Superstitious People - Type 1: The innocent, illiterate rural Villager

Last week I wrote a lot about superstition and superstitious people and even about the question whether superstitious people actually and really believe in all the nonsense that they tell others to believe in. The answer was no, but they are scared that it could be true anyway or just don’t have the courage to object to what elder people say. I felt that a little bit more clarification was needed to describe the mental situation of a superstitious person. I believe we can separate them in five different types of superstitious people, at least speaking for India. Here is the first one:

The superstitious rural Villager

This is the one type of person whom I cannot blame at all for believing in superstition because he honestly doesn’t know that it is nonsense. There are still many places in India where people don’t have much access to good education with which they could learn about science, about the reasons why things are as they are. Let’s not even talk about the quality of education, a lot of people have not even been to any school! They are completely illiterate and can count the number of books which they have seen in their lives on one hand. They know how to work on their fields and grow plants of which they live but they don’t know anything about how the earth turns around the sun, why water evaporates to steam or how diseases spread.

They are still at that stage where I believe superstition and religion actually started. They see a sun eclipse and obviously get afraid because suddenly everything is dark. A priest comes and reads out from a scripture that God does that when people committed a lot of sins or that a demon is fighting with the sun. That religious person tells them that they have to do a ceremony against it, pray and avoid any sins, only then this can be reverted and light will return to the world.

In the same way they believe chicken pox is the anger of a goddess and you cannot do anything against it with medicine – you can only pray and do rituals to appease the goddess.

That is exactly what they will do because they are afraid of the things they cannot understand. Religion knows how to take advantage of this and introduces ways to make people dependent on it, fooling them into believing that their rituals and ceremonies have an effect even on natural events.

These people are like frogs in a well, only knowing the small world that they are living in, not aware of the big space that surrounds them. They thus believe what their parents believed, who were just as illiterate as they are. When they listen to their parents, it makes sense what they are saying. When they listen to the religious preachers, it seems clear and very easy to just follow what they are told.

They use the examples that they get and create further superstitious rules whenever necessary. If something bad happens, they try to find a superstitious reason for it, a black cat for example. Whenever they see a black cat from that time on, they will be afraid that something happens. They are afraid of things that most people could explain them in a scientific way. It is their only explanation, they honestly believe in it and for them, it is their truth.

This is why I believe you cannot blame these people for being superstitious. You can blame the government that they have not brought education until their village or blame the priests and preachers who support religious nonsense although they know better. You cannot blame these people – you can only try helping them whenever you have the chance.