the “Calcutta Review” thinks this notion as old as the Greeks of the time of
Xenophon, as appears from a well known passage in Chap. ii. Book iii. of the
Anabasis: Ἐπεὶ περί σωτηρὶας ἡμῶν λεγόντον οἰωνὸς τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ σωτῆρος
ἐφάνη. Sneezing among the Hindus, if it occur behind your back, is regarded as
so unfavourable an omen, that they at once abandon the work on which at the
time they may have been engaged.
Various but not satisfactory attempts have been made to explain these customs.
Thus, the Mohammedan accounts for his “Al hamdu-l Allah” by the tradition
that, when the breath of life was breathed into the nostrils of Adam, he sneezed,
and immediately uttered those words. While in Europe the custom of blessing
the sneezer has been traced to the occurrence in Italy in the middle ages of some
fatal epidemic, of which one of the symptoms was sneezing.
The superstition which regards as a favourable omen the throbbing of the eye,
was well known to the ancient Greeks, is common in England, and flourishes all
over India. In England, it is the man’s right eye and the woman’s left that is
auspicious; and so it was in the Greece of Theocritus, and so it is in India and
Persia.
The curious superstition that ghosts are visible to dogs, to which we find an
allusion in Homer’s Odyssey, still flourishes in India. It may have originated in
the place given to the dog in the mythology of both Greek and Hindu, or in the
position enjoyed by the watch-dog among all the shepherd peoples of the world.
The belief belongs to the Semitic as well as the Aryan races; and its true origin
after all may be the apparently causeless howling of the dog at night,—the time
when “spirits walk abroad.” Whatever the ground of the belief, it is probably in
itself the cause of the superstition that the howling of dogs presages death or
misfortune.
Another singular coincidence of this kind is furnished “by the custom of spitting
on the breast as a charm against fascination.” In his “Greek Antiquities,” Potter
notes that it was an ancient Greek custom to spit three times on the breast at the
sight of a madman; and Theocritus has,—
τοιάδε μυθίζοισα τρὶς εἰς ἑὸν ἔπτυσε κόλπον.“Precisely the same effect is attributed to the act among the Aryan inhabitants of
India, where its threefold repetition is also insisted on. No sort of reason that we
can imagine, can be found for this belief; and in this case the idea is a complex
one.