Word Finder - superstition

definition

A belief or beliefs, not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, that events may be influenced by one's behaviour in some magical or mystical way.

definition

Excessive nicety; overscrupulousness.

This superstition dominated Scotland.

He had fits of superstition which in healthier moments he despised.

The young king regarded him with an affection which the superstition of the time attributed to witchcraft.

The old Hebrew prohibition of graven images was surely based on a like superstition, so far as it was not merely due to the physical impossibility for nomads of heavy statues that do not admit of being carried from camp to camp and from pasture to pasture.

He had made a copy of St Paul's epistles and committed them to memory, and from this arsenal of Scripture he attacked the unrighteousness of the state no less than the superstition of the Church.

Superstition also entered largely into the choice of remedies.

It must be remembered that his training was not altogether bad, although superstition entered so largely into it.

The church and church theology, to whose guidance the masses now surrendered themselves, took in along with them their superstition, their polytheism, their magic, their myths, and all the machinery of religious witchcraft.

He maintained that old prejudices would disappear with the progress of knowledge, and that superstition and mechanical devices of salvation would be insensibly abandoned.

Religion began in fear - as if it were no more than a lying superstition.

The philosophers themselves, no doubt, still lived on the knowledge they repudiated; but the masses were trained to a superstition with which the Christian church, as the executor of Neoplatonism, had to reckon and contend.

The removal of the ancient temple was undoubtedly intended when the Erechtheum was built, but superstition and popular feeling may have prevented its demolition and the removal of the, 6avov to the new edifice.

Dante refers to the shadowless spectre of Virgil, and the folklore of many European countries affords examples of the prevalence of the superstition that a man must be as careful of his shadow as of his body.

He was disgusted with the brutality of English manners, which he paints in no flattering colours, and he found pedantry and superstition as rampant in Oxford as in Geneva.

But the highest developments of priestly influence are hardly separable from something of magical superstition, the opus operatum of the priest has the power of a sorcerer's spell.

Being open to objection on grounds both of superstition and of irreverence, these customs were gradually put down by the council of Laodicea in A.D.

While in Egypt he became more and more imbued with superstition, consulting astrologers and allowing himself to be flattered into a belief that he possessed a divine power which could work miracles.

It is possible that the whole may be merely a reminiscence of a superstition similar to the familiar werwolf stories.

On the same bench of a Calcutta college sit youths trained up in the strictest theism, others indoctrinated in the mysteries of the Hindu trinity and pantheon, with representatives of every link in the chain of superstition - from the harmless offering of flowers before the family god to the cruel rites of Kali, whose altars in the most civilized districts of Bengal, as lately as the famine of 1866, were stained with human blood.

The practice of magic, superstition, &c., are also frequently referred to as sacrilege, especially during the long struggle with German heathenism.

Chrysippus did his best to reconcile the superstition with his own rational doctrine of strict causation.

Scaevola, following Panaetius, explained that the prudence of statesmen had established this public institution in the service of order midway between the errors of popular superstition and the barren truths of enlightened philosophy.

Antoninus may perhaps be explained in harmony with the older Stoic teaching; but, when taken in connexion with the rise of Neoplatonism and the revival of superstition, they are certainly significant.

In some of them he attacks superstition and philosophical error with the sharpness of his wit; in others he merely paints scenes of modern life.

If not intended from the first for purposes of divination, it was so used both before and after Confucius, and on that account it was exempted, through the superstition of the emperor of the Ts'in dynasty, from the flames.

The Cheese Well may have been a pagan shrine in the past, whose veneration has fallen to superstition.

At the same time a class of men arose interested in these forms for their own sake, professional lawyers Bence, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."

Another factor besides climate which has exerted a powerful influence on dress - more perhaps on what is commonly regarded as " jewelry " as distinct from " clothing " - is superstition.

They reveal to us a kindly and cheerful soul, well versed in the literary accomplishments of the period, but without any strength of intellectual grasp and peculiarly prone to superstition.

Born of a family of priest-physicians, and inheriting all its traditions and prejudices, Hippocrates was the first to cast superstition aside, and to base the practice of medicine on the principles of inductive philosophy.

The Christians were attacked on slanderous charges of superstition and secret abominations, but not as a church.

