by Chloe Rhodes
It is possible that the interlaced fingers of the cross-legged women provoked the modern finger-crossing custom, although many sources suggest that its origin is Christian rather than pagan. Some theories hold that it is a variation of the subtle sign of the cross that early Christians made to make themselves known to each other when the practice of their religion was a crime. However, the lack of documentary evidence for this suggests it may be another example of a historical explanation being tacked on to a modern custom. More plausible is the possibility that crossed fingers evolved as shorthand for making the sign of the cross over the whole body, by touching the forehead, chest and each shoulder. This gesture was made to cure illness from the eleventh century onwards and as a form of protection against evil from at least the seventh century, as this extract from a 1618 work by English Puritan William Perkins shows: ‘The crossing of the body . . . that we may be blessed from the Devil . . . wherein the crosse carrieth the very nature of a Charme, and the use of it in this manner, a practice of Enchantment.’
These days saying the words takes the place of physically crossing the fingers in many cases, although the visual image of crossed fingers is still powerful (in the UK it is the emblem of the National Lottery). Over time the action now has acquired a secondary meaning too; if you tell a lie or make a promise you don’t intend to keep, you can cross your fingers behind your back to signify that you don’t mean it, which might originally have been a way of evoking the protection of the cross to nullify the sin of lying.
COVERING MIRRORS AFTER A DEATH IN THE HOME
In the superstition-riddled sixteenth century, mirrors were seen as portals into an unnatural, alternative world presided over by the Devil. Anyone showing the sin of vanity by staring for too long at their reflection risked seeing a vision of Satan standing beside them. This was particularly terrifying in times when many people believed their reflection to be an embodiment of their soul (see Breaking a Mirror), and while their soul was outside their own body, it was vulnerable to being snatched, either by the Devil himself, or by the departing spirit of the recently deceased.
Their body too, was under threat of possession by another soul while their own was trapped in the looking glass, and it seems that a combination of all these fears fuelled the custom of covering mirrors in a house where someone had died. The earliest known reference in print to the practice comes from the 1780s and it seems to have been prevalent throughout the nineteenth century and was still common in the early 1900s. In his 1911 study of mythology The Golden Bough, the Scottish anthropologist, Sir James George Frazer gives the most thorough explanation of the practice to be found in print: ‘It is feared that the soul, projected out of the person in the shape of his reflection in the mirror, may be carried off by the ghost of the departed, which is commonly supposed to linger about the house till the burial.’
Other variations on the theme co-existed with this one, including the belief that if you look into a mirror in a room in which someone has recently died, an apparition of the corpse looking over your shoulder will appear in the reflection. This belief is common in Europe and America, where mirrors were used to catch ghosts. An old New Orleans voodoo technique was employed to trick spirits into being captured: a large mirror was placed in a doorway so that the ghost would walk into it thinking it was entering a room. Instead it would be trapped forever behind the glass.
A BED CHANGED ON FRIDAY WILL BRING BAD DREAMS
This old wives’ tale is a combination of two superstitious beliefs. The first is that starting any piece of work on a Friday, including minor household chores, was thought to be a bad omen (see Friday 13th is an Unlucky Day). Friday was the day that biblical sources suggest the crucifixion of Jesus took place and Friday has been set aside as a day of remembrance of Christ’s suffering since the days of the early Church. Farmers wouldn’t begin a harvest on a Friday, boats wouldn’t set sail and anyone who’d recovered from an illness would stay in bed for an extra day rather than get up for the first time on a Friday. In all these cases lives depended on the plentiful supply of good fortune; at sea especially, the smallest piece of bad luck could have catastrophic results and people dealt with the uncertainties ahead by adhering to rituals they believed would protect them. This way of thinking naturally extended into the home and women would never begin a household task on a Friday for fear of bringing misfortune on the whole household.
The particular significance of changing the bed came from the marriage of Friday’s bad luck with superstitious beliefs about the influence of a bed on the sleeper’s dreams. Today’s scientists still struggle to explain many aspects of the way our brains work while we sleep and two hundred years ago it was thought that spirits, both good and evil, could visit people in their dreams. In the 1800s changing the bed on a Friday was said to allow the Devil to take control of a person’s dreams for a week, while ‘turning the bed’ on the wrong day (both Fridays and Sundays appear in the records as inauspicious), could be an omen of a forthcoming death. Turning the bed meant turning the mattress over, a necessary chore in the days when mattresses were stuffed with natural materials such as straw, feathers and animal hair, but turning one on an unlucky day risked ‘turning the luck’. Unsettled dreams were also said to be caused by any interruption to the bed making, especially a fit of sneezing, which would lead to fitful sleep.
PUTTING SALT ON THE DOORSTEP OF A NEW HOUSE TO WARD OFF EVIL
Salt has been used as an emblem of purity since Classical times. It was used in religious ceremonies in ancient Greece and Rome and in the holy water used during baptisms in the Catholic Church. As early as 800 BC there are written records of salt being used in this way. Homer’s Iliad, for example, refers to meat being sprinkled with holy salt to sacrifice to the gods. These ritualistic practices transmuted into superstitions during the Middle Ages, when people sought comfort from the harsh living conditions, poor harvests and epidemics that plagued them, and blamed their hardships on the influence of the Devil.
