I’d like to move beyond the neat, fixed categories of what my convent school upbringing led me to believe about superstition — that it is the practice of the ignorant, the stupid, the primitive, and the unenlightened. This doesn’t satisfy me. I’d like to build up my own views on the subject.

I’ve encountered two categories of extremely superstitious people in my life. Those who live in a perpetual lack of safety, and those who live in a perpetual surplus of it. The binaries of urban/rural, educated/uneducated, western/eastern, or enlightened/ignorant don’t really do much for me. My categories are not universal, they’re just two categories that interest me, one set in industrialising England, the other in modern India.

Let me start with the first. In rabidly religious, swiftly-urbanising England, the most superstitious group of all were sailors, whose washed-up, sun-burnt corpses could be calculated by the ton. They had superstitions about everything — from ship naming, to unlucky numbers, to bananas, to cats, to tattoos, to whistling, and, of course, albatrosses. The most interesting superstition of them all, to me, is that clergymen were actively considered the worst kind of luck on the sea. They were considered the ilk of Jonah, the ultimate sign of doom.

The sailor, after all, was that category of person who lived in a limitless state of unsafety that boggled the mind. Where could a benevolent God be in the face of a hundred-foot wave that blocked out the sun? And so, while being ripped up by randomness, the sailor found superstition, and looked everywhere for a semblance of constancy, for universal signs and a kind of primordial external logic that operated beyond this grim, material world. This logic required such strength, that it went beyond even Christianity. Isn’t a loving, predictable God impossible in those horrifyingly deep waters that swallow the soul? Even now, the tendency amongst modern European sailors in various rituals like the line-crossing ceremony, is to acknowledge, with humility, that most demonstrably pagan of the Gods — angry, moody, irascible Neptune, whose endless whims must be appeased through the upkeep of ritual superstition.

Now, let us move to the other category. Surplus safety. Here, I’d like to come back to India, where some of the richest families the world has ever seen are superstitious to a fault. The National Media constantly televises the rituals they undertake. Every Indian, I bet, can conjure up a mental image of these families, bowing and prostrating and looking very shuddh and humble. In my opinion, these people, who live in an absolute surplus of safety, perform superstition out of a need to self-preserve in the context of the larger social fabric.

Especially in India, where income inequality is of such an incomprehensible magnitude, the wealthy, and even the middle-class, are forced to adopt various cultural attitudes to dispel guilt, and distract from the awful material reality of it all. One of many brilliant outlets for this is superstition, and religiosity. Assiduously following the orders of an astrologer with humility provides a neat logic for why these families excel on the social pyramid. As with the sailors, giving in to the rule of random assignation is horrifying. There can be no luck in merit.

Performing superstition thus provides a crucial outlet, in the guise of performed humility. It is both a private and a public purging. The private performance of superstition rids the individual of guilt (resulting in nauseating levels of narcissism), but as we move up the ladder of power and influence, it is absolutely necessary that the poor man is an audience to the rich man’s public performance of superstition. Don’t you see? The universal logic of power is set in the stars itself. My humility is only being rewarded as ordained by the powers that be.

This public performance of superstition thus helps justify the Indian economic hierarchy in those corners of the Indian mind where cold, hard Neoliberal Logic has not yet arrived. And caste interlocks so beautifully with both of these, does it not?

Finalism is the most potent drug a human being can ingest.