That such fancies, that customs so wild and grotesque, should have existed in Scotland, and among a well-educated people, down to a comparatively recent date, might be matter of wonder, if we were not aware of the tenacity with which the heart clings to the “use and wont” of the Past. Nor trivial as some, and inexcusable as all of them seem to the philosophic eye, is it wise to regard them too contemptuously. They seem to us to show how difficult man found it to realise to himself the idea of a living, personal God,—of a God, a Father, ever watching over the welfare of His children, chastening them in His mercy, but never refusing them the light of His countenance when they have sought Him with faith in the hour of sorrow and darkness. For want of this strengthening, consoling, elevating idea, he has endeavoured to support himself by the feeble prop of superstitious credulity, and instead of yielding wholly and trustfully to the love of God the Father, has vainly striven to secure some glimpse or foreshadowing of the Future, and to avert evil by peurile practices and idle traditions.
We may next be allowed to point out the kinship in superstition which prevails all over the world; so that the observance or custom which seems peculiar to England or Scotland, is found in India or Tartary. This remarkable similarity indicates a certain general tendency to attach an “ominous significance” to particular things and events. Take as an illustration, the act of sneezing. In Asia as well as Europe, among Semitic peoples as well as among Aryan, it is usual to connect with the act some form of blessing. Sometimes the sneezer is blessed by the bystander; sometimes he blesses himself; if a Mohammedan, he blesses God. In Italy, for example, the salutation addressed to him runs: “May God preserve you!” or “May you have children!” In Hindi it takes the form of “Sadàji’s” (May you live for ever!) and a similar salutation is used by the Jews of Austria.
But in different places and at different times sneezing has been made to carry a very different meaning. Among the Arabs, if, while a person is making an assertion which some may think hazardous or dubious, another sneezes, the speaker appeals to the omen as a confirmation of what he is saying. A writer in the “Calcutta Review” thinks this notion as old as the Greeks of the time of Xenophon, as appears from a well known passage in Chap. ii. Book iii. of the Anabasis: Ἐπεὶ περί σωτηρὶας ἡμῶν λεγόντον οἰωνὸς τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ σωτῆρος ἐφάνη. Sneezing among the Hindus, if it occur behind your back, is regarded as so unfavourable an omen, that they at once abandon the work on which at the time they may have been engaged.
Various but not satisfactory attempts have been made to explain these customs. Thus, the Mohammedan accounts for his “Al hamdu-l Allah” by the tradition that, when the breath of life was breathed into the nostrils of Adam, he sneezed, and immediately uttered those words. While in Europe the custom of blessing the sneezer has been traced to the occurrence in Italy in the middle ages of some fatal epidemic, of which one of the symptoms was sneezing.
The superstition which regards as a favourable omen the throbbing of the eye, was well known to the ancient Greeks, is common in England, and flourishes all over India. In England, it is the man’s right eye and the woman’s left that is auspicious; and so it was in the Greece of Theocritus, and so it is in India and Persia.
The curious superstition that ghosts are visible to dogs, to which we find an allusion in Homer’s Odyssey, still flourishes in India. It may have originated in the place given to the dog in the mythology of both Greek and Hindu, or in the position enjoyed by the watch-dog among all the shepherd peoples of the world. The belief belongs to the Semitic as well as the Aryan races; and its true origin after all may be the apparently causeless howling of the dog at night,—the time when “spirits walk abroad.” Whatever the ground of the belief, it is probably in itself the cause of the superstition that the howling of dogs presages death or misfortune.
Another singular coincidence of this kind is furnished “by the custom of spitting on the breast as a charm against fascination.” In his “Greek Antiquities,” Potter notes that it was an ancient Greek custom to spit three times on the breast at the sight of a madman; and Theocritus has,—
τοιάδε μυθίζοισα τρὶς εἰς ἑὸν ἔπτυσε κόλπον.
“Precisely the same effect is attributed to the act among the Aryan inhabitants of India, where its threefold repetition is also insisted on. No sort of reason that we can imagine, can be found for this belief; and in this case the idea is a complex one.
“The notion of a hiccough being an indication that some one is thinking of the person affected, is equally common in Europe and in India.