Black Cats and Evil Eyes Read online

  WALKING UNDER LADDERS

  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.

  SPILLING SALT

  Until relatively recently, salt was one of the most precious commodities known to man. The location of salt mines determined where cities would flourish, salt routes paved the way for later trade routes and, before refrigeration, curing with salt was the primary method by which food could be preserved, so lives depended on it. Without mechanized techniques for mining rock salt or the means by which to evaporate enough salt water to extract sufficient quantities of sea salt, it was expensive and hard to come by. All of this meant that it was unlucky in the most straightforward of ways to spill salt. As with so many superstitions that still influence our behaviour today, fear of the forces of evil shaped our responses to what might otherwise have been regarded as simple misfortune.

  Salt was used in Greek and Roman religious ceremonies and is still used to make holy water in the Catholic Church so spilling it was seen as an act of the Devil. This notion is thought by some to have been cemented by the overturning of the salt cellar by Judas Iscariot during the Last Supper, as depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. In medieval times it was believed that the Devil waited behind your left shoulder for any opportunity to pounce, which gave rise to the tradition of throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder immediately after you spilled it to strike him in the face and prevent him from making further trouble.

  In Norway it was believed that the more salt spilled the greater the misfortune would be as more tears would have to be shed in order to dissolve all the grains. In the Turkic states, ancient folklore held that a white angel lived at the right shoulder of every person and a black angel lived at the left shoulder; a pinch of the spilled salt in the eye of the black angel could prevent him from ruining future plans.

  THE EVIL EYE

  Belief in the power of the evil eye dates back to the earliest civilizations and references to it can be found aplenty in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman poets and philosophers including Aristophanes, Plutarch and Pliny the Elder. Put simply, it refers to the belief that those who possess the evil eye (sometimes described as a jealous spirit) can put a curse on others, usually unintentionally, by gazing at them enviously. The evil eye is usually developed in a person by their coveting of the good fortune of another. Biblical references also exist; Proverbs 23:6 reads ‘Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meat.’

  The effects of the curse vary slightly between cultures but the late American Professor of Folklore and Evil Eye expert Alan Dundes wrote that while belief in its powers spread through the Middle East, Africa and Europe – especially the Mediterranean region (with many variations in the methods used to avert it) – the feared effects of being given the evil eye tended to be similar: diseases related to dehydration, such as vomiting, wasting or shrivelling, sometimes resulting in death.

  Young children are believed to be at greatest risk of the evil eye, perhaps since their beauty and innocence is most likely to attract envious glances. Praising the appearance of a child is also believed to attract the evil eye, so in many countries where belief in the curse is strong, it is customary to touch a child immediately after praising it in order to remove the curse. In Bangladesh, mothers of young women who are particularly likely to attract the envy of others through their beauty put a black kohl mark behind their daughter’s ear to counter ill effects. In the Middle East and in some Mediterranean countries, glass amulets showing a blue eye are worn on jewellery or hung over doorways to repel the eye’s power. Blue eyes are regarded as evil in these countries because they aren’t usually found within the local population, and the belief is likely to have been underlined by the propensity of blue-eyed tourists to these areas for failing to recognize that photographing or cooing over children is frowned upon.

  Jewish tradition protects children from the eye by tying a piece of red string around their wrists. In Italy, where the curse is also believed to affect men and cause impotence, a hand gesture that uses the fingers as horns is used to counter it. These days, such preventive measures are usually judged to be effective, though in past times the prevalence of diseases causing dehydration in young children meant that many deaths were put down to the influence of the evil eye.

  MOONLIGHT

  As the closest and brightest aspect of the night sky, the moon has held humankind in its thrall since the earliest civilizations.

  Although the ancients had no notion of the gravitational influences the moon exerted on our planet, they did believe that the moon controlled all the water on the earth, and that not only the oceans but also the fluids within their bodies were acted on by the moon. The word ‘lunatic’, from the Latin lunaticus, meaning moonstruck, was used to describe those who seemed to be sent temporarily mad by a full moon and was in use in English from the early fourteenth century. In 1393, William Langland’s allegorical poem Piers Plowman refers to ‘Lunatic lollers and lepers about’, more or less mad according to the moon’s phases.

