Silly superstitions can stick around through the ages

BY Karen Champagnie Alman | The Olympian's Diversity Panel • Published August 15, 2008

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If you delve deep enough into any culture, you will find a repertoire of superstitions. These beliefs and practices pass through time and space -- from one generation to the next, from one culture to another -- with ageless continuity. Take, for example, breaking a mirror. Ancient Romans believed that a broken mirror presages seven years of bad luck. This superstition is now found in North and Latin American folklore. Another well-known superstition is that walking under a ladder yields misfortune. It is thought to be an early Christian superstition, with Egyptian origins. Today, you will find people in parts of Europe, North America and Latin America who avoid walking under ladders.

The ladder fear is one thing, but what I find truly irrational are the lengths some people will go to NOT walk under it. I have seen folks, faced with a painter and ladder ahead, navigate a treacherous detour into oncoming traffic; this, to me, is a fate far worse than paint spilling on one's head.

While some superstitions are familiar to several cultures, such as the broken mirror and ladder, others are unique to a specific culture or region. However, be they common or arcane, I find them all intriguing, because you never forget them, and some are downright funny.

I can relate from my own experience. After less than an hour of watching the Sunday evening movie, my date suddenly announced that it was time for him to go. "Go?" I asked, befuddled. "You just got here!" But he insisted on leaving, so I showed him to the door. On my way back inside the house, I noticed something rather odd -- a broom propped upside down in the corner of the kitchen. Just then, my mother sauntered down the stairs, grinning like a Cheshire cat. "Oh, he's gone?" she asked almost rhetorically. Then she asserted: "It was the salt in the broom, works like a charm every time."

According to Jamaican legend, if you sprinkle salt in a broom and turn it upside down, an unwanted guest will quickly depart. My mother never did like my date, and, as I later learned, my grandmother had used the same old salt-in-the-broom trick to ward off several of my mother's hapless suitors. At times, I think that superstitions are nothing more than hocus-pocus, yet strangely enough, I always hold a mirror as delicately as I hold a newborn, I think twice before walking under ladders, and I keep a broom handy -- just in case my daughter gets swept off her feet by the wrong guy!

Karen Champagnie Alman, Ph.D., vice president of sales and marketing for Alternative Marketing Experts and part-time college instructor, is a member of The Olympian's Diversity Panel. She can be reached at karen@alman.us.