNLUCKY DAY

  This is another of those bad-luck beliefs that even the most rationally minded among us are still haunted by today. Moving into a new home, starting a new job or getting married on Friday 13th are all considered unlucky and many of us would openly admit to doing our best to avoid them. These days, when we hang onto a belief of this kind, we tend to think of it as being rooted in something so ancient it’s not our place to question it. And yet this most deeply engrained superstition can’t be found in documentary evidence any earlier than the mid-twentieth century. It seems instead to be a relatively modern combination of two much older beliefs. The first is that Friday is an unlucky day. Records of this can be found in print from the fourteenth century, including in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales published around 1390, and all sources are agreed that it stems from the Christian belief that the Crucifixion of Jesus took place on a Friday. Since the early Christian Church, Good Friday has been marked by fasting and prayers in commemoration of Jesus’s death and is followed by celebrations of his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Friday has since been regarded as the most unlucky day of the week and it was seen as foolish to start any piece of work, do household chores or set out on a journey on a Friday. (See A Bed Changed on Friday Will Bring Bad Dreams.)

  The part of the superstition pertaining to the 13th day of the month has a less direct source. It seems to have evolved from a distrust of the number thirteen, which has its roots in the story of the Last Supper (see The Number Thirteen). Jesus and his twelve disciples made the number of people dining thirteen, and since Judas Iscariot then betrayed Jesus, this made people distrustful of the number. A separate superstition holds that it’s unlucky for thirteen people to sit down to eat, and while this belief has waned, the number thirteen has kept its negative associations in the modern fear of Friday 13th.

  NEVER USE A CROSSROADS AS A MEETING PLACE

  Much of the superstition that prevailed during the medieval period stemmed from the depth of people’s belief in evil spirits. With as much certainty as we know the earth to be round, the people of the Middle Ages believed that their world co-existed with a spirit world from which they were divided by the finest of veils. Anything that represented a boundary was seen as a kind of seam where the two worlds met; one which might part at any moment to let demons, vampires, goblins or ghosts spill through to haunt ordinary folk. Numerous superstitions grew up around crossroads. On the Isle of Man people would take their brooms to the crossroads at nightfall to sweep away evil spirits. In the Böhmerwald Mountains in Germany witches were expelled by cracking whips at a remote crossroads and in Bali ceremonies are held at crossroads to oust devils. In Roman mythology, Hecate, goddess of the night and protector of witches, appeared at crossroads and witches were thought to meet there.

  Christian tradition added to these pagan associations when the bodies of people who had committed suicide were buried at crossroads. Until 1823 suicides were not permitted to be buried in either consecrated ground or at unconsecrated public burial sites and it wasn’t until 1880 that their burial could be accompanied by prayers. For some years it was customary for burial sites for these bodies to be situated on the outer edges of towns or at crossroads. Gallows were also often erected at crossroads on the edge of towns and this magnified their pre-existing reputation as a place where the damned would congregate. The souls of these ‘sinners’ were thought to be denied access to heaven as a result of their wrong-doings and people were fearful that they might return to the homes they’d lived in and haunt the inhabitants. A crossroads burial was believed to confuse the soul, consigning it to linger for eternity at the junction between paths.

  CROSSED KNIVES AT THE TABLE SIGNIFY A QUARREL

  There are lots of superstitions about cutlery; most feature mild-mannered omens covering everything from receiving a visitor to getting married, but things turn darker when the cutlery is crossed. During the English witch hunts of the mid-seventeenth century, East Anglian vicar the Reverend John Gaule published a book titled Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches, in which he describes the laying of a knife across another piece of cutlery as one of the many actions being used to persecute innocent women for the crime of witchcraft: ‘Some Marks of witches altogether unwarrantable, as proceeding from Ignorance, humor, superstition . . . are . . . The sticking of knifes acrosse.’

  Gaule’s book is a fascinating documentation of the various practices associated with witchcraft, but its historical significance came from the influence it had on public opinion, rather than its detailing of witch methodology. Gaule’s purpose in recording such ‘signs of witchcraft’ was to show the cruelty of those who persecuted innocent women for crimes of which they weren’t guilty. The infamous Matthew Hopkins, self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, was responsible, along with his associates, for more hangings for witchcraft than had taken place in the previous hundred years, including the deaths of 300 women in the space of two years from 1644 to 1646. Gaule’s publication exposed Hopkins’s corrupt methods and began a campaign to suppress witch-hunting which resulted in Hopkins having to appear in court to be questioned about his methods. Hopkins retired the following year.

