Two faces of Superstitions.

I couldn't stop laughing while reading @McYusuf post about superstitions earlier today, it reminded me about a lot of naughty things we did as kids while growing up.

The broom superstition really cracked me up, you can see for yourself through the Link.

Have you ever thought about people who came up with lies that ended up as superstitions today?

These superstitions we talk about today have been in existence even before some of our parents were born and its ability to remain at this age still baffles me a lot. The trick is that these superstitions pretend to be prevention/solutions to a particular problem or the ability to do impossible things and we kind of transfer them from generation to generation but I don't think it still has a good stand with today's kids who check everything out on the computer.

The superstitions around the world are different and our culture and belief play a huge role in differences.

Not one or two people created these funny lies, I believe thousands of people came up with one superstition at a time and it was spread across the different continents.

Why are there superstitions?

This is the part I love talking about because a lot of people have wrong perspectives about superstitions. It is hard to believe but I will make you understand that superstitions were made for two reasons.

For fun: Many of the superstitions we have grown to know were just for fun and after observing it, you will end up laughing because it would end up being pointless.

A lot of us observed these funny superstitions when we were younger.

My experience:

Whenever we see a hawk flying, usually take a nail and hit it into the ground. The belief was that the nail would make the hawk stuck at one point, it looked like it worked in some instances because the hawk was struggling to move but we were wrong.

The point is that the birds were flying against the flow of the wind and it was difficult for them to move fast. When I finally got to understand as an adult, it made me laugh because I have been a fool all this while.

Aside from that, there are lots of funny like the examples @Mcyusuf shared in his article.

To create fear and discipline:

I am sure it sounds unbelievable that some superstitions were made to create fear in our hearts, they were made to prevent us from doing the things we shouldn't try.

I will give two examples.

I use to tease my mom that I would pee in the river someday while people are there and she always warned me not to try it. (I love going to the river when I was young, a week wouldn't go without me sneaking out to compete with my friends.)

I went to one event with my mom and it rained a lot at the event, my mom told me that the person celebrating his birthday offended a river and that's why water disrupt his event.

I was curious and asked what he could have done to make the river angry, she said the only way you can offend a river is by peeing in it.

I became scared and said to myself that I wouldn't dare to pee in the river again to prevent rain from disturbing my party when I grow. Silly me got to know the truth after many years, I was trying to scare some kids when an elderly neighbor laughed and told me it was just a trick to prevent kids from peeing in the river because in those days people drink from the river and it would be bad to pee inside.

Another instance was sitting on a mortar.

We use to have this mortar for pounding yam at home and I was very fond of sitting on it instead of using the stool chair.

My mom was always complaining about it but I was always forgetting the warning and on this fateful day, she said sitting on a mortar would make me dull in my academics.

That's one thing I don't like hearing because I don't joke with my grades at school. Since she said that, I always remember whenever I see mortar and I became fond of using the stool chair. The mortar is used for making food and shouldn't be sat on or used for dirty things, the superstition was just meant to prevent me from abusing the use of the mortar.

I also use these superstitions to scare my younger ones as well.

The power of superstition can't be looked down on, despite not having wings or legs, it has been about to travel across oceans.

Don't be surprised that the use of superstition to scare people is still very much effective in some parts of the world today and I have had conversations with elders that made me realize that some things we call superstitions are real but the world rarely crosses its boundaries with them.

Thanks for sharing and feel free to share the superstitions you were fooled with while young.

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