Black Cats and Evil Eyes (6 page)

Like many superstitions that have their roots in country customs, this one makes sense for practical reasons. Spiders are useful to farmers because they eat the aphids and
other insects that can destroy a farmer’s crops, so it was in the interests of rural people, especially those living in the days before pesticides, to preserve the life
of this helpful creature. Spiders were welcomed in the home for similar reasons in that it was better to have a few cobwebs in the corners than for your food (which couldn’t in those days be
refrigerated) to become infested with flies. There are mythical sources for the superstition also, with one legend in varying forms, making the harming of spiders a taboo across cultures.

A Christian fable tells how a spider hid the baby Jesus as Mary and Joseph fled with him from King Herod’s men. Joseph had found a cave high in the mountains where Mary could rest as they
ran from Herod, who had ordered the killing of all male children under the age of two. The Roman army were close behind and began to search the caves, but when they saw an intricate spider’s
web across the entrance to the one in which Jesus lay sleeping they passed by, assuming that it must have been there, undisturbed, for many days.

The Torah tells the parallel story of how David, later the King of Israel, was saved by a spider’s web covering the cave in which he was hiding from an army sent by the King Saul to kill
him. In the story of the life of the prophet Mohammed is the tale of how he took shelter in a cave when fleeing his enemies and was saved when a tree sprouted in front of it and a spider built a
web between the tree and the cave.

The spider’s usefulness in protecting human life can be traced back even earlier; in
AD
77 the Roman scholar Pliny wrote about the medicinal uses of spider’s webs, which were mixed
with vinegar and oil and used for healing fractures and cuts. These days we have fewer uses for our
eight-legged friends but many of us still put them out the back door with
trembling hands rather than risk bad luck by squashing them.

It would lead to some fairly serious pedestrian traffic jams if we tried to adhere to this superstition on the stairways of office blocks, train stations and the shopping malls
of the modern world. The best we can do to dispel any bad luck we incur is to keep our fingers crossed or hold our breath as we pass. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, our forefathers were
doing their best to avoid it, probably because of the association between stairways and the pathway to heaven. One old English rhyme, passed down by word of mouth, states ‘Never pass upon the
stairs, you’ll meet an angel unawares.’

In the mid-nineteenth century the living world was seen as much more closely linked to the spirit world than it is today. Despite the emergence of atheism in the previous century, most people
still believed in the afterlife and in the ability of spirits who hadn’t found rest to appear to the living. Accounts of hauntings from this era often describe ghostly figures on staircases:
spectral women in white descending the stairs or the ghosts of dead children sitting on the steps.

There may also have been practical reasons for the superstition that stemmed from the narrowness of early staircases. Two people passing on the narrow staircases of
fortified medieval castles would leave themselves open to attack from behind. These stairways were also booby-trapped with ‘stumble steps’ which were made different heights from the
others in order to trip any attacker advancing up them.

An earlier piece of stairway folklore meant that by the sixteenth century anyone hoping to be married might have appreciated a stumble step, as it was considered lucky to stumble on your way up
a staircase and was a good omen of a future wedding in the household. Stumbling on your way down was still thought of as a misfortune though and seen as a sign of bad luck to come. Restoration
dramatist William Congreve recorded the belief in his 1695 play
Love for Love
: ‘But then I stumbled coming down stairs, and met a weasel; bad omens those.’

The Greek scholar Theophrastus (c.372–c.278
BC
), who succeeded Aristotle at the Peripatetic School, wrote a study of human nature entitled
The Characters
that was made up
of sketches of different moral character types. The English translation incudes among the traits of ‘The Superstitious Man’: ‘He will not tread upon a tombstone.’
Theophrastus’s work was published in around 319
BC
, but after the fall of the Roman Empire his teachings were lost to the Western world until the twelfth century, when translations of Latin
texts began to be made. This superstition was incorporated smoothly into a medieval world in which the risk of dying young was enough to make anyone who valued life avoid anything that might
increase their chances of going to an early grave.

Many of the superstitions surrounding the dead in this
period stemmed from the idea that the departing soul would loiter on earth for as long as possible before making its
journey either upwards to heaven or downwards to hell. During this time of restlessness it would look for other souls to keep it company on its journey, so doing anything to antagonize the newly
buried was seen as foolhardy in the extreme. (
See also
The Covering of Mirrors after a Death
.)

