MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WALKING last week through the strait orifice that leads from Fleet Street to the Inner Temple, I observed a tall ladder propped against a building under repair. The feet of the ladder projected across the alley, leaving but a tiny passage between themselves and the opposite wall. As I approached this obstruction I was shocked to observe that the jurisconsults, returning to their chambers for the luncheon interval, hesitated when they approached the ladder: instead of taking the direct course under the ladder's span, they stepped sideways and walked round the by-pass provided at its feet. I paused for a moment and watched with dismay this stream of learned men returning from the Law Courts to their luncheon. There were old men and young men ; there were solicitors' clerks carrying brief-cases and barristers' clerks carrying things in blue baize bags ; there were youthful aspirants fresh from the univer- sity with neat butterfly collars and pin-striped legs ; there were K.C.s and King's Proctors and Remembrancers and Benchers and Serjeants and solicitors and judges, and even, for all I could tell, members of the Chancery Bar. Yet one and all, when they saw that ladder, did they pause and walk aside. " Here," I said to myself, " are men of profound erudition who have been trained and conditioned to apply the principles of reason to the vicissi- tudes of human life. Yet when they encounter a ladder, they are afraid to walk under it, and will, at inconvenience to themselves, make a wide detour in order to avert the evil eye. If I were to stop and ask one of them the reason for this ridiculous' conduct, they would titter foolishly and reply that they did not wish to have paint or bricks dropped upon their heads. Yet even as they said this, they would know that they were telling a lie. Their motives are not motives of security ; they are superstitious motives. Tanturn religio potuit sufulere malorum."
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I have no idea at all why a learned judge, returning from the Law Courts to his Chambers, should regard a ladder as taboo. I am prepared to believe that the Egyptians were wont to repre- sent a dead Pharaoh mounting on as ladder to heaven in the semblance of Osiris. I am even prepared to believe that the Jewish theologians, afraid lest their students might become in- fected by foreign myths, laid it down that ladders, in their mythology, should be taboo. In the twentieth chapter of Exodus some supplementary recommendations are added to the Ten Commandments, and among them the injunction in verse 26: " Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon." I find it difficult to sup- pose that members of the Bench or Bar, on returning to luncheon, would call to mind this somewhat obscure passage from Exodus ; yet even if they did so, they would, with their acute powers of analysis, realise that the prohibition was aimed, not at people who went under ladders, but at people who climbed up them. Moreover, if disturbed by the threat implied, they might, with their wonderful faculty for quoting relevant precedents, reply that when Jacob went to sleep near Beer-sheba he had a dream about angels ascending and descending a ladder, and that this dream was regarded by the ,patriarch as a good, not as a bad, omen. In fact, he celebrated the occasion by pouring oil upon the Stone of Destiny which he had used as his pillow. To any legal mind these two Biblical examples would seem to cancel each other out. Ladders, it must be admitted, did play a signi- ficant part in the cult of Mithras. But what English lawyer need be frightened of encountering Ahriman, or even Osiris, at luncheon-time on June 29th, 1951, in King's Bench Walk?
* * * * Magic irritates me, and I defy taboos. I will cross the street in order to walk under a ladder and thus demonstrate to my fellow-citizens that enlightenment is more than a mere phrase.- If I find that we are thirteen at dinner I am always the first to rise. I am not given to killing magpies, or bringing May into the house, or cherishing horseshoes ; but if 1 desired to do any of these things 1 should not be deterred by any superstitious inhibi- , tions. In fact, I have no faith at all in necromancy, alectryo- mancy cledonomancy, axinomancy, coscinomancy, catoptroJ mancy, extispicy or hepatoscopy. It is for me a sad reflection that men of courage and education can ever have been influenced by such barbaric forms of divination. When 1 consider the number of taboos that man has invented in order further to corn., plicate an already intricate existence, 1 experience an almost Lucretian indignation. Why should men and women, in different localities and at different periods, have regarded as unlucky such things as crossed knives, white horses, black cats, faces, hair; personal names, broken mirrors, Fridays, the number thirteen and-the parents of twins? For some of these taboos there are obvious religious explanations, but the others confound even the knowledge of Sir James Frazer. Why were the unhappy Kings of Ireland not allowed on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays to do things that they were obliged to do on Wednesdays and Thurs., days? Why were they not permitted, when visiting Dublin, to sleep on the left side? Why had they to avoid meeting a piebald horse? No wonder that, preoccupied as they were with this, tangle of ritual, they had not time to rule their provinces.
The Greeks had an excellent name for superstition ; theyl called it " Deisidaimonia " or " dread of deities." Superstition was rightly condemned by all the later humanists. Plutarch, that most intelligent man, describes it in his Moralia as" an emotional idea and an assumption productive of a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a man." Cicero, although himself an augur, has in the De Divinatione poked heavy Tusculan, fun at the auspices and auguries in which the Romans, although with diminishing conviction, still indulged. He is specially con- temptuous about the sacred chickens who, if they gobbled their food greedily, were deemed to have provided' a " triptidiwn " or sacred omen. His brother Quintus is sharply snubbed for sug- gesting that Crassus was defeated and killed by the Parthians because he ignored such warnings. Cicero rightly esteemed it unworthy of a civilised man to imagine that high destinies could be affected by the feeding habits of birds obtained from a poulterer. "Hoc igitur," he remarks magnificently, although in another context, " per gailinas luppiter tantae civitati sigma?* dabat? "—" Do you really believe that Jupiter would have used chickens to manifest his will to so mighty a State? " How comas it, he asks moreover, that different countries interpret the condi- tions of the entrails of animals in different ways? The man who in Rome would be precluded from embarking on a voyage or marrying his daughter because a goat's liver was found to show a cleft or fissure, would in Armenia be much encouraged by this unusual symptom. " Myths," Cicero concludes,' " can have no place in philosophy."
I agree with Burke that " superstition is the religion of feeble minds," but what puzzles me is that so many men and women, whose minds are certainly not feeble, should still be frightened if a mirror smashes or they upset the salt. There are, of course,' certain taboos that are not ,mythical but based upon scientific; observation. It is demonstrably necessary, if one has uttered, some careless boast, to strike the table three times sharply, to,4 murmur the German word " Unberufen," and thus to avert the penalties of hubris. It is equally essential not to see the new, moon for the first time through glass, other than that provided for optical purposes. It is prudent and pious to greet the first of every month by murmuring the word " Rabbits " reverently to, oneself. It is highly dangerous to walk on cracks in pavements,' Such practices do not derive from superstition ; they are essential precautions handed down to us by the wisdom of our ancestors
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