Also called folk belief, the lore of the supernatural, magic, and omens. In common
parlance, the word “superstition” is loaded with pejorative connotations. Thought by
many to be rooted in the pagan traditions of earlier, more primitive stages of human
culture, superstition is conceived of as the irrational belief of the naive, uneducated, and
the ignorant in superhuman powers. The fact that the term is, in the minds of the popular
masses, so loaded with negative preconceptions would, in itself, reduce its value as a
scholarly concept. But this problem is exacerbated to a considerable degree by the fact
that prominent scholars, in attempting to define the term, have themselves been greatly
influenced by the popular notions handed down by Western tradition.
The process by which “superstition” became a loaded term was delineated in a study
of the term from its first recorded use in ancient Rome to modern times (Harmening
1979). Although the precise etymology of the word eludes classical scholars, there is no
doubt that its first recorded use was in the term homo superstitiosus, meaning “seer” or
“prophet.” Cicero later associated the term with superstes, a thing “left over” or a
“survival,” an etymology that was char-acteristically seized upon by both Jacob Grimm
and E.B.Tylor.
For a time used as a synonym for religio, the term later became a pejorative synonym
for excessive religious fervor that characterized the intrusive mystery cults from the
Orient that plagued Rome in pre-Christian times. The Roman Catholic Church fathers
stressed this pejorative meaning when they sought to contrast the fatal moral depravity of
pagan religions and cultures to the moral harmony of Christian faith. Augustine in so
doing used superstitio in the sense of a false faith, a meaning that is still evident in such
terms as German Aberglaube, Dutch overgeloof, Danish overtro, and in a now obsolete
English term used by the I4th-century theologian John Bromyard to condemn “this
blyndnesse of old misbelive” (quoted in Opie and Tatem 1989:viii).
This legacy of associations was adopted first by the clergy of Western nations and
later became a focal issue for all of the philosophers and writers in the so-called Age of
Reason during the 18th century, when superstition was reviled as the depraved wallowing
of the unenlightened in the irrational ignorance of the “Dark Ages.” Edmund Burke
(1729–1797) in 1790, even declared superstition to be “the religion of feeble minds.”
Nineteenth-century Romanticism saw a momentary respite in the centuries-old
rejection of superstition as scholars like the Grimm brothers sought in these “survivals”
fragments of the glorious myths and religions of the pagan past (Ward 1981, Vol. 2:534–
553). However, in the Age of Positivism that dominated the succeeding century, these
survivals were viewed by Tylor and his contemporaries as part of the excess baggage
from primitive times that exerted a retarding force on the inexorable progress of cultural
evolution.
It is apparent that the term “superstition” has become in its long cultural history
burdened with increments of pejorative associations to the degree that its use as a
scholarly construct has been called into question. Some have sought to solve the problem
by eliminating the term from the scholarly lexicon and replacing it with “folk belief,”
“popular belief,” “folk science,” and even “conventional wisdom.” Each of these terms,
however, has its own drawback that introduces new problems. Folk belief for example, shares the same negative connotations that the word “folk” has in popular usage, and
because the word “popular” connotes for many the lore of the broad masses as opposed to
the world of scholars and the intellectually elite, such terms as “popular belief” are not
satisfactory. The term “belief” is also problematic because it implies an element of faith
in the efficacy of a given proposition or prescription. There are, however, specific
superstitions that have become traditional and are cited even by those who do not believe
in them. For example, most Americans in the late 20th century know that “to break a
mirror means seven years’ bad luck.” When someone in an American household breaks a
mirror, the notion is likely invoked by a household member. But the fact that individuals
know and cite this “belief” does not necessarily imply that they believe it. For such items
that persist in tradition, even when belief is absent, the term “superstition” remains useful
(Ward 1993:xviii-xix).
American folklorists demonstrate a growing tendency, if not a consensus, to see folk
belief as an element of tradition that makes its presence felt in a variety of forms of
folklore (such as amulets and charms, folktale, legend, ballad, proverb, custom, ritual,
and folk religion), while restricting the term “superstition” to the verbal utterances in
which “beliefs” are framed (see Dundes 1961). Wayland D.Hand, America’s most
distinguished student of belief and superstition, insisted on using both “popular belief”
and “superstition,” and both words are evident in the titles of the collections of belief
materials that Hand edited in his lifetime. Moreover, The Encyclopedia of American
Popular Beliefand Superstition, founded by Hand and being edited in the 1990s retains
both words in its title (Hand and Ward 1993). Hand found justification for using both
terms in the somewhat questionable distinction he drew between “superstitions” as being
“patently false” and potentially harmful and “popular belief” as “faiths and foibles” of “a
negligible or frivolous kind” (Hand 1961–1964, Vol. 6:xxi).
