Jinx

Is there any feeling of helplessness more complete than sitting on an airplane midflight? Thirty thousand feet above the ground, at the mercy of engineers, of metal and screws, of the pilots, of the very air itself.I learned the rhythms of the earth early in life by watching the trees: the brilliant October red of the maple on the corner by my school, the burnt amber of the dry pine needles that blanketed the ground in winter, brittle and wiry, leaving indentations on my knees. At recess, my friends and I would run around and collect handfuls of acorns in baskets we made from the bellies of our shirts before letting them tumble onto the forest floor, where we would kneel and count our treasures.Later, when I was a bit older, a friend and I found a gnarled rhododendron that we claimed as ours. We tied ropes to it for climbing and sat on the dipped branches and told secrets.Many ancient and medieval peoples believed that spirits and gods were embodied in trees. Some considered oaks, in particular, to be sacred. The Celts and Druids worshipped the oak, congregated in oak groves, and looked to them for wisdom and protection.Oak trees are said to be more likely to be struck by lightning than other trees. I have not been able to determine if this is true.Insurance companies consider a lightning strike to be an “Act of God.” Some policies cover damages from Acts of God. Others do not.I developed a fear of lightning when I was young, after a violent thunderstorm snuck up on my family and me on the beach.Lightning tends to strike the tallest object around. If you are caught outside during a thunderstorm, one of the most dangerous places to be is under a tall tree.It is not, however, generally an issue for airplanes. If struck, lightning simply passes through the plane, conducted by the aluminum of the aircraft, the passengers oblivious. It is estimated that every commercial airplane is struck by lightning at least once a year.It is safer, sometimes, to be in the sky during a storm than it is to be on the ground. But still, I'd like to avoid lightning all together. Step on a crack and break your mother's back. As children we'd shriek the rhyme to each other as we hopscotched across the sidewalk. I knew it was nonsense, but still, I was very careful to avoid the cracks in the pavement.It was around the time—it must have been—that my mother was fighting cancer. Head bald, body hurting. I did not want to make her hurt more.The word “superstition” is formed from the Latin super-, or over, and stō, to stand.In classical Latin, superstes referred to a soldier standing above the prostrate body of an enemy. Another conjugation, superstitiō, carried a connotation of superiority, and later of prophecy and sorcery.Superstition, supersto. “I stand over, above.” Or, “I survive.”I started knocking on wood in high school. I think the habit developed in relation to my sports games. I was extremely competitive and always wanted to win, but if someone were to suggest that we might, the outcome immediately felt doomed. The ritual expanded beyond sports and then followed me to college, and it was only after university, when I was thrown into the abyss of my mid-20s, that knocking on wood became less of a habit and more of a compulsion.No one can agree on the origins of knocking on wood. Some believe it can be traced back to the Celts and Druids, who may have hit their knuckles on the bark of trees to call upon the spirits within or to ask for protection. Others think it may be Christian in origin—or perhaps made that way later by reformers in Europe—and connected to the wood of the cross Christ died on in order to save the faithful from Hell.Cicero suggested that that superstitious people were called so because of their excessive religious devotion, undertaken in order that their children might live.The phrase “knock on wood” first appeared in The New York Times in 1914 in a brief, unsigned letter to the editor asking for an explanation of the saying. The item, which went unanswered in print, was titled “A Heathen Exorcism.”Recently, British folklorist Steve Roud suggested that the practice and phrase—in Britain, to “touch wood,” rather than “knock”—is much newer, and stems from a nineteenth-century playground game called Tiggy Touchwood, a version of tag in which you were only safe from the threat of others if you were touching a piece of wood.Around the time of the first World War, the Polish–British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski traveled to the Trobriand Islands, a string of tiny coral atolls just to the east of New Guinea. Malinowski was, among other things, interested in the intersection of science and religion and what he described as “magic.” The Trobriand people had a culture rich in all three, and full of ritual.The population on the isles relied on farming and fishing—practices subject to the whims of nature, and the focus of much of their magic. But their magical rituals were applied unevenly, Malinowski noted. Those who fished in the lagoon, where the waters were calm and shallow and the method of fishing almost guaranteed a big catch, had very little use of magic. There, a man could rely on his knowledge and skill—magic “did not exist.” But for those who fished on the open sea, “full of danger and uncertainty,” there was, Malinowski wrote, “extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results.”A paper in 2008 found that participants in experiments that assigned them a lack of control were more likely to report superstitious beliefs.While on a walk in London just before dusk, a man slunk up next to me and started spitting catcalls. I kept walking. He started screaming at me. When I ignored that, too, he began to follow me. I was close to my flat and did not want to lead him there so I ducked into a