The Elizabethan Years: An age Cursed with Superstition
...ng “God Bless You” when a person sneezes is second nature to most people today, but the practice actually came from the belief that when someone sneezed, it gave the devil a chance to enter their body. By blessing them, the evil spirit would not be able to stay in that place. Every child plays “Ring around the Rosey” at some point in their childhood, but not many of them know the origin of the game. It actually comes from plague times when people carried flowers or “posies” in their pockets to ward off the deadly disease. One of the biggest superstitions today involves the number thirteen. This number is seen as bad luck to many people, not excluding the Elizabethan public who came to believe the number represented evil and began using thirteen knots to tie the noose of someone about to be hanged. A lot of these superstitions also had religious undertones on the premise of good versus evil that went along with their stories. Good and evil were the basis behind the rise of the beliefs in superstition during this time period. The English people thought that the ideas of good and evil needed to maintain a balance in the spiritual and natural world. This balance would keep the world in an ordered structure and keep people healthy and safe. However, if the balance was disrupted the world would become chaotic with terrible results. The smallest procedures could throw off this balance at anytime. For instance, stirring a pot counter-clockwise was believed to be extremely unlucky, not only making the food go bad, but ...