I have to start with a disclaimer: I am not superstitious. When a black cat crosses my path, I just call out, here kitty, kitty. When the salt shaker slips from my grasp spilling the white stuff everywhere, I just grin sheepishly. When I burned the sleeve of a blouse I was ironing, I ignored my mother’s horrified gasp and said cheerfully, oh dashitall. I need to get a new blouse now.
That small reveal about my mother would have told you what I am about to disclose: I come from a family of highly superstitious people. My grandmother’s house was a stately old pile set in the middle of all kind of trees. Tall trees, short trees, canopied trees and fruit trees. At any given time after night fell, we would hear the sounds of bats stirring, owls hooting, nightjars clicking like mad. The moment an owl was heard calling loudly and dolefully, my aunts would shiver in apprehension and mutter, why is that wretched bird calling misfortune down on us? When the adults would step out to the waiting car and a kid would call out behind them, they’d all turn as one, and bark, what on earth are you doing, stunning the hapless kid into mortified silence. Because, you see, calling someone back even as they set forth, was a sign of upcoming misfortune. Or something.
My father was in the Army, and every time we’d set off to his new place of posting (usually by car because he was an expert at long distance driving and all of us loved the drives), without fail my mother would apprehensively say, did that man we just crossed have a squint? Apparently if you came across a squint-eyed man (always a man), it meant a not too auspicious start to your journey. Us girls would break out into giggles even as my father would wryly ask, do you want me to drive in reverse to come abreast of him and check his eyes out?
But am I really in the clear? Not entirely. Every time the football World Cup rolled around, I’d fish out an aged, holey unwashed cardigan and pull it on, in the often deluded hope that my team of choice would lift the Cup that year, because and only because of that lucky sweater. Oh, I am an avid reader of the weekly horoscopes, too.
Now, a study of human behaviour has revealed that human beings have been superstitious back from the 4th century, even in the face of rationalists down the ages telling them that their beliefs have no scientific basis. Apparently this age-old tradition is pegged to a deep-seated belief that, armed with stout conviction in the movement of the moon, sun, a swathe of salt and suchlike, we feel we have some control over circumstances. When things could all too easily flip against us, there is nothing that gives us a morale boost, a fillip, like a strong belief that we are invincible on that particular day, simply because the stars are aligned in our favour.
The study I mentioned earlier was conducted by scientists in Germany and had participants play some sort of word game. Before the game, they were told to bring along a lucky charm. Just before the start of the game, half the players had their charm taken away. The study went on to prove that those participants who went into the game with their lucky charm on their person, in their pocket or wallet/bag, went in with far more confidence than the ones deprived of their good luck totems. And now comes the kicker: the first lot performed better in the game than the second lot, clearly sailing on the strength of their self- confidence, an emotion boosted by that underpinning of superstition.
And so, some amount of mild belief in harmless superstition could well act as a performance booster. The problem arises when the belief turns blind, harmful and destructive; that is the dangerous side of superstition. When people, acting on their emotions rather than their intellect, develop an addiction to superstition disseminated by dubious characters, some in religious robes, others not, the result can be absolute mayhem. Like poor innocents beaten to death by their own kin to ‘drive the evil spirit out’. Like women in poverty-ridden hamlets stoned to death by people for being ‘witches’. Like infants sacrificed to appease blind faith.
That is the other side of superstition. One we would do better not to indulge.