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Superstitions are religious forms surviving the loss of ideas. Some truth no longer known or a truth which has changed its aspect is the origin and explanation of all. Their name, from the Latin superstes, signifies that which survives; they are the dead remnants of old knowledge or opinion.

Ever governed by instinct rather than by thought, the common people cleave to ideas through the mediation of forms, and it is with difficulty that they modify their habits. The attempt to destroy superstitions impresses them always as an attack on religion itself, and hence St. Gregory, one of the greatest popes in Christendom, did not seek to suppress the old practices. He recommended his missionaries to purify and not destroy the temples, saying that “so long as a people have their old places of worship they will frequent them by force of habit and will thus be led more easily to the worship of the true God”. He said also: “The Bretons have fixed days for feasts and sacrifices; leave them their feasts and do not restrain their sacrifices; leave them the joy of their festivals, but from the state of paganism draw them gently and progressively into the estate of Christ.”

It came about in this manner that older pious observances were replaced by holy mysteries with scarcely a change of name. There was, for example, the yearly banquet called Charistia, to which ancestral spirits were invited, so making an act of faith in universal and immortal life. The Eucharist, or supernal Charistia, has replaced that of antiquity, and we communicate Easter by Easter with all our friends in heaven and on earth.1 Far from maintaining the old superstitions by such adaptations, Christianity has breathed soul and life into the surviving signs of universal beliefs.

That science of Nature which is in such close consanguinity with religion, seeing that it initiates men into the secrets of Divinity, that forgotten science of Magic, still lives undivided in hieroglyphical signs and, to some extent, in the living traditions or superstitions which it has left outwardly untouched. For example, the observation of numbers and days is a blind reminiscence of primitive magical dogma. As a day consecrated to Venus, Friday was always considered unlucky, because it signified the mysteries of birth and death. No enterprise was undertaken on Friday by the Jews, but they completed thereon the work which belonged to the week, seeing that it preceded the Sabbath, or day of compulsory rest. The number 13, being that which follows the perfect cycle of 12, also represents death, succeeding the activities of life; and in the Jewish Symbolum the article relating to death is numbered thirteen. The partition of the family of Joseph into two tribes brought thirteen guests to the first Passover of Israel in the Promised Land, meaning thirteen tribes to share the harvests of Canaan. One of them was exterminated, being that of Benjamin, youngest of the children of Jacob. Hence comes the tradition that when there are thirteen at table the youngest is destined to die quickly.2

The Magi abstained from the flesh of certain animals and touched no blood. Moses raised this practice into a precept, on the ground that it is unlawful to partake of the soul of animals, which soul is in the blood. It remains therein after their slaughter, like a phosphorous of coagulated and corrupted Astral Light, which may be the germ of many diseases. The blood of strangled animals digests with difficulty and predisposes to apoplexy and nightmare. The flesh of carnivora is also unwholesome on account of the savage instincts with which it has been associated and because it has already absorbed corruption and death.

“When the soul of an animal is separated violently from its body,” says Porphyry, “it does not depart, but, like that of human beings which have died in the same way, it remains in the neighbourhood of the body. It is so retained by sympathy and cannot be driven away. Such souls have been seen moaning by their bodies. It is the same with the souls of men whose bodies have not been interred. It is to these that the operations of magicians do outrage, by enforcing their obedience, so long as the operators are masters of the dead body in whole or in part. Theosophers who are familiar with these mysteries, with the sympathy of animal souls for the bodies from which they are separated, and with their pleasure in approaching these, have rightly forbidden the use of certain meats, so that we may not be infected by alien souls.

Porphyry adds that prophecy may be acquired by feeding on the hearts of ravens, moles and hawks; here the Alexandrian theurgist betakes himself to the processes of the Little Albert, but though he lapses so quickly into superstition it is by entering a wrong path, for his point of departure was science.3

To indicate the secret properties of animals, the ancients said that at the epoch of the war of the giants, various forms were assumed by the gods with a view to concealment, and that they resumed these subsequently at pleasure. Thus, Diana changed into a she-wolf; the sun into a bull, lion, dragon and hawk; Hecate into a horse, lioness and bitch.

