Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Read online

  PANATI’S EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINS OF EVERYDAY THINGS

  Charles Panati

  Dedication

  To 443 Sail and The Crew:

  Rob, Bruce, Richard, Bill, and Stan

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 From Superstition

  Chapter 2 By Custom

  Chapter 3 On the Calendar

  Chapter 4 At the Table

  Chapter 5 Around the Kitchen

  Chapter 6 In and Around the House

  Chapter 7 For the Nursery

  Chapter 8 In the Bathroom

  Chapter 9 Atop the Vanity

  Chapter 10 Through the Medicine Chest

  Chapter 11 Under the Flag

  Chapter 12 On the Body

  Chapter 13 Into the Bedroom

  Chapter 14 From the Magazine Rack

  Chapter 15 At Play

  Chapter 16 In the Pantry

  References

  Index

  Other Books by Charles Panati

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  From Superstition

  Superstitions: 50,000 Years Ago, Western Asia

  Napoleon feared black cats; Socrates the evil eye. Julius Caesar dreaded dreams. Henry VIII claimed witchcraft trapped him into a marriage with Anne Boleyn. 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 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.” A horseplayer scores high on a rainy day and weather is then factored into his betting. 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.

  Rabbit’s Foot: Pre-600 B.C., Western Europe

  Adhering strictly to early tradition, a person in search of luck should carry the foot of a hare, the rabbit’s larger cousin. 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 600 B.C., the rabbit foot amulet. 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 all 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 interpretations existed, man, in his cave drawings and stone sculptures, incorporated the foot as a phallic symbol, a totem to foster fertility in women and a cornucopian harvest in the fields.

  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.D. 959, was approached one day by a man who asked that horseshoes be attached to his own feet, suspiciously cloven. 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 once celebrated St. Dunstan’s feast day, May 19, with games of horseshoes.

  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 horseshoe 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. Dunstan legend) went: “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Nail the devil to a post.” And in 1805, when British admiral Lord Horatio Nelson met his nation’s foes in the Battle of Trafalgar, the superstitious Englishman nailed a horseshoe to the mast of his command ship, Victory. The military triumph—commemorated in London’s Trafalgar Square by Nelson’s Column, erected in 1849—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-400 B.C., Etruria

  Two people, making secret wishes, tug on opposite ends of the dried, V-shaped clavicle of a fowl. For the person who breaks off the larger piece, a wish comes true. The custom is at least 2,400 years old, and it originated with the Etruscans, the ancient people who occupied the area of the 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.C., the Etruscans believed the hen and the cock to be soothsayers: the hen because she foretold the laying of an egg with a squawk; the cock because his crow heralded the dawn of a new day. 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 ground, was divided into about twenty parts, representing letters of the Etruscan alphabet. Grains of corn were placed in each sector, and a sacred hen was set in the center of the circle. Her pecking at the corn 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.”

  For more than two centuries, Etruscans wished on unbroken clavicles. 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 well-established 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 1621. (See “Thanksgiving,” page 64.) Thus, by a circuitous route, an ancient Etruscan superstition became part of an American celebration.

  Knock Wood: 2000 B.C., North America

  Children who play tree tag, in which touching a tree signifies safety, are unwittingly enacting a four-thousand-year-old custom begun by the Indians of North America.

  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 among the North American Indians around 2000 B.C. and later among the Greeks. 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).

  Cock and hen, ancient oracles. The expression “lucky break” applied to a person winning the larger half in a wishbone tug-of-war.

  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.

  In Europe during the Middle Ages, Christian scholars argued that the knock-wood s
uperstition originated in the first century A.D. and stemmed from the fact that Christ was crucified on a wooden cross. To knock wood hopefully was supposedly synonymous with a prayer of supplication, such as: “Lord, let my wish come true.” But modern scholars claim that there is no more truth to that belief than to the onetime boast that every Christian cathedral on the European continent possessed a piece of wood from the true cross. 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, and they are the point of origin of many modern superstitious practices, such as kissing beneath mistletoe. (See page 68.)

  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: 200 B.C., British Isles

  More than any other factor, the rarity of the four-leaf clover (normally, the clover is a three-leaf plant) made it sacred to the sun-worshiping Druid priests of ancient England.