Extraordinary origins of everyday things pdf free download

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Peter the Great suffered a pathological terror of crossing bridges. Samuel Johnson entered and exited a building with his right foot foremost. Bad-luck superstitions still keep many people from walking under a ladder, opening an umbrella indoors, or boarding an airplane on Friday the thirteenth.

On the other hand, these same people, hoping for good luck, might cross their fingers or, knock wood. Superstitious beliefs, given their irrational nature, should have receded with the arrival of education and the advent of science. Yet even today, when objective evidence is valued highly, few people, if pressed, would not admit to secretly cherishing one, or two, or many superstitions.

Across America, tens of thousands of lottery tickets are penciled in every day based on nothing more or less than people's "lucky" numbers. Perhaps this is how it should be, for superstitions are an ancient part of our human heritage. Archaeologists identify Neanderthal man, who roamed throughout Western Asia fifty thousand years ago, as having produced the first superstitious and spiritual belief: survival in an afterlife.

Whereas earlier Homo sapiens abandoned the dead, Neanderthals buried their dead with ritual 1 From Superstition funerals, interring with the body food, weapons, and fire charcoals to be used in the next life. That superstition and the birth of spirituality go hand in hand is not surprising. Throughout history, one person's superstition was often another's religion. The Christian emperor Constantine called paganism superstition, while the pagan statesman Tacitus called Christianity a pernicious, irrational belief.

Protestants regarded the Catholic veneration of saints and relics as superstitious, while Christians similarly viewed Hindu practices. To an atheist, all religious beliefs are superstitions. Today there seems to be no logical reason why a wishbone symbolizes good luck while a broken mirror augurs the opposite. But in earlier times, every superstition had a purposeful origin, a cultural background, and a practical explanation.

Superstitions arose in a straightforward manner. Primitive man, seeking answers for phenomena such as lightning, thunder, eclipses, birth, and death, and lacking knowledge of the laws of nature, developed a belief in unseen spirits. He observed that animals possessed a sixth sense to danger and imagined that spirits whispered secret warnings to them.

And the miracle of a tree sprouting from a seed, or a frog from a tadpole, pointed to otherworldly intervention. His daily existence fraught with hardships, he assumed that the world was more populated with vengeful spirits than with beneficent ones.

Thus, the preponderance of superstitious beliefs we inherited involve ways to protect ourselves from evil. To protect himself in what seemed like a helter-skelter world, ancient man adopted the foot of a rabbit, the flip of a coin, and a four-leaf clover. It was an attempt to impose human will on chaos. And when one amulet failed, he tried another, then another. In this way, thousands of ordinary objects, expressions, and incantations assumed magical significance.

In a sense, we do the same thing today. A student writes a prize-winning paper with a certain pen and that pen becomes "lucky. We make the ordinary extraordinary. In fact, there's scarcely a thing in our environment around which some culture has not woven a superstitious claim: mistletoe, garlic, apples, horseshoes, umbrellas, hiccups, stumbling, crossed fingers, rainbows.

And that's barely the beginning. Though we now have scientific explanations for many once-mysterious phenomena, daily life still holds enough unpredictability that we turn, especially in times of misfortune, to superstitions to account for the unaccountable, to impose our own wishes on world vicissitudes. So, thumbs up, fingers crossed, with luck, here are the ancient origins of many of our most cherished irrational beliefs.

Cross my heart. Historically, it was the hare's foot that possessed magical powers. However, most early European peoples confused the rabbit with the hare, and in time the feet of both animals were prized as potent good luck charms. The luck attributed to a rabbit's foot stems from a belief rooted in ancient totemism, the claim, predating Darwinism by thousands of years, that humankind descended from animals. Differing from Darwinism, however, totemism held that every tribe of people evolved from a separate species of animal.

A tribe worshiped and refrained from killing its ancestral animal and employed parts of that animal as amulets, called totems. Remains of totemism are with us today. In biblical literature, totemism is the origin of many dietary laws prohibiting consumption of certain animals.

It has also given us the custom of the sports mascot, believed to secure luck for a team, as well as our penchant for classifying groups of people by animal images or traits. On Wall Street, there are bulls and bears; in government, hawks and doves; and in politics, elephants and donkeys.

