The Thirteen Club

Yes that's right. Founded in the 1800s, this was a club by which its members would participate in deliberate practical experiments against superstition. There were clubs in London and New York both with the same aim: to educate people against their slavery to 'senseless' superstition.

Beginning on Friday, 13 August 1948, an exhibition (influenced by the Thirteen Club) on Superstition, Prejudice and Fear ran at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan for 13 days. This came about as a result of a worried US government claiming superstitions to be 'unpatriotic and unscientific, an open threat to democratic freedom and progress.' The exhibition included having to walk under ladders and rooms full of open umbrellas and broken mirrors. As a relation to this, the 1952 book, Understanding Public Opinion: A Guide for Newspapermen and Newspaper Readers reads '[The superstitious person] not only has false hopes and fears, but he is a sucker for demagogic appeal. He is inclined toward racial prejudice, disregarding all anthropological evidence to the contrary, and in a time of insecurity he will fall for any kind of new Messiah that comes along… A person who believes in black cats and umbrellas and all of these other everyday superstitions is less likely to think logically and clearly in any other field. He is continuing in an unscientific frame of mind at a time when the clearest type of scientific thinking is essential.'

Now, to me, this all seems a bit ridiculous. It is understandable that one should be encouraged to think logically and scientifically else the world be built upon whimsical characters and glitter paint. Yet is it not fair to say that even the most superstitious of people are still logical and scientific to some extent? To say that they are not at all would be implying that they have little or no intelligence or education. For example I know that finding a four leafed clover will scientifically nor logically affect my life in any way in terms of luck, yet it gives me great joy in thinking that maybe it will. It's like reading a good book: you know that what you are reading is not truth, the images you are seeing are not real, but yet you while away the hours enveloped in that world. Escapism. Superstition is escapism.

Oscar Wilde's refusal letter to dinner with the London Thirteen Club sums this up: 'I love superstitions. They are the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense. The aim of your society seems dreadful.'

Nice one Oscar.