by Chloe Rhodes
In 1787, the English lexicographer Francis Grose included an alternative antidote in his Provincial Glossary: ‘If you meet a funeral procession, or one passes by you, always take off your hat: this keeps all evil spirits attending the body in good humour.’
From the eighteenth century onwards, pointing at a funeral procession was considered an absolute folly and was said to cause you to die within the month. Pregnant women and newborn children were also warned against accompanying funeral processions, for fear that infants and foetuses were especially tempting prey for the spirits that gathered at an open grave. Since the replacement of the walking funeral procession with the hearse, these old superstitions have fallen out of general use, although older people still often bow their heads for a moment if they notice a coffin being driven by.
COVERING THE MOUTH WHEN YAWNING
The act of covering the mouth when yawning began more than 2000 years ago as result of two distinct theories. The first, incredibly for its time, was that fatal diseases might be passed on in a yawn. Writing in 1499, the Italian historian Polydore Vergil notes in his De Rerum Inventoribus: ‘Crossynge of our mouth. Alike deadly plage was sometime in yawning, wherefore menne used to fence themselves with the signe of ye crosse . . . which costome we reteyne styl at this day.’
The other reason was equally concerned with wellbeing but more that of the yawner than the wider public, since the ancient Greeks and the classical Maya believed that spirits could enter or leave the body during a yawn. One notion held that the yawn was caused by the Devil himself, to allow demons to enter bodies while the yawner’s mouth was stretched wide. Another theory was that the soul of whoever was yawning might fly out of their body and that covering the mouth was the only way to stop it escaping. (See Saying ‘Bless You’ When Someone Sneezes.)
These ideas seemed to be supported by observations physicians made of newborn babies, who often yawn instinctively to fill their newly inflating lungs. Figures on infant mortality in antiquity are hard to pin down precisely, but although rates are thought to have been much lower than in the Middle Ages (estimated at 50–200 deaths per thousand births) there was little understanding of what caused infants to die. In their efforts to document the behaviour of newborns who didn’t survive, doctors noted that they often yawned excessively, which seemed to some to corroborate the theory that their souls had escaped through their mouths. To guard against this, new mothers were advised to keep their babies close and use their own hand to cover its mouth whenever it yawned.
By the seventeenth century such superstitious beliefs had combined with a sense that yawning was rude, which meant that people were keener to conceal it. In 1663 the English Jesuit and translator Francis Hawkins advised that ‘In yawning howl not, and thou shouldst abstain as much as thou can to yawn, especially when thou speakest.’
There are now several scientific theories about why we yawn, primarily that when tired or bored our breaths become shallow and yawning increases the amount of oxygen entering the lungs. However, nobody really knows exactly why, so perhaps this is one superstition that it is wise to uphold.
KNOCK ON WOOD / TOUCH WOOD
Knocking on wood or saying the words ‘Touch wood’ to prevent bad luck or stop our hopes from being dashed is thought to stem from an ancient pagan belief in wood sprites called dryads, or tree spirits, who were said to live in the trees, especially oak trees. The Druids believed these spirits were practised in the art of divination and could be called on for protection against evil spirits. This in turn has been suggested by some sources to stem from an even earlier custom prevalent in ancient Greece of calling on the protection of Zeus by touching an oak tree.
These beliefs slotted well into the slew of superstitions by which our more recent ancestors swore. As in rural areas where so much of our folklore was passed on from one generation to the next, there was an inherent faith in the protection the natural world could provide if it was sought in the right way. Touching or knocking on wood were used, as they continue to be today, when discussing an aim or aspiration. This ritual helped people brought up on proverbial warnings against taking things for granted (‘Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched’, etc.) to talk about their plans without feeling that expressing their wish would cause its failure.
Some sources reject claims of these spiritual origins, however, suggesting instead that, since the earliest records in print of the belief don’t appear until the nineteenth century, it may instead come from a children’s playground game of chase known as ‘tig’, in which touching wood made you immune from being caught. Wherever in our history it came from, however, the custom is still going strong today. In modern times, however, we knock on wood more to preserve our self-esteem in case our scheme should fail than because we fear that mentioning our dreams will scupper their chances of success.
TYING A KNOT IN A HANDKERCHIEF
Most people are familiar with the concept of tying a knot to help us remember something, but an earlier superstition held that a knotted handkerchief could actually work as a charm and protect whoever carried it from evil influences. This belief has been around since at least the fourteenth century and comes from the idea that devils and demons would be drawn to the cunning complexity of a knot, and become so distracted by trying to untie it that they would forget about whatever evil they’d been planning to inflict.
Similar methods are said to have been employed against vampires, including throwing a fishing net, traditionally made from knotted twine, over a vampire’s grave. This was said to keep the vampire in his grave, not by trapping him, but by delaying him with the distraction of having to untie so many knots that the sun would rise and banish him back into the earth before he had a chance to attack.
But knots were also used by those feared for their ability to summon evil. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History refers to knots as cures for fever and also mentions that they were distrusted as a device used by witches although knots are known to have featured in numerous witches’ spells. Witches’ ladders, for example, were pieces of string or rope made from natural fibres like cotton, hemp or human hair into which between three and forty knots were tied, sometimes accompanied by feathers or other trinkets. In the practice of black magic, witches could use these knotted strings to cast ‘death spells’, or to inflict pain or loss on another person.
The Scottish clergyman Richard Bannatyne’s journal, Memorials of Transactions in Scotland from 1569 to 1573, describes the burning of a woman suspected of witchcraft at St Andrews. The author details how in the struggle to tie the woman’s hands, her clothes were lifted up revealing a white cloth with strings tied in knots. To her dismay this was taken from her and she cried out: ‘Now I have no hoip [hope] of my self.’ This was taken as proof of her involvement in witchcraft, but as with so many of the accusations made against witches, this one could equally well have signified that she was using the charms against witchcraft passed on to her through the generations. Many of the superstitions we hold on to today originate from charms against black magic and yet, ironically, many others are simply modernized versions of the spells used by the very women who were accused of witchcraft or even considered themselves practitioners of magic.
LIGHTNING WILL NEVER STRIKE A HOUSE WITH A BURNING FIRE
As one of the most dramatic examples of the irrepressible power of nature, lightning features in the folklore of many cultures. In ancient Rome lightning bolts were the javelins of Jove, the king of the gods, who sent his eagle carrying fiery bolts to punish sinners and to smite whole armies of men. Thunderbirds appear in native American and African legends too. In South Africa a thunderbird known as the Umpundulo was thought to peel the bark from trees with his blazing talons; its bright feathers were said to send out lightning and the thunder was caused by the beating of its heavy wings.
Elsewhere, early folklore about lightning was influenced by Old Testament accounts of a wrathful God using lightning against the Philistines, such as these lines from the s
econd book of Samuel: ‘And he sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and discomfited them.’ (2 Samuel 22:15, King James)
A Yorkshire proverb from the 1870s shows how the biblical became proverbial: ‘When tunner’s loud crack shaks t’Heavenly vau’ts, It’s the Lord wo is callin’ ti men o’ their fau’ts.’
Fear of evoking God’s anger with their flaws resulted in a number of superstitions designed to appease him when storms threatened. Fire is symbolic of faith in many religions, and keeping a fire burning in the hearth was said to protect a home from lightning because it showed that the household was keeping its faith alive. Talking about the storm was avoided as a mark of respect and pointing to it was strictly forbidden, as this extract from an 1862 edition of history magazine Notes and Queries illustrates: ‘It is wicked to point towards the part of the heavens from which lightning is expected. I have seen a little boy, for this offence, made to kneel blindfold on the floor, to teach him how he would feel if the lightning came and blinded him.’
This interpretation of thunder as a punishment from God has endured among believers well into our more secular age. When a fire destroyed one of the UK’s finest cathedrals at York Minster in 1985 and the Bishop announced the news that a lightning strike was to blame, a reader of The Times newspaper wrote in to say ‘“Just lightning” says the Bishop dismissively. To those of us as old-fashioned as I, lightning is the wrath of God.’
NEVER LIGHT THREE CIGARETTES WITH ONE MATCH
This superstition is still widely held today and for some it’s as much a part of the ritual of smoking as tapping the end of the cigarette or turning one upside down in a new pack. Most collections of superstitions place its roots in the trenches of the Boer War, when, the theory goes, the expert snipers in the Boer army would spot a flame across the veldt as the first cigarette was lit, take aim as it reached the second and shoot as the third light was being offered, killing the last soldier before he’d had chance to take a single puff.
Historically, superstitions have always engrained themselves most deeply in times of peril. Faced with the very real prospect that life could be snuffed out at any moment, people naturally seek an escape route, and if none is available, they create a battery of superstitious rituals to trick the mind into feeling that they are doing something to protect themselves and help quell the rising panic. It is easy to imagine then that this superstition might have flourished in trench warfare, but there is evidence to suggest that it might have begun with a different army. A reluctance to light three articles with the same match had also been noted among Russian prisoners in the Crimean War, which predated the Boer war by half a century. The reason said to have been given by these prisoners was that rules of the Russian Orthodox Church stated that the only person allowed to light the three altar candles with a single taper was the priest, so no one outside the church would dare to re-enact such a holy rite.
This religious source is supported by the first appearance of the superstition in print. In the 1916 novel The Wonderful Year by William Locke, a character named Fortinbras lights the cigarettes of his two companions and uses another for his own:
‘A superstition,’ said he, by way of apology. ‘It arises out of the Russian funeral ritual in which the three altar candles are lit by the same taper. To apply the same method of illumination to three worldly things like cigars or cigarettes is regarded as an act of impiety and hence as unlucky.’
