What is the colour of happiness?

In western countries, red is for danger. Red is the colour of blood, the colour of fire and the colour of passion. It is the colour used for stop signs and traffic lights. It is also the colour of Mars, the Roman god of war. Red is the colour of anger - 'I saw red!' - and redheads are believed to have fiery tempers. But in China, red is the colour of happiness.

Colours mean different things to different cultures. In the West, black is the colour of mourning, and white is traditionally worn by brides; in China and India, the colour of mourning is white. In Europe, royalty is said to be 'blue-blooded', in Malaysia, royal blood is white.

Compass colours

Among the Pueblo Indians in the United States, colours are associated with the points of the compass. East is linked with white, north with yellow, west with blue, and south with red. The Cherokees associate abstract properties as well as direction with colours: success comes from the east and is red, the north is blue and means trouble, the black west is death, and the happy south is white.

For Westerners, blue is generally a happy colour (unless you have 'the blues'); it is associated with heaven, fidelity and peace. But the strongest curse of the Yezidis of the Caucasus and Armenia, who detest blue, is: 'May you die in blue garments!'

When Men Give Birth

Long before the advent of modern anaesthetics, the expectant mothers of Dumfries, Scotland, had the good fortune to experience totally painless child birth. According to a 1772 report, the local midwives had the power to transfer the pains of labour from wife to husband. How they managed this remains a mystery, but the babies 'kindly came into the world without giving the mother the least uneasiness, while the poor husband was roaring with agony and in uncouth and unnatural pains.'


The extraordinary spectacle of husbands suffering more from pregnancy and childbirth than their wives has not, by any means, been limited to one town in Scotland. Known as couvade (from the French for 'brooding' or 'hatching'), the phenomenon occurs in various forms all over the world.


In some African tribes, the men will take to their beds for the entire duration of their wives' pregnancy. The women continue to work as usual until a few hours before giving birth. They believe that men are cleverer as well as physically stronger than women, and are therefore better able to defend unborn children against malign and evil spirits - which is their task during the pregnancy.


The symbolic activity undertaken by fathers is not always so extreme. Some Pacific islanders do no more than separate husband and wife during the birth and for several days afterwards; and during this time the man will avoid certain foods and certain tasks that the islanders regard as 'man's work'.


In medieval Europe a woman would put on her husband's clothes when labour started, hoping to transfer the birth pangs to him. The belief that all fathers feel sympathetic labour pains had a practical use, too. Villagers in the north of England would find the father of an illegitimate child simply by waiting for the mother to go into labour, and then scouring the village for any man lying ill in bed.

What Is Superstition?

Few people in any era have been entirely free of superstitions, those illogical feelings that supernatural or magical forces influence the events in our lives. Especially among prescientific cultures, superstitions are a psychological defense in a world seemingly aswarm with menacing, unpredictable spirits that must be appeased in order to avoid disaster and to survive. Today, they have lost most of their desperate urgency and endure as easy, somewhat comforting learned responses to uncertainty. The word superstition comes from the Latin superstites, which means "those left standing after battle," in other words, survivors.

Many of today's common superstitions are descended from older superstitions whose origins are lost in the mists of time. For example, the belief that a broken mirror brings bad luck for seven years is believed to stem from the ancient notion that a man's reflection in water portrayed his soul, and that ripples in water destroyed it.

The horseshoe, which is roughly crescent in shape, seems to have derived its magical reputation from the Egyptian worship of the moon. Its iron makes it even more potent, because the first known specimens of iron fell from the sky as meteorites. It is mounted with ends facing up, so the luck doesn't fall out.

In pagan Britain, the hare (a relative of the rabbit) was an object of worship. With the advent of Christianity this practice was outlawed, but old habits die hard and many people still carry a rabbit's foot for luck.

India has 'million tons' of superstitions which are spreaded mainly among Hindus and Muslims.

Widows Once Followed Their Husbands Into The Grave

Monuments all over India testify to the devotion of Hindu widows to their husbands. Each of the suttee (virtuous women) had made a supreme gesture to expunge her own and her husband's sins and ensure eternal bliss for them both: each had hurled herself onto the flames of her husband's funeral pyre.

Whether these women sacrificed themselves voluntarily or not is a moot point. Any Hindu widow who might have questioned her expected duty may also have decided that death was preferable to life as the reviled outcast she would have become had she refused. And if, in the end, her courage failed her, there were men at hand with poles to pin her down among the flames.

This grim practice dates back at least to the 4th century BC. It was a progressive Hindu sect, the Brahmo Samaj, who first agitated against suttee (sati in Hindi) and, in the face of orthodox Hindu opposition, persuaded the British to prohibit it. In 1829, suttee was outlawed in British India, but remained legal in some princely states for 30 years. And there are unconfirmed reports that it still secretly occurs today.

Neighbours Not On Speaking Terms

Travel 40 km (25 miles) in a straight line in New Guinea and the chances are you will have crossed a linguistic frontier: about 750 languages have been identified in New Guinea and its surrounding islands, and the linguistic map is far from complete. Whether you measure this figure against the area of the islands or their population, in either case it represents by far the greatest concentration of languages in the world. Applying New Guinea's ratio of one language per 1090 sq km (420 sq miles) to Britain would give that nation 211 different native tongues.

New Guinea, divided politically into Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya (a province of Indonesia), has almost 5 million inhabitants, but many of these are recent immigrants. Only 3 million are speakers of the indigenous languages: an average of 4000 per language.

More than half of the languages are related, some very closely, and over 100 linguistic sub-families have been identified. Some languages are used by tribal groupings of 100,000 or more; others are spoken by just a few hundred or even a few dozen people, cut off in isolated valleys of the mountainous interior. There are almost certainly languages still to be classified, and in remote regions of Irian Jaya it is just possible that there are as yet undiscovered tribes.

April Fool - Joker's Paradise

Because some people will believe almost anything, they are the perfect victims for practical jokes on the morning of April 1. April Fool's Day, also known as All Fools' Day, has no clear origin, but is often said to derive from Hilaria, a Roman spring festival of jollity and dissipation. An alternative suggestion, which is based on the Bible, is that this the day on which Noah released a dove from the ark, on what seemed to be a fool's errand, to find land on an Earth that appeared to be completely flooded.

The fooling tradition may have come to Britain from France during the 16th century. There, April Fools' is known as poisson d' avril or 'April fish', poisson being a corruption of the word for passion and a reference to the mocking and tormenting of Jesus by the Romans on the day of his Crucifixion, remembered around this time of year.

One of the earliest known references to April Fooling in England comes in notes made in the 1680s by the antiquarian John Aubrey. A notorious practical joke involved a bogus 'Ceremony of Washing the White Lions'. In 1860 many Londoners were sent 'official' invitations to witness this ceremony at the Tower of London. They were to enter by the non-existent White Gate and many cab drivers repeatedly drove the length of Tower Hill looking for it. A similar trick is said to have been played at the Tower in 1698.

Why Is 13 Thought To Be Unlucky?

The unmber 13 has been a deeply ingrained symbol of bad luck in many countries and for many centuries. In ancient Babylon, 13 people were chosen to personify the gods in certain religious rites. One person, however, was always seated apart from the others and was put to death at the end of the ceremony. In the Bible, 13 were present at the Last Supper, and Jesus Christ foretold that one of them would soon betray him. Even today some people hesitate to sit down when there are 13 at a table.

Culture and language influence superstitions. In China and Japan, the number 13 has no particular significance, but 4 is unlucky, perhaps because the Chinese character, or ideograph, for four also signifies death.