When I was a kid, back in the day (as some of my students refer to my childhood), I occasionally carried a rabbit’s foot for good luck.
The rabbit’s foot was prized as a potent good luck charm by nearly everyone. The talisman was touted by superstitious folk of the hills for its benevolence.
The rabbit-foot amulet allegedly had its origins in Western Europe sometime before 600 B.C. The fetish represented good luck, not bad.
The Celts believed that the animal spent so much time underground because it was in secret communication with the netherworld.
Thus, a rabbit was privy to information that humans were denied.
It was the rabbit’s fecundity, though, that helped to give its body parts their strongest association with good luck and prosperity. So prolific was the animal that early peoples regarded it as an outstanding example of all that was procreative in nature.
To possess any part of a rabbit—tail, ear, foot, or dried innards—assured a person’s good fortune. Interestingly, the foot was always the preferred totem, believed to be luckier than any other part.
Just why the foot of the rabbit is a lucky piece is not exactly known.
But it is recounted, according to folklorists (even before Freud contaminated modern thinking with his obsessions with sex), that early man, in his cave drawings and stone sculptures, incorporated the foot as a phallic symbol—a totem to foster fertility in women and a cornucopian harvest in the fields.
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Even more than the rabbit’s foot, however, the most universal of all good luck charms is the horseshoe. It was a powerful amulet in every age and country where the horse existed.
Horseshoes have been traced back to 4th century Greece.
And though the Greeks introduced the horseshoe to Western culture and regarded it as a symbol of good fortune, legend credits St. Dunstan with having given the horseshoe, hung above a house door, special power against evil.
Dunstan, a blacksmith by trade who would become the Archbishop of Canterbury in A.D. 959, allegedly was approached one day by a man who asked that horseshoes be attached to his own feet, suspiciously cloven.
Dunstan immediately recognized the customer as Satan and explained that to perform the service he would have to shackle the man to the wall.
The saint deliberately made the job so excruciatingly painful that the bound devil repeatedly begged for mercy. Dunstan refused to release him until he gave his solemn oath never to enter a house where a horseshoe was displayed over the door.
Eventually, the horseshoe came to serve a dual purpose as the (horseshoe shaped) door knocker.
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During the Middle-Ages, when the fear of witchcraft peaked, the horseshoe assumed an additional power.
It was believed that witches traveled on brooms because they feared horses, and that any reminder of a horse, especially its iron shoe, warded off a witch the way a crucifix struck terror in a vampire.
Thus, a woman accused of witchcraft was interred with a horseshoe nailed atop her coffin to prevent resurrection.
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Back in the times when large family dinners were in vogue, two people, making secret wishes, tugged on opposite ends of the V-shaped clavicle of a chicken or turkey breast.
For the person who broke off the larger piece, a wish came true.
The custom is reportedly 2,400 years old, and it originated with the Etruscans, the ancient people who occupied the area of the Italian peninsula between the Tiber and Arno rivers.
The highly cultured Etruscan people, whose civilization reached its height in the 6th century B.C., believed the hen and the cock to be soothsayers: the hen because she foretold the laying of an egg with a squawk; the cock because his crow heralded the dawn of a new day.
It was the Romans who brought the wishbone superstition to England.
Colonial folklore holds that wishbones were snapped at the first Thanksgiving, celebrated in 1621, when the Pilgrims tugged the breastbone of a wild turkey.
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