Enjoy Your Superstition

                          Ten Tips to enjoy your superstition

Charles Dickens believed that if the gift of a knife is not reciprocated by some return gift the relation between giver and receiver is terminated. So when he received a set of cutlery as gift from famous company, he sent him back his own publisher's first copy of David Copperfield. (Telegraph)

Man has always been intrigued by supernatural in one form or another. Initially, it was magic and later when civilized it was religion. The underlying idea is same "that by creating the illusion that you control reality you can actually control it". Second, man’s eternal quest to understand and control the nature played important role in inception of magic and thus religion. 

Man as Homo sapiens is evolved form of the Apes and so did his mimetic art . All music, all dance forms and all paintings are examples of mimetic art. Whether it is Tandava  dance or Caterpillar dance man has mimicked the thunders, lightening and movements of animals. The roots of superstitions are in magic and religion.

Superstition is nurtured in the belief that the course of events in nature has elasticity and they can be deflected or diverted from the path of their natural flow for our advantage by some external factor. That external factor could be a colour, number, person, event, animal, gesture or anything expected or unexpected. Popular Elizabethan superstitions like sneezing, spilling salt and pepper, Black Cats find place in Literature. Some authors like Murakami are obsessed with black cats and they find a place in most of his work.

Shakespeare plays like Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Hamlet etc. proves how an author can make some orthodox, unscientific, baseless belief more acceptable in society and establish their credibility by the course of events in his work.

People assume that successful people are more superstitious than unsuccessful, old are more superstitious than young, rich are more superstitious than poor, uneducated people are more superstitious than educated, rural people are more superstitious than urban, females are more superstitious than males and beautiful girls are more superstitious than ugly girls.

Ten Tips to enjoy your superstition

1. Prepare a list of your superstition.

2.  Classify your superstition. Make your own classification. Some superstition could be harmful for society. If you believe in witches and doubt someone to be a witch and perform a drowning test on her, it is harmful for society.

3. Analyse your superstitions, scientifically. Analytical methods are same for all theory. Consider your superstition to be a Hypothesis and test on your parameters. Like if you think 13 is not a lucky number ( In the last supper of Jesus 13 were present, and Judas the traitor reached in last), keep a log of the times you were harmed by this number.

4. Implement the result of your analysis. If you find number one is lucky for you, change your cell phone number the total of which should reach to number one. Your SIM provider knows how you can have your lucky cell number.

5. Research would help you. Whatever is lucky in one country could be unlucky in some other part of the world. Every superstition has a story behind it.

6. Objectivity helps. Superstitions are totally subjective, but there is objectivity in them. Try to find that. Everything in the cosmos has a purpose.

7. Psyche is important. You need not to be a psychic to believe that some of your personal superstitions are deeply rooted in your Psyche.

8. Rationale people never try to rationalise their superstition.

9. Edit your superstition. Delete some old one and add few new.

10. Enjoy your superstition without any guilt, inhibition, rejection and tagging.

This is my 64 post on this Blog, which is a lucky number for me. Let me see how many readers like it, share it, and comment over it.

© Vipin Behari Goyal
Advocate, Rajasthan High Court, Jodhpur, India