A
Anonymous
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Ok. So I was thinking about superstitions (I imagine there's half a dozen threads on them already and someone will bump this on later...). I came up with the following thought:
Superstitions can be divided into two types -
1) Rational Superstitions. Things which seem dumb, but have a perfectly 'logical' explanation attached to them. Eg,
Third light from a match/ligher is bad luck (apparently because if you were in the trenches, it took that long for a sniper to get a bead on you in the dark...).
Walking under ladders is bad luck (because it's plausible that someone has walked under a ladder only to have a bucket/person/whole ladder fall on them).
Putting new shoes on a table (where they're defenseless from breakfast spillage?).
Opening an umbrella indoors (which is just hazzardous).
'Red sky at night...' or the whole cows lying down thing (It only takes a few observations of weather conditions/ animal behaviour in the evening and morning to spot a pattern), etc.
Basically, anything where there might have been an archetypal event where the doing of that act or observing of that phenomenon lead directly to a mishap.
2) Irrational superstitions. Things that seem just as dumb, but I can't see any such plausible archetype (though that doesn't stop me adhering to one or two of these.
Eg, Money spiders - when and where did someone first equate the appearance of a small arachnid on their hand with the sudden loss/gain of money?
Saluting magpies to ward off bad luck - I've got into the habit of doing this, but even in the past, when magpies were seen as far more portentious and ominous, who decided that any sinister influence they had could be pacified by acknowledging them respectfully? It's a wierd one. You couldn't do it by accident. No-one could have seen a magpie, saluted it, then 'realised' that nothing unlucky had happened to them after a while, and so decided it was safest to do that every time... could they?
Horse-shoes. Lucky? Why? A rabbit's foot I can understand - you'd have been lucky to have caught the rabbit in the first place, but horse-shoes is just wierd.
Are these actually 'rational' ones that I'm just not bright enough to see the archetype behind, or are they as inexplicable as I'm making them out to be?
Superstitions can be divided into two types -
1) Rational Superstitions. Things which seem dumb, but have a perfectly 'logical' explanation attached to them. Eg,
Third light from a match/ligher is bad luck (apparently because if you were in the trenches, it took that long for a sniper to get a bead on you in the dark...).
Walking under ladders is bad luck (because it's plausible that someone has walked under a ladder only to have a bucket/person/whole ladder fall on them).
Putting new shoes on a table (where they're defenseless from breakfast spillage?).
Opening an umbrella indoors (which is just hazzardous).
'Red sky at night...' or the whole cows lying down thing (It only takes a few observations of weather conditions/ animal behaviour in the evening and morning to spot a pattern), etc.
Basically, anything where there might have been an archetypal event where the doing of that act or observing of that phenomenon lead directly to a mishap.
2) Irrational superstitions. Things that seem just as dumb, but I can't see any such plausible archetype (though that doesn't stop me adhering to one or two of these.
Eg, Money spiders - when and where did someone first equate the appearance of a small arachnid on their hand with the sudden loss/gain of money?
Saluting magpies to ward off bad luck - I've got into the habit of doing this, but even in the past, when magpies were seen as far more portentious and ominous, who decided that any sinister influence they had could be pacified by acknowledging them respectfully? It's a wierd one. You couldn't do it by accident. No-one could have seen a magpie, saluted it, then 'realised' that nothing unlucky had happened to them after a while, and so decided it was safest to do that every time... could they?
Horse-shoes. Lucky? Why? A rabbit's foot I can understand - you'd have been lucky to have caught the rabbit in the first place, but horse-shoes is just wierd.
Are these actually 'rational' ones that I'm just not bright enough to see the archetype behind, or are they as inexplicable as I'm making them out to be?