By the eighteenth century the superstition had evolved so that a more generalized misfortune would befall anyone who walked on a grave. The English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge puts it
succinctly in his 1798 poem ‘The Three Graves’: ‘To see a man tread over graves / I hold it no good mark; / ’Tis wicked in the sun and moon, / And bad luck in the
dark!’

The belief remains prevalent in America and across much of Europe. In predominantly Catholic Brittany there is a walled cemetery at the Church of Lanrivoare where 7,727 ‘unnamed
saints’ are buried, which is so strict about the superstition that you can enter only after you have removed your shoes. Failure to abide by this rule is said to have once resulted in a
visiting stranger falling backwards so that his entrails came out.

Archaeologists believe that burial rituals can be traced back to the Middle Palaeolithic, when, in Europe, Neanderthals buried weapons alongside their dead. There is some
evidence to suggest that plants and flower heads were buried with bodies in this era, and, though this has yet to be proved, the custom of decorating a grave with flowers is known to date back at
least to Roman times, when bodies were buried with numerous important possessions that might be useful in the afterlife. Miniature gardens were laid out over burial sites so that the spirit of the
newly departed could enjoy their tranquillity once they were at peace, and cut flowers were placed alongside tombs as offerings to the Gods.

The ancient Romans would have considered it disrespectful to both the gods and the soul of the person within the grave to take anything left by the bereaved at the graveside and it is still seen
as callous and morally wrong to do so. Since at least the early nineteenth century there has been an added deterrent for any would-be flower snatcher – the superstitious belief that taking
flowers from a grave would lead the thief to be the next to be buried.

The belief is especially strong where it relates to the picking of living flowers that are growing naturally on a grave, since these are said to indicate that the person buried within was good.
Weeds growing on a grave are said
to suggest the opposite, which is why many superstitious people take special care to tend to the graves of their loved ones.

A diluted version of these traditions still survives today and has, in fact, experienced something of a resurgence in the West in recent years, with modern graves being decorated with items of
clothing, favourite personal effects of the deceased and plastic flowers. It’s a change that has caused consternation among traditionalists within the Christian church, who believe the
metaphorical message conveyed by live flowers – that their beauty, like human life, is transient, has been lost.

New Year is celebrated at different times and in different ways, with a huge range of customs and rituals. New Year’s
resolutions, for example, can
be traced back to the Romans, who made offerings and sacrifices and were on their best behaviour throughout January in order to win favour with Janus, the god of beginnings, and ensure a lucky
year. They gave gifts to each other, a custom which continues in Latin countries, and they believed that the beginning of anything, a journey, a chore and especially a new year, was an omen as to
how it would unfold.

One traditional belief that survived well into the Renaissance, and that lasts in a diluted form to this day, held that your actions or circumstances on the first day of the New Year set the
tone for the whole of the year ahead. This meant that on 1 January (for countries using the Gregorian calendar) cupboards had to be full, fires must be kept burning and any activity that had
symbolic links to loss or misfortune had to be avoided.

One such activity was the use of scissors. In folklore, scissors were imbued with special powers to sever more than just the fabric and paper for which they were designed (
see
Never Give a Knife
or Scissors as a Gift
). In the Middle Ages they were used as protection against witchcraft and were hidden near a doorway to prevent witches from entering, or secreted beneath a cushion or under a
rug to make a witch feel uncomfortable in a room and force her to leave without using her wiles to harm the inhabitants. Their protective powers were thought to be magnified if they were left open
in the shape of a cross, adding the divine protection of the crucifix to the strength of the iron or steel and the keenness of the sharpened blades. Using such a powerful instrument on the first
day of the year, even for a minor domestic task, was frowned upon as it risked cutting off good fortune for the coming year.

One of the best sources we have of the superstitions and old wives’ tales that governed the lives of our distant ancestors is a medieval French manuscript called
Les
Évangiles des Quenouilles
, which, in around 1470, recorded on parchment the wisdom of six peasant women. The manuscript is a precious resource for those interested in folklore for two
principal reasons: firstly, until this time, knowledge of this kind was passed down orally and rarely documented, which means that many of the beliefs and customs of the Middle Ages have been lost
to us. Secondly, because it dates from before the vilification of village wise women as witches, the women whose observations appear in it were free to divulge their ancient lore, charms and cures
without fear of persecution. Thus we have a richer, more detailed account of the folklore of the time than we could have hoped for once women like the manuscript’s authors
were shunned, or worse. In 1507 an English translation of the manuscript, called
The Gospelles of Dystaues
, or
The Distaff Gospels
, was published and within its pages can be found
early versions of many of the superstitions we’re familiar with today.