  In the days before neuroscience had shed light on the intricate workings of the brain, people suffering from brain disorders such as epilepsy were thought to be afflicted by a madness brought on by the waxing and waning of the moon. This belief gave rise to strong superstitions surrounding the power of the moon: to sleep in moonlight was thought to cause insanity or ‘moon-blindness’ and special care was taken to draw the curtains against a full moon. It was also considered dangerous to look at the moon in a mirror, or to stare at it for too long when it was full. These beliefs became further entrenched in the Middle Ages, when stories about werewolves and vampires combined with an unshakeable belief in the influence of the Devil to feed popular fear about the power of the moon. All kinds of inexplicable behaviour was attributed to its influence: ‘It is the very error of the Moone,’ wrote Shakespeare in Othello. ‘She comes more nearer Earth than she was wont, And makes men mad.’

  Some of us still blame a full moon for unusual antics; it has been linked to a rise in the number of suicides, hospital admittances and crime, and although there are no scientif
ic studies to prove it, the police have reported an increase in aggressive behaviour on nights when the moon is full – some British police forces even employ extra officers to cope with the surge.

  BREAKING A MIRROR

  The widely held superstition that breaking a mirror means seven years’ bad luck dates back to the late eighteenth century, but the idea that death or some other misfortune will befall anyone who breaks a looking glass goes back much further. The Romans, alongside ancient Greeks, Chinese, Africans and Indians believed that the soul of a person was transferred into their reflected image when they looked into a mirror. If the glass was damaged, the soul held within it would be too. In his 1777 publication Observations on the popular antiquities of Great Britain, the English antiquarian John Brand wrote ‘the breaking a Looking Glass is accounted a very unlucky accident. Mirrors were formerly used by Magicians in their superstitious and diabolical operations; and there was an antient [sic] Kind of Divination by the Looking Glass.’

  As with many superstitious portents of doom, the exact nature of the misfortune that lies ahead has evolved over time. When Alfred, Lord Tennyson referred to it in his poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in 1842, the result was a generalized misery: ‘The mirror cracked from side to side; “The curse has come upon me,” cried the Lady of Shalott.’

  By later in the 1800s a broken mirror foretold a death in the family or the loss of a friend, and the first reference to seven years of bad luck appeared in print in 1851. The exact origins of this very specific period of strife are uncertain, but may be linked to the Roman belief that the human body renewed itself every seven years and perhaps this process of renewal provided a clean slate for the soul.

  These days, while we still fear the curse of a broken mirror, few of us do more than sweep up the pieces and hope no one’s noticed, but our forefathers practised a range of rituals to mitigate the disaster. Some ground the broken pieces to dust to release the soul trapped inside, others buried the shards beneath a tree by the light of the next full moon, and Africans working as slaves in America are reported to have believed the bad luck could be washed away by placing the shattered pieces in a southerly flowing river.

  LOOSE OR BROKEN SHOELACES

  It is generally held to be bad luck if your shoelace breaks or comes loose while you’re walking along, but this seems not to be simply for the obvious practical reason that it might cause you to trip and fall, since a fuller version of the belief states that you must continue to walk another nine paces before retying a loose shoelace, otherwise you will tie bad luck to yourself for that day.

  Tripping over or stumbling as you walk has been regarded as a sign of trouble ahead since Roman times. In 45 BC, the Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero in his philosophical treatise De Divinatione lists those things noted with superstition as ‘stumbling, breaking a shoe-latchet, and sneezing’. Some attribute the superstition to the cautionary tale of the Roman Emperor Augustus who, according to legend, stumbled over the laces of his caligae sandals as he fled from an attempt on his life, only narrowly escaping assassination. The distrust of an untied lace deepened in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, when men sporting even a well-tied, dandyish ‘Oxford’ shoe were felt to represent a decline in morality and masculinity in contrast to the sturdy buckle popular with more macho types.

  As life became less precarious, omens that had once foretold death or disaster took on a lighter tone and a loose lace was said by young women to be a sign that your sweetheart was thinking about you. In less giddy circles it was thought that if the left lace was loose someone was speaking ill of you, while if the right came undone someone was singing your praises. It remained bad luck to dream of a shoelace becoming untied, though if a knot forms in a lace it’s good luck.

  To turn the bad luck into good you could take the shoe off completely and throw it in the direction of someone to whom you wish well. The traditional wedding good-luck superstition of tying shoes to the back of newly-weds’ cars comes from a sixteenth-century tradition described by Proverb collector John Heywood in his Dialogue of the Effectual Proverbs in the English Tongue Concerning Marriage published in 1598: ‘And home again hitherwards quicke as a bee, now for good luck, cast an old shoe after me.’

