Superstitious Minds

As an atheist, I find comfort in dust to dust. And yet try as I might, I cannot shake my secret beliefs based in magic, chance, ignorance and fear. What in damnation is wrong with me?

Photo by Amy Reed on Unsplash

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this topic, though a debut in this space. For any longtime readers/ followers, you may remember me initially sharing my struggle to escape the manacles of superstition in relation to grief. I’ll touch upon that story, offering an update nearly three years later. But for the uninitiated, this yarn really begins during my early school days and the long summer, Easter and Christmas holidays spent with my grandparents.

Like any child from a single parent family, I had a broad range of influences in my nascent years, simply through necessity. While my mum worked to make the ends stretch to meet, her parents, cousins, sister, aunties and uncles stepped in to entertain my brother and me, sometimes for weeks at a time. At my nan and grandad’s house, I was provided a designated bedroom, a clutch of girl’s magazine annuals and host of old wives’ tales.

My grandparents on my mum’s side were slightly better to do than on my dad’s. By a hair’s breadth. Both one of seven, my grandad was born at the Salvation Army Hospital for unwed mothers in Hackney, and his birth certificate records ‘father unknown’. My great grandmother, his mum, was mixed race Asian, and my grandad was dark skinned. Family lore says that his biological father was Romany, and he spent a couple of years working with a travelling fairground in his youth, escaping evacuee life to hoist rides up around Medway, Kent. Tilly, my great grandmother married and conceived another six children with a husband who she married while my grandad was a toddler, so he grew up ostensibly in a nuclear family, just with a slight difference in appearance from his siblings.

What was always extraordinary about my grandad was that he wore any supposed disadvantages of his position so lightly. He was 5’ 1’’, got his hand caught in a machine at the paper factory where he worked as a foreman, leading to a lifelong disability; he was mixed race in Enoch’s epoch and in his own words, ‘a bastard’ in a time when illegitimacy was still stigmatized. But he had this unshakable stoicism based on a very specific view of the winds of the world. My nan was also a factory worker and left school at 14 to start her career. She and her six siblings were often left with ‘air soup’ for dinner– stock, salt and pepper in case you wondered. My great-grandfather’s first job was being a scarecrow in a field—literally—so understandably money was always tight.

I recall all the above not just because I remain a turbo family history geek, but to give a little context to my grandparents’ background. They could both read and write (in fact my grandad’s penmanship was exquisite, even after his accident), but they were totally folksy and in lots of ways, innocent. They had no real formal education and were both guided by supernatural notions.  Neither were religious, but they both had very witchy ideas about the world, ideas which were rooted deeply within their own cultures and family traditions. And having spent so much time with them, especially when I was young, a good amount of these superstitious ideas were instilled somewhere in my immature psyche.

Some examples include the concept that if you broke something you loved, you needed to immediately run to the back of the garden and smash a jam jar or something of similarly low value (of which my nanny Aude kept on hand for such occasions) against a wall to ‘balance it out’. You had to cross your fingers when you crossed anyone on the stairs, even in a public place, or you would have bad luck. If you had a wart, the advice was to rub a copper coin on it then bury it in the ground and it would disappear. If you combed your hair with an ivory comb at midnight on Halloween in front of a mirror, a vision of your husband would appear behind your right shoulder. Bad things came in threes, black cats were to be noted, ladders avoided. And more than anything, magpies were harbingers of the future.

I understand how silly all this sounds written down.

I understand how outlandish and anti-science and beyond plausible.

And I very much appreciate that for my grandparents with their extremely limited schooling, struggling with seemingly endless natural tragedies, not least my nan’s crippling mental health issues, that creating this web of inherited certainties helped them navigate an uncertain world.

And yet. I still count magpies. I still cross my fingers. I still believe bad things come in threes. I don’t believe these things openly and I would never communicate these thought processes in the moment to anyone outside of my family. But I have to fight so hard not to mention any of it in front my children. So incredibly hard that it makes my mind boggle at my own credulity.

Today, we live in such apathetic, secular times. I feel comfortable with the knowledge that when I die that is it. I don’t seek traditional belief systems to ferry me through challenging times. I bear no truck with any doomsday vision outside of environmental annihilation, nor is there a messianic leader who could tempt me to adhere to their vision. I don’t do tarot, psychics, or the crystal business. Manifestation is a step too far for me outside of the clear value of spelling out what you want to yourself. I don’t believe in the stars or Chinese birth charts or the occult. Generally, as a human, I am doubtful, even a sceptic. My eyes are open. I have plumbed the rabbit hole. I have also been educated formally as far as it goes. Like an increasing number of us, I am absolutely faithless. Outside of fucking magpies. Lord, give me strength.

Countless studies have proven the relationship between a higher level of education and a decreased belief in superstitions including this 2017 paper. But I wonder how truly honest people really are. If someone asked me in a survey about my superstitions, I wouldn’t ‘fess up. I wouldn’t mention that having seen five single magpies over the weekend has made me believe that something bad is coming or something terrible is happening to my reputation behind my back. I obviously don’t really believe this. I half believe. Maybe quarter believe. I definite do not believe it enough to admit it on a fricking form.

