Black Cats and Evil Eyes (4 page)

To turn the bad luck into good you could take the shoe off completely and throw it in the direction of someone to whom you wish well. The traditional wedding good-luck superstition of tying
shoes to the back of newly-weds’ cars comes from a sixteenth-century tradition described by Proverb collector John Heywood in his
Dialogue of the Effectual Proverbs in the English Tongue
Concerning Marriage
published in 1598: ‘And home again hitherwards quicke as a bee, now for good luck, cast an old shoe after me.’

As the entry point of the home and the threshold to the private world, the door has a special status in folklore. Talismans against evil have been mounted on doorframes since
the earliest dwelling places were constructed, and to this day good-luck tokens like horseshoes, sacred statues or Chinese feng shui symbols can be found on front doors from East to West. In China,
doors are often still painted with a fresh coat of auspicious red paint before New Year to bring good luck and happiness to the home.

These charms have their origins in the belief that
humanity lived under constant threat from the forces of evil. In the ancient world these forces were represented by
fearful gods; Set or Seth, the demon of death in Egyptian mythology, or the fearsome winged monster Typhon in ancient Rome. In the Western world during the Middle Ages, the Devil was as much of a
presence in everyday life as God, and was held responsible for the myriad of misfortunes that might befall a person living in times when the average life expectancy at birth was thirty-five years.
Evil spirits in the form of sprites and fairies or demonically possessed animals might be lurking in every shadow; the home had to be defended from these destructive forces and the front door was
the first line of defence. It was therefore considered unlucky when entering a house for the first time to use its back door, since it wasn’t protected against evil spirits. Visitors were
always asked to leave by the same door by which they’d entered in order to prevent them from taking the home owner’s luck and protection out with them.

Doors were also seen as representative of less tangible barriers, so they were always opened after a death in the house to let the departing spirit out, and during a birth to let the soul of the
new arrival in.

Black cats feature in the mythology of many cultures, and superstitions about them are still familiar to most of us in modern times. They are a prime example of the
contrariness of many of our superstitious beliefs; some swear they’re lucky, others see them as a sign of certain doom. According to Norse legend, Freya, queen of the Valkyries and goddess of
fertility, drove a chariot pulled by black cats that some sources suggest turned into horses possessed by the Devil. In the Middle Ages, black cats were often portrayed as the familiars of witches,
which is likely to be the origin of the distrust with which they are regarded in America, where early Puritan settlers rejected anything associated with the Devil and witchcraft. In the US it is
still considered a bad sign if a black cat crosses your path, since it means you have been noticed by the Devil. In Germany the same rule applies if the cat is walking from right to left, but if it
crosses from left to right then good fortune is coming your way. In Scotland the arrival of a black cat outside your home is a sign of coming prosperity, while in China black cats are regarded as
harbingers of
hunger and poverty. In Italy, if a black cat should rest on the bed of a sick person it is thought to signify the patient’s imminent death.

In England a black cat is still considered lucky if it walks towards you, though there are countless variations and reversals of the rule across the world, the origins of which have become
blurred and blended by the passage of time. The sixteenth-century English author William Baldwin’s satirical work
Beware the Cat
put into print the belief, commonly held at the time of
its publication in 1561, that cats were in fact witches disguised in animal form: ‘A Cat hath nine lives, that is to say, a witch may take on her a Cat’s body nine times.’

In Great Britain and Ireland though, it is considered lucky to own or see a black cat, particularly on important occasions such as weddings or at the start of a long journey. King Charles I was
so convinced of his own black cat’s luck-bringing qualities that he had it guarded round the clock. When it eventually died he was reportedly devastated that his luck had run out.
Coincidentally (or not!) the king was arrested by Cromwell’s troops the very next day and was beheaded two years later.

There are few superstitions still so widely and publicly observed as the belief that the number thirteen is unlucky; high-rise buildings are constructed without a thirteenth
floor, aeroplanes rarely have a thirteenth aisle and you’d be hard pressed to find a hotel room with the number thirteen on the door. The source of our distrust is held
by most to be biblical: at the Last Supper, when Jesus told his twelve apostles that one of them would betray him, there were thirteen at the table and Judas was said to have been the thirteenth
guest. (
See also
here
)

There are numerous alternative explanations for our fear of the number, however, many of them equally well-rooted in our cultural history. Norse legend describes a banquet at which twelve gods
were dining when a thirteenth guest Loki, a cunning, shape-changing god, arrived. The deities were entertaining themselves by throwing things at favoured god Balder, who they knew to be immune from
injury, but Loki tricked the blind god Hod into killing Balder by throwing an arrow made from mistletoe, knowing it to be the one thing that could harm him. Balder’s death was the start of
Ragnarok, the end of the old world during which there were three years of winter and the Norse gods were all killed.

