Black Cats and Evil Eyes (8 page)

While there are still countless superstitious beliefs surrounding childbirth and newborn babies, this one is likely to be less familiar to modern readers. In fact, only just
over half of newborns are christened in the UK and America these days, which shows just how much times have changed since this custom was common practice. In the Middle Ages, baptism usually took
place within a week of the birth but the many who died before they had been baptized were believed to exist in the ‘limbo of infants’ – a section of hell set aside for those still
sullied by original sin but too young to have committed any personal sins that would consign them to the ‘Hell of the Damned’. Similar beliefs existed in European countries; for
example, Scandinavian folklore said their souls became will-o’-the-wisps that drifted like mist over marshland.

Between 30 and 50 per cent of medieval babies died in infancy, many in the first days after birth, as a result of infections and diseases that basic medicine could not comprehend and had no
means to prevent. This pairing of
a high death rate with such fearsome beliefs about where the soul of a lost child would end up fuelled medieval families’ faith in
superstitious practices that might protect their offspring through this most vulnerable time. The tradition of wrapping a newborn in its mother’s clothes was based on the hope that it would
be seen by evil spirits that might prey upon it as an extension of her, and be left alone. Other forms of protection included communion wafers and iron amulets placed in the crib and red string
tied around the baby’s wrist. Knives were also placed in the crib, as the following astonishing rhyme relays:

A talisman or mother’s clothing also fended off the attention of fairies, who were said to covet the beauty of human babies and to swap them for their own young, which were ugly and
deformed. In the days before genetics could explain congenital disorders and birth abnormalities, parents who noticed such variations in their newborns often put them down to this superstition.

Dogs have been believed to possess a sixth sense for the supernatural since the earliest civilizations and it’s possible that this superstition, still widely held today,
has its origins in Egyptian mythology. Sirius, the Dog Star, is said to have appeared just before the rising of the Nile and acted as a warning to the people to prepare for a flood, so dogs and
gods with the faces of dogs were recognized for their prophetic powers and worshipped from then on.

The Romans also credited canines with an ability to warn of a death and dogs were said to have howled before Caesar’s murder and before the death of Emperor Maximinus. These beliefs were
carried into the folklore of numerous cultures, where subtle variations can still be found. In Wales there is a legend that says dogs were the only creatures to be able to see the fearsome Hounds
of Annwn, while in Irish, Hebrew and Greek tradition their
melancholy howl is seen as the first prophetic note of a funeral dirge, which the mourners then imitate in their
keening as they follow the funeral procession.

The first direct reference to the superstition in print can be found in the medieval
Distaff Gospels
, which documented the received wisdom of women in the fifteenth century. The 1507 English
translation reads: ‘What one hereth dogges houle and cry he ought for to stopee his eres, for they brynge euyell [evil] tydynges.’

Over time the prophecies became more precise so that in Europe and Ireland a dog howling relentlessly during the night meant that someone nearby would soon die, while a solitary howl suggested
that the hound was marking a death that had just occurred.

The longevity of the superstition owes much to the fact that it inspired numerous pre-eminent authors, who wove it into their work with such dramatic impact that it became firmly entrenched in
the public imagination. Shakespeare’s
Henry VI
includes the line ‘At thy birth, an evil signe . . . Dogs howl’d.’ In his poem
Christabel
Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes
the howling of a mastiff’s bitch and writes: ‘some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.’ In his novel
Martin Chuzzlewit
Charles Dickens describes how ‘The howling of a dog
before the house, filled him with a terror he could not disguise.’

Modern mediums still credit dogs with the power to sense spirits and to see ghosts that remain invisible to the human eye.

This kitchen superstition comes from an older belief that accidentally burning beef bones was a sign that a great deal of sorrow was coming your way as a result of poverty. The
precise origin of the belief is hard to pinpoint accurately but it may stem from the story of St Lawrence, one of the most honoured martyrs of the Roman Church, whose role was to care for the poor
and needy. In the year 258 he was told by the Prefect of Rome, who believed the Church had a hidden fortune, to hand over the treasures of that institution. The saint said he would need three days
to gather the treasures but instead of bringing gold, he brought all the destitute people of Rome who were being helped by the Church. In his anger the Prefect of Rome ordered that St Lawrence be
put to a slow and painful death: he was tied to a grill and slowly burned alive.

An interesting variation of the superstition appears in one of the earliest collections of women’s wisdom, the
Distaff Gospels
, published in 1507, and this version provides the link to St
Lawrence: ‘He that dothe not caste, or suffreth not to caste bones in the fyre shall not haue the toothache for ye honour of saynt Laurens.’

The superstition doesn’t appear in print in its modern form until 1840, when it was included in Mother Bunch’s
Golden Fortune Teller
, described as an oracle of love, marriage and
fate. Mother Bunch adds that ‘To burn fish or poultry bones indicates that scandal will be spread about you, and to cast those of pork or veal into the fire
inflicts
pains in the bones of the person so improvident.’