Putting salt on the doorstep of a new home was just one of the many rituals carried out to cleanse evil from a dwelling place and to bless and protect the new inhabitants. In the Middle Ages, when evil spirits were thought to roam freely in the form of demonic animals, goblins and fairies, the entrance to the home had to be heavily protected to stop them from getting in. Alongside lucky charms and amulets (see Horseshoes), salt was sprinkled on the floor and rubbed into the doorstep to repel evil with its cleansing power.
The strength of medieval belief in the efficacy of salt as a charm against evil is illustrated in a 1486 account of a witch trial in the Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of Witches’), the most influential publication in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages: ‘The Judge and all his assessors must . . . always carry about them some salt consecrated on Palm Sunday . . . for the banishing of all power of the Devil.’
This faith in the power of salt to counteract witchcraft persisted well into the nineteenth century. In the English writer William Howitt’s Rural Life in England, published in 1838, he describes a Nottinghamshire shoemaker who ‘had standing regularly by his fireside a sack-bag of salt and of this he frequently took a handful, with a few horsenail stumps, and crooked pins, and casting them into the fire together, prayed to the Lord to torment all Witches and Wizards in the neighbourhood.’
Offering someone salt and helping them to it, though, was deemed very bad luck: ‘Help me to salt, help me to sorrow’ was recited from early 1800s, and we still throw a pinch of salt over our shoulder to ward off bad luck if we spill some (see Spilling Salt).
PLACING SHOES UPON A TABLE WILL BRING BAD LUCK
Common from the late 1800s, this superstition doesn’t appear in print before 1869, leading to modern speculation that it may simply have stemmed from the housewife’s instinctive reluctance to allow muddy, possibly manure-covered boots on the table on which she’d soon be laying out the supper. This theory is scuppered by the fact that most early nineteenth-century examples of the superstit
ion specify that new shoes are responsible for the direst of consequences.
The repercussions vary from signifying an argument to prophesying a death and many macabre origins are suggested. Some sources hold that it comes from an aversion to anything that reminds people of the gallows, and was based on the unfounded notion that prisoners were hanged with their shoes on and that once the noose had done its job and was slackened, the tips of their toes would tap on the platform. Others attribute it to the tradition of dressing a corpse in new clothes for the wake, when the body would be laid on a table in the family home until the time of the burial. It is also ascribed in some quarters to the tradition in mining communities of breaking the news of the death of a miner to his family by placing his boots on the table.
Appealing as each of these explanations may be, there is little evidence to support any of them, yet the absence of a plausible source has done nothing to diminish the power of the superstition. In his 1932 collection of folklore Those Superstitions, Sir Charles Igglesden includes a tale about the Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley, twice British Prime Minister and fearless victor of the Battle of Waterloo who ‘instantly discharged an old servant because he placed his Grace’s boots on a table.’
Anyone sharing the Duke’s aversion could counteract the curse by spitting on the soles of the shoes (see Spitting to Ward off Evil) or by ensuring that the person who put them there is the one to remove them.
NEVER TAKE A BROOM WITH YOU WHEN YOU MOVE HOUSE
While most household items have some superstition or other attached to them, those surrounding brooms are stuck to with extra tenacity by the superstitious because of their long association with witchcraft. According to folklore prevalent across Europe, witches used broomsticks to fly to their magic meetings, called sabbats, which resulted in the belief that the broomstick was particularly receptive to the influence of spirits and spells.
Originally brooms were used for pagan fertility magic because of their phallic shape. They were taken into the fields and mounted by farmers who would leap high in the air on them in the hope that their crops would grow to great heights. This early association with magical power meant that they were soon put to use for other household spells: they were thought to be able to repel black magic if they were placed across the threshold of a home and were used as wands for charms and cures by rural wise women. In the Czech Republic a festival called Čarodějnice (the burning of the witches) still takes place on 30 April each year, when it’s traditional for people to burn broomsticks on large communal bonfires.
Many modern Wiccans follow the traditions of their medieval predecessors in using a broom as an altar tool during rituals. They are used for clearing a sacred space by sweeping away negative or distracting energy and it is this association with spiritually cleansing a room that gave rise to this particular superstition. A new broom was said to bring good luck to a new home, while using an old broom in a new house risked bringing evil spirits from the old dwelling into the new one. A German tradition for healing a house after misfortune has befallen someone in the household was for everyone to take a broom and sweep from the centre of the house outwards until the negative energy had been banished.
Another strongly held superstition about brooms is that it’s unlucky to buy one in May: ‘Brooms bought in May, sweep the family away.’ It is also said to be unlucky to sweep after dark, a belief which comes from the fourteenth-century persecution of witches, when a woman seen wielding a broom after dark was suspected of sweeping a spell towards someone and could be tried and burned for witchcraft.
