The Origin and Purpose of Superstitions

The origin and purpose of superstitions

Superstitions are part of every modern culture in today’s world. They help us overcome issues difficult to understand and aid us in transitional years, often telling us what is ethically writ and wrong.

I say modern culture because I regard superstitions as elements of “earlier versions of our culture”. Every culture has an evolution of its own, and as we advance in science, technology, art and humanity in general, our culture evolves and changes. What we have is an ever-changing culture that constantly adopts new elements, beliefs and gets rid of old. This ongoing change is the birthplace of superstitions. Something that was a normal every day ritual for your grandma sixty years ago, just doesn’t fit into today’s picture, but she keeps on repeating it, and before you know it you accept it as an old superstition and begin to practice it. It is like they are caught between the past and the present belonging to neither one of the two.

Superstitions have a life of their own… they summarize elements from thousands of years of cultural evolution. Let us examine some of the most common superstitions like spilling salt or opening an umbrella in an enclosed area. Both of these, like most of the superstitions in the western world, imply luck, will, spirits and other paranormal magical issues. This is a remnant of Europe’s old pagan, shaman and other occult religions. Even after 1500 years of Christianity, which strictly denies the existence of any kind of luck, the people of Europe haven’t gotten rid of their favorite beliefs. Probably they didn’t like the idea of a single god determining their faith, so they kept their amulets and charms to keep off bad spirits and jinxes. In fact, real Christianity and its canonical rules, as they were defined, were never implemented outside of the monastery walls, because it was not that easy to convince the commoners to set aside their paganistic way of life. Now let’s go back to the salt… as soon as man started eating cooked meat (that is since he tamed fire), salt became a valuable resource. Salt that is naturally found in the muscles of the animals is lost in the cooking process, so it had to be added to every meal to satisfy the need for salt in the human body. There are some accounts that salt was so valuable that some thousands of years ago, a years ration of salt was a common part of a soldier’s paycheck. It was not until a hundred years ago that salt could be bought from your local grocery store. I can even remember my grandma telling me stories about the Great War, when it was very important for a family among other supplies such as flour and oil to have a good supply of salt.

So what do you do when you accidentally spill some salt? You toss a pinch over your left shoulder, in the eyes of the devil, which dwells there, to chase him away and prevent him from bothering you to spill any more salt… maybe not, I have at least a couple of theories about the salt, but one thing is sure: that salt played an important role in people’s lives, so they attributed some magical characteristics to it.

This leads me to the other superstition about the umbrella. The umbrella is another very important object that plays an important role for the people around the British Isles, where they have plenty of rainfall during the season. An umbrella is practically a symbol of every Englishmen. So again concerning the two thousand year old beliefs, you add some special characteristics to this magical object that protects us from the rain. And furthermore we would not like to damage it, therefore offending the good spirits that created it, so we tell our kids not to play with the umbrella indoors… it is just another theory that might be wrong, but it touches the concept and moreover purpose of a superstition.

In fact this is the only point where I agree with the “anthropologist” Margaret Mead: that superstitions help us develop, teaching us what is good and bad, sometimes even acting as transitional objects, helping us explain the unexplainable, and allowing us to predict the unpredictable. However I can not distinguish