We may have abandoned the practice of physically carrying around our identifying totems, but they are with us nonetheless. Folklorists have not yet identified the "Hare" tribal society that gave the early inhabitants of Western Europe, sometime before B. They have ample evidence, though, of why this lagomorph became a symbol of good luck, not bad.

The rabbit's habit of burrowing lent it an aura of mystery. The Celts, for instance, believed that the animal spent so much time underground because it was in secret communication with the netherworld of numina.

Thus, a rabbit was privy to information humans were denied. And the fact that most animals, including humans, are born with their eyes closed, while rabbits enter the world with eyes wide open, imbued them with an image of wisdom: for the Celts, rabbits witnessed the mysteries of prenatal life.

Actually, the hare is born with open eyes; the rabbit is born blind. And it is the rabbit that burrows; hares live aboveground. Confusion abounded. It was the rabbit's fecundity, though, that helped to give its body parts their strongest association with good luck and prosperity.

So prolific was the animal that early peoples regarded it as an outstanding example of aJ,1 ' that was procreative in nature.

To possess any part of a rabbit-tail, ear, foot, or dried innards-assured a person's good fortune. Interestingly, the foot was always the preferred totem, believed to be luckier than any other body part. Why the foot? Folklorists claim that long before Freudian sexual inter- 3 A blacksmith who forged horseshoes possessed white magic against witchery. Lest its luck drain out, a horseshoe is hung with pointed ends upward. Horseshoe: 4th Century, Greece Considered the most universal of all good luck charms, the horseshoe was a powerful amulet in every age and country where the horse existed.

Although the Greeks introduced the horseshoe to Western culture in the fourth century and regarded it as a symbol of good fortune, legend credits St. Dunstan with having given the horseshoe, hung above a house door, special power against evil.

According to tradition, Dunstan, a blacksmith by trade who would become the Archbishop of Canterbury in A. Dunstan immediately recognized the customer as Satan and explained that to perform the service he would have to shackle the man to the wall.

The saint deliberately made the job so excruciatingly painful that the bound devil repeatedly begged for mercy. Dunstan refused to release him until he gave his solemn oath never to enter a house where a horseshoe was displayed above the door.

From the birth of that tale in the tenth century, Christians held the horseshoe in high esteem, placing it first above a doorframe and later moving it down to middoor, where it served the dual function of talisman and door knocker.

Hence the origin of the horseshoe-shaped knocker. Christians 4 Wishbone: Pre B. For the Greeks, the horseshoe's magical powers emanated from other factors: horseshoes were made of iron, an element believed to ward off evil; and a horseshoe took the shape of a crescent moon, long regarded as a symbol of fertility and good fortune.

The Romans appropriated the object both as a practical equestrian device and as a talisman, and their pagan belief in its magical powers was passed on to the Christians, who gave the superstition its St. Dunstan twist. In the Middle Ages, when the fear of witchcraft peaked, the horseshoe assumed an additional power. It was believed that witches traveled on brooms because they feared horses, and that any reminder of a horse, especially its iron shoe, warded off a witch the way a crucifix struck terror in a vampire.

A woman accused of witchcraft was interred with a horseshoe nailed atop her coffin to prevent resurrection. In Russia, a blacksmith who forged horseshoes was himself credited with the ability to perform "white magic" against witchery, and solemn oaths pertaining to marriage, business contracts, and real estate were taken not on a Bible but upon anvils used to hammer out horseshoes. The hbrseshoe could not be hung just any way. It had to be positioned with points upward, lest its luck drain out.

In the British Isles, the horseshoe remained a powerful symbol of luck well into the nineteenth century. A popular Irish incantation against evil and illness originating with the St. The military triumph-commemorated in London's Trafalgar Square by Nelson's Column, erected in ended Napoleon's dream of invading England. The horseshoe may have brought luck to the British people, but Nelson himself lost his life in the battle. Wishbone: Pre B.

For the person who breaks off the larger piece, a wish comes true. The custom is at least 2, years old, and it originated with the Etruscans, the ancient people who occupied the area ofthe Italian peninsula between the Tiber and Arno rivers, west and south of the Apennines.

