The Old Religion

The Origins of Modern Superstitions

Many of our superstitions and unfriendly ideas about Paganism come from anti-Pagan propaganda. The thing is, they are all based in fact, but a negative bent was added in order to paint these people in a bad light. Some of these enduring myths and superstitions are:

The number 13/Friday the 13th: As mentioned earlier, the number 13 is important to Witches because it is the number of months in a lunar year. The patriarchal system divided the solar year into 12 months and declared the 13-month calendar to be heresy. Friday is the day of the Roman goddess Venus. When women were villified, everything feminine was diabolized, including the Pagan goddesses. Thus, Friday the 13th was considered a double whammy of bad luck.
A black cat crossing your path: According to color theory, black is the sum of all colors. Black fabric absorbs light, which is why we wear light colors in the summer. Witches often wear black to help them channel the energies around them. Black is also associated with nighttime and, in patriarchal, solar societies, with evil. Witches do use animals as familiars, to help them connect with the world beyond. Some people believed that Witches sent their familiars out to look for victims. Thus, encountering such an animal would be bad luck.
Left-handedness: Without fail, all pre-Christian religions which worshipped an androgynous diety saw the male half on the right side and the female half on the left side. Perhaps not co-incidentally, the left hemisphere of the brain (which controlls the right side of the body) is the center of stereotypical male qualities such as logic and "solid" thinking, and the right hemisphere of the brain (which controls the left side of the body) is the center of stereotypical female qualities such as intuition and creativity. The Latin word "sinister" means simply "left." The French "gauche," which is slang for "wrong," means literally "left." It is an interesting co-incidence, then, that The Left refers to political liberalism, and The Right refers to political conservatism (in America, the Republicans are backed by the Religious Right, the Christian Coalition, and other fundamentalist groups). Up until early in this century, left-handedness was strongly discouraged, and many natural lefties were trained to be righties.

[In Memory of the Burning Times] [Never Again the Burning Times] [The Witches' Voice]

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