Vital Fictions: Superstition

“After the Atlanta Braves removed Chief Noc-A-Homa’s teepee in 1982, and the team lost 19 of the next 20 games, our son, a devoted Braves fan, blamed the gods. The team’s creation of ‘Homer the Brave’ helped assuage his grief, but he hasn’t forgotten the betrayal. I was partly to blame for his ‘stitious’ nature because I’d been telling him for years, with tongue in cheek, that Aeolus made the wind blow and Jupiter Pluvius made it rain. Eventually, he understood the bulge in my cheek when I mentioned either of these gods but, like me, he found value in them and passed them along to his own sons.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger

“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother.”—Voltaire, “A Treatise in Toleration.”

I “Finnair cancelled ‘Flight 666 to Hel’
when some objected to the sulfurous smell.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—August/September 2024—From St. Augustine to Wallace Stevens, superstition has been variously defined as an excessive belief, a modification of an earlier belief, an error, or in Stevens’ phrase, “a necessary fiction.” I’ll leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to decide which of these four definitions suits the following story.

During World War II, natives on the Melanesian islands of the South Pacific watched in astonishment as “silver birds” of debatable origins dropped all manner of useful goods on those below. Light-skinned “aliens” in green clothing and black boots collected most of the “cargo,” but the bundles that hung up in the trees or dropped in the sea were left for anyone who was desperate enough to retrieve them. This mysterious but welcome munificence went on for several years before it suddenly stopped as inexplicably as it had started. Indigenous children, who’d never seen the giant “birds,” were naturally skeptical, so the elders cobbled stories to explain these events; created idols to revere, and rituals to entice the donors to return. In situations like this, humans often choose the divine fail-safe option because it’s easier than the complex truth, and it’s gratifying to think someone up there loves us.

Like many Latin words, “superstition” harbors its origins. As the word implies, to allow oneself to labor under a belief, whether irrational or necessary, is to allow it to “stand over” the believer. In other words, a superstition is a belief that dominates even as it welcomes believers into submission.

I recently asked Lena, our visiting 14-year-old granddaughter, if she had any rituals or superstitions that she felt oddly obligated to continue. She volunteered that if she forgot to tap her toothbrush twice on the sink when she’d finished brushing, she felt uneasy and would return to the bathroom to complete the ritual. Once she tried to break the routine, but decided it was easier to continue tapping. When she returned home, I texted her saying, “Don’t forget to tap your toothbrush.”

She replied, “I definitely won’t forget!”

“Your life may depend on it,” I said with tongue in cheek.

“Gramps,” she replied, “it does depend on it.”

Without exaggerating its importance, it appears that for Lena this simple, harmless ritual, performed twice a day, is “a necessary fiction.”

II “Night Game
Skip cleans his spikes steps up to his work,
and spits at the demons off in the murk.”—The Wordspinner

Just minutes before my doctoral orals at the University of South Carolina, I headed to the drink machine in the basement of the Welsh Humanities Building to spike my adrenaline with caffeine. Confronting the droning oracle, I recalled the last time I’d consulted it when ice had shattered on the drain, syrup and soda water bathed the ice, on top of which fell an empty cup, two beats off the pace.

I’m not sure whether it was the machine’s seductive purring, the neon’s beguiling glow, or just a reckless need to take a flier, but something convinced me that this refrigerated roulette wheel had fathomed my fate. I put all I had on “red” and spun the “wheel”: “click”—the cup fell squarely in the chute; “click”—five hollow cubes dropped in the cup; “click”—syrup and soda water mixed in midflight and rose foaming to the brink but not over.

Off I went with my Coke in hand, reason washed with a squirt of superstition, confident, but not so anyone could see. I was Mickey Mantle with one homer already under my belt, a run-saving catch in center field, and Don Larson pitching a perfect game for us in the top of the ninth.

When it comes to superstitions, we know better, as someone said, and we know that we know better, but we find it useful to pretend we don’t. This observation cleverly places superstition in the white space between belief and play while taking graceful account of rabbits’ feet on keyrings, 3:33 on a digital clock, and haint-blue porch ceilings.

Numbers have long had a powerful hold on the human imagination. Here are some random number superstitions from some random people:

• Woody Allen cuts every banana into seven pieces, never six or eight. Seven has been lucky for millennia because for one reason if one can locate the seven stars of the Big Dipper, one can often determine the way home.
• In December of 2021, Harper’s Magazine reported that 13 percent of Americans think “13” is unlucky.” How lucky is that?
• An anonymous hotel patron declined room 307-C because 3+7+3 (C being the third letter) is 13. Thirteen has been unlucky for a variety of reasons but mainly in Christian countries because Jesus was crucified the day after he dined with twelve friends at the Last Supper.
• James Joyce urged his publisher to wait until 1922 to issue Ulysses because 1+9+2+1 is 13. The publisher obliged, and the novel became a best seller.
• Seventeen is unlucky in Spanish-speaking countries because VIXI, Latin for “my life is over,” is an anagram of XVII.

