by Chloe Rhodes
Between 30 and 50 per cent of medieval babies died in infancy, many in the first days after birth, as a result of infections and diseases that basic medicine could not comprehend and had no means to prevent. This pairing of a high death rate with such fearsome beliefs about where the soul of a lost child would end up fuelled medieval families’ faith in superstitious practices that might protect their offspring through this most vulnerable time. The tradition of wrapping a newborn in its mother’s clothes was based on the hope that it would be seen by evil spirits that might prey upon it as an extension of her, and be left alone. Other forms of protection included communion wafers and iron amulets placed in the crib and red string tied around the baby’s wrist. Knives were also placed in the crib, as the following astonishing rhyme relays:
Let the superstitious wife,
Near the child’s heart lay a knife,
Point be up, and haft be down;
While she gossips in the town.
This ’mong other mystic charms
Keeps the sleeping child from harms.
A talisman or mother’s clothing also fended off the attention of fairies, who were said to covet the beauty of human babies and to swap them for their own young, which were ugly and deformed. In the days before genetics could explain congenital disorders and birth abnormalities, parents who noticed such variations in their newborns often put them down to this superstition.
WHEN A DOG HOWLS, DEATH IS NEAR
Dogs have been believed to possess a sixth sense for the supernatural since the earliest civilizations and it’s possible that this superstition, still widely held today, has its origins in Egyptian mythology. Sirius, the Dog Star, is said to have appeared just before the rising of the Nile and acted as a warning to the people to prepare for a flood, so dogs and gods with the faces of dogs were recognized for their prophetic powers and worshipped from then on.
The Romans also credited canines with an ability to warn of a death and dogs were said to have howled before Caesar’s murder and before the death of Emperor Maximinus. These beliefs were carried into the folklore of numerous cultures, where subtle variations can still be found. In Wales there is a legend that says dogs were the only creatures to be able to see the fearsome Hounds of Annwn, while in Irish, Hebrew and Greek tradition their melancholy howl is seen as the first prophetic note of a funeral dirge, which the mourners then imitate in their keening as they follow the funeral procession.
The first direct reference to the superstition in print can be found in the medieval Distaff Gospels, which documented the received wisdom of women in the fifteenth century. The 1507 English translation reads: ‘What one hereth dogges houle and cry he ought for to stopee his eres, for they brynge euyell [evil] tydynges.’
Over time the prophecies became more precise so that in Europe and Ireland a dog howling relentlessly during the night meant that someone nearby would soon die, while a solitary howl suggested that the hound was marking a death that had just occurred.
The longevity of the superstition owes much to the fact that it inspired numerous pre-eminent authors, who wove it into their work with such dramatic impact that it became firmly entrenched in the public imagination. Shakespeare’s Henry VI includes the line ‘At thy birth, an evil signe . . . Dogs howl’d.’ In his poem Christabel Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the howling of a mastiff’s bitch and writes: ‘some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.’ In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit Charles Dickens describes how ‘The howling of a dog before the house, filled him with a terror he could not disguise.’
Modern mediums still credit dogs with the power to sense spirits and to see ghosts that remain invisible to the human eye.
IT IS BAD LUCK TO BURN BEEF BONES
This kitchen superstition comes from an older belief that accidentally burning beef bones was a sign that a great deal of sorrow was coming your way as a result of poverty. The precise origin of the belief is hard to pinpoint accurately but it may stem from the story of St Lawrence, one of the most honoured martyrs of the Roman Church, whose role was to care for the poor and needy. In the year 258 he was told by the Prefect of Rome, who believed the Church had a hidden fortune, to hand over the treasures of that institution. The saint said he would need three days to gather the treasures but instead of bringing gold, he brought all the destitute people of Rome who were being helped by the Church. In his anger the Prefect of Rome ordered that St Lawrence be put to a slow and painful death: he was tied to a grill and slowly burned alive.
An interesting variation of the superstition appears in one of the earliest collections of women’s wisdom, the Distaff Gospels, published in 1507, and this version provides the link to St Lawrence: ‘He that dothe not caste, or suffreth not to caste bones in the fyre shall not haue the toothache for ye honour of saynt Laurens.’
The superstition doesn’t appear in print in its modern form until 1840, when it was included in Mother Bunch’s Golden Fortune Teller, described as an oracle of love, marriage and fate. Mother Bunch adds that ‘To burn fish or poultry bones indicates that scandal will be spread about you, and to cast those of pork or veal into the fire inflicts pains in the bones of the person so improvident.’
In addition to honouring the memory of St Lawrence, the everyday homemakers of the medieval and Renaissance periods would have seen burning the bones as unlucky in itself. Most families kept one or two cows at a time and, when slaughtered, the whole of the animal was put to use – the bones were often used for making household utensils like tools, weapons, fasteners and sewing implements.
IF A BAT GETS IN YOUR HAIR YOU ARE POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL
The Roman poet Virgil helped to link the bat to a sense of evil by identifying it with the monstrous winged creatures described in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. In the first century AD, charms carved from the bones of bats were used to repel evil, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recommended fixing the body of a bat upsidedown above a door to ward off misfortune.
