In the spirit of Hallowe’en and all things spooky, this month we looked at superstitions connected with time, tide, birth and death.
The old saying that time and tide wait for no one is very true. However, there are a lot of superstitions attached to the tide (and to when your time is up!) which have long been held by people living close to the sea.
The power of the moon over the tides has been recognised for millennia, even in it is not completely understood.
For people living by the sea, there might be an added twist: the superstition that people who live near the coast can’t die until the tide is ebbing.
This was noted as early as 77AD. Pliny the Elder (often mentioned in these superstition pieces) wrote in his Natural History that, “… no animal dies unless the tide is ebbing…” and this has also “… been found true with respect to man.”
The moon, with its magnetic pull, is thought to influence all fluids on Earth from the oceans to the human body, which is made up of around 70% water.
The female reproductive cycle is responsive to the moon’s phases and more births are said to happen in coastal areas when the tide is in. Spanish coastal areas believe in this strongly, but they also believe that people suffering from chronic illnesses only let go of life when the tide turns.
Author, James George Frazer recorded in The Golden Bough, that this belief is held on both the Pacific coast and in Southern Chile. He wrote about someone “…in the last stage of consumption, after preparing to die like a good Catholic, was heard to ask how the tide was running. When his sister told him that it was still coming in, he smiled and said that he had yet a little while to live. It was his firm conviction that with the ebbing tide his soul would pass into the ocean of eternity.”
Even our own Charles Dickens got in on the act, perpetuating the superstition in the UK.
In his novel, David Copperfield, the character Mrs Peggotty observes that people living along the coast can’t die except when the tide’s nigh out, adding that if a person lives until the tide turns, they will hold their own until past the flood and go out with the next tide.
Whilst scientists don’t fully understand the power of the moon’s pull on the turning of the tides that are ever-present in out coastal village lives, we are lucky enough to be able to see the beautiful moon shining across our beautiful beach, every night.
