Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Breaking a mirror is said to bring seven years of bad luck [1]; A bird or flock of birds going from left to right () [citation needed]Certain numbers: The number 4.Fear of the number 4 is known as tetraphobia; in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, the number sounds like the word for "death".
Examples of omens from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493): natural phenomena and unnatural births. Manuscript of the mid-nineteenth century, possibly of Sgaw Karen origin, shows various appearances in the sun, the moon, clouds, etc., and indicates the primarily bad omens these appearances foretell. Explanations in English were added to this ...
A serpent or dragon consuming its own tail, it is a symbol of infinity, unity, and the cycle of death and rebirth. Pentacle: Mesopotamia: An ancient symbol of a unicursal five-pointed star circumscribed by a circle with many meanings, including but not limited to, the five wounds of Christ and the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, and soul).
Sailors believed that certain symbols and talismans would help them in facing certain events in life; they thought that those symbols would attract good luck or bad luck in the worst of the cases: Sailors, at the constant mercy of the elements, often feel the need for religious images on their bodies to appease the angry powers that caused ...
The anthropologist Lynne Isbell has argued that, as primates, the serpent as a symbol of death is built into our unconscious minds because of our evolutionary history.. Isbell argues that for millions of years snakes were the only significant predators of primates, and that this explains why fear of snakes is one of the most common phobias worldwide and why the symbol of the serpent is so ...
Items and symbols such as crosses, crucifixes, silver bullets, wild roses and garlic were believed to ward off or destroy vampires. Peisistratus hung the figure of a kind of grasshopper before the Acropolis of Athens as apotropaic magic. [9] In Roman art, envy was thought to bring bad luck to the
Symbol Culture Notes 7: Western, Japanese [3] [4] 8: Chinese, Japanese Sounds like the Chinese word for "fortune". See Numbers in Chinese culture#Eight. Used to mean the sacred and infinite in Japanese. A prime example is using the number 8 to refer to Countless/Infinite Gods (八百万の神, Yaoyorozu no Kami) (lit. Eight Million Gods).
A superstition is "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation" or "an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition."