As promised in an earlier column, I’m going to talk about superstitions again. Though this column won’t be as funky or fun as Stevie Wonder’s song, I did receive a few very interesting suggestions from readers on superstitions they grew up with. So, as soon as I check for broken mirrors, I’ll get started.
Like before, I took these superstitions online to try to find the best answers or reasoning behind them. I’m starting off with superstitions given to me by Edgewater reader Art Baker.
The first of Art’s superstitions sounded similar to the one my grandmother instilled in me. Bakerās mother, who was from England, used to tell him to never leave shoes on the table, as that was bad luck.
And, just like what I found on the āhat on the bedā rule, the answers on why not to leave shoes on the table yielded a range of reasons. There were the mundane ā shoes are dirty! Itās disrespectful to leave them on the table!
Then there were the more exciting, old-world reasons. Shoes, like hats, were apparently a signifier of impending doom throughout history. What was interesting to me was that shoes were specifically tied to miners. When a miner would die in a work-related accident, his shoes would be placed on a table as a tribute. Shoes on the table are also found in the theater world to be an omen of a bad performance ā the opposite of the phrase ābreak a leg.ā
Another belief was that shoes on the table represented a coming quarrel. There was also speculation that shoes on a table forecasted a coming thunderstorm, though Iām failing to catch the symbolism in that. Then there was the idea that a woman putting shoes on the table would bring about a birth that year, either by her or someone else in the family. Here, I can see how the symbolism may work, but I donāt believe getting into the detail of that is necessary.
My favorite response to this superstition is again the most grim. Some believed that shoes on a table were a symbol of a criminal being hung. As it were, in the old days of public hangings, the perpetrator would stand on a box, chair, table or raised trapdoor with a noose tied around their neck. The platform would be kicked out from underneath them or the door opened and swift, 18thācentury-style justice would be served. The imagery is clear here, but it is truly a dark thing to think of.
Bakerās next superstition is much more cheerful. His father, from Georgia, used to say to turn over a silver coin in your pocket during the first new moon. The answer I found to this was that having no money during a new moon is bad luck, but turning over a silver coin in your pocket (without removing it from your pocket) would bring you plenty of money through the next month. In addition, any wish made while turning the coin over would come true.
The next superstition comes from Bobbi Bradley, also of Edgewater. Bradley, as it turns out, is featured in The Edge this edition. Is that a coincidence? I’ll never tell!
Anyway, Bobbi’s superstition is similar to Art’s second one: when you give someone a new purse or wallet, you should always put a coin in it.
I think I can deduce the answer here based on the last superstition: the coin ensures the person will always have money in that purse/wallet. I found this to be basically right, though there was more of an emphasis on it being bad luck to give the item empty.
I did find a couple of other tidbits, such as black purses are considered bad luck. To me, this one seems contrived. Of course black purses would be considered “bad luck,” so are black cats and black ravens. What’s next, receiving black socks is bad luck?
One thing I did find interesting was a worker in a retail store said that when someone buys a new purse, they always insert a 10 pence coin in it. That, of course, was an answer from the British version of Yahoo! Answers, the site that I hold to be as trustworthy as a used car salesman.
What I’ve learned from these superstitions, if you’ll allow me to put on my amateur anthropologist hat for a moment, is that people in the past were chiefly concerned with money and death. And while I’d like to say our civilization has come a long way in quality of life and mortality rate, remind me again how that old saying goes: what are the two sure things in life?