In spite of the fact that generations of scholars have inherited the legacy of negative
associations invoked by the word “superstition,” there remains the need for a term that
refers to the long history of these notions in popular tradition without necessarily
implying belief; and because the English language does not provide us with any other
term for this purpose, “superstition” remains a valuable, if somewhat flawed, scholarly
construct.
The popular notions of Americans about the nature of superstition were gready
influenced by the British Anthropological school, which included such renowned
scholars as Herbert Spencer (1820–1902) and E.B.Tylor (1832–1917). Spawned by the
Age of Positivism, which championed the scientific method with its stress on laws of
natural causality and nurtured by the doctrine of “cultural evolution” that emerged from
Darwin’s discovery, this school culminated in the figure of Sir James Frazer (1854–1941)
and his monumental twelve-volume work, The Golden Bough. In the first volume, and
especially in the famous chapter on “Sympathetic Magic,” Frazer analyzed the “magical”
thinking that underlies superstition and, in so doing, identified mental processes that were
supposed to characterize superstitious behavior everywhere.
In keeping with the tenets of positivism, Frazer saw magical thought processes as
natural laws. The basic principle of what Frazer called “magic” was the perceived affinity
linking individual items in a sympathetic relationship. In identifying the two basic
principles of sympathetic magic, Frazer wrote: “Practices based on the Law of Similarity
may be termed Homeopathic Magic; those based on the Law of Contact or Contagion, Contagious Magic.” Homeopathic magic assumes that “like produces like, effect
resembling cause,” while contagious magic implies that “things once in contact continue
even afterwards to act on each other.” The principles of homeopathy thus are premised on
the perceived bond between things or actions that resemble one another. For example, the
belief that “If you drink all the bubbles on the surface of your cup of coffee, you will
soon have lots of money” is based on the recognition that the shiny round bubbles look
somewhat like coins. Thus, bubbles and money are symbolically linked to each other.
Another example, “Eating walnuts will help intelligence,” is based upon the perceived
similarity of the brain with the two hemispheres of a shelled walnut. The principles of
contagion, by contrast, imply not so much contact as notions of contiguity. Human
imagination infers a permanent and contiguous relationship between items that once were
either in contact or were parts of a whole that later became separated. The dairy farmer’s
fear that if someone boils milk, he or she will injure the cow that produced it exemplifies
this principle. The fact that the milk has been completely separated from the cow does not
diminish the perceived bond between the two (Ward 1993:xxi).
In spite of the fact that they have been discredited by modern anthropologists, Frazer’s
basic analysis and his implicit theories are irrefutable, and they continue to be cited by
those who seek to understand the essence of traditions of belief. This fact, however, does
not mean that Frazer’s work can go completely unchallenged. For Frazer, like all
scholars, was a product of the time in which he lived and worked. His choice of the word
“magic” to describe the mental processes of superstitious behavior reveals a great deal
about his own assumptions and preconceptions. In keeping with the principles of cultural
evolution, Frazer was convinced that all human culture evolved from the simple and
primitive to the complex and civilized along a unilinear route. Thus, the same “laws” that
governed the evolution of the simple forms of life ultimately into Homo sapiens were
also seen as operative in all cultural spheres, including those of a spiritual nature. At the
bottom of the evolutionary scale—that is, at its most primitive stage—was a faith in
“magic.” At the top of the scale, toward which there is an inexorable drive, lies
monotheistic religion. According to this model of human history, those of us who now
live in a high civilization and worship one god are the end result of a development that
began with primitive savages who practiced magic. Superstition was thus seen by Frazer
and his contemporaries as the modern survival of humankind’s most primitive impulse. It
was, therefore, inferred that anyone who remained superstitious in the modern age was
guilty of primitive and even “savage” thinking. Frazer evidences this attitude when he
calls upon his readers to recognize “the spurious system behind the bastard art” of magic.
“Homeopathic magic,” he writes, “commits the mistake of assuming that things which
resemble each other are the same; contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming
that things which have once been in contact with each other are always in contact”
(writer’s emphasis). He further suggests giving “the name of magic to the whole
erroneous system,” that he considers “one great disastrous folly.”
