Common Superstitions

Etymology[edit]

Some cultures consider black catsto signify good or bad luck
The word superstition is first used in English in the 15th century, modelled after an earlier French superstition. The earliest known use as an English noun occurs inFriar Daw's Reply (ca. 1420), where the foure general synnes are enumerated asCediciouns, supersticions, þe glotouns, & þe proude. The French word, together with its Romance cognates (Italian superstizione, Spanish superstición, Portuguesesuperstição, Catalan superstició) continues Latin superstitio.
While the formation of the Latin word is clear, from the verb super-stare, "to stand over, stand upon; survive", its original intended sense is less clear. It can be interpreted as "‘standing over a thing in amazement or awe",^[7] but other possibilities have been suggested, e.g. the sense of excess, i.e. over scrupulousness or over-ceremoniousness in the performing of religious rites, or else the survival of old, irrational religious habits.^[8][9]
The earliest known use as a Latin noun occurs in Plautus, Ennius and later by Pliny, with the meaning of art of divination.^[10] From its use in the Classical Latin of Livyand Ovid (1st century BC), the term is used in the pejorative sense it still holds today, of an excessive fear of the gods or unreasonable religious belief, as opposed to religio, the proper, reasonable awe of the gods. Cicero derived the term from superstitiosi, lit. those who are "left over", i.e. "survivors", "descendants", connecting it with excessive anxiety of parents in hoping that their children would survive them to perform their necessary funerary rites.^[11] While Cicero distinguishes between religio and superstitio, Lucretius uses only the term religio^[12] (only with pejorative meaning). Throughout all of his work, he only distinguished between ratio andreligio.
The Latin verb superstare itself is comparatively young, being "perhaps not ante-Augustan", first found in Livy, and the meaning "to survive" is even younger, found in late or ecclesiastical Latin, for the first time in Ennodius. The use of the noun by Cicero and Horace thus predates the first attestation of the verb.^{[citation needed]} It doesn't exclude that the verb might have been created and used after the name.
The term superstitio, or superstitio vana "vain superstition", was applied in the 1st century to those religious cults in theRoman Empire which were officially outlawed. This concerned the religion of the druids in particular, which was described as a superstitio vana by Tacitus, and Early Christianity, outlawed as a superstitio Iudaica in AD 80 by Domitian.