Knock on Wood...Why??

I’m not superstitious about walking under ladders or breaking mirrors; no not me…heck I’ll even step on cracks with the best of them. I do however greatly fear “temping the fates” as I call it, and if you’ve every muttered the phrase “knock on wood” you too have feared the wrath of the fates.

My hubby likes to make fun of me because I freak out if he says things like “The baby will sleep great tonight.” Now if the fates torture you as they do me then you know that my baby will not sleep. Why? Because assuming is bad enough, but actually voicing your assumptions is the number one aggravator of the fates. You might suggest that a simple phrase “knock on wood” will ward off these fates that I speak of. Yes a lot of people think that, and a lot of people could be right, but in my dark and twisty mind those words only further anger the fates. In my dark and twisty mind they see right through my attempts to manipulate their powers and punish me further with not only a baby that won’t sleep, but a headache as well.
As you can imagine I often grow frustrated with my constant paranoia about the things I say. I thought about “knock on wood”, what makes knock on wood an effective guard from the powers that be…the fates. As it turns out…no one knows….spooky

Okay well, no one knows exactly where the phrase “knock on wood” came from. We do know that it derives from a religious belief…but which one?? It’s likely that it came from a pagan religion. The ancient druids believed in the power of the trees, they were even worshiped. The Ancient Chinese believed that the soul of a mother who died in childbirth dwelled into a nearby tree. Even the ancient Greeks revered trees, like the oak which was sacred to Zeus or the Myrtle sacred to Aphrodite. Naturally Christianity adopted the phrase later on, claiming that the phrase referred to the wood of the cross. There’s also a very interesting Jewish version of the story, during the Spanish Inquisition persecuted Jews fled to synagogues which were made of wood. They used a coded knock to enter, this system saved thousands of lives. It became common to knock on wood for good luck.