  Just over fifty years later the crossing of cutlery was still seen as unsettling, as this extract from an article in The Spectator from 1711 illustrates:

  The Lady seeing me quitting my knife and fork, and laying them across one another upon my plate, desired me that I would humour her so far as to take them out of that figure, and place them side by side.

  It’s still deemed inappropriate to cross cutlery at the end of a meal, though these days it’s regarded less of a sign of witchcraft and more as bad table manners and perhaps prophetic of a quarrel with the
offended chef.

  TO DREAM OF A LIZARD IS A SIGN THAT YOU HAVE A SECRET ENEMY

  Many of the superstitions handed down to us through the generations concern prophetic omens of one kind or another. Methods for divining some small clue about the future flourished in the days when most people believed that their life paths were set and their fate pre-determined; dreams were a rich source of material for interpretation.

  A Saxon manuscript listing dreams and their meanings, compiled in around 1050, appeared in Oswald Cockaye’s Leechdoms in 1866 and featured an extensive range of dream subjects with a wide range of interpretations. Dream analysis had a similar level of popularity to other fortune-telling methods such as tarot cards, palmistry and tea-leaf reading, all of which provided a sense that if you couldn’t change the future, you could at least be prepared for it. Omens of bad luck or coming strife were particularly important in allowing people to feel that forewarned was forearmed.

  In dream analysis, as in much traditional folklore, animals and birds are often linked to human attributes or flaws that seem to be mirrored by their natural behaviour (see A Bride Must Sew a Swan’s Feather into her Husband’s Pillow to Ensure Fidelity). Lizards were associated with trickery and deception because of their ability to camouflage themselves and use tricks to escape capture, such as shedding their tails if caught by a predator. Naturally, lizards feature most prominently in the mythology of countries where they exist in the greatest numbers. In Australia, for example, there are many superstitious beliefs about the carnivorous goanna (including that they snatch small children), which were started by the early European settlers who must have feared them, and are now entrenched in the bushlore of the outback farming community.

  In India, where geckos are a common sight both inside and outside the home, the superstitious go into overdrive if a lizard falls from the rafters and lands on you. Enormous significance is placed on the precise part of your body the lizard touches in its descent, with sixty-five different prophetic possibilities to be interpreted depending on the exact bone of your foot or section of your scalp the gecko touches.

  While most of the pseudoscience that existed before the Renaissance faded out of favour as more empirical methods for explaining the universe were discovered, sleep is one of the few areas in which modern science is still relatively in the dark. Dream analysis is still popular to this day, with thousands of different books on the subject in print in Europe and America.

  A CHILD’S NAILS SHOULDN’T BE CUT BEFORE ITS FIRST BIRTHDAY

  The significance of the hair and nails in folklore dates back to early Egypt, when it was believed that a potion made by stirring together hair, nails and human blood could give the mixer complete power over whichever unfortunate soul the samples had come from. The potency of the ingredients came from the fact that they were thought to represent the person on an elemental level.

  Hair and nails were certainly used in sixteenth-century spells designed to protect against evil curses. Archaeological evidence of this practice exists in the form of witch bottles – glass bottles into which were placed hair and nail clippings, pins, wine or urine. The idea was that any curse that had been directed at the owner of the witch bottle would be attracted to the hair and nails and trapped inside the bottle, held there by the pins and washed away by the wine or urine. They were common during the mid-sixteenth century and have been discovered hidden beneath the floors and inside chimney breasts of houses from this era.

  Experts in Wicca suggest that many of the uses for hair and nails in Western witchcraft have their origins in The Venidad, a Zoroastrian book of laws written in the fifth century BC. In these early scriptures the hair and nails are said to be used as instruments of evil by witches and sorcerers (of whom Zoroaster, as the prophet for one of the first monotheistic religions, heartily disapproved) because they grew with a life of their own and could be cut off the body and used in spells.

  It is traditional in many cultures for hair and nails to be buried or burned to prevent them from falling into hands that might put them to such uses and this practice continued in Great Britain and Ireland well into the nineteenth century. For infants, who were especially vulnerable to the forces of evil, it was deemed by many parents to be too risky to cut their nails at all until they were over twelve months old.

  SPITTING TO WARD OFF EVIL

  These days spitting is usually regarded as both unhygienic and uncouth, but spitting hasn’t always had such a grimy reputation. In the Gospel of John, Jesus spits on the ground and mixes his saliva with the dirt to make mud, which he applies to the eyes of a blind man and restores his sight. In ancient Greece spitting was a way to counteract the advances of malevolent spirits and in AD 77 pliny the Elder wrote ‘We are in the habit of spitting to repel contagion.’

