When a cat crosses your path
When a cat crosses your path.
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Life in itself is a mystery. Add to it the deep-rooted superstitions and it becomes even more complex. You like it or not, there are many superstitions that exist in our society. Most of them were born to help mankind and were based on sound reasoning. But with time the logic was left behind and the belief became a superstition. The perplexity is one can neither believe them nor ignore them. Particularly those superstitions that predict future. Anything from a bird’s call to the falling of utensils can alter your life.
As far as superstitions go, fear of a black cat crossing one’s path is of relatively recent origin. It is also contrary to the revered place once held by the cat in Egypt, around 3000 B.C.
During the middle ages, the dread of black cats first arose in England. The cat’s characteristic independence, willfulness and stealth, coupled with its sudden overpopulation in major cities, contributed to its fall from grace. Alley cats were fed by poor, lonely old ladies, and when witch hysteria struck Europe, and many of these homeless women were accused of practicing black magic, their cat companions (especially black ones) were deemed guilty of witchery by association.
One popular tale from British lore illustrates the thinking of the day. In Lincolnshire in the 1560s, one moonless night a father and his son were frightened by a small creature that passed across their path into a crawl space. Hurling stones into the opening, they saw an injured black cat scurry out and limp into the adjacent home of a woman suspected by the town of being a witch. Next day, the father and son encountered the woman on the street. Her face was bruised, her arm bandaged. And she now walked with a limp. From that day on in Lincolnshire, all black cats were suspected of being witches in night disguise.
‘Breaking a mirror’, one of the most widespread bad luck superstitions still in existence, originated long before glass mirrors existed. The belief arose out of a combination of religious and economic factors.
The first mirrors, used by the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews and Greeks, were made of polished metals such as brass, bronze, silver, and gold, and were unbreakable. By the 6th Century B.C., the Greeks had begun a mirror practice of divination called catoptromancy, which employed shallow glass or earthenware bowls filled with water. A glass water bowl was supposed to reveal the future of any person who cast his or her image on the reflective surface. If one of these mirrors slipped and broke, the seer’s interpretation was that either the person holding the bowl had no future (because he or she would soon die) or the future held events so dreadful the gods were kindly sparing the person a glimpse of their fate.
The Romans adopted this bad luck superstition in the 1st Century A.D. and added their own twist—our modern meaning. They maintained that a person’s health changed in cycles of seven years. Since mirrors reflect a person’s appearance (that is, health), a broken mirror augured seven years of ill health and misfortune. The superstition acquired a practical, economic application in 15th Century Italy. The first breakable sheet glass mirrors with silver-coated backing were manufactured in Venice at that time. Being very costly, they were handled with great care. Servants who cleaned the mirrors were frequently and emphatically warned that to break one of these treasures invited seven years of a fate worse than death. Such effective use of the superstition served to intensify the bad luck belief for generations of Europeans. By the time inexpensive mirrors were being manufactured in England and France in the mid-1600s, the broken mirror superstition was widespread and firmly rooted in tradition.
Ankita Singhal is a freelance writer and a mass comm graduate.
Article from articlesbase.com
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Questions About Cat Superstitions
Daniel asks…
Cat – Cat – Cat – Cat crossIng bad omen or a superstition spiritually?
Its quite a famous belief spread around all parts of India that when we head our way to someplace
important and if a cat runs across your way, its a bad omen, and the solution would be to go back home, sit for a while and then start again…
why this? Do anyone know reasons for this cat crossing? This is not a mere superstition… It has a little bit of logical background..!
Do you know ? if so, please share it with us.
Suzi Q answers:
It is a Superstition.
But we have to take it in positive manner. For example, if a cat crosses while going for a task, we have to take it as a warning that we missed some important thing to carry for effectively completing the task.
Http://aanmikam.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post_4124.html
Only some signals given by animals & birds before some havoc like Tsunami, Quake etc are proved to be true.
One mystery still I am wondering:
Observed phenomenon that is interpreted as signifying good or bad fortune. The many and varied omens that the ancients noted included lightning, cloud movements, the flights of birds, and the paths of sacred animals. Each type of omen was gauged according to specific meaningful characteristics, such as the kinds of bird in flight or the direction of flight in relation to the observer.
Long back I heard that the “who-o-o, who-o-o” type of sound made by Owls indicates certain events likely to happen. One day we heard such Owl “who-o-o, who-o-o” sound and my father started counting the number of repetition and it was 8 times.
My father told me there will be an unexpected death if Owl makes “who-o-o, who-o-o” sound for 8 times. Within few hours one lady in the opposite house who was admitted in hospital for delivery, was brought back as dead body with dead child. This was happened some where 40 years back.
Here there could be a possibility that owls may have the capacity to understand the event and tell in its way to the people. After all science is an observed facts later on proved with definition and reasoning!
Http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091225230408AAyjqok
Steven asks…
Black Cat meaning. . .?
Why is it that in Britain (and the rest of Europe I think) a black cat is a symbol of good fortune and having one cross your path is considered lucky whilst in the USA they think it bad luck??
Suzi Q answers:
Personally I think it’s a stupid superstition. A black cat crossed my path while I was driving and I stopped and it never got hit. This delayed my drive by a few seconds which might have saved my life. A truck just flew right by me and if I was a couple of seconds ahead, I could have been crushed.
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