One of the first scholars to question the Frazerian paradigm was the Austrian
philosopher and Cambridge professor Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). In a number of
aphoristic writings between 1927 and 1945, Wittgenstein questioned the evolutionary
model that separated the various levels of “savagery” from “civilization.” He furdier
insisted that “magic” was a vitally essential aspect of human life and that human beings
suffer because people like Frazer have helped deprive us of its benefits. “Frazer,” wrote Wittgenstein in 1967, “is much more savage than most of his savages, for they would not
be so far removed from the understanding of a spiritual matter as an Englishman of the
twentieth century.”
The recognition that beliefs and superstitions are vital to humanity has come slowly to
the scholars of the 20th century, but the signposts have been there for many decades. In
1819 the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in a collection of aphoristic
observations, stated that “Der Aberglaube ist the Poesie des Lebens” (Superstition is the
poetry of life). Although Goethe did not explicate precisely what he meant by these
words, it is evident that he recognized the affinity of superstition, which Frazer later
decried as “sympathetic magic,” with the splendid metaphors of the world’s most gifted
poets. Thus, when a priest sprinkles the naked body of a maiden with water in the attempt
to ensure both rain and the fertile productivity of the earth, it is, to be sure, an example of
the principles of homeopathic magic at work, but it is also much more than that. It is a
vivid drama that demonstrates to divine powers the needs of the supplicants while using
the dramatic and powerful metaphors that one finds in the best of the world’s poetry.
Indeed, one could argue that the ability to engage in metaphoric and analogous thinking
that is evidenced in “sympathetic magic” was a highly significant milestone in the
development of the brain of Homo sapiens.
There are similar poetic uses of metaphor in many thousands of the beliefs stored in
the UCLA archive. There is, for example, a belief that an empty bird’s nest should hang
in the loft of a cabin where a woman is about to give birth (Hand and Ward,
Forthcoming, Vol. 2: entry titled “Empty”). The fact that people equate the woman’s
womb to the empty nest is, again, a valid case of homeopathic magic. However, instead
of debasing this belief as an example of primitive and naive ignorance or as “faulty
reasoning,” one should rather acknowledge the poetic value of its metaphoric dimension.
One can, furthermore, imagine the potential benefits from such a belief in the days on the
frontier when expectant mothers were days removed from any access to medical aid. One
can envision the father’s act of finding an empty nest and his placing it in the loft
providing at least a modicum of solace and comfort for the woman in labor.
Other scholars who took Frazer to task included the Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm
von Sydow and his student Albert Nilsson (later known as Albert Eskeröd). Drawing on
the work of the German scholar Wilhelm Mannhardt, Frazer had discussed the
widespread European agricultural custom of taking the last sheaf of the harvest, shaping
it anthropomorphically, decorating it with colored fabrics and trinkets, and then using it
as the centerpiece of the harvest festival. Frazer adopted Mannhardt’s inference that the
honoring of the sheaf represented the survival of the early pagan worship of a Spirit-ofthe-Grain” (Korndämon). Frazer also saw survivals of this heathen divinity in the beliefs
and legends surrounding the Rye-Wolf and the Rye-Witch, frightening demons that were
thought to inhabit grain fields.
Von Sydow objected strenuously to these inferences of pagan survivals and instead
suggested universal emotional needs and the play instincts of human beings (Von Sydow
1934). He pointed out that the first and last in a sequence of items or events invariably
attract attention to themselves solely by virtue of the fact that they stand out from others.
Writing in German, he labeled these elements externe Dominante (external dominating
elements); he contrasted these with the emotional needs and instincts of humans that he
called interne Dominante (internal dominating concerns). He also took Frazer and his contemporaries to task for their having missed the essence of belief traditions when they
assumed faulty reasoning behind the thought processes that they labeled “post hoc, ergo
propter hoc” (after this, therefore caused by this)—that is, the tendency of the naive mind
to assume causality when two events occur in a temporal sequence (B occurs after A,
therefore B was caused by A). It was, von Sydow insisted, the scholar who was being
naive when he assumed that any two events could be so linked. With highly convincing
examples, von Sydow demonstrated that the chronological sequence of two arbitrary
events was in itself not the occasion for inferring causality. Instead, it was only when the
two events linked an externe Dominante with an interne Dominante that an individual
assumed a causal sequence between the two. Von Sydow’s student Albert Eskeröd later
expanded these terms into three categories: Milieudominanzen, Interessendominanzen,
and Traditionsdominanzen.