  It does seem to have been viewed as a superstitious act even in those days though, as the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus, writing his study of human motivations The Characters, includes in his description of ‘The Superstitious Man’: ‘If he sees a maniac or an epileptic man, he will shudder and spit into his bosom.’ Maniacs and epileptics were in those days thought to be possessed by demons, and the condition was believed to be catching.

  Spitting on to the bosom is a custom that still exists in Greece and Cyprus, although over time it became unnecessary to actually spit to evoke the protection it offered and the sound ‘ptew’ was used instead. ‘Ptew, Ptew mi me matiasis’ is still commonly recited in Greece to repel the Evil Eye (see The Evil Eye) and can be roughly translated as ‘Spit, spit, I spit on myself to protect myself from the Evil Eye.’ The most superstitious will still lift the clothing away from their chest at the neck and imitate spitting onto their chest.

  Across the world fishermen traditionally spit into their nets to ensure they get a good catch. In the UK and America boxers spit on their knuckles before a fight and pretending to spit on each hand before tackling any difficult task is common in many cultures. The Irish had a custom of spitting on horses to keep them safe from fairies, who were said to be repelled by anything unclean. The fairies were wrong, however, as modern science has discovered that saliva is in fact an excellent antiseptic, so when we say we’re ‘licking our wounds’ we probably really should be.

  NEVER CHOOSE A REDHEAD AS A BRIDESMAID AS SHE WILL STEAL THE GROOM

  Suspicion and persecution of redheads is not a modern phenomenon restricted to playground bullying. The Middle English poem Proverbs of Alfred, thought to have been written in the latter half of the twelfth century, contains the following piece of ‘wisdom’: ‘The rede mon he is a quet [wicked man]; for he wole the thin uvil red [he will give thee evil counsel.]’ Red-haired women were viewed with even more misgiving. In Jewish mythology, Lilith (identified in the Old Testament as Lamia, or in some versions simply as ‘screech-owl’ or some other night bird) is said to be the first wife God created for Adam, who was thrown out of the Garden of Eden because of her refusal to accept Adam’s superiority and went on to marry the Devil and have children by him who were part human, part demon. Lilith is always depicted with red hair, such colouring said to indicate fieriness and a desire for sexual dominance.

  The same theme is apparent in depictions of Eve following her fall. Michelangelo’s Temptation and Fall, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512, shows a brown-haired Eve being offered the apple by Satan (in the guise of a red-haired serpent woman). In the adjacent fresco, in which she is being expelled from the Garden of Eden for biting the forbidden fruit, her hair is painted red.

  Eve’s red hair is a physical manifestation of her sin and through this association red-haired women have been branded seductresses. The superstition in question suggests that a redhead shouldn’t be trusted as a bridesmaid in case she uses her powers of temptation to lead the groom astray. Numerous other superstitious beliefs stemmed from this sexualized reputation, including that red-haired children are the result of their mothers’ indelicacy.

  Distrust of redhea
ds was exacerbated by their rarity. Only 4 per cent of the world’s population have red hair and in many parts of the world it’s barely ever seen. Scotland and Ireland have the highest percentage of red-haired citizens, followed by Scandinavian countries. In Denmark it’s considered an honour to give birth to a redheaded child, but in Corsica, where the colouring is much less common, it’s customary to spit and turn around to avoid bad luck if you pass a redhead on the street.

  KEEPING FINGERS CROSSED TO MAKE WISHES COME TRUE

  Crossing fingers to make wishes come true is such a commonplace custom that we barely register it as superstitious. Its use is so widely recognized that the phrase ‘fingers crossed’ peppers our discussions of every aspect of our lives that involve chance, from our most mundane anticipations to our wildest ambitions. However, despite the many records of good-luck customs made from the seventeenth century onwards, there is no mention of crossing the fingers for luck in print until the early twentieth century. Traditionally people seem to have crossed their legs instead. In 1595, the English dramatist George Peele’s satirical romance The Old Wives’ Tale referred to sitting crossed-legged and saying your prayers backwards as a good-luck charm and A Provincial Glossary of Popular Superstitions collected by the English lexicographer Francis Grose in 1787 states: ‘It is customary for women to offer to sit cross-legged, to procure luck at cards for their friends. Sitting cross-legged, with the fingers interlaced, was anciently esteemed a magical posture.’