In The Golden Bough, a fascinating passage has introduced me to parallels in the riddance of evil across many cultures. I'm not talking about your basic run-of-the-mill Christian rituals, but those from all corners of the globe, including New Guinea, Japan, Russia, Africa, and the historically obsolete heathen cultures that predated Christianity. It astonishes me that no matter where you look, the prevailing civilizations practiced similar rituals and had the same supernatural suspicions.
One of the most curious of these superstitions is the idea that noise scares away evil spirits. This is practiced all over the world. In east Asia (Japan, Korea, China), fireworks were thought to scare them away during New Year celebrations. On Walpurgis Night, an April 30 holiday in central Europe, festivities were held to make as much noise as possible, to rid the local villages of evil spirits. Similar practices were held on Twelfth Night all over Europe, and in Ancient Greece and Rome. Many Indigenous tribes in Africa and the Americas also utilized noise to rid the air of their foul suspense.
For years I would listen to the radio while I was falling asleep. The comfort of noise became ritualized in my own life, a practice that opened my brain to many peaceful slumbers. Parents sing lullabies to children for a similar comfort. What I was unconsciously doing wasn't entirely clear at the time. I was using noise to dispel the discomfort of potentially harmful spirits bothering me during sleep. This had started years before any real attacks happened.
Another curious thing is that in many cultures, people will use a transference of evil to rid their houses of its suspected presence. If an object was believed to be the source of a spirit's haunting, it was either gotten rid of in some unusual fashion, or transferred ritualistically to another object, person, or even animal. I've also done this myself, without having any prior knowledge about these methods. When the attacks were bad, I threw some precious gems I'd collected in Arizona into the river near where I was living, hoping they were the source of the wretched demon's haunting. It didn't work, but the fact that I had tapped into some trans-human hex ritual reveals a lot about the common beliefs we all inherited, which might have a source on some psycho-genetic level.
It's not all that surprising when you consider we all came from the same tribe in Africa that started our collective mythology, and therefore must have had a pantheon so generalized that a vast amount of its interpretations filtered through the divergent lineages of mankind. What is surprising is that the resultant civilizations, which all sprung up tens of thousands of years after these migrations, all seem to have upheld the basic mythology of this parent tribe, without having been in contact with each other for centuries.
The Golden Bough illustrates many such parallels across all cultures and mythologies. My father believes we all inherited a single mythology that was continuously reinterpreted as migration took place. She's right of course; but who knew such a resonance could be so strong? It makes one realize we aren't so different after all.
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