Luck or White Lie....Fingers Crossed Draft

Everyone, and I do mean everyone, at some point in their life have had a superstition. For me, the one I still find myself doing even as an adult is crossing my fingers for luck. Especially when I'm sitting waiting to see a score, I'm crossing my fingers for good luck. I don't actually believe that crossing my fingers will give me luck but it's a habit I had as a child and still have not broken today.

Have you ever wondered though where the concept of crossing your fingers came from? According to www.wisegeek.com, one meaning of crossed fingers could be bringing good luck and warding off evil spirits or witches. The origins have been hard to find and it is believed to have begun during a time period between Pre-Christianity and Early Christianity. While researching, I came across information that I had never heard before. There were those people who believed in "sacred geometry" and they thought that gentle spirits lived in intersection of crosses and this required two people. Seiyaku.com also mentions this theory as a possibility and they refer to the intersection as the "Solar Cross". One person would hold out his or her index finger while the other would put his or her own index finger to form a cross. These people then used this method to make wishes.

The next theory that WiseGeek talks about is one of my favorites. It deals with secret societies and just seems to resemble one of my favorite games Assassin's Creed about a secret society. Christianity became an outlawed religion during it's early history. It's followers had to form a secret society and to protect their identities they had to develop secret hand signs to be able to recognize each other. Talk about insanely cool!! I mean it would be horrible to have to resort to secret meeting in order to avoid getting caught and quite possibly tortured. But the idea of secret societies and conspiracies makes interesting fodder for a fantasy novel (keeping that idea for later).

Another theory that interested me was when WiseGeek talked about the possible origin of the modern day version of crossing fingers. They talked about the Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1457. Individuals on both sides of the army needed all the luck they could get and archers would have crossed his fingers and quickly prayed before pulling the bowstring back.

To break away from the theories of luck and warding off evil, most of us as children would cross our fingers when telling a "white lie". According to Wikipedia, this could have sprung up from the belief that the "Christian cross"could possibly save a person who told a lie from going to hell. Which brings me to the next thing I would like to address about fallacies and superstitions affecting logic. In the meantime, enjoy this video I happened upon that has lyrics pertaining to crossing fingers for good luck:

So why do we still cross our fingers for luck or to "cancel" a promise? We know that superstitions such as this can affect our logic yet we still do them. BF Skinner, a behavioral psychologist, studying supposed superstitious behavior in pigeons. His theory has been adapted to explain superstition in humans. Basically this would mean that we continue to practice or "believe" in superstitions because of two main reasons: 1) the person thinks that by continuously practicing the superstition it will eventually work; or 2) the practice of the superstition has coincided with an event or result and could continue to do so either at random or continuously. Which makes sense if it happened as a child. If I'm remembering correctly, I observed someone else crossing their fingers in several instances and as a kid I thought that it was magic because they seemed to always get what they wanted. And as a child, we are extremely influenced easily by what we see or hear.

Here's another video for you to enjoy about superstitions: