Black Cats and Evil Eyes (13 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 second 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.’

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.