NEVER LEAVE A ROCKING CHAIR ROCKING WHEN EMPTY
Rocking chairs didn’t appear in England until 1725, but since this time they have been linked to the two groups of people most often associated with the spirit world: the very elderly and witches. Faith in the close connection between the living and the dead was strong in the eighteenth century and many people believed in ghosts. The souls of the dead were thought to pay regular visits to the homes they had left behind, sightings of apparitions on staircases would often be reported (see It is Bad Luck to Pass Anyone on the Staircase) and in the rocking chairs the recently deceased had favoured towards the end of their lives. The independent rocking of a chair was taken as a sign that the chair itself was haunted and they often appear in ghost stories creaking away on their own.
The connection with witches evolved from earlier folklore about witches flying on their chairs. Along with the rabid witch-hunt manuals of the Middle Ages that purported to list the signs by which someone could be judged a witch, there were other voices exploring the phenomenon of witchcraft. Not all the women in the docks at witch trials denied the charges levied at them. Some were defiant about the charms and spells they used and fuelled anti-witch hysteria by confirming that they could indeed transform themselves into animals or fly through the air. This resulted in some attempts to understand what these women were experiencing by investigating the potions and brews they cooked up. In De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Illusions of the Demons and on Spells and Poisons) published in 1563, the Dutch physician and occultist, Johann Weyer, found that henbane, deadly nightshade and mandrake were the main ingredients. A potion of these ingredients when rubbed into the skin of the upper thighs and genitals could produce the sensation of flying in the mind of the person anointed with it. This mixture was also applied to broomsticks and to chairs, in the belief that they could be used as vehicles for flight.
By the end of the eighteenth century there are printed records of a superstition that it is unlucky to seat yourself next to an empty chair, since either the spirits of the dead or witches might be sitting there invisibly. Later, the rhythmic movement of an empty rocking chair was thought to provide extra encouragement to such spirits to make themselves at home.
A LOAF OF BREAD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN AFTER SLICING IS PERILOUS
Bread is one of the most important foods in the history of humankind and has been revered since the growing of crops for harvest first began in Neolithic times. Wheat and bread appear in the Old Testament as emblems of the earth’s fertility and in the New Testament bread becomes the ultimate gift from God to mankind: ‘Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.’ (Matthew 26:26, King James). Christians have made the sign of the cross over new loaves of bread for centuries and since the thirteenth century bakers would often mark the top of loaves with a cross, so turning one upside down would have been seen as sacrilegious.
Bread was sacred to the ancient Greeks and Romans too; Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth, domesticity and the family and Vesta the Roman equivalent, were patrons of bread-making and traditionally received the first sacrificial offering in the household. One theory about the origin of this superstition is that turning a loaf upside down was an insult to the goddess of the hearth and offending her put the sustenance of the family at risk. In England, the consequences of turning a loaf upside down once cut was that the – literal – breadwinner of the family would fall ill, which seems to boost the hearth-goddess notion. Although sources suggest that cutting off the first slice released tempting aromas that would drift down to hell and attract evil spirits, if the loaf was then upturned there is little to support either theory in print.
An alternative explanation comes from eighteenth-century France where each town had a public executioner whose life was loaded with superstition: his house was marked with red paint, he sat in his own pew in church and his family were isolated from the community. It was held to be unlucky to speak to him or touch anything that belonged to him, especially his bread, so much so that the local bakers would bake the executioner’s loaf separately and turn it upside down to make sure no one else took it by mistake. In many parts of rural France it is still considered improper to serve or even store a loaf the wrong way up.
IT IS BAD LUCK TO MEET A FUNERAL PROCESSION HEAD ON
No one likes to be reminded of their own mortality, so it is of litt
le wonder that coming face to face with a funeral procession is considered bad luck. In the 1700s the consequences were much worse than a few moments of existential angst. Usually coming across someone else’s funeral unexpectedly meant that your own, or at least, that of a member of your close family, wouldn’t be long in coming. This belief may have come about in part as a result of the limited understanding people had, pre-scientific revolution, of the diseases that swept through the population. In the days before vaccination, antibiotics or proper hygiene there was a high chance that if someone died from a contagious illness, or from a water-borne disease, others living in close proximity would soon suffer the same fate. With no proper insight into how germs spread people naturally devised their own superstitious explanations.
Among these was that when someone died, evil spirits would cluster round their body, looking for opportunities either to take that body over or to coax the spirit of the recently deceased to join them in their haunting. This led to countless superstitions about the period immediately after death, which in those days was in the hands of the family of the deceased. The body would be kept at home, usually on display for friends and neighbours to come and view, and the rules governing what happened in this time covered everything from the direction the body was carried, to the order the pall bearers walked in to collect it. Anyone meeting the procession on its way to the church could anger these spirits, so to appease them and avoid being the next in the ground, the best advice was to walk along with the mourners for a time and thus transform your ‘meeting’ into a ‘joining’.