pub, where I nursed an overpriced glass of wine for an hour while wondering if he had left, if it was safe for me to go home.Surveys over the last several decades have found that, in general, women are more superstitious than men.Humans as a species tend to fixate on the negative, an inclination that scientists have dubbed the “negativity bias.” We dwell on negative events, we think about negative ideas more than we do positive ones, and we often make decisions based on negative information.It is an evolutionary trait. Early on, being aware of potential threats was a matter of life or death. Being more attuned to negative possibilities meant you were more likely to survive.In 2013, a team of three researchers interested in superstitious actions meant to ward off bad luck—knocking on wood, throwing salt, spitting, and so on—devised a multipart study to investigate the effectiveness of those rituals.In the first phase of the study, the researchers guided participants to make definitive statements about avoiding car accidents; for example, they had the participants say, “Nobody I know will get into a bad car accident.” In short, the researchers got the participants to jinx themselves.Crucially, the participants in the study did not know the researchers were investigating superstitions. The idea that participants were tempting fate was never suggested, but still, the participants reported feeling very uncomfortable.Next, the researchers asked some of the participants to knock on the top of a wooden table. Other participants were instructed to knock on the underside of the table, toward themselves. And others were not asked to knock at all.The specific superstition of knocking on wood was not mentioned, and not a single participant made the association spontaneously themselves. But at the end, when the participants were asked by the researchers how likely they believed it was that they or their friends would indeed get into a horrible car accident, those who knocked down on the table said it was significantly less likely compared to the participants who knocked on the underside of the table or who did not knock at all.Jinx is an American English word thought to come from the English jynx, a seventeenth-century word for a wryneck, a bird used in witchcraft and divination, charms and spells. Both wryneck and jynx are in turn derived from the Latin and Greek iynx.Iynx was a nymph in Greek mythology who was turned into a bird as a punishment for daring to cast a spell on Zeus.There is a theory in psychology that the mind works in two systems. The first is instinctual, impulsive. The second is more rational, more logical. It provides a check to that first system, watching for errors and course-correcting if needed.People who engage in superstitions while knowing that they are irrational challenge our ideas about the mind's processes. That first system of thinking might feel what's called a “magical intuition,” prompting the person to engage in a superstition.Then the second system kicks in. In some people, this second system will detect an error. It will tell us that a superstition is illogical. It should correct the thinking. It should make us stop.But sometimes it does not. Sometimes the mind knows an action is irrational, knows that knocking on a wooden table will not keep you from dying in a car accident, and yet it does not correct it. We continue to knock on wood.Behavioral scientist Jane Risen calls this phenomenon “acquiescence.”“Acquiescence” is an interesting word for engaging in superstition, since the whole point is to buck against the uncontrollable, to attempt to wrest control over an uncertain future. It is in many ways the opposite of a giving in, except perhaps to the self.The expression “to tempt God” was recorded as early as the mid-1300s, meaning to test God, to prod the limits of His power, to provoke. “To tempt fate” did not appear until much later, near the end of the seventeenth century.I could not stop thinking about the word “acquiescence,” so I asked Risen, on a gray March afternoon, how she chose the term. She wanted to capture, she said, the sense of an internal conflict—the keen awareness that something is irrational and the decision to continue to do it anyway.We can see a similar but not identical phenomenon in people who are overly optimistic, or, conversely, people who have serious phobias.“We know that flying is safer than driving,” she told me. “But that does not mean that someone will not be scared of flying.” I recite the Lord's Prayer during takeoff every time I fly. I'm not sure exactly when the ritual started, the prayer itself a vestigial practice from my childhood. Recently I have begun to fumble the words, but still, I will recite it as the wheels pull up and we lift into the air, humming the cadence of the prayer even when I forget the phrasing—have I trespassed or have I sinned?I did not think much of this habit of mine until I flew with my partner for the first time. He crossed himself as soon as we left the ground and again when we landed. It was jarring, this outward display of faith I had never seen from him before. He has done it, he explained, on every flight he has ever taken. And like me, he has never been sure if it is more a prayer or a reflex.I was raised in a generally nondenominational Protestant household. We went to church much more often when I was younger, first Lutheran and then later Presbyterian. The Presbyterian church was an imposing brick cathedral with stained-glass windows and vaulted ceilings and an organ. I had to wear a dress every Sunday. It was stuffy and formal and dull.We changed churches for the third time when I was a teenager, for a reason I can't really remember but that I think was linked to some kind of pastoral scandal. The new church looked more like a