Von Sydow also criticized Mannhardt for his insistence in seeing traditions of the
Rye-Wolf and the Rye-Witch as survivals of ancient heathen agricultural divinities. They
were, he argued, a product of the playful spirit of humans and, above all, a means of
frightening children so that they would not play in the grain and trample it before the
harvest. He considered such traditional behavior not as ancient pagan beliefs, but rather
as “fictions”—that is, free inventions created either for pragmatic reasons or from the
human play instinct. The tradition of the “demon in the well” was, for example, not a
creature of ancient folk beliefs, but rather a “cautionary fiction” a bogeyman created so
that children would not lean over the well and thus be in danger of falling in. In addition
to cautionary fictions, von Sydow also saw “jocular fictions,” “pedagogical fictions,”
“etiological fictions,” and “taboo fictions” underlying many traditional customs and
beliefs. He further argued that both the emotional needs and the play instinct were there
from the beginning. In other words, he saw—as Magne Velure has put it—play and
jesting as perpetual factors that are equally as primordial as magic and cults. “Said in
another way, Homo ludens is not necessarily a degenerate Homo religiosus” (Velure
1983:113). Donald Ward has also demonstrated the central role diat play occupies in
traditional beliefs and customs (Ward 1993:xxvi–xxviii).
One chapter in the history of the term “superstition” that we have not yet surveyed
occurred when Christian missionaries sought to convert the peoples of Europe to the new
faith. Seeking to eliminate recalcitrant pockets of paganism, medieval theologians and
clergy began to conduct a more or less systematic study of the pagan superstitions they
were fighting. In so doing, they divided superstition into three main categories:
superstitio observationis, superstitio divinationis, and superstitio artis magicae
(Harmening 1979:1–42 and passim). The first two categories deal with attempts of
individuals to read signs in order to determine future events. They differ in that
superstitio observationis involves the passive attempt to identify and read the signs
provided in nature or elsewhere in one’s environment, while superstitio divinationis
designates the active attempt, usually in the form of a divinatory ritual, to produce signs
that the specialist (priest, shaman, sorcerer, and the like) then interprets as auguries of the
future. The third category, superstitio artis magicae, by contrast, refers to the “magic
arts,” the specific rites of sorcerers to enlist superhuman forces to achieve desired ends.
These magic practices, which were either malevolent or beneficent in their goals, were
characterized by the use of magic books, symbols, and other implements as well as herbs,
verbal charms, incantations, and the like.
There have been in recent decades new attempts to categorize superstition. Curiously,
these later efforts have repeated the observations of medieval clergy without necessarily
improving upon them. Swedish folklorist Eskeröd, for example, distinguished between
omens that betoken various events and human acts that are thought to achieve desired
effects. He saw superstitions, above all, as structured utterances consisting of a stated
condition and an anticipated result, with some of the conditions being signs and others
being causal actions. To designate these two kinds of sequences, Eskeröd used the
actional and perfective Latin participles, ominant-ominat and causantcausat. Thus, “If
geese fly south early” (ominant), “there will be an early winter” (ominat). But, “If you
whistle on board a ship” (causant), “you will whistle up a storm” (causat).
The American folklorist Alan Dundes made essentially the same distinction when he
classified superstitions into three categories. “Sign superstitions,” wrote Dundes, “consist
of one or more signs that are thought to indicate a result.” Thus, “if one notes a ring
around the moon, one can predict rain” (Dundes 1961:29). Contrasted to this are “magic
superstitions” that “often consist of multiple conditions [that]… serve as a means of
production and prescription rather than prediction. In contrast to sign superstitions,
human activity in magic superstitions is intentional rather than accidental” (Dundes
1961:30). Dundes added a third category that he labeled “conversion superstitions,…a
hybrid category in which, for the most part, sign superstitions are converted into magic
superstitions, often in the attempt to neutralize the unwanted result of a sign superstition.”