The name of Pherebates was, according to several theosophers, assigned to Proserpine because she lived upon turtle-doves, and these birds were the usual offering which the priestesses of Maïa made to that goddess, who is the Proserpine of earth, daughter of the fair Ceres, and foster-mother of the human race. The initiates of Eleusis abstained from domestic birds, fish, beans, peaches and apples; they abstained also from intercourse with a woman in child-bed, as well as during her normal periods. Porphyry, from whom this information is derived, adds as follows: “Whosoever has studied the science of visions knows that one must abstain from all kinds of birds in order to be liberated from the bondage of terrestrial things and find a place among the celestial gods.” But the reason he does not give.

According to Euripides, the initiates of the secret cultus of Jupiter in Crete touched no flesh-meat; in the chorus addressed to King Minos, the priests in question are made to speak as follows: “Son of a Phœnician Tyrian woman, descendant of Europa and great Jupiter, King of the Isle of Crete, famous through an hundred cities, we come unto thee, forsaking temples built of oak and cypress fashioned with knives; leaders of a pure life, behold, we come. Since I was made a priest of Jupiter-Idæus, I take no part in the nocturnal feasts of Bacchanals, I eat no half-cooked meats; but I offer tapers to the mother of the gods. I am a priest among the Curetes clothed in white; I keep far from the cradles of men; I shun also their tombs; and I eat nothing which has been animated by the breath of life.”

The flesh of fish is phosphorescent and hence is aphrodisiacal. Beans are heating and cause absence of mind. For every form of abstinence, including the most irregular forms, a deep reason, apart from all superstition, can probably be found. There are certain combinations of foods which are opposed to the harmonies of Nature. “Thou shalt not seethe the kid in his mother's milk,” said Moses—a prescription which is touching as an allegory and wise on the ground of hygiene.

The Greeks, like the Romans, but not to the same extent, were believers in presages; it was good augury when serpents tasted the sacred offerings; it was favourable or the reverse when it thundered on the right or the left hand. There were presages in the ways of sneezing and in other natural weaknesses which may be left here to conjecture. In the “Hymn to Mercury”, Homer narrates that when the god of thieves was still in his cradle he stole the oxen of Apollo, who took the youngster and shook him, to make him confess the larceny:

Mercure s'avisant d'un étrange miracle.De ses flancs courroucés fit entendre l'oracle;Jusqu'au grand Apollon la vapeur en monta. 4

It was all presage with the Romans—a stone against which the foot struck, the cry of a screech-owl, the barking of a dog, a broken vase, an old woman who was first to look at you. All such idle terrors had for their basis that grand magical science of divination which neglects no token but from an effect overlooked by the vulgar ascends through a sequence of interlinked causes. This science knows, for example, that those atmospheric influences which cause the dog to howl are fatal for certain sufferers, that the appearance and the wheeling of ravens mean the presence of unburied bodies—which is always of sinister augury; localities of murder and execution are frequented by these fowl. The flight of other birds prognosticates hard winters, while yet others, by their plaintive cries over the sea, give the signal of coming storms. On that which science discerns ignorance remarks and generalises; the first sees useful warnings everywhere; the other distresses and frightens itself at everything.

The Romans furthermore were great observers of dreams; the art of their interpretation belongs to the science of the vital light, to the understanding of its direction and reflections. Men versed in transcendental mathematics are well aware that there can be no image in the absence of light, be it direct, reflected or refracted; and by the direction of the ray, the return under the fold of which they know how to find, they arrive by an exact calculation, and invariably, at the source of light and can estimate its universal or relative force. They take into account also the healthy or diseased state of the visual mechanism, external or internal, and attribute thereto the apparent deformity of rectitude of images. For such persons dreams are a complete revelation, since dream is a semblance of immortality during that nightly death which we call sleep. In the dream-state we share in the universal life, unconscious of good or evil, time or space. We leap over trees, dance on water, breathe upon prisons and they fall; or, alternatively, we are heavy, sad, hunted, chained up—according to the state of our health and often that of our conscience. All this is useful to observe, and unquestionable, but what can be inferred therefrom by those who know nothing and are without the wish to learn?