In addition to honouring the memory of St Lawrence, the everyday homemakers of the medieval and Renaissance periods would have seen burning the bones as unlucky in itself. Most families kept one
or two cows at a time and, when slaughtered, the whole of the animal was put to use – the bones were often used for making household utensils like tools, weapons, fasteners and sewing
implements.

The Roman poet Virgil helped to link the bat to a sense of evil by identifying it with the monstrous winged creatures described in Homer’s epic poem
The Iliad
. In the
first
century
AD
, charms carved from the bones of bats were used to repel evil, and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recommended fixing the body of a bat upsidedown above a
door to ward off misfortune.

In medieval Europe, on the other hand, it was considered bad luck to see a bat in daylight and if one flew into your house it meant a death would soon follow. The animals’ nocturnal habits
meant that they were considered ‘creatures of the night’ and thought to associate with witches and the Devil. Some peasants believed that a bat had the power to bewitch you if you got
too close and many medieval artistic representations of the Devil depict him with bats’ wings. In an age when people believed that God was in a constant state of war with the Devil for their
souls, it wasn’t unusual for demonic possession to be suspected if someone began to behave strangely. There was no understanding of conditions such as epilepsy or psychosis, and the medieval
interpretation of the symptoms of these problems was that the Devil himself had taken over the soul of the sufferer, or that a demon in the form of an animal like a bat had been sent into the body
by a witch.

In the eighteenth century, when novels like Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
brought the folkloric figure of the vampire to the forefront of public consciousness, public opinion turned against bats
even more. While Europeans did everything they could to prevent bats from coming close to them, in China and the Middle East they were welcome visitors. Mythology from both cultures feature bats as
symbols of happiness and long-life. Only since hard-fought campaigns by environmentalists has the ecological importance of bats been recognized in the West and they are now a legally protected
species.

This is probably the most common superstition we act upon today. Whether we believe we need to or not, few of us can hear a companion sneeze without saying ‘Bless
you!’ and as well as being the most widely practised superstition in the Western world, it is also one of the oldest. Writing his
Natural History
in 77
AD
, the Roman naturalist and
philosopher Pliny the Elder asks the question: ‘Why is it that we salute a person when he sneezes, an observation which Tiberius Caesar, as they say, the most unsociable of men, as we all
know, used to exact, when riding in his chariot even?’

Pliny may not have known the origin of the custom, but an explanation is offered in William Caxton’s 1483 manuscript
The Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints
, which was a translation of
one of the most popular religious works of the Middle Ages
Aurea Legenda
, compiled in 1275 by the Italian archbishop and chronicler Jacobus de Voragine. The text describes a pestilence sent to the
Christian Romans that was so cruel and sudden that if someone was heard to sneeze, those nearest them said ‘God helpe you or Cryst helpe’, knowing that they could be dead within
minutes.

Many sources date saying ‘Bless you’ to the great plague. Although Caxton’s reference proves this incorrect (the original text predating the arrival of the bubonic
plague by just over a century), it does seem likely that the practice was cemented by the horror of such a virulent and devastating disease from which people could do so little to
defend themselves.

At some stage in its history though, the custom of blessing sneezers became linked to the spiritual, rather than the medical dangers of the act. The soul of a person has often been represented
by the breath, and it was thought that when someone sneezed, the sudden expulsion of air from their body took their soul with it. In this moment the body of the person was vulnerable to being
inhabited by an evil spirit, so the blessing became a form of protection against demonic possession. In Spain when someone sneezes people say ‘Jesus!’, because saying the Lord’s
name offered similar protection.

This belief comes from an earlier superstition that a blister would form on your tongue if you told an outright lie, flattered someone falsely or used clever language to
conceal the truth. It was widely believed in from at least the seventeenth century, evidence of which can be found in Shakespeare’s
A Winter’s Tale
, in which Paulina, knowing she must
deliver bad news to the King, speaks the line ‘If I prove honey-mouth’d, let my tongue blister.’ The medieval notion that the part of the body most directly responsible for a sin
would suffer the consequences of its wrongdoing (
see
Never Kill a Robin
) was still common in Elizabethan society; thieves often had their right hand cut off as a punishment, and the tongue, in
particular, was often described as its own entity where falsehood was concerned. The Bible contains numerous references to support this: Proverbs 26:2 (King James Bible) for example, states:
‘A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin.’ The widely accepted Christian interpretation was that lies
were
conceived in the heart under the influence of Satan, so lying of any kind was regarded not simply as an example of a human failing, but as the direct work of the Devil. This was enough to convince
most God-fearing people of the need to tell the truth, but the Bible is not the source of this superstition. There is documentary evidence that the threat of a blistered tongue hung over the
ancient Greeks as well. In around 275
BC
, the Sicilian poet Theocritus included the following reference in his
Idylls
: ‘Thee I’le sing, Thee sweet, nor
midst my song tell-tale Blisters rise, and gall my Tongue.’