Superstitions

It is very bad luck. Read more at evileyebead.com

It was once believed that the violence of a sneeze, momentarily displaced your soul from your body.

During that moment, people thought the devil could step in, and take you over. By saying "bless you" someone else could keep the devil from inhabiting you.

The widespread superstition that spilling salt brings bad luck is believed to have originated with the overturned salt cellar in front of Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper, an incident immortalized in Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting.

According to an old Norwegian superstition, a person will shed as many tears as will be necessary to dissolve the salt spilled. An old English belief has it that every grain of salt spilled represents future tears. The Germans believe that whoever spills salt arouses enmity, because it is thought to be the direct act of the devil, the peace disturber. The French throw a little spilled salt behind them in order to hit the devil in the eye, to temporarily prevent further mischief. In the United States, some people not only toss a pinch of spilled salt over the left shoulder, but crawl under the table and come out the opposite side.

No.

there is no specific source for a superstition. someone started it and it continued.it also forms from stories told by elders to scare children

No seeing a black cat is not bad luck dont Believe who tells you that

yes it is because in China they eat fish. if they dont have there tail it will be easier to eat. if they do they wont be able to eat it,

Go on living life... that means picking up the pieces and possibly getting a new mirror. if you think that it'll give you bad luck then you have 7 years of it..

Jinx

It is not 'bad luck' to do laundry on Easter Day or any other day in fact. The reason for this is simple: 'luck' as such, does not exist and is part of superstitious nonsense. Easter Day is commemorated as the day in which Jesus Christ rose from death after his crucifixion the Friday before. 'Luck' therefore and other superstition, has no place in matters Christian or elsewhere for that matter.

i thought that was New Years your not supposed to do laundry

my aunt and another distant cousin washed laundry on new years and both died the same year, but i think just coincidence. i mean i usually wash clothes, drink and/or fornicate on my holidays and im still breathin.

The superstition means that if two people are walking together and come to a pole, if one goes one way around the pole and the other goes the other way around the pole, it will bring bad luck. Both should go the same way around the pole together to avoid the bad luck.

Ther are dozens of superstitions about rabbits (and hares), but the most commonly known is the carrying of a "lucky" rabbit's foot as an amulet for good luck.

It is believed that the best of these is the left hind foot of a rabbit killed under a full moon by a cross-eyed man.

To brush a child, a fruit tree, or some other valued object with the rabbit's foot is said to keep them from harm.

In old days, poachers carried a rabbit's foot to ensure they didn't get caught.

The thinking behind the superstition is believed to originate from the fact that rabbits are born with their eyes open, and thereby ward against evil. Another school of thought suggests that their fecundity and powers of procreation link them with growth and prosperity throughout life.

Dozens spring to mind…

It is unlucky for the groom to see the bride's dress before the ceremony.

It is unlucky for the couple to see one another before the ceremony.

It will cause you husband to stray if you let anyone else wear your wedding ring.

There are also superstitions about the kind of marriage you will have relating to the month or day you are married:

Married in January's hoar & rime, Widowed you'll be before your prime.

Married in February's sleepy weather, Life you'll tread in time together.

Married when March winds shrill & roar, Your home will be on a distant shore.

Married beneath April's changing skies, A chequered path before you lies.

Married when bees over May blooms flit, Strangers around your board will sit.

Married in the month of the rose - June' Life will be one long honeymoon.

Married in July with flowers ablaze, Bittersweet memories on after days.

Married in August's heat and drowse, Lover and friend is your chosen spouse.

Married in September's golden glow, Smooth and serene your life will go.Married when leaves in October thin, Toil and hardship for your gain.

Married in the veils of November mist, Fortune your wedding ring has kissed.

Married in days of December cheer, Love's star shines brighter from year to year.

Monday for wealth, Tuesday for health, Wednesday the best day of all.

Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, Saturday for no luck at all.

I believe it means they don't want you to worry so they take feather's from there wing's. They don't want to see you sad the rest of their live. It also could stand for being connected with the loved one. Or there could be a bird in your house are a material that has feathers inside.

No, that is just a myth. A long time ago people thought they were bad luck because they thought witches could turn into black cats.

No

Chillax friend. Chain Mail are made by Stupid Preppy Teenagers that have no other life then texting. Noone has ever died from chain mail. A clown isn't going to kill you if you don't send a stupid message to 10 people. And you wont die. You'lll die when your time comes, not when a stupid idiot trying to scare you decides. Proof is because they typed the text message, so it can't exist. Don't Worry friend, you can't die. just delete it and move on.

