Death and The Supernatural
- If you go to a funeral, you should throw salt over yourself before entering your home. This is believed to be cleansing.
- You should never sleep with your head in North position or you will have a short life (this is the way a body is laid out at funeral).
- Chopsticks should not be stuck upright into food, especially rice. Chopsticks are only stuck upright into rice in the bowl on the altar at a funeral. Likewise, food should never be passed chopstick-to-chopstick as this is done in a ceremony where bone fragments from cremated remains are placed in an urn. This is called "hotokebashi."
- Cutting your fingernails or toenails at night is bad luck. If you do so, it is believed that you will not be with your parents at their deathbed.
- You should never write a person's name in red ink. This is due to names on graves being red.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Superstitions
Famous quotes containing the words death and the, death and/or supernatural:
“I don’t know much about death and the sorriest lesson I’ve learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone’s dying.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one’s eyes. It becomes its symbol.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)