If you touch wood to protect yourself, if you went to Greece and came back with an evil eye, if you feel nervous on Friday 13^th or avoid the 13^th floor in a hotel, if you have a horseshoe hanging in your home, if you believe pride comes before a fall, if you have rituals you go through whenever your football team plays, if you couldn’t say out loud, ‘no-one I love will ever be in car accident’, you are in some way invested in everyday magic. And you are not an outlier. According to a recent YouGov survey based on 2022 data, 34% of Britons admit to being ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ superstitious (and I would argue this is far lower than the reality because you know, the quarter believer liars like me). Thirty three percent say they knock on wood, 32% believe in the power of a four leaf clover, while 29% seek pennies for all day long good luck. While I’m sure a good number of these superstitious folk are fueling today’s online conspiracy culture and checking the back of your neck for scales, I absolutely cannot condescend, nor set myself aside from them, because I’ve lived my entire life in this glass house.

A theory by Jane Risen, Professor of Behavioural Science at Chicago University potentially helps me square my circle. “Traditionally, research on superstition and magical thinking has focused on people's cognitive shortcomings, but superstitions are not limited to individuals with mental deficits. Even smart, educated, emotionally stable adults have superstitions that are not rational,” she writes in her paper, Believing in What We Do Not Believe,’ Psychological Review, 2016. She expands on the idea of dual process reasoning – where you can have an automatic, unconscious thought at the same time as a controlled and conscious thought. Her theory argues that superstitions are intuitions which people acknowledge to be wrong, but acquiesce to rather than correct. Something, somewhere in my mental makeup, chooses to yield to what I know to be impossible, perhaps as Risen argues, because the cost of ignoring my intuition feels too high to reconcile. The sheer fear of the bad that I believe to be coming my way is such a heavy weight to bear that I will suspend my disbelief in order to avoid it.

The story I mentioned in the opening paragraph is probably related to this intolerable weight. I’ve lived by the magpie credo for decades, saluting singular birds to ward off sorrow; basking in the joy of pairs, dreaming of the boys and girls coming for me with fours and threes. After a spate of true bad luck befell me, with incredibly unlikely odds not in my favour, I lost my mind to the importance of these birds. We’d lost a house sale on the day of completion (it was also the day of exchange so sadly no deposit to recoup) due to Covid, meaning our dream family home slipped away a few weeks after losing a baby to a very rare genetic condition caused by a rare genetic mutation. Then my partner was furloughed and in the same way it was for everyone, life was unbearable. Grief had a stranglehold on me, I believed I was cursed and I felt like I couldn’t walk out the house; I feared masonry falling on my head (this is something that happened to friends of mine) and was constantly looking up to the sky. And what I saw that whole hot summer long was magpies. On their own, all the time.

Cutting a long story of redemption short, I learnt just before leaving the property that there was a tree at the other end of my street replete with magpie nests. I wasn’t being hounded by some kind of Hitchcockian portent. There were just an unusual number of black and white birds residing metres from my front door. Three years ago I rounded off that tale with another kind of magic – the idea that birds are somehow close to death and have traditionally been believed to be involved in conveying spirits away from the physical world. I shared that I found that a huge comfort, even though I don’t believe in spirits or the afterlife. Why? Because the alternative hole of total emptiness was probably just too heavy to contemplate. What do I think now? I think we create stories to protect ourselves, and the deeper the fear and pain, the further we will err from rational reality.

When I was younger, I used to feel in a way superior to my grandparents because they harboured these ideas which now continue to pinball around my mind. This is perhaps not surprising, simply because the word superstition is a pejorative. Yet so many of these beliefs and common folk convictions are as old as England. They have been communicated through oral tradition and common memory from generation to generation. Which is possibly why I struggle so much to cut the ties of communication to my own children. I have also had moments in my life where I struggled to understand the appeal of both organized and independent religion, not least when I’ve watched some kind of Netflix cult story or heard some hideous account of abuse in mainstream religion. It would also be so easy to dismiss those radicalised online, those searching for Q, or believing that Russell Brand is being persued by an international cabal. I’m no apologist, but what I know is that if we can acquiesce to irrationality and choose not to override our intuition, anyone is vulnerable to magical stories, at least to some point on a sliding scale. Today when certainties seem so wobbly, when trust in the media has been so eroded, when we are inundated with charlatans either trying to get us to wire our life savings to them or cancel this or that person, there exists a huge vacuum where our roots once tethered us together. In that void, the stories of yore can make you feel connected to something beyond this apparently crumbling temporal world.   As Risen says, “stated simply, magical thinking is not magical. It is not extraordinary. It is surprisingly ordinary.” As for me, I’ve stopped myself saluting birds again. But I also got the word ‘LUCKY’ tattooed on my hand. One step forward, two steps back.