The roots of the 2012 ‘End of days’ theories can also be linked to the number thirteen. In ancient Persia, where the twelve constellations of the zodiac were assigned to the calendar
year, people believed that each sign reigned over the world for a millennium. Once each constellation had completed its rule and the thirteenth millennium began, there would be no dominant
constellation, resulting in chaos.

For both ancient and modern scholars of sacred geometry exploring mathematical patterns and geometric forms in the natural world, the number thirteen is revered as a basic structural unit within
nature and the heavens. There are thirteen major joints in the skeleton, the moon
completes thirteen degrees of its orbit each day and there are thirteen lunar cycles in a
solar year. The number is also auspicious in Judaism where it is the age of responsibility when a boy becomes bar mitzvah. Usually written as
yod-gimel
, thirteen is also the numerical value
of the word
ahava
, meaning love. All of which has led some to suggest that our suspicion of the number might have its roots in anti-Semitism.

The giving of presents is riddled with risk for the superstitious, since it’s one of the few occasions when our own actions have a direct impact on others for good or
ill.
According to folklore, an empty wallet or purse received as a gift will stay empty forever, so to give one is akin to cursing the recipient with a lifetime of poverty. The
belief is thought to stem from the notion that the Devil would inhabit an empty purse and use poverty to drive people to acts of desperation such as theft, deceit and prostitution that were
regarded as ungodly and sinful.

The superstition was strengthened by its association with a saying that dates back to at least the early eighteenth century, which states ‘An empty purse is the Devil.’ The phrase
was in popular use in Britain and America throughout the 1800s and can be found in print in an essay written by the pre-eminent American lexicographer Noah Webster, Jr. in 1786 lamenting the
weakness of the federal government: ‘It prevents the adoption of any measures that are requisite for us as a nation; it keeps us from paying our honest debts . . . It also throws out of our
power all the profits of commerce, and this drains us of cash. Is not this the devil? Yes, my countryman, an empty purse is the devil.’

The same phrase appeared in an 1882 edition of
Notes and Queries
, a scholarly magazine devoted to the exploration of the English language, history and antiquarianism, and we still use a
version of it today. ‘The Devil Danced in Empty Pockets’ is the title of a song by contemporary American country singer Joe Diffie, and the same line appears in Tom Waits’s murder
ballad ‘Lucinda’.

To guard against the curse of the empty purse, it was customary from the 1800s onwards to keep at least one coin in a wallet, or, if that had to be spent, a piece of string or twine could be
used to trick the Devil into keeping out. Many people still slip a coin, or, if they’re in a generous mood, a note, inside a purse or wallet if it’s to be a gift.

If you want to see a friend again, the full version goes, then don’t ever say goodbye to them on a bridge. As with many old-fashioned superstitions, this one confers
symbolic meaning on the physical world. Rivers divide bodies of land and the bridges that spanned them were seen as a kind of no-man’s-land, belonging to neither bank and representative of
separation. To part company from a friend on a bridge and each to set off for opposite banks of a river was therefore to risk being parted for ever, just as the land had been. The motives for
adhering to this custom weren’t simply the mirroring of nature; what really drove their reluctance to part ways over water was their fear of the Devil fuelled by folk tales.

In the legend of the Devil’s Bridge in Cardiganshire, an old woman had become separated from her cow by a deep ravine and the Devil took advantage of her distress by offering to throw a
bridge across in return for the soul of the first living creature to cross it. The old woman agreed
and the Devil rubbed his hands with glee, delighted that in her panicked
state of mind she’d been willing to sacrifice herself, but instead she took a crust of bread from her pocket and threw it across and her dog ran after it, angering the Devil. Similar stories
are told in different parts of Europe; on the river Main in Frankfurt it’s a bridge builder who drives a rooster across ahead of him; in Switzerland, the St Gotthard Pass is spanned by
‘The Devil’s Bridge’, named after a legend about the Devil waiting to catch anyone crossing after dark.