Not all naturally occurring phenomenon can or should be interpreted as signs or omens. That said, a weddingphoto falling from the wall, when no mundane explanation can be found, could be read as meaning the marriage is in for a rough spell, particularly if the glass breaks.

Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky Paraskevidekatriaphobia: Friday the 13th Origins, History, and Folklore By David Emery, About.com Friday the 13th I HAVE BEFORE me the abstract of a 1993 study published in the British Medical Journal provocatively titled, "Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your Health?" With the aim of mapping "the relation between health, behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United Kingdom," its authors compared the ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years. Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly higher than on "normal" Fridays. Their conclusion: "Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended." Paraskevidekatriaphobics — people afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th — should be pricking up their ears about now, buoyed by seeming evidence that the source of their unholy terror may not be so irrational after all. But it's unwise to take solace in a single scientific study, especially one so peculiar. I suspect these statistics have more to teach us about human psychology than the ill-fatedness of any particular date on the calendar. Friday the 13th, the most widespread superstition The sixth day of the week and the number 13 both have foreboding reputations said to date from ancient times, and their inevitable conjunction from one to three times a year (there happen to be three such occurrences in 2009, two of them right in a row) portends more misfortune than some credulous minds can bear. According to experts it's the most widespread superstition in the United States today. Some people won't go to work on Friday the 13th; some won't eat in restaurants; many wouldn't think of setting a wedding on the date. How many Americans at the turn of the new millennium actually suffer from this condition? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of phobias (and coiner of the term paraskevidekatriaphobia, also spelled paraskavedekatriaphobia), the figure may be as high as 21 million. If he's right, eight percent of Americans are still in the grips of a very old superstition. Exactly how old is difficult to say, because determining the origins of superstitions is an inexact science, at best. In fact, it's mostly guesswork. LEGEND HAS IT: If 13 people sit down to dinner together, one will die within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it was practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894). Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue. Many buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters in their names). There are 13 witches in a coven. Although no one can say for sure when and why human beings first associated the number 13 with misfortune, the superstition is assumed to be quite old, and there exist any number of theories — most of which deserve to be treated with a healthy skepticism, please note — purporting to trace its origins to antiquity and beyond. It has been proposed, for example, that fears surrounding the number 13 are as ancient as the act of counting. Primitive man had only his 10 fingers and two feet to represent units, this explanation goes, so he could count no higher than 12. What lay beyond that — 13 — was an impenetrable mystery to our prehistoric forebears, hence an object of superstition. Which has an edifying ring to it, but one is left wondering: did primitive man not have toes? Life and death Despite whatever terrors the numerical unknown held for their hunter-gatherer ancestors, ancient civilizations weren't unanimous in their dread of 13. The Chinese regarded the number as lucky, some commentators note, as did the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs. To the ancient Egyptians, these sources tell us, life was a quest for spiritual ascension which unfolded in stages — twelve in this life and a thirteenth beyond, thought to be the eternal afterlife. The number 13 therefore symbolized death, not in terms of dust and decay but as a glorious and desirable transformation. Though Egyptian civilization perished, the symbolism conferred on the number 13 by its priesthood survived, we may speculate, only to be corrupted by subsequent cultures who came to associate 13 with a fear of death instead of a reverence for the afterlife. Anathema Still other sources speculate that the number 13 may have been purposely vilified by the founders of patriarchal religions in the early days of western civilization because it represented femininity. Thirteen had been revered in prehistoric goddess-worshiping cultures, we are told, because it corresponded to the number of lunar (menstrual) cycles in a year (13 x 28 = 364 days). The "Earth Mother of Laussel," for example — a 27,000-year-old carving found near the Lascaux caves in France often cited as an icon of matriarchal spirituality — depicts a female figure holding a cresent-shaped horn bearing 13 notches. As the solar calendar triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated civilization, it is surmised, so did the "perfect" number 12 over the "imperfect" number 13, thereafter considered anathema. On the other hand, one of the earliest concrete taboos associated with the number 13 — a taboo still observed by some superstitious folks today, apparently — is said to have originated in the East with the Hindus, who believed, for reasons I haven't been able to ascertain, that it is always unlucky for 13 people to gather in one place — say, at dinner. Interestingly enough, precisely the same superstition has been attributed to the ancient Vikings (though I have also been told, for what it's worth, that this and the accompanying mythographical explanation are apocryphal). The story has been laid down as follows: And Loki makes thirteen. . . Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla. Loki, the Evil One, god of mischief, had been left off the guest list but crashed the party, bringing the total number of attendees to 13. True to character, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was a favorite of the gods. Hod took a spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and obediently hurled it at Balder, killing him instantly. All Valhalla grieved. And although one might take the moral of this story to be "Beware of uninvited guests bearing mistletoe," the Norse themselves apparently concluded that 13 people at a dinner party is just plain bad luck. As if to prove the point, the Bible tells us there were exactly 13 present at the Last Supper. One of the dinner guests — er, disciples — betrayed Jesus Christ, setting the stage for the Crucifixion. Did I mention the Crucifixion took place on a Friday? LEGEND HAS IT: Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring bad dreams. Don't start a trip on Friday or you will have misfortune. If you cut your nails on Friday, you cut them for sorrow. Ships that set sail on a Friday will have bad luck – as in the tale of H.M.S. Friday ... One hundred years ago, the British government sought to quell once and for all the widespread superstition among seamen that setting sail on Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named "H.M.S. Friday." They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday, selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be her captain. To top it off, H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a Friday, and was never seen or heard from again. Some say Friday's bad reputation goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It was on a Friday, supposedly, that Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit. Adam bit, as we all learned in Sunday School, and they were both ejected from Paradise. Tradition also holds that the Great Flood began on a Friday; God tongue-tied the builders of the Tower of Babel on a Friday; the Temple of Solomon was destroyed on a Friday; and, of course, Friday was the day of the week on which Christ was crucified. It is therefore a day of penance for Christians. In pagan Rome, Friday was execution day (later Hangman's Day in Britain), but in other pre-Christian cultures it was the sabbath, a day of worship, so those who indulged in secular or self-interested activities on that day could not expect to receive blessings from the gods — which may explain the lingering taboo on embarking on journeys or starting important projects on Fridays. To complicate matters, these pagan associations were not lost on the early Church, which went to great lengths to suppress them. If Friday was a holy day for heathens, the Church fathers felt, it must not be so for Christians — thus it became known in the Middle Ages as the "Witches' Sabbath," and thereby hangs another tale. The witch-goddess The name "Friday" was derived from a Norse deity worshipped on the sixth day, known either as Frigg (goddess of marriage and fertility), or Freya (goddess of sex and fertility), or both, the two figures having become intertwined in the handing down of myths over time (the etymology of "Friday" has been given both ways). Frigg/Freya corresponded to Venus, the goddess of love of the Romans, who named the sixth day of the week in her honor "dies Veneris." Friday was actually considered quite lucky by pre-Christian Teutonic peoples, we are told — especially as a day to get married — because of its traditional association with love and fertility. All that changed when Christianity came along. The goddess of the sixth day — most likely Freya in this context, given that the cat was her sacred animal — was recast in post-pagan folklore as a witch, and her day became associated with evil doings. Various legends developed in that vein, but one is of particular interest: As the story goes, the witches of the north used to observe their sabbath by gathering in a cemetery in the dark of the moon. On one such occasion the Friday goddess, Freya herself, came down from her sanctuary in the mountaintops and appeared before the group, who numbered only 12 at the time, and gave them one of her cats, after which the witches' coven — and, by "tradition," every properly-formed coven since — comprised exactly 13. The astute reader will have observed that while we have thus far insinuated any number of intriguing connections between events, practices and beliefs attributed to ancient cultures and the superstitious fear of Fridays and the number 13, we have yet to happen upon an explanation of how, why, or when these separate strands of folklore converged — if that is indeed what happened — to mark Friday the 13th as the unluckiest day of all. There's a very simple reason for that: nobody really knows, though various explanations have been proposed. The Knights Templar One theory, recently offered up as historical fact in the novel The Da Vinci Code, holds that it came about not as the result of a convergence, but a catastrophe, a single historical event that happened nearly 700 years ago. The catastrophe was the decimation of the Knights Templar, the legendary order of "warrior monks" formed during the Christian Crusades to combat Islam. Renowned as a fighting force for 200 years, by the 1300s the order had grown so pervasive and powerful it was perceived as a political threat by kings and popes alike and brought down by a church-state conspiracy, as