In medieval Europe, on the other hand, it was considered bad luck to see a bat in daylight and if one flew into your house it meant a death would soon follow. The animals’ nocturnal habits meant that they were considered ‘creatures of the night’ and thought to associate with witches and the Devil. Some peasants believed that a bat had the power to bewitch you if you got too close and many medieval artistic representations of the Devil depict him with bats’ wings. In an age when people believed that God was in a constant state of war with the Devil for their souls, it wasn’t unusual for demonic possession to be suspected if someone began to behave strangely. There was no understanding of conditions such as epilepsy or psychosis, and the medieval interpretation of the symptoms of these problems was that the Devil himself had taken over the soul of the sufferer, or that a demon in the form of an animal like a bat had been sent into the body by a witch.
In the eighteenth century, when novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula brought the folkloric figure of the vampire to the forefront of public consciousness, public opinion turned against bats even more. While Europeans did everything they could to prevent bats from coming close to them, in China and the Middle East they were welcome visitors. Mythology from both cultures feature bats as symbols of happiness and long-life. Only since hard-fought campaigns by environmentalists has the ecological importance of bats been recognized in the West and they are now a legally protected species.
SAYING ‘BLESS YOU’ WHEN SOMEONE SNEEZES
This is probably the most common superstition we act upon today. Whether we believe we need to or not, few of us can hear a companion sneeze without saying ‘Bless you!’ and as well as being the most widely practised superstition in the Western world, it is also one of the oldest. Writing his Natural History in 77 AD, the Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder asks the question: ‘Why is it that we salute a person when he sneezes, an observation which Tiberius Caesar, as they say, the most unsociable of men, as we all know, used to exact, when riding in his chariot even?’
Pliny may not have known the origin of the custom, but an explanation is offered in William Caxton’s 1483 manuscript The Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints, which was a translation of one of the most popular religious works of the Middle Ages Aurea Legenda, compiled in 1275 by the Italian archbishop and chronicler Jacobus de Voragine. The text describes a pestilence sent to the Christian Romans that was so cruel and sudden that if someone was heard to sneeze, those nearest them said ‘God helpe you or Cryst helpe’, knowing that they could be dead within minutes.
Many sources date saying ‘Bless you’ to the great plague. Although Caxton’s reference proves this incorrect (the original text predating the arrival of the bubonic plague by just over a century), it does seem likely that the practice was cemented by the horror of such a virulent and devastating disease from which people could do so little to defend themselves.
At some stage in its history though, the custom of blessing sneezers became linked to the spiritual, rather than the medical dangers of the act. The soul of a person has often been represented by the breath, and it was thought that when someone sneezed, the sudden expulsion of air from their body took their soul with it. In this moment the body of the person was vulnerable to being inhabited by an evil spirit, so the blessing became a form of protection against demonic possession. In Spain when someone sneezes people say ‘Jesus!’, because saying the Lord’s name offered similar protection.
IF YOU BITE YOUR TONGUE WHILST EATING, IT IS BECAUSE YOU HAVE RECENTLY TOLD A LIE
This belief comes from an earlier superstition that a blister would form on your tongue if you told an outright lie, flattered someone falsely or used clever language to conceal the truth. It was widely believed in from at least the seventeenth century, evidence of which can be found in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, in which Paulina, knowing she must deliver bad news to the King, speaks the line ‘If I prove honey-mouth’d, let my tongue blister.’ The medieval notion that the part of the body most directly responsible for a sin would suffer the consequences of its wrongdoing (see Never Kill a Robin) was still common in Elizabethan society; thieves often had their right hand cut off as a punishment, and the tongue, in particular, was often described as its own entity where falsehood was concerned. The Bible contains numerous references to support this: Proverbs 26:2 (King James Bible) for example, states: ‘A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin.’ The widely accepted Christian interpretation was that lies were conceived in the heart under the influence of Satan, so lying of any kind was regarded not simply as an example of a human failing, but as the direct work of the Devil. This was enough to convince most God-fearing people of the need to tell the truth, but the Bible is not the source of this superstition. There is documentary evidence that the threat of a blistered tongue hung over the ancient Greeks as well. In around 275 BC, the Sicilian poet Theocritus included the following reference in his Idylls: ‘Thee I’le sing, Thee sweet, nor midst my song tell-tale Blisters rise, and gall my Tongue.’
So it seems likely that the idea was adopted into British culture directly from translations of early Greek poetry. Over time the blister became a less specific burning sensation, and the superstition spread to the US. ‘The Despot’s Song’, published anonymously in Baltimore in 1862 by an author opposed to the Union government uses the idea to discredit the then President Abraham Lincoln, to whom he gives the lines:
Lie! Lie! Lie!
As long as lies were of use;
But now lies no longer pay,
I know not where to turn,
For when I the truth would say,
My tongue with lies will burn!