A highly cultured people, whose urban civilization reached its height in the sixth century B. The "hen oracle," through a practice of divination known as alectryomancy, was consulted for answers to life's most pressing problems. A circle, traced on the 5 From Superstition ground, was divided into about twenty parts, representing letters of the Etruscan alphabet. Grains of com were placed in each sector, and a sacred hen was set in the center of the circle. Her pecking at the com generated a sequence of letters, which a high priest interpreted as answers to specific questions-a sort of living Ouija board.

When a sacred fowl was killed, the bird's collarbone was laid in the sun to dry. An Etruscan still wishing to benefit from the oracle's powers had only to pick up the bone and stroke it not break it and make a wish; hence the name "wishbone.

We know of this superstition from the Romans, who later adopted many Etruscan ways. Roman writings suggest that the practice of two people's tugging at a clavicle for the larger half sprang from a simple case of supply and demand: too few sacred bones, too many people wishing for favors.

Why did the Etruscans not regard all the thin bones of a fowl's skeleton as wishbones? That could have solved the problem of scarcity. According to Roman legend, the Etruscans chose the V-shaped clavicle for a symbolic reason: it resembles the human crotch.

Thus, a symbol of the repository of life was employed to unravel life's mysteries. In all, we have inherited more than the Etruscan wishbone superstition. Etymologists claim that the expression "get a lucky break" initially applied to the person winning the larger half in a wishbone tug-of-war.

It was the Romans who brought the wishbone superstition to England, where the bone itself became known as a "merrythought, " for the "merry" wishes people typically made. Breaking the clavicle of a chicken was a wellestablished British tradition by the time the Pilgrims reached the New World.

Finding the wooded northeastern shore of America populated with wild turkeys, which possessed clavicles similar to those of chickens, the Pilgrims instituted the turkey wishbone custom, making it part of Thanksgiving festivities. Colonial folklore holds that wishbones were snapped at the first Thanksgiving, celebrated in See "Thanksgiving," page Thus, by a circuitous route, an ancient Etruscan superstition became part of an American celebration.

Knock Wood: B. In the modern game of tag, the base of any tree serves as a safe haven. Historically, though, the tree to touch was an oak, venerated for its strength, stately height, and numinous powers.

Furthermore, when a person today ventures a hopeful prediction and superstitiously knocks wood, that wood ought only to be, traditionally, oak. Cults surrounding the oak tree are ancient. They sprang up independently 6 Cock and hen, ancient oracles. The expression "lucky break" applied to a person winning the larger half in a wishbone tug-ofwar.

Both cultures, observing that the oak was struck frequently by lightning, assumed it was the dwelling place of the sky god the Indians and the god of lightning the early Greeks.

The North American Indians carried their superstitious belief one step further. They held that boasting of a future personal accomplishment, battle victory, or windfall harvest was bad luck, a virtual guarantee that the event would never occur. A boast, deliberate or inadvertent, could be neutralized from sinister retribution by knocking on the base of an oak tree.

In effect, the person was contacting the sky god, seeking forgiveness. To knock wood hopefully was supposedly synonymous with a prayer of supplication, such as: "Lord, let my wish come true. Thus, the Catholic veneration of wooden crucifix relics did not originate the custom of regarding wood with awe; rather, it mimicked, modified, and reinforced a much older, pagan view.

Other cultures revered, knocked on, and prayed to different kinds of trees. Whereas the American Indians and the early Greeks favored the oak, for the Egyptians the sycamore was sacred, and for ancient Germanic tribes the tree of choice was the ash.

The Dutch, with a purist bent, adhered to the knock-wood superstition, but for them the kind of wood was unimportant; what mattered was that the wood be unvarnished, unpainted, uncarved, in every way unadorned.

Tree cults were commonplace throughout history, 7 From Superstition and they are the point of origin of many modern superstitious practices, such as kissing beneath mistletoe. See page In America, our custom of knocking on wood to keep a boast from boomeranging descended not from the homegrown American Indian superstition but from the later Greek belief, passed on to the Romans and then to the Britons.