The popular faith was full of heathenish superstition strangely blended with the higher ideas which were the inheritance left to Israel by men like Moses and Elijah; but the common prophets accepted all alike, and combined heathen arts of divination and practices of mere physical enthusiasm with a not altogether insincere pretension that through their professional oracles the ideal was being maintained of a continuous divine guidance of the people of Yahweh.

It is a problem how to reconcile his ignorance, his weakness, his superstition, his crude notions, his erroneous observations, his ridiculous influences and theories, with his grasp of method, his lofty views of the true scope of medicine, his lucid statements, his incisive and epigrammatic criticisms of men and motives.

We must bear in mind that he was no cold systematic thinker, but an Oriental visionary, brought up in crass superstition, and without intellectual discipline; a man whose nervous temperament had been powerfully worked on by ascetic austerities, and who was all the more irritated by the opposition he encountered, because he had little of the heroic in his nature.

The piles of granite rocks somewhat in the shape of cromlechs which are found scattered about this province, and especially along the western edge of the Hondsrug, have long been named Hunebedden, from a popular superstition that they were "Huns' beds."

But to these were quickly added subjects of allegory, of classical learning, of witchcraft and superstition and of daily life; scenes of the parlour and the cloister, of the shop, the field, the market and the camp; and lastly portraits of famous men, with scenes of court life and princely pageant and ceremony.

Penetrated by the conviction that ignorance was the worst of the inveterate evils of old Russia, a pitiless enemy of superstition of every sort, a reformer by nature, overflowing with energy and resource, and with a singularly lucid mind armed at all points by a farreaching erudition, Prokopovich was the soul of the reforming party after the death of Peter the Great.

To the same effect, the synod of Chalon-sur-Saone (813) reprobated the superstition which was wedded to the pilgrimage (c. 13); and it would be easy to collect similar judgments, delivered in every centre of medievalism.

The comic poets satirized them, and Plato and Demosthenes inveighed against them; but they continued to spread, with all their fervid enthusiasm, their superstition and their obscene practices, wide among the people, whose religious cravings were not satisfied with the purely external religions of Hellenism.

But this version of the idea of Antichrist, hostile to the Jews and better expressing the relation of Christianity to the Roman empire, was prevented from obtaining an absolute ascendancy in Christian tradition by the rise of the belief in the ultimate return of Nero, and by the absorption of this outcome of pagan superstition into the Jewish-Christian apocalyptic conceptions.

Some thought him Elijah or one of the ancient prophets returned to earth - a suggestion based on popular tradition; others said He was John the Baptist risen from the dead - the superstition of Herod who had put him to death.

The supposition that the tree was the source of Christ's crown of thorns gave rise doubtless to the tradition current among the French peasantry that it utters groans and cries on Good Friday, and probably also to the old popular superstition in Great Britain and Ireland that ill-luck attended the uprooting of hawthorns.

The result is instructive when we turn to the numerous serpent myths and legends from the Old World and the New, to the stray notices in old writers, or to the fragmentary scraps of popular superstition everywhere.

According to a common Indian belief a wealthy man who dies without an heir returns to guard his wealth in the form of a serpent, and Italian superstition supposed that to find a serpent's skin brought good luck (Leland) .2 No singular preference for jewels on the part of serpents will explain the belief, and creatures like the jackdaw which have this weakness do not enjoy this prominence in folk-lore.

Superstition and stupidity hedged them in on every side, so that sorcery and magic seemed the only means of winning power over nature or insight into mysteries surrounding human life.

The medieval Jews also held that there is a cardiac demon in wine which takes possession of drunken men; and the Mahommedan prohibition of wine-drinking is based on a similar superstition.

It appals the reader with its irregularity of treatment, its variations of style, and its abrupt transitions from the spiritual to the crude and trivial, and from superstition to the purest insight.

Against superstition, fanaticism and priestcraft they protested unceasingly.

Grieved at the ignorance and superstition which the remissness of the clergy permitted to flourish in the neighbouring parishes, he used every year to visit the most neglected parts of Northumberland, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Westmorland and Cumberland; and that his own flock might not suffer, he was at the expense of a constant assistant.

The people exhibit every stage of human progress, and every type of human enlightenment and superstition from the educated classes to primitive hill tribes.