To counter bad luck, Americans have myriad countermeasures. (Note my superstitious need to balance the list below with the list above.)

• 22 percent knock on wood.
• 14 percent carry a rabbit’s foot.
• 14 percent have been known to throw salt over a shoulder.
• 18 percent won’t open an umbrella indoors.
• And in 1999, 10,113 Americans bought Y2K “anti-parthenogenesis [virgin-birth] insurance.” To the best of my knowledge, these policies were 100 percent effective.

All this fits very nicely with our susceptibility to conspiracies: 47 percent of Americans still think Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone; 27 percent of us think the government is hiding mummified aliens in Area 51, and about 30 percent of us think “Orange Jesus” won the 2020 election.

III “Mixed Messages
Widowed some twenty years Mae carries a torch
and rocks away on her haint-blue porch.”—The Wordspinner

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is set outside of a rural train station. Seated on a bench, an aging rabbit is handing something to his son who’s off to college judging from the pennants pasted to his suitcase. Says the father to his son: “Your mother wanted you to have this. It’s her foot.”

Neither of my parents had quite as much as Mrs. Rabbit invested in the superstitions they passed along to me, but there was no shortage. I recall seeing my father, a man with two advanced college degrees, turn his chair around to “turn his luck” when he was having a bad night at the poker table. When it came time for him to put the family home on the market, he buried a small statue of St. Joseph in the front yard. Mother was thrilled when a week later the house sold, but what Dad never told her that he’d lowered the price.

My father’s superstition that meant the most to me, however, was “Skipper,” my nickname at the time, stenciled on both sides of his jeep’s hood during World War II. Though he lost three men in his battalion to accidents, he did not lose one to enemy fire while driving that jeep. I’m glad I was able to help the greater cause. Dad called “Skipper” his “mystical ballast,” which left me if not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Much of my stitious nature stemmed not from my mother but from her mother. “Dear,” as the grandchildren called her, baked birthday cakes for her five children in which she placed a dime, a thimble, and her wedding band. The child who found the dime was promised wealth; the thimble represented luck, and the wedding band, of course, represented marriage. The fact is it worked for all five, each of whom married and had more than the average share of luck including one uncle’s natural gas well that is still producing seven decades after it was uncorked in Texas. The wedding band, however, wasn’t a perfect barometer, for two of the five divorced, but all five died with homes that were paid for while their first, second, or third wife was seated beside them.

According to folklorist Alan Dundes, the average American family subscribes to 15 superstitions. That’s 15 out of the quarter million that Dundes cataloged over the course of his career. My own list is nowhere near that long, but we all know that “tails never fails,” and a penny found heads down is not worth rescuing.

Going to vote, I find myself knocking on wood if I can find any, and I have been drawn to anagrams for decades. Before my wife and I married, I started playing with my name to see if I could find a sign that our nuptials were indeed made in heaven. I thought “girl nest,” an anagram for “Sterling,” my given name, looked promising. “Gemini rise,” however, an anagram for “Eisiminger,” puzzled me because I’m a Sagittarian, and Ingrid is an Aquarian. “Skip,” my nickname, contains pi, which is endless, but what was I to make of “ski” and “kips”? The decisive factor was the anagram, “OK on wed,” formed from my middle name “Kenwood.” And despite the implicit warning in the German word for superstition, “Aberglaube,” literally “wrong belief,” she married me, and I’ve never regretted it.

IV “Hast thou [science] not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?”—Edgar Allan Poe

After the Atlanta Braves removed Chief Noc-A-Homa’s teepee in 1982, and the team lost 19 of the next 20 games, our son, a devoted Braves fan, blamed the gods. The team’s creation of “Homer the Brave” helped assuage his grief, but he hasn’t forgotten the betrayal. I was partly to blame for his stitious nature because I’d been telling him for years with tongue in cheek that Aeolus made the wind blow and Jupiter Pluvius made it rain. Eventually, he understood the bulge in my cheek when I mentioned either of these gods, but like me, he found value in them and passed them along to his own sons.

In “On the Value of Superstitions,” Margaret Mead wrote, “[Superstitions] give all of us ways of moving back and forth among the different worlds in which we live—the sacred, the secular, and the scientific. They allow us to keep a private world, where, smiling a little, we can banish danger with a gesture and summon luck with a rhyme, ‘make’ the sun shine in spite of storm clouds, ‘force’ the stranger to do our biding, ‘keep’ an enemy at bay, and ‘straighten’ the paths of those we love.”

Like religion, myth, and literature, superstitions help us feel safe in a hostile world by providing the illusion of control. The cost of the belief is low, and the benefits are often hard to evaluate, but I’m knocking on my forehead as I write. If our son were to perish tomorrow, God forbid, I’d probably blame the gods, but I’d also tell our grandsons that their father’s in better place.

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.