  NEVER LEAVE A HOUSE THROUGH A DIFFERENT DOOR FROM THE ONE USED FOR ENTRANCE

  As the entry point of the home and the threshold to the private world, the door has a special status in folklore. Talismans against evil have been mounted on doorframes since the earliest dwelling places were constructed, and to this day good-luck tokens like horseshoes, sacred statues or Chinese feng shui symbols can be found on front doors from East to West. In China, doors are often still painted with a fresh coat of auspicious red paint before New Year to bring good luck and happiness to the home.

  These charms have their origins in the belief that humanity lived under constant threat from the forces of evil. In the ancient world these forces were represented by fearful gods; Set or Seth, the demon of death in Egyptian mythology, or the fearsome winged monster Typhon in ancient Rome. In the Western world during the Middle Ages, the Devil was as much of a presence in everyday life as God, and was held responsible for the myriad of misfortunes that might befall a person living in times when the average life expectancy at birth was thirty-five years. Evil spirits in the form of sprites and fairies or demonically possessed animals might be lurking in every shadow; the home had to be defended from these destructive forces and the front door was the first line of defence. It was therefore considered unlucky when entering a house for the first time to use its back door, since it wasn’t protected against evil spirits. Visitors were always asked to leave by the same door by which they’d entered in order to prevent them from taking the home owner’s luck and protection out with them.

  Doors were also seen as representative of less tangible barriers, so they were always opened after a death in the house to let the departing spirit out, and during a birth to let the soul of the new arrival in.

  BLACK CATS

  Black cats feature in the mythology of many cultures, and superstitions about them are still familiar to most of us in modern times. They are a prime example of the contrariness of many of our superstitious beliefs; some swear they’re lucky, others see them as a sign of certain doom. According to Norse legend, Freya, queen of the Valkyries and goddess of fertility, drove a chariot pulled by black cats that some sources suggest turned into horses possessed by the Devil. In the Middle Ages, black cats were often portrayed as the familiars of witches, which is likely to be the origin of the distrust with which they are regarded in America, where early Puritan settlers rejected anything associated with the Devil and witchcraft. In the US it is still considered a bad sign if a black cat crosses your path, since it means you have been noticed by the Devil. In Germany the same rule applies if the cat is walking from right to left, but if it crosses from left to right then good fortune is coming your way. In Scotland the arrival of a black cat outside your home is a sign of coming prosperity, while in China black cats are regarded as harbingers of hunger and poverty. In Italy, if a black cat should rest on the bed of a sick person it is thought to signify the patient’s imminent death.

  In England a black cat is still considered lucky if it walks towards you, though there are countless variations and reversals of the rule across the world, the origins of which have become blurred and blended by the passage of time. The sixteenth-century English author William Baldwin’s satirical work Beware the Cat put into print the belief, commonly held at the time of its publication in 1561, that cats were in fact witches disguised in animal form: ‘A Cat hath nine lives, that is to say, a witch may take on her a Cat’s body nine times.’

  In Great Britain and Ireland though, it is considered lucky to own or see a black cat, particularly on important occasions such as weddings or at the start of a long journey. King Charles I was so convinced of his own black cat’s luck-bringing qualities that he had it guarded round the clock. When it eventually die
d he was reportedly devastated that his luck had run out. Coincidentally (or not!) the king was arrested by Cromwell’s troops the very next day and was beheaded two years later.

  THE NUMBER THIRTEEN

  There are few superstitions still so widely and publicly observed as the belief that the number thirteen is unlucky; high-rise buildings are constructed without a thirteenth floor, aeroplanes rarely have a thirteenth aisle and you’d be hard pressed to find a hotel room with the number thirteen on the door. The source of our distrust is held by most to be biblical: at the Last Supper, when Jesus told his twelve apostles that one of them would betray him, there were thirteen at the table and Judas was said to have been the thirteenth guest. (See also here)

  There are numerous alternative explanations for our fear of the number, however, many of them equally well-rooted in our cultural history. Norse legend describes a banquet at which twelve gods were dining when a thirteenth guest Loki, a cunning, shape-changing god, arrived. The deities were entertaining themselves by throwing things at favoured god Balder, who they knew to be immune from injury, but Loki tricked the blind god Hod into killing Balder by throwing an arrow made from mistletoe, knowing it to be the one thing that could harm him. Balder’s death was the start of Ragnarok, the end of the old world during which there were three years of winter and the Norse gods were all killed.

  The roots of the 2012 ‘End of days’ theories can also be linked to the number thirteen. In ancient Persia, where the twelve constellations of the zodiac were assigned to the calendar year, people believed that each sign reigned over the world for a millennium. Once each constellation had completed its rule and the thirteenth millennium began, there would be no dominant constellation, resulting in chaos.