Black Cats and Evil Eyes (3 page)

Until relatively recently, salt was one of the most precious commodities known to man. The location of salt mines determined where cities would flourish, salt routes paved the
way for later trade routes and, before refrigeration, curing with salt was the primary method by which food could be preserved, so lives depended on it. Without mechanized techniques for mining
rock salt or the means by which to evaporate enough salt water to extract sufficient quantities of sea salt, it was expensive and hard to come by. All of this meant that it was unlucky in the most
straightforward of ways to spill salt. As with so many superstitions that still influence our behaviour today, fear of the forces of evil shaped our responses to what might otherwise have been
regarded as simple misfortune.

Salt was used in Greek and Roman religious ceremonies and is still used to make holy water in the Catholic Church so spilling it was seen as an act of the Devil. This notion is thought by some
to have been cemented by the overturning of the salt cellar by Judas Iscariot during the Last Supper, as depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. In medieval
times it
was believed that the Devil waited behind your left shoulder for any opportunity to pounce, which gave rise to the tradition of throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder immediately after
you spilled it to strike him in the face and prevent him from making further trouble.

In Norway it was believed that the more salt spilled the greater the misfortune would be as more tears would have to be shed in order to dissolve all the grains. In the Turkic states, ancient
folklore held that a white angel lived at the right shoulder of every person and a black angel lived at the left shoulder; a pinch of the spilled salt in the eye of the black angel could prevent
him from ruining future plans.

Belief in the power of the evil eye dates back to the earliest civilizations and references to it can be found aplenty in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman poets and
philosophers including Aristophanes, Plutarch and Pliny the Elder. Put simply, it refers to the belief that those who possess the evil eye (sometimes described as a jealous spirit) can put a curse
on others, usually unintentionally, by gazing at them enviously. The evil eye is usually developed in a person by their coveting of the good fortune of another. Biblical references also exist;
Proverbs 23:6 reads ‘Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meat.’

The effects of the curse vary slightly between cultures but the late American Professor of Folklore and Evil Eye expert Alan Dundes wrote that while belief in its powers spread through the
Middle East, Africa and Europe – especially the Mediterranean region (with many variations in the methods used to avert it) – the feared effects of being given the evil eye tended to be
similar: diseases related to dehydration, such as vomiting, wasting or shrivelling, sometimes resulting in death.

Young children are believed to be at greatest risk of the evil eye, perhaps since their beauty and innocence is most likely to attract envious glances. Praising the appearance of a child is also
believed to attract the evil eye, so in many countries where belief in the curse is strong, it is customary to touch a child immediately after praising it in order to remove the curse. In Bangladesh,
mothers of young women who are particularly likely to attract the envy of others
through their beauty put a black kohl mark behind their daughter’s ear to counter ill
effects. In the Middle East and in some Mediterranean countries, glass amulets showing a blue eye are worn on jewellery or hung over doorways to repel the eye’s power. Blue eyes are regarded
as evil in these countries because they aren’t usually found within the local population, and the belief is likely to have been underlined by the propensity of blue-eyed tourists to these
areas for failing to recognize that photographing or cooing over children is frowned upon.

Jewish tradition protects children from the eye by tying a piece of red string around their wrists. In Italy, where the curse is also believed to affect men and cause impotence, a hand gesture
that uses the fingers as horns is used to counter it. These days, such preventive measures are usually judged to be effective, though in past times the prevalence of diseases causing dehydration in
young children meant that many deaths were put down to the influence of the evil eye.

As the closest and brightest aspect of the night sky, the moon has held humankind in its thrall since the earliest civilizations.

Although the ancients had no notion of the gravitational influences the moon exerted on our planet, they did believe that the moon controlled all the water on the earth, and that not only the
oceans but also the fluids within their bodies were acted on by the moon. The word ‘lunatic’, from the Latin
lunaticus
, meaning moonstruck, was used to describe those who seemed to be
sent temporarily mad by a full moon and was in use in English from the early fourteenth century. In 1393, William Langland’s allegorical poem
Piers Plowman
refers to ‘Lunatic lollers
and lepers about’, more or less mad according to the moon’s phases.