recounted by Katharine Kurtz in Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Books, 1995): On October 13, 1307, a day so infamous that Friday the 13th would become a synonym for ill fortune, officers of King Philip IV of France carried out mass arrests in a well-coordinated dawn raid that left several thousand Templars — knights, sergeants, priests, and serving brethren — in chains, charged with heresy, blasphemy, various obscenities, and homosexual practices. None of these charges was ever proven, even in France — and the Order was found innocent elsewhere — but in the seven years following the arrests, hundreds of Templars suffered excruciating tortures intended to force "confessions," and more than a hundred died under torture or were executed by burning at the stake. A thoroughly modern phenomenon There are drawbacks to the "day so infamous" thesis, not the least of which is that it attributes enormous cultural significance to a relatively obscure historical event. Even more problematic, for this or any other theory positing premodern origins for Friday the 13th superstitions, is the fact that no one has been able to document the existence of such beliefs prior to the late 19th century. If folks who lived in earlier ages perceived Friday the 13th as a day of special misfortune, no evidence has been found to document it. As a result, some scholars are now convinced the stigma is a thoroughly modern phenomenon exacerbated by 20th-century media hype. Going back more than a hundred years, Friday the 13th doesn't even merit a mention in the 1898 edition of E. Cobham Brewer's voluminous Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, though one does find entries for "Friday, an Unlucky Day" and "Thirteen Unlucky." When the date of ill fate finally does make an appearance in later editions of the text, it is without extravagant claims as to the superstition's historicity or longevity. The very brevity of the entry is instructive: "Friday the Thirteenth: A particularly unlucky Friday. See Thirteen" — implying that the extra dollop of misfortune might be accounted for in terms of a simple accrual, as it were, of bad omens: UNLUCKY FRIDAY + UNLUCKY 13 = UNLUCKIER FRIDAY If that's the case, we are guilty of perpetuating a misnomer by labeling Friday the 13th "the unluckiest day of all," a designation perhaps better reserved for, say, a Friday the 13th on which one breaks a mirror, walks under a ladder, spills the salt, and spies a black cat crossing one's path — a day, if there ever was one, best spent in the safety of one's own home with doors locked, shutters closed, and fingers crossed. Postscript: A novel theory In 13: The Story of the World's Most Popular Superstition (Avalon, 2004), author Nathaniel Lachenmeyer argues that the commingling of "unlucky Friday" and "unlucky 13" took place in the pages of a specific literary work, a novel published in 1907 titled — what else? — Friday, the Thirteenth. The book, all but forgotten now, concerned dirty dealings in the stock market and sold quite well in its day. Both the titular phrase and the phobic premise behind it — namely that superstitious people regard Friday the 13th as a supremely unlucky day — were instantly adopted and popularized by the press. It seems unlikely that the novelist, Thomas W. Lawson, literally invented that premise himself — he treats it within the story, in fact, as a notion that already existed in the public consciousness — but he most certainly lent it gravitas and set it on a path to becoming the most widespread superstition in modern times. Sources and further reading (updated): # Bowen, John. "Friday the 13th." Salon magazine, 13 Aug 1999. # Brewer, E. Cobham. The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. (1898 Edition in Hypertext). # "Days of the Week: Friday." The Mystical World Wide Web. # de Lys, Claudia. The Giant Book of Superstitions. New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1979. # Duncan, David E. Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year. New York: Avon, 1998. # Ferm, Vergilius. A Brief Dictionary of American Superstitions. New York: Philosophical Library, 1965. # Krischke, Wolfgang. "This Just Might Be Your Lucky Day." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 Nov 2001. # Kurtz, Katharine. Tales of the Knights Templar. New York: Warner Books, 1995. # Lachenmeyer, Nathaniel. 13: The Story of the World's Most Popular Superstition. New York: Avalon, 2004. # Lawson, Thomas W. Friday, the Thirteenth. New York: Doubleday, 1907. # Opie, Iona and Tatem, Moira. A Dictionary of Superstitions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. # Panati, Charles. Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Harper Collins, 1989. # Q and A: Triskaidekaphobia. New York Times, 8 Aug 1993. # Scanlon, T.J., et al. "Is Friday the 13th Bad for Your Health?" British Medical Journal. (Dec. 18-25, 1993): 1584-6.

To be on the more friendly side, vampires may not be real, but to be more supernatural about it, it says in legends that vampire are beasts of evil and are sent to hell when killed. But according to The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith, vampires don't go anywhere after the die. Instead, their soul just disappears. There is no afterlife for them when they truly die(as in getting staked through the heart kind of die).

Diamonds are said to symbolise conjugal love. They are said to be lucky if they show a flash of colour inside the stone. Several named diamonds are said to be cursed, including the Hope diamond and th Koh-i-Noor diamond.

There is an old rhyme that goes like this:

Monday for wealth, Tuesday for health, Wednesday the best day of all. Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, Saturday for no luck at all.