The all-powerful action of harmony, in exalting the soul and giving it rule over the senses, was well known to the ancient sages; but that which they employed to soothe was wrested by enchanters to excite and intoxicate. The sorceresses of Thessaly and of Rome believed that the moon could be dragged from the sky by the barbarous verses which they recited and that it fell pale and bleeding to the earth. The monotony of their recitations, the sweep of their magical wands, their circumambulations about circles, magnetised, excited, and led them by stages to fury, to ecstasy, even to catalepsy itself. In this kind of waking state they fell into dream, saw tombs open, the air overcast by clouds of demons, the moon falling from heaven.

The Astral Light is the living soul of the earth, a material and fatal soul, controlled in its productions and movements by the eternal laws of equilibrium. This light, which environs and permeates all bodies, can also suspend their weight and make them revolve about a powerfully absorbent centre. Phenomena which have been so far insufficiently examined, though they are being reproduced in our own days, prove the truth of this theory. To the same natural law must be ascribed those magical whirlpools in the centre of which enchanters located themselves. It explains the fascination exercised on birds by certain reptiles and on sensitive natures by others which are negative and absorbent. Mediums are generally diseased creatures in whom the void opens and who thus attract the light, as abysses draw the water of whirlpools. The heaviest bodies can then be lifted like straws and are carried away by the current. Such negative and unbalanced natures, whose fluidic bodies are formless, can project their force of attraction, delineating by this means supplementary and fantastic members in the air. When the celebrated medium Home makes hands without bodies appear in his vicinity, his own hands are dead and frozen. It may be said that mediums are phenomenal beings in whom death struggles visibly against life. As much may be concluded in the case of enchanters, fortune-tellers, those with the evil eye and casters of spells. Consciously or unconsciously, they are vampires, who draw the life which they lack and thus disturb the balance of the light. When this is done consciously, they are criminals who should be punished, and when otherwise they are still exceedingly dangerous subjects, from whom delicate and nervous people should be carefully isolated.

Porphyry tells the following story in his life of Plotinus. “Among those who professed philosophy, there was a certain Olympius, who was of Alexandria and for a time disciple of Ammonius. He treated Plotinus with disdain, being ambitious to surpass him in repute. He sought also to injure him by magical ceremonies, but having found that the attempt reacted on himself he admitted to his friends that the soul of Plotinus must be one of great power, since it could turn back on his enemies their own evil designs. Plotinus was conscious of the hostile attempts of Olympius, and there were times when he said suddenly: ‘Now he is having convulsions.' This kind of thing being repeated, and finding that he was afflicted himself with the evils which he would have wrought on Plotinus, Olympius ceased to persecute.”

Equilibrium is the great law of the vital light; projected with force and repelled by a nature more balanced than our own, it comes back upon ourselves with equal violence. Woe therefore to those who would employ natural powers in the service of injustice, since Nature is just and her reactions are terrible.

1 There were two pagan festivals which have a certain likeness between them : (a) Charisia, which was in honour of Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne, the Charites or Graces. It was celebrated by dances at night, and the person who maintained the exercise longest was presented with a cake, (b) Charistia, a Roman festival, for the reconciliation of relations and friends, at which food was eaten. It could be wished fer the perpetuity and catholicity of the sacraments that there were traces of a Eucharist in the Christian sense prior to Christian times.

2 It may be mentioned that 13 is also the number of resurrection, or birth into new life.

3 The Grimoire mentioned under the name of Little Albert is called in the Latin edition Alberti Parvi Lucii Libellus, and is “a treasure of marvellous secrets.” The original intention was to father it on Albertus Magnus, and in fact there is another collection which is known as the Great Albert. It is of similar value.

4 I have suffered these lines to stand as they are given by Éliphas Lévi, following the French translation of Salomon Certon. Shelley, who rendered Homer's Hymn to Mercury into verse which is unworthy of his name, represented the Greek original by asterisks at this point, and I have taken a lesson from the counsel. Lévi gives some further lines—I scarcely know why, but they stand as follows in Shelley's version:

“Phœbus on the grass

Him threw, and whilst all that he had designed

He did perform—eager although to pass,

Apollo darted from his mighty mind

Towards the subtle babe the following scoff:—

‘Do not imagine this will get you off,

“‘You little swaddled child of Jove and May!'

And seized him: ‘By this omen I shall trace

My noble herds, and you shall lead the way.’”