Superstition is one of the coarser of the brushes used to tar the unbelievers, or is it just the believers in the wrong credo? The Religion of Fools: Superstition Past and Present is a seminal contribution to our understanding of this fascinating phenomenon and, much to its eternal credit, it begins right at the beginning. Smith’s introduction is concise and engaging, a polished piece of writing that sets the tone for the overall cohesiveness of the collection. The essays arise out of a conference held in the University of Essex in 2005 sponsored by Past and Present journal. The collection is published here as a supplement. The temporal reach is panoramic, crossing two millennia, from Classical Greece to Cameroon. The idea undergoes some interesting inflexions from its rather innocuous origins in antiquity. Superstitio, Richard Gordon explains, simply meant excessive religious practice to classical authors like Cicero. It has become an irritatingly persistent and mostly pejorative label, certainly from the point of view of a folklorist, more about that momentarily. For classical authors it often meant non-Roman religion and developed connotations of foreign religions or practices. St. Augustine of Hippo influenced the developing sense within Christendom of a pact with the devil. This was reinforced by Thomas Aquinas who firmed up the association with pacts, implicit and explicit, with demons. Superstitiosus, the Latin adjective, describes divination. Just when you feel that this collection might put the issue to bed there is a slightly discomfiting early assertion that superstition “lives on.” This assertion echoes much evolutionary argument about past and present: it is an antiquated phenomenon but it survives, whether you feel that this is fortunate (for old school folklorists) or whether you think it is unfortunate (for new school evangelists of progress). This is no harm as it adds an interesting twist to the plot.

With the emergence of canon law and ecclesiastical courts around the twelfth century what was understood as “religious deviance” was increasingly regulated. After the fourteenth century the Church was concerned with the uses made of artefacts such as amulets, charms, spells, healing potions and, by the fifteenth, “the idea of witchcraft as a diabolic conspiracy, complete with Sabbaths, sexual congress with the devil and marks of the devil, was fully elaborated” (21). Witch trials peaked during 1580-1620 in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Reason came to organize the domain of Catholic theology. The trials declined in the seventeenth century, and the literature condemning superstition increased in the first phase of the Enlightenment, between 1680 and 1725. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was published in 1791, and superstition became synonymous with resistance to progress. Reason and education were celebrated as antidotes. “The Internationale,” Eugène Pottier’s famous rallying cry written for the Paris commune of 1871, exhorts people to cast aside their “superstitions” (27). The Enlightenment commitment to rationalism was blended with a materialism and opposed, in Engel’s mind, to idealism. Superstition becomes a misplaced assumption about causality derived ultimately from an erroneous understanding of nature.

In one definition it is a fairly finite inventory of incidents or coincidents: touching wood, crossing your fingers, walking under ladders, the number thirteen, faith healers, evil spirits, and so on. In another, however, it appears to have more far-reaching implications that complicate the picture. These are “matters of intellectual conviction,” systems of belief, worldview, cosmology, writ large. Unfortunately the latter tend to bear the brunt of some hardnosed scientific pooh-poohing. They can be traditional or indigenous knowledge or iterations of such knowledge that have travelled or perhaps lent themselves to the contemporary marketplace for one reason or another: think of alternative medicines, healing, feng shui and so on. S. A. Smith, one of the editors, sets the scene as a dialectic in Weberian terms somewhere between enchantment and disenchantment. Having worked as a historian in the Soviet Union and China he was struck by the regimes’ control of “superstition” and its spread subsequent to the dissolution of those polities. Irrationality, as conceptualized by the conventions of Cartesian-Newtonian foundationalism, lies at the heart of the debate. This may be more of a classification of knowledge than a description of it: it may be a legitimation of one knowledge system over another, delegitimated one. It carries an abiding sense of faulty or a non-naturalistic understanding of cause and effect, a kind of premodern or Cyclopean cognition. Before the Enlightenment it was bad religion, afterwards it was bad science. The folklorist is overshadowed by the scientist whose alchemy of marvel and profitable mantra of proof, proof, proof is a winning combination every time in the shop window of corporate universities. A new non-stick chewing gum is news and money in the bank, throwing urine (the “master”) as a protection is unlikely to catch on again or repay the bond holders though its uses are not unfounded even for the utilitarian.