Dundes’ observations have been challenged by several scholars of folklore. Ward
noted that, in divinatory rites, human activity is never “accidental,” as Dundes insists
(Ward 1968), and a causal sequence of events need not be intentional, as, for example,
when someone unwittingly “whistles up a storm” aboard a ship. Ward, moreover, notes
that there is a vast body of beliefs in which it is not possible to distinguish between the
passive reading of omens and the active use of magic to achieve a result. For example, a
woman in Virginia maintains that “if in handling a loaf of bread you accidentally break it
into two parts, it is a sign that there will be wet weather for a whole week” (Virginia:
UCLA Archive). Does the use of the expression “it is a sign” indicate the absence of the
notion of causality in this belief? Here the distinction between omens and causal agents
seems to disappear. Ward suggests that it is likely that the woman is oblivious to this
difference because she associates the two phenomena without necessarily seeing a direct
linear relationship between them. Ward adduces a number of examples from the UCLA
Archive in which the informant’s choice of either a causal or an ominal verb seems to be
highly arbitrary. There are, for example, countless variants of a belief documented
throughout the United States that shows a perceived link between the call of a crow and
an approaching storm. In many of the variants, one detects an ominant-ominat seqaence:
“If a rain crow calls”: “you can expect rain,” “it indicates rain,” “it is a sign of rain,” “it is
a sure sign of rain,” and “it foretells rain.” Other variants of the belief, however, indicate
a causant-causat sequence: “If the rain crow calls”: “it is calling for rain,” “it brings
rain,” “…causes rain,” and “…is sure to bring rain.” It is doubtful if the tradition bearers
in these cases perceive any essential differences between supposed ominal and causal
agents. Ward infers from these observations that folk belief often sees related phenomena
existing in configurations other than that of linear causality, resulting in beliefs in which
it is impossible to distinguish between a “sign” and a “cause.” An example: A student has
a dart board in his study where he is preparing for an important examination. He interrupts his study, picks up three darts and says to himself: “If one of these darts strikes
the bull’s-eye, I will get an ‘A’ on my exam.” Although the dart’s striking the bull’s-eye
is related to the good grade, it is not perceived as the direct cause of it. The two events
exist in an associative relationship that is nonlinear.
Dundes was also taken to task by Michael Owen Jones for having treated superstitions
as “superorganic” entities divorced from the human beings who are the bearers of the
tradition (Jones 1967). For Jones, the people who make the utterances in living contexts
are more important than the utterances themselves, and he suggests a modification of
Dundes’ categories that better represents the manner in which individuals invoke
superstitions in their daily lives.
By observing carefully the manner in which living humans invoke superstitions,
folklorists could discover significant aspects of human behavior. One can, for example,
note how people, when invoking folk beliefs, invariably draw a firm dividing line
between knowledge and belief. The former is accepted as fact, while the latter is accepted
or rejected on faith. Thus, one farmer may plant his corn with the onset of the waxing
moon because he “knows” it is most auspicious to do so, while the second farmer
“believes” it to be so. The distinction is not mere academic hocus-pocus. People are
aware that certain things can be known while others have to be accepted on faith. One
will ask if you believe in ghosts, UFOs (unidentified flying objects), guardian angels, and
Santa Claus, but they will not ask if you believe in the Empire State Building. The very
question “Do you believe?” implies both the recognition of the need for faith and, more
important, the possibility of doubt. A hunter will not say, “I believe in whitetail deer,” but
he might very well say, “I believe in Bigfoot.” When he does so, he communicates that
the latter does not belong to everyday reality and that its existence must be accepted or
rejected as a matter of faith. He furthermore acknowledges that doubt is present. Indeed,
belief in supernatural entitites thrives on a degree of doubt, for without it the encounters
with them would not result in the numinousness central to supernatural experiences.
Theoretically, if one accepted ghosts completely as part of everyday reality, seeing one
would be no more significant than seeing one’s spouse at the breakfast table. The point is,
however, that people do not accept ghosts as everyday reality, nor do they “know” that
ghosts exist; they occupy a dimension that is separate from daily reality, and they exist,
above all, in human faith.
Anyone interested in studying belief and superstition must acknowledge the great
work accomplished by one man, Wayland D.Hand. Hand assembled a massive archive of
more than one million belief items (located at the University of California, Los Angeles),
and he developed a classification system for these materials that serves as the model for
all such collections worldwide. This system also has been applied by Hand to the regional
collections of American beliefs that he edited (Hand 1961–1964, Hand, Casetta, and
Thiederman 1981; Hand and Talley 1984). We also owe Hand a debt of gratitude for his
analysis of superstitions that has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of belief
as it has been, and continues to be, practiced by humans everywhere. That we now
understand the processes of magical transference and divestment, plugging, pullingthrough, measuring, and so forth is largely due to the published books and essays of
Hand.
One more item from Hand’s archive can serve as an exemplary model for the thought
processes upon which the idea of transference is founded. “To cure a child of bedwetting,
take him to a cemetery at midnight and have him urinate into an open grave.” When the
grave is later filled with the coffin of the deceased and covered over with earth, the
affliction is thought to be transferred to the beyond, a realm from which there can be no
return. When we consider that the UCLA Archive contains more than a million such
items, we begin to grasp its potential for helping us understand the human condition. For
such beliefs are not (to use Hand’s own words) mere “mental errors” and “abberations of
the human mind,” they are pure artistry. It is obvious that Goethe was correct when he
asserted that superstition is poetry.
Donald J.Ward
References
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——. 1981. The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm. 2 vols. Philadelphia: ISHI.
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