In the days before neuroscience had shed light on the intricate workings of the brain, people suffering from brain disorders such as epilepsy were thought to be afflicted by a madness brought on
by the waxing and waning of the moon. This belief gave rise to strong superstitions surrounding the power of the moon: to sleep in moonlight
was thought to cause insanity or
‘moon-blindness’ and special care was taken to draw the curtains against a full moon. It was also considered dangerous to look at the moon in a mirror, or to stare at it for too long
when it was full. These beliefs became further entrenched in the Middle Ages, when stories about werewolves and vampires combined with an unshakeable belief in the influence of the Devil to feed
popular fear about the power of the moon. All kinds of inexplicable behaviour was attributed to its influence: ‘It is the very error of the Moone,’ wrote Shakespeare in
Othello
.
‘She comes more nearer Earth than she was wont, And makes men mad.’

Some of us still blame a full moon for unusual antics; it has been linked to a rise in the number of suicides, hospital admittances and crime, and although there are no scientific studies to
prove it, the police have reported an increase in aggressive behaviour on nights when the moon is full – some British police forces even employ extra officers to cope with the surge.

The widely held superstition that breaking a mirror means seven years’ bad luck dates back to the late eighteenth century, but the idea that death or some other
misfortune will befall anyone who breaks a looking glass goes back much further. The Romans, alongside ancient Greeks, Chinese, Africans and Indians believed that the soul of a person was
transferred into their reflected image when they looked into a mirror. If the glass was damaged, the soul held within it would be too. In his 1777 publication
Observations on the popular
antiquities of Great Britain
, the English antiquarian John Brand wrote ‘the breaking a Looking Glass is accounted a very unlucky accident. Mirrors were formerly used by Magicians in their
superstitious and diabolical operations; and there was an antient [
sic
] Kind of Divination by the Looking Glass.’

As with many superstitious portents of doom, the exact nature of the misfortune that lies ahead has evolved over time. When Alfred, Lord Tennyson referred to it in
his poem
‘The Lady of Shalott’ in 1842, the result was a generalized misery: ‘The mirror cracked from side to side; “The curse has come upon me,” cried the Lady of
Shalott.’

By later in the 1800s a broken mirror foretold a death in the family or the loss of a friend, and the first reference to seven years of bad luck appeared in print in 1851. The exact origins of
this very specific period of strife are uncertain, but may be linked to the Roman belief that the human body renewed itself every seven years and perhaps this process of renewal provided a clean
slate for the soul.

These days, while we still fear the curse of a broken mirror, few of us do more than sweep up the pieces and hope no one’s noticed, but our forefathers practised a range of rituals to
mitigate the disaster. Some ground the broken pieces to dust to release the soul trapped inside, others buried the shards beneath a tree by the light of the next full moon, and Africans working as
slaves in America are reported to have believed the bad luck could be washed away by placing the shattered pieces in a southerly flowing river.

It is generally held to be bad luck if your shoelace breaks or comes loose while you’re walking along, but this seems not to be simply for the obvious practical reason
that it might cause you to trip and fall, since a fuller version of the belief states that you must continue to walk another nine paces before retying a loose shoelace, otherwise you will tie bad
luck to yourself for that day.

Tripping over or stumbling as you walk has been regarded as a sign of trouble ahead since Roman times. In 45
BC
, the Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero in his philosophical treatise
De
Divinatione
lists those things noted with superstition as ‘stumbling, breaking a shoe-latchet, and sneezing’. Some attribute the superstition to the cautionary tale of the Roman Emperor
Augustus who, according to legend, stumbled over the laces of his
caligae
sandals as he fled from an attempt on his life, only narrowly escaping assassination. The distrust of an untied lace
deepened in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Europe, when men sporting even a well-tied, dandyish ‘Oxford’ shoe were felt to represent a decline in morality and
masculinity in contrast to the sturdy buckle popular with more macho types.

As life became less precarious, omens that had once foretold death or disaster took on a lighter tone and a loose lace was said by young women to be a sign that your sweetheart was thinking
about you. In less giddy circles it was thought that if the left lace was loose someone was speaking ill of you, while if the right came undone someone was singing your praises. It remained bad
luck to dream of a shoelace becoming untied, though if a knot forms in a lace it’s good luck.