A BRIDE MUST SEW A SWAN’S FEATHER INTO HER HUSBAND’S PILLOW TO ENSURE FIDELITY
Superstitions tend to cluster around the most significant moments in life, which is why there are so many surrounding birth, death and marriage. The start of married life, like the start of the New Year, was said to determine how successful the union would be, so newlyweds traditionally followed all sorts of wedding-day customs designed to ensure a happy life together, many of which continue to this day. There was one superstitious act, though, that the bride carried out in secret: to keep her new husband faithful she would sew the feather of a swan into his pillow.
Placing items inside or under pillows was traditionally seen as a way of influencing a person’s behaviour or wellbeing. Anyone afraid of being bewitched would place a knife beneath their pillow to keep witches away and it was thought that sleeping with a carefully selected posy of flowers beneath your pillow would allow you to dream of your future spouse. These beliefs mirrored ancient African witchcraft customs, in which ‘voodoo’ charms like bones, hair, rags or strings placed under a pillow were said to cause sleeplessness or even death through so-called ‘Pillow Magic’.
The significance of the swan’s feather in ensuring fidelity came from the bird’s reputation in folklore for faithful love, founded on the fact that, unlike most other birds and animals, they mate for life. Swans appear in the legends of many cultures; one of the oldest is from India about a nymph, Urvasi, who fell in love with a mortal man, Puruvaras, and pledged to stay with him as long as she never saw him naked. A god, envious of their love, tricked Puruvaras into breaking her condition and Urvasi was forced to flee from him. Loyal Puruvaras searched endlessly for her and finally found her swimming with other nymphs in the guise of swans. Some versions say she refused to return to him, others that he was granted immortality to remain with her forever. Parallel tales can be found in Egyptian and Roman mythology and in legends from Greenland, Eastern Siberia and Ireland, where they were said to be bewitched maidens, or carriers of the souls of women who had died as virgins. Later, portrayals of their devotion in Wagner’s operas Parsifal and Lohengrin and Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet Swan Lake cemented the swan’s image as an emblem of devotion.
PUT A PINPRICK IN EMPTY EGGSHELLS
A reference to this superstition can be found in the Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, from the first century AD. ‘There is no one . . . who does not dread being spell-bound by means of evil imprecations; and hence the practice, after eating eggs or snails, of immediately breaking the shells, or piercing them with the spoon.’
Although belief in witchcraft reached its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women had been being persecuted for practising magic since Roman times, not for their association with the Devil, as was the case in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, but for practising outside the strict control of the Roman government, which relied on certain kinds of magic but outlawed any that it deemed a threat to its power.
It seems that the Romans believed witches might use intact eggshells to cast spells on the people who’d eaten them, and by 1486 this suspicion had been documented by the Catholic inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in his infamous witch-hunt manual Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of Witches’):
We have often found that certain people have been visited with epilepsy or the falling sickness by means of eggs which have been buried with dead bodies, especially the dead bodies of witches, together with other ceremonies of which we cannot speak, particularly when these eggs have been given to a person either in food or drink.
Others held that a shell could be used in the same way as a voodoo doll to inflict pain on whoever had eaten it by piercing them with pins, but by the late sixteenth century people had begun to speak out against the torture and killing of women accused of witchcraft. Among them was English MP Reginald Scot, who set out to prove that witchcraft did not exist by documenting the methods inquisitors claimed were used by witches and showing that they were simply tricks of the mind. His 1854 book Discoverie of Witchcraft mentions the belief that witches would use eggshells as boats and simulate rough seas with them to cause shipwrecks. Despite his efforts to illustrate the fallacy of this accusation, many people continued to believe that shells could be used by witches either to enact storms or to literally carry them o
ut to sea to create havoc in the waves. Piercing a hole in the shell or crushing it completely was the only remedy.
HOLDING YOUR BREATH WHEN PASSING A CEMETERY
Graveyards have been the subject of superstition since burial rites were first performed for the dead. In ancient cultures the rituals surrounding burial grounds were, of course, regarded as dutiful rather than superstitious and this particular belief may have originated from a blending of the practical with the spiritual. Although they had no notion of the way in which infectious disease could be passed through the air, the smell of decomposing bodies made people wary of breathing in the vapours emitted by a corpse, so covering the mouth became customary. On the spiritual level, early man associated the breath with the life force, or soul, as a result of simply observing that the spirit seemed to leave the body with the exhalation of the final breath.
The soul is linked with the breath linguistically too: pneuma is an ancient Greek word for breath and is translated in religious contexts as ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. The English word spirit comes from the Latin word spiritus, which means breath, and in Hindu philosophy the word prana means breath, but also ‘life force’. It stood to reason in their minds that just as the spirit could be exhaled from the body of someone on their deathbed, that soul might then be inhaled into the body of a living person.
Over time, beliefs like these were incorporated into folklore and compounded by stories of ghosts and possession by evil spirits. Graveyards were believed to be full of the spirits of the dead, either returning to communicate with their loved ones or trapped in limbo as a result of their earthly sins. Since it was thought to be more common for the spirits of the sinful to loiter around graveyards (the good spirits being happily ensconced in Heaven), the chances of becoming possessed by an evil soul were greater and certainly worth holding your breath to avoid.
