The Things We Still Won’t Do

I noticed it first in myself...

A cracked mirror in a motel bathroom somewhere off a two-lane highway. The glass had split cleanly from corner to corner, a thin lightning bolt frozen in silver. I stood there longer than I meant to, toothbrush in hand, doing the quiet math everyone pretends not to do. Seven years. That was the number, wasn’t it?

I don’t believe in curses. I don’t believe in bad luck. And yet, I covered the mirror with a towel before leaving the room.

This contradiction turns out to be remarkably common. We hesitate before walking under ladders. We flinch when salt spills across a table. We knock on wood mid-sentence, as if the thought itself might hear us. These gestures are so ordinary they’ve become invisible in ways. Small rituals passed off as habit or humor. But habits don’t usually come with consequences attached.

Superstitions are often described as leftovers. Cultural debris. Mental fossils from a less enlightened age. The assumption is that they survived accidentally, clinging to modern life like static. But when you line them up, really line them up... you start to notice something unsettling.

They haven’t faded. They’ve settled.

Across centuries and continents, the details change, but the behavior remains. Different gods. Different languages. Different fears. Same instincts. Same pauses. Same quiet sense that something unseen is paying attention. That was when this stopped being a harmless folklore assignment.

Following the Pattern

The deeper I went, the clearer the pattern became. Superstitions cluster around the same ideas again and again: thresholds, reflections, animals, numbers, accidents. Moments where one state becomes another. Places where control slips.

• A doorway.
• A mirror.
• A broken object.
• A spoken hope.

In early belief systems, these weren’t metaphors. They were danger zones. A mirror wasn’t decoration, it was a doubled self. A ladder wasn’t just a tool, it formed a triangle, a sacred shape associated with divinity and death. Trees weren’t wood, they were inhabited. Salt wasn’t seasoning, it was protection, currency, survival.

What struck me most wasn’t how irrational these beliefs were, but how consistent they were. Superstitions didn’t arise randomly. They emerged in societies facing uncertainty; plagues, famine, war, infant mortality. When explanation failed, ritual stepped in.

You couldn’t control the world, but you could control your behavior within it.

Over time, the gods faded. The spirits changed names. The stories thinned. But the physical acts remained. Crossing fingers. Knocking wood. Avoiding. Turning away. As if the body remembered something the mind had dismissed.

To understand why these beliefs persist, I stopped treating them as myths and started treating them as case files.

Case File #1: Black Cats

Few superstitions are as widely recognized, or as misunderstood, as the black cat.

Today, it’s shorthand for misfortune. A shadow crossing your path. An omen. But this association is surprisingly recent. In many early cultures, black cats weren’t feared at all. They were revered.

In ancient Egypt, cats were sacred animals, protectors of the home and guardians against disease. Their nocturnal nature wasn’t sinister, it was powerful. They could see what humans couldn’t. They moved between light and darkness without fear.

That perception carried into early European folklore, where cats, particularly black ones, were associated with protection and luck. Sailors kept them aboard ships. Farmers welcomed them into barns. A black cat crossing your path once meant something good was watching over you.

That changed abruptly during the Middle Ages.

As witch trials spread across Europe, anything associated with independence, mystery, or the unseen became suspect. Cats, with their glowing eyes and solitary habits, fit the profile too well. Black cats, hardest to see at night, became symbols of concealment and deception. They were labeled familiars, extensions of witches rather than animals in their own right.

When belief systems collapsed, symbols didn’t disappear. They were reassigned. The black cat didn’t lose power. It inherited guilt.

The superstition intensified rather than faded. To this day, black cats are less likely to be adopted from shelters. Fear, once attached, proved remarkably durable.

Case File #2: Broken Mirrors

The superstition surrounding broken mirrors feels almost universal, and for good reason: it targets something deeply personal.

In ancient cultures, reflections were not seen as images, they were extensions of the soul. To damage a reflection was to damage the self. Early mirrors were made of polished metal or water, fragile and rare. Seeing yourself clearly was an act loaded with significance.

The Roman Empire formalized the superstition. Romans believed life renewed itself in seven-year cycles. Injury to the soul required time to heal. Break a mirror, and you fractured more than glass, you disrupted the cycle.

What’s notable is how little this belief has softened. Even people who dismiss the superstition outright hesitate when faced with a shattered mirror. There’s a moment of silence. A pause. A sense that something irreversible has occurred.

Mirrors were never just objects. They were contracts. And contracts, once broken, carry consequences, whether we admit it or not.

Case File #3: Walking Under Ladders

At first glance, this one seems purely practical. Ladders are dangerous. Tools fall. Accidents happen. But the superstition predates construction safety by centuries.

In medieval Europe, ladders placed against walls formed triangles. A sacred shape representing the Holy Trinity. To pass through that triangle was an act of desecration. It wasn’t just unlucky. It was offensive.

There’s a darker layer as well. Gallows were often accessed by ladders. Walking beneath one meant passing through the space of execution, a symbolic brush with death.

Over time, the religious meaning faded. The fear didn’t.

Today, the superstition has softened into habit. People avoid ladders without knowing why. The original warning has been stripped of context, leaving behind behavior without explanation.

A ritual without a story still has power.

Case File #4: Knocking on Wood

Of all superstitions, this one feels the most casual. A joke. A reflex. But its origins are ancient and deliberate.

Early pagan cultures believed trees were inhabited by spirits. Wooden guardians bound to the land. Wood wasn’t inert, it was alive... To touch it was to invoke protection, to ask for silence, or to prevent misfortune from overhearing your intentions.

Knocking wasn’t random. It was communication.

As belief systems shifted, the spirits disappeared from the story. The action remained. We no longer remember who we’re knocking for, or why, but the instinct persists. When we speak hopes aloud, we still feel the need to follow it with a gesture. As if something is listening.

Case File #5: Spilled Salt and Threshold Warnings

Salt appears in more superstitions than almost any other substance, and for good reason. It preserved food. Prevented disease. Sustained life. To waste it was reckless.

In many cultures, spilled salt symbolized broken protection. Some believed it attracted malevolent forces. Others believed it invited betrayal. The response, throwing salt over the shoulder, wasn’t symbolic. It was defensive.

Thresholds carried similar weight. Doorways, crossroads, bridges; these were places where rules changed. Spirits lingered. Protection weakened. Many cultures buried charms beneath doorsteps to ward off intrusion.

We still hesitate in these places. We still pause. We don’t know why, but we do.

What the Superstitions Reveal

By themselves, these beliefs seem harmless. Quirky. Amusing. But together, they form a map.

Superstitions cluster around vulnerability. Around moments where certainty fails. Around places where humans once felt exposed, to disease, death, loss, the unknown. They are not relics of ignorance. They are evidence of memory.

Cultural scar tissue, passed down through generations. Proof that something frightened us enough to be encoded into behavior. Long after the danger faded, the warning remained.

We like to think we’ve outgrown these beliefs. That we’re immune to them. But immunity doesn’t look like obedience. And obedience is exactly what these rituals still command.

The Quiet Conclusion

Superstitions were never meant to explain the world. They were meant to protect us from it.

They filled the gaps where knowledge failed. They gave shape to invisible threats. They offered control in uncontrollable times. And once embedded, they proved nearly impossible to remove.

We don’t believe in them anymore. We just obey them. And perhaps that’s the most unsettling part, not that our ancestors feared the unknown, but that some part of us still does.

Quietly... Instinctively... Without asking who taught us to be afraid in the first place.