In time, when oak was not conveniently at hand, a rap on any type of wood sufficed. And in today's high-tech world of plastics and laminates, the knock-wood superstition persists, even though real wood, of any kind, is not always in arm's reach.

Four-Leaf Clover: B. The Druids, whose Celtic name, dereu-wid, means "oak-wise" or "knowing the oak tree," frequented oak forests as worshiping grounds.

They believed that a person in possession of a four-lf:af clover could sight ambient demons and through incantations thwart their sinister influence. Our information on the origin of this good luck charm as well as on other beliefs and behaviors of that learned class of Celts who acted as priests, teachers, and judges comes mainly from the writings of Julius Caesar and from Irish legend.

Several times a year, Druids assembled in sacred oak forests throughout the British Isles and Gaul. There they settled legal disputes and offered human sacrifices for any person who was gravely ill or in danger of death from forthcoming battle. Huge wicker cages filled with men were burned. Though Druid priests preferred to sacrifice criminals, during periods of widespread law and order they incinerated the innocent.

The immortality of the soul, and its transferal after death to a newborn, was one of their principal religious doctrines. Before terminating the forest ritual, Druids collected sprigs of mistletoe believed to be capable of maintaining harmony within families and scouted for rare clover. Four-leaf clovers are no longer rare.

In the s, horticulturists developed a seed that sprouts only clover with four lobes. The fact that today they are grown in greenhouses by the millions and cultivated by the score on kitchen windowsills not only strips the tiny herb of the uniqueness that is its luck but usurps the thrill and serendipity of finding one. A wish made on a cross was supposed to be anchored steadfastly at the cross's intersection until that desire was realized.

The superstition was popular among many early European cultures. Interestingly, the notion of trapping a fantasy until it becomes a reality is found in another ancient European superstition: tying a string around the finger. Today we label the practice a "memory aid," a means of "psychological association" in which the string serves merely as a reminder of a task to be performed. To the Celts, the Romans, and the Anglo-Saxons, however, the string was thought to physically prevent the idea from escaping the body.

Originally, in crossing fingers for good luck, the index finger of a wellwisher was placed over the index finger of the person expressing the wish, the two fingers forming a cross.

While one person wished, the other offered mental support to expedite the desire. As time elapsed, the rigors of the custom eased, so that a person could wish without the assistance of an associate. It sufficed merely to cross the index and the middle fingers to form an X, the Scottish cross of St.

Customs once formal, religious, and ritualistic have a way of evolving with time to become informal, secular, and commonplace. As the ancient "knock oak" custom generalized to "knock wood" to today's "knock whatever is handy," so the "crossed fingers" of friends degenerated to a wisher crossing his own fingers and finally to today's expression "I'll keep my fingers crossed," with the well-wisher never actually doing so, and no one expecting him or her to. Thus, what was once deliberate and symbolic becomes reflexive and insignificant-though not obsolete.

The contemporary street custom among young boys of hooking index fingers as a means of agreement on a deal is similar in form and content to the ancient and original crossed fingers of friends.

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down: B. But to a fourth-century B. Etruscan gladiator it meant something more: literally, "Spare his life.

While the meaning of the Etruscan "rule of the thumb" was adopted by the Romans and is the proximate origin of our modern gesture, the Egyptians developed a thumb language with meanings closer to our own.

The Egyptian "thumbs up" signified hope or victory, while "thumbs down" meant ill will or defeat. Why, though, in these cultures did the thumb become the signaling finger?

Roman historians in the time of Julius Caesar offered the first written 9 From Superstition explanation for the gestures. They observed that an infant often enters the world with its thumbs tucked within clutched fists.

As the baby gradually responds to stimuli in its environment, the hands slowly unfold, releasing the thumbs upward. As if to come full circle, at the time of death the hands often contract, enclosing the down turned thumbs.

Thus, to the Romans, "thumbs up" became an affirmation of life, "thumbs down" a signal for death. Every culture believes in a benediction following a sneeze. The custom goes back to a time when a sneeze was regarded as a sign of great personal danger. For centuries, man believed that life's essence, the soul, resided in the head and that a sneeze could accidentally expel the vital force.

