Superstitions
or
Folk Beliefs
Superstitions Are also Called
• Folk Beliefs
• Traditional Science
• Conventional Wisdom
Superstitious Sayings: Form
• CONDITIONS (SIGNS OR CAUSES)
• E.G., rubbing chicken skin on a wart and burying it
• RESULT
• As the chicken skin decays, the wart will disappear
• SOME SAYINGS HAVE CONVERSIONS, WHICH
MAY ALTER THE RESULT
• “If you break a mirror, you’ll have seven years bad luck
unless you gather all the pieces and throw them into
running water.”
Why Folk Beliefs?
• They explain the unexplainable
• Superstitions reflect a desire to have the
universe make sense, to see a cause-effect
relations between events
• They reflect our desire to have some power
over our destinies
• Some are based on the fear of the abnormal.
Sympathetic Magic: James G.
Frazier’s Theory of Folk Belief
• Homeopathic magic (The magic of similarity)
• Taking a picture of someone may allow the soul to be
stolen
• Planting when the moon is waxing.
• Contagious Magic (The magic of touch)
• Buying a wart by rubbing a nickel against it and giving
it to another person
• Sending healing by means of a handkerchief.
• Woman touching the hem of Jesus’ garment.
Two theories that may apply
• Gesunkenes Kulturgut
• Witchcraft
• Astrology
• Survivals
Collections Worth Noting
• Frank C. Brown Collection of North
Carolina Folklore (Vol. 6 & 7 are
superstitions edited by Wayland Hand)
• Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from
Utah, Collected by Anthon S. Cannon, ed.
by Hand and Talley
Wayland D. Hand
Organizational Pattern
• Cycle of Human Life
• Supernatural
• Cosmology and the Natural World
• Miscellaneous
Hand’s Cycle of Human Life
• Birth, Infancy, Childhood
• Human Body, Folk Medicines
• Home, Domestic Pursuits
• Economic, Social Relations
• Travel, Communication
• Love, Courtship, Marriage
• Death and Funereal Customs
Folk Medicine---Warts
• If a person of opposite skin pigmentation rubs the
warts, they will disappear.
• Tying a silk thread around the wart
• Using rainwater from a white oak stump
• Holding your palms up to a full moon
• Draw blood from a wart, put it on a kernel of corn
and feed it to a chicken
• Let a grasshopper nibble at the wart, it will
disappear.
Folk Medicine---Other Maladies
• Breaking a Fever or curing a cold
• Stopping hiccoughs
• Curing cold sores
• Curing rheumatism or arthritis
• Curing a hangover
Weather lore
• Signs of rain or a storm
• “Red Sky at night, sailors delight, red sky in the
morning, sailors take warning.” Ring around
the moon.
• Predictors of a cold winter
• Heavy fur on beavers, skunks, and possums; a
late frost; a thick onion skin.
Birth lore
• How do birthmarks come about?
• How can one choose the sex of a
forthcoming child?
• How can one discover the sex of a child
one is carrying?
Lore of Marriage/Death
• Marriage customs
• Clothing
• Traditions at receptions
• Showers, bachelor parties
• Bride not to see the groom
• Death or Funereal Customs
• Viewings
• Contact with spirits
• Bird flies into the house