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, death and/or supernatural:
“In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness ... every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies: one is punished for success. This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is—ultimately—impossible.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)
“The child who enters life comes not with knowledge or intent,
So those who enter death must go as little children sent.
Nothing is known. But I believe that God is overhead;
And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead.”
—Mary Mapes Dodge (1831–1905)
“One writer says that Brown’s peculiar monomania made him to be “dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.” Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)