This suspicion was reinforced by the deathbed sneezing of the sick. Every effort was made to hold back a sneeze, and an inadvertent or unsuppressed sneeze was greeted with immediate good luck chants. Enlightenment arrived in the fourth century B. They observed that sneezing, when associated with existing illness, often foretold death. For these ill-boding sneezes, they recommended such benedictions as "Long may you live!

The Romans preached the view that sneezing, by an otherwise healthy individual, was the body's attempt to expel the sinister spirits of later illnesses. Thus, to withhold a sneeze was to incubate disease, to invite debility and death.

Consequently, a vogue of sneezing swept the Roman Empire and engendered a host of new post-sneeze benedictions: "Congratulations" to a person having robustly executed a sneeze; and to a person quavering on the verge of an exhalation, the encouraging "Good luck to you. It began by papal fiat in the sixth century, during the reign of Pope Gregory the Great. A virulent pestilence raged throughout Italy, one foreboding symptom being severe, chronic sneezing.

So deadly was the plague that people died shortly after manifesting its symptoms; thus, sneezing became synonymous with imminent death. Pope Gregory beseeched the healthy to pray for the sick.

He also ordered that such well-intended though leisurely phrases as "May you enjoy good health" be replaced with his own more urgent and pointed invocation, "God bless you! But without knowledge of the expression's history, the words themselves are puzzlingly vague. Broken Mirror: 1st Century, Rome Breaking a mirror, one of the most widespread bad luck superstitions still extant, originated long before glass mirrors existed.

The belief arose out of a combination of religious and economic factors. The first mirrors, used by the ancient Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the Greeks, were made of polished metals such as brass, bronze, silver, and gold, and were of course unbreakable. By the sixth century B. Much like a gypsy's crystal ball, a glass water bowl-a miratorium to the Romanswas supposed to reveal the future of any person who cast his or her image on the reflective surface.

The prognostications were read by a "mirror seer. The Romans, in the first century A. They maintained that a person's health changed in cycles of seven years. Since mirrors reflect' a person's appearance that is, health , a broken mirror augured seven years of ill health and misfortune. The superstition acquired a practical, economic application in fifteenthcentury Italy. The first breakable sheet-glass mirrors with silver-coated backing were manufactured in Venice at that time.

See "Mirror," page Being costly, they were handled with great care, and servants who cleaned the mirrors of the wealthy were emphatically warned that to break one of the new treasures invited seven years of a fate worse than death.

Such effective use of the superstition served to intensify the bad luck belief for generations of Europeans. By the time inexpensive mirrors were being manufactured in England and France in the mids, the broken-mirror superstition was widespread Cj. Number Thirteen: Pre-Christian Era, Scandinavia Surveys show that of all bad luck superstitions, unease surrounding the number thirteen is the one that affects most people today-and in almost countless ways.

The French, for instance, never issue the house address thirteen. In Italy, 11 Norse god Balder right , source of the number thirteen superstition; Norse goddess Frigga, crowned with crescent moon, source of the Friday the thirteenth superstition; American dollar bill symbols incorporate numerous items numbering thirteen. National and international airlines skip the thirteenth row of seats on planes. In America, modem skyscrapers, condominiums, co-ops, and apartment buildings label the floor that follows twelve as fourteen.

Recently, a psychological experiment tested the potency of the superstition: A new luxury apartment building, with a floor temporarily numbered thirteen, rented units on all other floors, then only a few units on the thirteenth floor. When the floor number was changed to twelve-B, the unrented apartments quickly found takers.

How did this fear of the number thirteen, known as triskaidekaphobia, originate? The notion goes back at least to Norse mythology in the pre-Christian era.

There was a banquet at Valhalla, to which twelve gods were invited. Loki, the spirit of strife and evil, gate-crashed, raising the number present to thirteen. In the ensuing struggle to evict Loki, Balder, the favorite of the gods, was killed. This is one of the earliest written references to misfortune surrounding the number thirteen.

From Scandinavia, the superstition spread south throughout Europe. By the dawn of the Christian era, it was well established in countries along the Mediterranean. Then, folklorists claim, the belief was resoundingly reinforced, perhaps for all time, by history's most famous 12 Black Cat: Middle Ages, England meal: the Last Supper.

