Black Cats and Evil Eyes (11 page)

Spitting on to the bosom is a custom that still exists in Greece and Cyprus, although over time it became unnecessary to actually spit to evoke the protection it offered and the sound
‘ptew’ was used instead. ‘Ptew, Ptew mi me matiasis’ is still commonly recited in Greece to repel the Evil Eye (
see
The Evil Eye
) and can be roughly translated as
‘Spit, spit, I spit on myself to protect myself from the Evil Eye.’ The most superstitious will still lift the clothing away from their chest at the neck and imitate spitting onto their
chest.

Across the world fishermen traditionally spit into their nets to ensure they get a good catch. In the UK and America boxers spit on their knuckles before a fight and pretending to spit on each
hand before tackling any difficult task is common in many cultures. The Irish had a custom of spitting on horses to keep them safe from fairies, who were said to be repelled by anything unclean.
The fairies were wrong, however, as modern science has discovered that saliva is in fact an excellent antiseptic, so when we say we’re ‘licking our wounds’ we probably really
should be.

Suspicion and persecution of redheads is not a modern phenomenon restricted to playground bullying. The Middle English poem
Proverbs of Alfred
, thought to have been written in
the latter half of the twelfth century, contains the following piece of ‘wisdom’: ‘The rede mon he is a quet [wicked man]; for he wole the thin uvil red [he will give thee evil
counsel.]’ Red-haired women were viewed with even more misgiving. In Jewish mythology, Lilith (identified in the Old Testament as Lamia, or in some versions simply as
‘screech-owl’ or some other night bird) is said to be the first wife God created for Adam, who was thrown out of the Garden of Eden because of her refusal to accept Adam’s
superiority and went on to marry the Devil and have children by him who were part human, part demon. Lilith is always depicted with red hair, such colouring said to indicate fieriness and a desire
for sexual dominance.

The same theme is apparent in depictions of Eve following her fall. Michelangelo’s
Temptation and Fall
, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512, shows a
brown-haired Eve being offered
the apple by Satan (in the guise of a red-haired serpent woman). In the adjacent fresco, in which she is being expelled from the Garden of Eden
for biting the forbidden fruit, her hair is painted red.

Eve’s red hair is a physical manifestation of her sin and through this association red-haired women have been branded seductresses. The superstition in question suggests that a redhead
shouldn’t be trusted as a bridesmaid in case she uses her powers of temptation to lead the groom astray. Numerous other superstitious beliefs stemmed from this sexualized reputation,
including that red-haired children are the result of their mothers’ indelicacy.

Distrust of redheads was exacerbated by their rarity. Only 4 per cent of the world’s population have red hair and in many parts of the world it’s barely ever seen. Scotland and
Ireland have the highest percentage of red-haired citizens, followed by Scandinavian countries. In Denmark it’s considered an honour to give birth to a redheaded child, but in Corsica, where
the colouring is much less common, it’s customary to spit and turn around to avoid bad luck if you pass a redhead on the street.

Crossing fingers to make wishes come true is such a commonplace custom that we barely register it as superstitious. Its use is so widely recognized that
the phrase ‘fingers crossed’ peppers our discussions of every aspect of our lives that involve chance, from our most mundane anticipations to our wildest ambitions. However, despite the
many records of good-luck customs made from the seventeenth century onwards, there is no mention of crossing the fingers for luck in print until the early twentieth century. Traditionally people
seem to have crossed their legs instead. In 1595, the English dramatist George Peele’s satirical romance
The Old Wives’ Tale
referred to sitting crossed-legged and saying your prayers
backwards as a good-luck charm and
A Provincial Glossary of Popular Superstitions
collected by the English lexicographer Francis Grose in 1787 states: ‘It is customary
for women to offer to sit cross-legged, to procure luck at cards for their friends. Sitting cross-legged, with the fingers interlaced, was anciently esteemed a magical
posture.’

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.

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.

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.

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.’