Black Cats and Evil Eyes (12 page)

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
).

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 superstition 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.

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
Č
arod
ě
jnice (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.

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.

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.

No one likes to be reminded of their own mortality, so it is of little 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’.

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.’