Christ and his apostles numbered thirteen. Less than twenty-four hours after the meal, Christ was crucified. Mythologists have viewed the Norse legend as prefiguring the Christian banquet.

They draw parallels between the traitor judas and Loki, the spirit of strife; and between Balder, the favorite god who was slain, and Christ, who was crucified. What is indisputable is that from the early Christian era onward, to invite thirteen guests for dinner was to court disaster. As is true with any superstition, once a belief is laid down, people search, consciously or unconsciously, for events to fit the forecast. In , for instance, a British publication, Gentlemen's Magazine, fueled the thirteen superstition by quoting actuarial tables of the day, which revealed that, on the average, one out of every thirteen people in a room would die within the year.

Earlier and later actuarial tables undoubtedly would have given different figures. Yet for many Britons at the time, it seemed that science had validated superstition. Ironically, in America, thirteen should be viewed as a lucky number. It is part of many of our national symbols. On the back of the U. All of that, of course, has nothing to do with superstition, but commemorates the country's original thirteen colonies, themselves an auspicious symbol.

Friday the Thirteenth. Efforts to account for this unluckiest of days have focused on disastrous events alleged to have occurred on it. Tradition has it that on Friday the thirteenth, Eve tempted Adam with the apple; Noah's ark set sail in the Great Flood; a confusion of tongues struck at the Tower of Babel; the Temple of Solomon toppled; and Christ died on the cross.

The actual origin of the superstition, though, appears also to be a tale in Norse mythology. Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess oflove and fertility. When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the devil-a gathering of thirteen-and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week.

For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as "Witches' Sabbath. It is also entirely antithetical to the revered place held by the cat when it was first domesticated in Egypt, around B.

So strong was cat idolatry that a pet's death was mourned by the entire family; and both rich and poor embalmed the bodies of their cats in exquisite fashion, wrapping them in fine linen and placing them in mummy cases made of precious materials such as bronze and even wood-a scarcity in timber-poor Egypt.

Entire cat cemeteries have been unearthed by archaeologists, with mummified black cats commonplace. Impressed by the way a cat could survive numerous high falls unscathed, the Egyptians originated the belief that the cat has nine lives. The cat's popularity spread quickly through civilization.

Sanskrit writings more than two thousand years old speak of cats' roles in Indian society; and in China about B. About A. In those centuries, a cat crossing a person's path was a sign of good luck. Dread of cats, especially black cats, first arose in Europe in the Middle Ages, particularly in England.

The cat's characteristic independence, willfulness, and stealth, coupled with its sudden overpopulation in major cities, contributed to its fall from grace.

Alley cats were often fed by poor, lonely old ladies, and when witch hysteria struck Europe, and many of these homeless women were accused of practicing black magic, their cat companions especially black ones were deemed guilty of witchery by association.

One popular tale from British feline lore illustrates the thinking of the day. In Lincolnshire in the s, a father and his son were frightened one moonless night when a small creature darted across their path into a crawl space. Hurling stones into the opening, they saw an injured black cat scurry out and limp into the adjacent home of a woman suspected by the town of being a witch. Next day, the father and son encountered the woman on the street.

Her face was bruised, her arm bandaged. And she now walked with a limp. From that day on in Lincolnshire, all black cats were suspected of being witches in night disguise. The lore persisted. The notion of witches transforming themselves into black cats in order to prowl streets unobserved became a central belief in America during the Salem witch hunts.

Thus, an animal once looked on with approbation became a creature dreaded and despised. Many societies in the late Middle Ages attempted to drive cats into extinction. As the witch scare mounted to paranoia, many innocent women and their harmless pets were burned at the stake.

A baby born with eyes too bright, a face too canny, a personality too precocious, was sacrificed for fear that it was host to a spirit that would in time become a witch by day, a black cat by night. Given the number of centuries in which black cats were slaughtered throughout 14 Spilling Salt: B.

Flip of a Coin: lst Century B. And they devised ingenious forms of divination to coax gods to answer important questions with an unequivocal "yes" or "no. Caesar's own head appeared on one side of every Roman coin, and consequently it was a head-specifically that of Caesar-that in a coin flip determined the winner of a dispute or indicated an affirmative response from the gods.