Folklorists may find Alexandra Walsham’s article particularly interesting. The discipline of folklore developed “within a fashionable evolutionary paradigm, magic, religion, and science being seen, respectively, as successive stages of human cognitive development” (30). E. P. Tylor (1832-1917) considered these as “survivals” and was followed by Sir Laurence Gomme (1853-1916) and Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1907-1922), viewing superstition as primitive thought. This trail of thought has been pursued by luminaries such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Peter Burke has pointed out interestingly that empiricism is derived from the English term for healer. The knowledge of many practitioners was not as inferior as you could immediately deduce from such a one-way-street approach. In Ivy’s essay the role of the more autocratic wing of nationalism in the historic configuration of our modern understanding of folklore is informative. It is engaging to consider the choices that Greek nationalists made (when they still had choices presumably) between rites linking them back to a more ancient Greece and their ambitions as a modern Christian nation. This is a trope that pervades much European discourse. Belief sometimes became a vector for national sentiment. Belief in exotika (things outside or beyond), or exotica, sustained visions of indigeneity in oppositional discourse but this was often partial. Questions of cultural transmission, valorization of the unwritten, discoveries of the marginal, and textual constructions of the “folk” are replica constituents of modern nationalisms throughout the world (32). I remain unconvinced whether this can be applied so readily to all nationalist discourse but it is challenging and refreshing. If adhered to too blindly paradigms are susceptible to implosion from era to era as the institutional pendulum swings from approval to disapproval. In some countries the “formal” religions now appear more “superstitious” and “dark” than the traditionally deluded, opening up new possibilities for further inquiry.

The Reformation saw an onslaught on superstition in Protestantism. On each end of the spectrum, from the Christian to the non-Christian. It was used by defenders of orthodoxy to “police the bounds of acceptable knowledge” (11). Contributors differ on exactly this point, a facet that lends the book an interesting array of perspectives. Some deny that it can be considered a phenomenon that actually exists. Others treat it more as a category of ascription or a label. In a somewhat reductionist explanation Hugh Bowden says that the deisidaimonia (literally, fear of the gods) of ancient Greece would be considered as obsessive-compulsive disorder. It could be argued in this case that psychology is no more a legitimate science than astrology. The temptation often is to try and translate unresolved or incongruous concepts into the orthodox canon of perception.

T. H. Barrett’s chapter discusses the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). Taoist elites drive to suppress “licentious shrines” where animal sacrifice was sometimes practiced. It tended on the whole to absorb local deities into the orthodox pantheon (18). Protestants, although their clerics condemned charms and spells, used incombustible portraits of Luther. Alison Rowland points out that a distinction was drawn between miracles and “marvels.” Marvels were understood as preternatural events rather than supernatural but included the work of demons or angels (22). In Japan the local is often regulated for the national while in China, as Barrett shows, nationalism was more sympathetic to the Enlightenment principles of science and democracy (35). Temples became schools, the modern word for superstition, mixin, means confused belief and was borrowed from Japan. Superstition was understood as feudal. The New Culture Movement (1915-1920s) sought to, as it saw it, modernize the local religion and Confucian rituals in line with Western criteria. The final chapters by Peter Geschiere, Basile Ndjio, and Lauren Derby, deal in good chronological order with the late-twentieth century. In Africa, Latin America, and Asia global capitalism has revitalized what Todd Sanders and Harry West call “occult cosmologies,” ones that view the world as enchanted, animated by secret, unseen, or mysterious powers (37). This is modernity’s “dark Other.” In return, varied occult idioms speak of gluttony, power, and suddenly acquired wealth. Ndjio says it makes eminent sense for Cameroonians to conclude that this in itself has some supernatural origin when people are struggling to make sense of the serendipity of economic discourse. More could be done to highlight the absence of logic in the modernists’ (capitalist) manifesto. Superstition has been variously understood as immoderation, excess, vain and empty belief, folly or irrationality, illicit or heterodox. Does it remind anyone of anything? Much economics, an abacus of give and take, is casually understood or misunderstood in allegorical terms as “booming” or being “depressed.” Here the discussion might have learned from the experience and knowledge already gained in the early chapters but the examples are brilliant and illuminating. Like many broad categories it has a dominant rhetorical dimension and is best viewed from a distance; once magnified it tends to slip from view. That need not necessarily be a bad thing for many of us. Some see it, a little worryingly it must be said, as the fossilized thought of some genus of contemporary Neanderthal; others, and I exhort readers to do so also, see it as “ethnoscience” or knowledge (when ideas) or system of thought.

This book is well written and researched as well as being broad and philosophical, the best kind of book. It will interest scholars across the humanities and they are encouraged to read it. For folklorists it should become a standard reference.

WORKS CITED

Burke, Peter. 2000. A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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[Review length: 1734 words • Review posted on December 7, 2011]