Black Cats and Evil Eyes (10 page)

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.