Such was the reverence for Caesar that serious litigation, involving property, marriage, or criminal guilt, often was settled by the flip of a coin. Caesar's head landing upright meant that the emperor, in absentia, agreed with a particular decision and opposed the alternative.

Spilling Salt: B. Following an accidental spilling of salt, a superstitious nullifying gesture such as throwing a pinch of it over the left shoulder became a practice of the ancient Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and later the Greeks.

For the Romans, salt was so highly prized as a seasoning for food and a medication for wounds that they coined expressions utilizing the word, which have become part of our language. The Roman writer Petronius, in the Satyricon, originated "not worth his salt" as opprobrium for Roman soldiers, who were given special allowances for salt rations, called salarium"salt money"-the origin of our word "salary. Today these caves are tourist attractions, situated near the town of Salzburg, which of course means "City of Salt.

The veneration of salt, and the foreboding that followed its spilling, is poignantly captured in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. Judas has spilled the table salt, foreshadowing the tragedy-Jesus' betrayal-that was 15 From Superstition to follow. Historically, though, there is no evidence of salt having been spilled at the Last Supper. Leonardo wittingly incorporated the widespread superstition into his interpretation to further dramatize the scene. The classic painting thus contains two ill-boding omens: the spilling of salt, and thirteen guests at a table.

Umbrella Indoors: 18th Century, England Bad luck superstitions surrounding the umbrella began with the Egyptians, who imparted their intricately designed umbrellas of papyrus and peacock feathers with religious significance. These early umbrellas were never intended to protect against rain which was rare and a blessing in arid Egypt , but served as sunshades in the blistering heat of day. See "Umbrella," page The Egyptians believed that the canopy of the sky was formed by the body of the celestial goddess Nut.

With only her toes and fingertips touching the earth, her torso spanned the planet like a vast umbrella. Man-made umbrellas were regarded as small-scale earthly embodiments of Nut and suitable only to be held above the heads of nobility. The shade cast by an umbrella outdoors was sacred, and for a commoner to even accidentally step into it was considered sacrilegious, a harbinger of bad luck. This belief was reversed by the Babylonians, who deemed it an honor to have even a foot fall into the umbra of the king's sunshade.

Folklorists claim that the superstitious belief that opening an umbrella indoors augurs misfortune has a more recent and utilitarian origin. In eighteenth-century London, when metal-spoked waterproof umbrellas began to become a common rainy-day sight, their stiff, clumsy spring mechanism made them veritable hazards to open indoors.

A rigidly spoked umbrella, opening suddenly in a small room, could seriously injure an adult or a child, or shatter a frangible object. Even a minor accident could provoke unpleasant words or a serious quarrel, themselves strokes of bad luck in a family or among friends.

Thus, the superstition arose as a deterrent to opening an umbrella indoors. Today, with the ubiquitousness of radio, television, and newspaper weather forecasts, the umbrella superstition has again been altered. No longer is it really considered a bad luck omen to open an umbrella indoors though it still presents a danger.

Rather, on a morning when rain is in the forecast, one superstitious way to assure dry skies throughout the day is to set off for work toting an umbrella. On the other hand, to chance leaving the umbrella at home guarantees getting caught in a downpour.

Subtle, unobtrusive, and even commonplace, superstitious beliefs infiltrate our everyday conversations and actions. The true origin of the superstition, though, has nothing to do with practicality. A ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, long regarded by many societies as the most common expression of a sacred trinity of gods. The pyramid tombs of the pharaohs, for example, were based on triangular planes.

In fact, for a commoner to pass through a triangulated arch was tantamount to defiance of a sanctified space. To the Egyptians, the ladder itself was a symbol of good luck. It was a ladder that rescued the sun god Osiris from imprisonment by the spirit of Darkness. The study shows how advertisers of housekeeping products perpetuated the Happy Homemaker stereytype while tobacco and cosmetics marketers dismantled women's stereotypes to create an entirely new type of consumer.

How do you cope with two children under the age of three when the tumor leads to blindness? How do you make sense of yor life when the physician, angry that you didn't die, mumbles that he will now have to treat you as if you have multiple sclerosis? Lana Ford was faced with these questions and began to answer them one by one over a two-year period. She was forced to examine the meaning of life, to sort through her beliefs about health and illness, living and dying, and to discard all the cultural programming she had accepted since childhood.

