SALT-CELLAR SUPERSTITIONS.

Waikato Independent, Volume XXII, Issue 2576, 25 July 1922, Page 7

SALT-CELLAR SUPERSTITIONS.

The superstition connected with the spilling of salt has the same origin as the one concerning thirteen people at a table—the Last Supper. But there is no foundation for it in history. None of the accounts of the last Supper records any spilling of salt by Judas, and it is doubtful whether Leonardo da Vinci, in his famous fresco, intended to attach any significance to the overturned salt-cellar beyond indicating mere nervousness on the part of Judas. Leonardo’s painting having been accepted as an historic replica of the Supper, it is only natural that the incident, of the overturned salt should have been implanted in our minds as an integral part of the, meal, and that it should have been connected with Judas and his subsequent ill-fortune. The custom of throwing salt over the left shoulder in order to dissipate any evil influence has an origin which antedates Leonardo by hundreds of years. The pagan Romans considered that salt was sacred to the Penates, the household gods, and that to spill it during a meal, would incur their wrath—not upon the spiller, but upon the person in whose direction it was spilled. Casting a pinch of salt over the left shoulder—the shoulder of evil—was an act of politeness, for it was supposed to lift the curse from the person towards whom the salt fell and to fasten it upon the spiller himself.

It was probably this ancient Latin belief which caused Leonardo da Vinci to include the overturned salt in his painting of the Last Supper,