The shrewd salesmanship of Swedish tycoon Ivar Kreugar, whose match-making empire dominated post-war production of matches, also helped to cement the belief in the public consciousness. The financier and businessman, who was found after his suicide to have committed high-level fraud, is thought to have used his international marketing knowhow to help propagate the myth in order to increase demand for his product and fuelled the fire of this superstition still further.
WEAR A TOAD AROUND THE NECK TO WARD OFF THE PLAGUE
Thankfully the need for protection against the Black Death waned so long ago that superstitions like this one have been consigned to the history books. The mascots and charms that many of us still carry around have their roots in a time when people didn’t just use them for good luck, but because they hoped they might save their lives. It is a challenge in the modern age to imagine what life must have been like during the great plagues of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Overcrowding, extreme poverty and the lack of clean water or proper sanitation systems meant that life was precarious even before the arrival of a deadly epidemic. Once the bubonic plague arrived, carried by rats and passed to humans via flea bites, it swept through entire populations, killing 70 per cent of its victims within two to seven days.
The Great Plague of London, which struck in 1665, killed between 75,000 and 100,000 people, representing almost a quarter of the city’s population. It was the last in a string of plague epidemics that began in 1499 so people knew all about the horrors that lay ahead. In their desperation to avoid contagion, most who could afford to fled the city, leaving the poor in the decrepit, rat-infested slums that were the hotbed of the disease. Those left behind leapt on anything that offered the chance of protection; as journalist Daniel Defoe describes in his 1722 fiction A Journal of the Plague Year there was a craze for ‘charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets, and I know not what preparations against the plague; as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in a triangle or pyramid.’
Other methods documented at the time included painting a red cross on the door of infected houses with the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’; the application of a recently killed pigeon to the buboes (grossly enlarged lymphatic glands) or the tying of a frog around the neck to draw out the disease.
Defoe’s words sum up the futility of their efforts: ‘The poor people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the dead carts and thrown into the common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their necks.’
NEVER BRING LILIES INDOORS
Flowers have been imbued with historical and religious significance for thousands of years and the lily appears in folklore dating back to antiquity. According to Greek legend the flower was formed from drops of the Goddess Hera’s spilt breast milk and was a symbol of purity and fecundity. Lilies were woven together with ears of wheat to form crowns worn by brides at marriage ceremonies where they represented their innocence and blessed their fertility. In Roman tradition, lilies were presented to young women by their suitors during the celebration of the spring solstice, and Slavic pagan mythology also has the lily as a symbol of fertility and new life where they were ritually given as gifts at the spring celebration of Ostara, the time of renewal, which eventually became the Christian Easter.
According to Christian legend, lilies sprang from Eve’s tears when she and Adam were banished from the garden of Eden. Borrowing from the earlier mythology linking the lily to motherhood and purity, they are also associated with the Virgin Mary and are said to represent her tears. Early paintings depicting the annunciation show the Archangel Gabriel handing Mary lilies as he tells her she is expecting the son of God, and St Thomas was said to have found lilies in place of Mary’s body in her tomb after she ascended to heaven. The flower was also said to have sprung from drops of Jesus’s sweat in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the crucifixion, which made them symbolic of the Resurrection. Lilies can often still be seen decorating churches at Easter.
At Roman burials a lily was placed in the hands of the deceased to signify rebirth. This tradition was adopted by the early Church, which eventually appropriated the flower as a Christian symbol of death, and it is from this that the superstition about them bringing bad luck if brought into the home derives.
IT IS UNLUCKY TO DENY A PREGNANT WOMAN HER
CRAVINGS
Many readers might view this one as less of a superstition and more of a self-defence measure, since hell is widely known to have no fury like a pregnant woman denied the midnight snack her heart desires. However, this superstition began with the belief that if a woman was made to go without the food she craved, her baby might be ‘marked’.
The 1507 translation of medieval manuscript the Distaff Gospels includes the opinions of two wise women on this subject: ‘I tell you also that when you are with a married woman who could have children or who is pregnant . . . God and reason forbid talking about any food which could not be found at that time if needed, in order that her baby does not have a mark on the body.’ A second testimony to this superstition comes from Lady Abonde du Four who claims that if cherries, strawberries or red wine are thrown in the face of a pregnant woman, the child will have marks on the body.
This latter view reflects medieval beliefs in ‘Maternal Impression’ where experiences the mother has during pregnancy were thought to be visible on the child after its birth. Some American folklore suggests that birthmarks could be found on parts of the body that suffered injuries in a past life, while Iranian mythology states that a mark can appear on an unborn child when its mother touches a part of her own body during a solar eclipse.
However, the unsatisfied cravings theory was most widely believed to be the cause and the naming of birthmarks in several languages reflects this. In Italian they’re called ‘voglie’, in Spanish they are known as ‘antojos’ and in Arabic ‘wiham’, all of which can be roughly translated as ‘wishes’, since they symbolized the unfulfilled wishes of the child’s mother as she carried the unborn child.