Then she began to play with inventing other realities, visualizing the internal workings of her own body, and refusing to believe in anything outside her own experience. She trusted only the inner wisdom found in meditation, including exploration of past lives and conversations with angels. Her body began healing, and within months, she was symptom free and has remained so for more than twenty years. Yet at the time, she knew in her heart that no one would believe her story.

In the twenty years following her illness, she has been a seeker of wisdom, finding information from ancient texts; asking for translations of the Hebrew she found herself chanting; studying with eminent astrologers, theologians, shamans, quantum physicists, and those on the leading edge exploring realms of consciousness.

With both humor and scientific evidence she shares the wisdom she found -- that miracles lie in the mysterious interpretations we make of the events in our own lives and the connections we make with each other. Amato Publisher: Reaktion Books ISBN: Category: History Page: View: Most of the stories we tell are about great feats, dangerous journeys, or daring confrontations—exceptional moments in our existence. But what about how we live every single day? In Everyday Life, Joseph A.

Amato offers an account of daily existence that reminds us how important the quotidian is. Ranging across social, economic, and cultural history—as well as anthropology, folklore, and technology—he explores how and why the pattern of our lives has changed and developed over time. Amato examines the common facts and occurrences in lives from all spheres, whether of a pauper or a noble, a criminal or state official, or a lunatic or a philosopher.

Such facts include basic aspects of human existence, such as play, work, conflict, and healing, as well the logistics of survival, such as housing, clothing, cleaning, cooking, animals, plants, and machines. Tracing core historical developments like efficiency of production and greater mobility, Amato shows how we became modern in everyday ways.

He explores how, paradoxically, commerce, technology, design, industrialization, nationalism, and democratization—which have so undercut traditional culture and have homogenized, centralized, and secularized masses of people—have also profoundly transformed daily life, affording citizens with materially improved lives, individual rights, and productive and rewarding expectations.

A wide-ranging account of lives throughout history, this book gives us new insights into our own condition, showing us how extraordinary the ordinary can be.

Ward Publisher: Springer ISBN: Category: Psychology Page: View: In this provocative book, acclaimed psychologists Thomas Ward, Ronald Finke, and Steven Smith eloquently portray the fascinating processes of the creative mind at work, and hand us the invaluable tools with which we can mine our most valued and important resource.

Creativity - and the methods by which we can heighten it - has recently become the focus of a burgeoning and exciting new field in psychology. By skillfully blending this cutting-edge scientific research with the real-world experiences of humanity's most successful creative thinkers, this provocative book isolates the mechanisms by which our mind conceives innovative and creative ideas. Since all creative thoughts emerge from skillfully drawing upon the well of knowledge we already possess, this book tackles the very nature of this knowledge.

As these astute authors convincingly argue, the same mental processes that help a chemist like Kary Mullis discover a revolutionary new scientific principle or inspire an artist like Beethoven to create a marvelous symphony underlie the host of creative endeavors we all undertake. This inspiring book applies these basic tenets to a rich variety of creative pursuits, including engineering, design, writing, business, science, art, and even the challenges of our everyday lives.

We learn how best to combine and play with the images, words, and concepts that spark fertile new ideas and lead to ever more impressive creative leaps.

This, the fifth book in the Awakening The Soul series, is the story of the discovery of the suppression of almost all the traits of our spiritual nature by those who should have been protecting and enhancing them. By the time you get to the end of this book, you will understand what Western Religions have done to the world.

This realization grew to the point where it became obvious this most vital information needed a wider, more immediate audience for greater exposure than just to those actively seeking spiritual awakening.

These historically-documented truths, many presented here for the first time, are something every contemporary Christian, Jew and Muslim should know. Whether looking at the bright lights of the Jazz Age in the s, the sexual and the rock-n-roll revolution of the s, or the thriving social networking websites of today, each period in America's cultural history develops its own unique take on the qualities define our lives. American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade is the most comprehensive reference on American popular culture by decade ever assembled, beginning with the s up through today.