warehouse than a cathedral. There were padded metal chairs instead of pews, a piano and drums instead of an organ, a projector screen instead of hymnals. It was the kind of place where the pastor wore jeans and drank coffee on stage. I liked this church much better for many reasons, yet there was a nagging sense of something lost.I am jealous of the rituals of other religions—Muslims with their prayers and fasting, Jewish people with their careful seder plates, Catholics with their rosaries and candles.There is something grounding about ritual, something I find attractive about faith made visible, tangible—something reinforcing and wholly missing from the sanitized, WASP-y version of Christianity with which I am familiar. I wonder sometimes whether, if I had something to hold in my hands, my faith wouldn't have slipped through my fingers.Religious Jews often affix a mezuzah to the doorframe of their homes and, sometimes, in the entryways of the rooms inside. It is a small object made with a piece of parchment on which a scribe has written verses from the Torah, and which is then placed in a decorative case made from plastic, ceramic, or, often, wood.A mezuzah marks the space as Jewish, serves as a reminder of the holiness of the home and as a reminder of G-d. Some Rabbinical teachings hold that the mitzvah of mezuzah offers protection to the home and those inside. It is common for Jews to touch or rub the mezuzah on their way in or out, and sometimes to kiss those fingers afterward.The researchers in the 2013 study on superstition, having established in the first phase of the experiment that knocking on wood can indeed mitigate the perception that one has jinxed oneself, then moved on to the second part of the study.As before, the researchers got unsuspecting participants to jinx themselves. This time, they asked some of the participants to assert that they would not be mugged that year. Others were asked to say that they would not get sick. Again, the statements made the participants uncomfortable. They reported that they did indeed feel like they were tempting fate.Next, the participants were given a ball. Some of them were instructed to simply hold the ball. Others were asked to throw the ball. Afterward, the participants were asked how likely they thought it was that they would get mugged or get sick that year. Those who threw the ball said that it was significantly less likely compared to those who simply held the ball. Throwing the ball, it seemed, reduced the feeling of a jinx.Throwing a ball is not associated with any socially engrained superstition like knocking on wood. The results of the study, the researchers concluded, supported the hypothesis that any kind of avoidant physical action reduces the perception of a jinx.It could explain why some superstitions have lasted through centuries and spread across cultures—a kind of natural selection of magical thinking.Knocking on wood, spitting, throwing salt—throwing a ball—there is, in all, a subconscious sense that you are pushing something away from yourself, as if, by sheer physical force, you can ward yourself, you can drive some horrible fate away. That through your body you can control what comes.When I knock on wood, is it not a kind of prayer?One of the explanations for why we hold on to superstitions is that the cost–benefit analysis is favorable. The cost of knocking on wood is very low. But if a superstition proves true, then the potential benefit of, say, saving yourself from getting into a horrible car accident is quite high.Risen, the behavioral scientist, observed in a footnote tucked into one of her papers that this justification is quite similar to Pascal's wager. The French philosopher argued that a rational person should believe in the Christian God because of the potential consequences. If God does not exist, believers face only the loss of worldly pleasures, things they perhaps abstained from in the name of faith. But if God does indeed exist, the reward is infinite, eternal.By the logic of Pascal's wager, we could worship our shoes, our coffee cups, our desks—just in case they could save us. We don't, of course.The wager, Risen wrote, is only appropriate if one already has some level of belief in God, or at least recognizes that others believe in God and is “open to the possibility that those people are correct.”Risen's thoughts on superstition and religion are complicated. She tries not to wade too deeply into it in her work. But for her, asking God for a specific outcome or for something to happen can feel very close to superstition, while praying for faith or simply worshiping—that, she said, is where she feels the two diverge.I have prayed for specific things, and I have given thanks, but I am not sure if I have ever prayed for faith.Pascal held that if rationality gets in the way of faith, simply acting as if you believe could eventually lead to true belief.My mother asked me to call her one Saturday night. I put the phone on speaker while I continued to dress for a friend's birthday party, shimmying tights over my winter-pale knees, trying not to snag the fabric.Voice cracking from across an ocean, she told me that my dad was in the hospital, fighting a nasty infection that took root after a biopsy that I hadn't even known he'd had. And the biopsy, she said, had shown that he had cancer.When she assured me that they caught it early, that it was slow-growing, that with he would be I did not even think about knocking on wood. When we I sat in the of my flat and instead began to of is before I go into the to check that the is the to the up the and back my the as if they are piano three, three, I the three the and in the of I the for do this most until my partner calls to me from the other he will is know it is I will still, I the again and the a