20 Superstitions That Changed The Course Of History

Rasputin was a Siberian peasant mystic who was called in after doctors could not halt the bleeding of Tsarevich Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra. His illness was hemophilia, a disease that means blood doesn’t clot normally. Rasputin told the boy’s doctors to stop giving him aspirin, a blood thinner that made the bleeding worse. Once they did, the bleeding ceased. Convinced that he was divinely gifted, Alexandra relied heavily upon his advice on who should be appointed ministers while the tsar was away at war, undermining the stability of the government. Rasputin was murdered by a group of nobles in December 1916. The next year, the Romanov dynasty fell.

As Athens battled Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Nicias led a calamitous expedition against the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Finally, Nicias got his commanders to agree on a secret night retreat by sea in 413 BC. Then a total lunar eclipse darkened the sky as the fleet prepared to sail. Nicias, a devout man, sought advice from his soothsayers, who told him the omens demanded they remain another 27 days to propitiate the gods. In that interval, Syracuse surrounded the harbor and cut off the Athenians’ escape route. The Athenian fleet was destroyed, and the army was annihilated. The disaster left Athens too exhausted to resist Sparta’s eventual victory.

The Roman dictator Julius Caesar, who was finishing off the last holdouts of his civil war in North Africa, tripped and fell flat on his face when he landed at Hadrumetum in 47 BC. A fall upon arrival was considered a bad omen, meaning the gods were against the military invasion. But rather than rising to his feet immediately, Caesar remained sprawled on the beach and flung his arms wide and shouted, according to later Roman tradition, “I hold thee, Africa!” And suddenly Caesar’s ill-omened landing became a land-taking. His troops’ morale was saved, and he soon vanquished his enemies at the Battle of Thapsus.

In 333 BC, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great came upon a small town called Gordium while en route to invading the Persian Empire. In that town was an old ox-cart, with the shafts tied together with a knot so complicated that no man had been able to find the two ends. A legend said that whoever managed to untie the knot would conquer Asia. What happened next is unclear: some say Alexander yanked out a peg that held the cart together, others say he just took his sword and cut the knot in half. Regardless, he said he had solved the riddle. And indeed, his troops’ morale rocketed, and over the course of the next decade they went on to conquer the whole Persian Empire.

A king named Croesus in Lydia (now part of western Turkey), worried about the Persian Empire’s expanding borders, asked the Oracle of Delphi in Greece for advice before attacking Persia in 546 BC. The priestess at the oracle told him: “If Croesus crosses the Halys River, he will destroy a great empire.” Emboldened by what sounded like a sure thing, Croesus attacked. The Persian king Cyrus the Great defeated the Lydian army and seized their capital city. The great empire that was destroyed was his own.

Qin Shi Huang, the emperor who unified China in 221 BC, spent his life trying to avoid dying. When alchemists told him they knew how to live forever, he dispatched the official Xu Fu to sea in 219 BC, along with thousands of young people, to find an island that was supposedly home to the secret. He also ingested elixirs made by alchemists that contained mercury, under the false belief that the metal could bring eternal life. But the mercury broke down his body and brain. He was 49 when he died, and his empire fell shortly after.

The Empress Dowager Cixi, who was in reality the ruler of China under the Qing Dynasty, saw conservative princes at court perform ceremonies showing that the Yihetuan (“Boxers”), a secret society that rebelled against foreign influence, were impervious to bullets because of their magic spells. Seeing an opportunity to create a militia to expel the foreign intruders, she declared war on them in June 1900. The subsequent siege of the foreign legations in Beijing prompted international military intervention that occupied China and ended the regime’s power.

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King ruled Canada for over 21 years throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. After losing his mother and other important figures, he became a deeply committed Spiritualist in secret. Through séances and Ouija boards, he was told he could communicate with the spirits of the dead, including his mother and a former prime minister, and used them to determine when to call elections and how to move in Parliament. No one knew until his personal diaries were made public following his death.

In 525 BC, Cambyses II of the Persian Empire faced off against Pharaoh Psamtik III’s army at the fortress of Pelusium. It was considered a crime against gods such as Bastet, the cat goddess, to kill an animal they deemed sacred. The ancient Greek writer Polyaenus writes that Cambyses lined up his first row with live cats, dogs, sheep, and sacred birds, knowing the Egyptians wouldn’t dare to shoot and risk striking one of the animals. They didn’t, and the Persians got through and conquered Egypt.

Publius Claudius Pulcher, Roman consul in command of a Roman fleet during a protracted conflict between Rome and Carthage in 249 BC, is said to have consulted his auspices, sacred chickens, in preparation for battle. If the birds ate greedily, then the gods were in favor of the engagement. But when the chickens would not eat, Pulcher allegedly threw them overboard, saying, “If they will not eat, let them drink!” He then sailed into battle against Carthaginian ships near Drepana in Sicily. The Romans lost more than 90 out of some 120 ships. The anecdote about the chickens comes from historians writing generations after the fact, but the loss of the fleet was a very real tragedy.

In the 600s BC, Esarhaddon was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which covered parts of modern-day Iraq. Royal astrologers paid close attention to celestial events like solar eclipses, because they were seen as harbingers of death for the king. In order to avoid this fate, kings used a procedure known as the “substitute king.” The real king would go into hiding and disguise himself as a peasant. The substitute king, who would usually be a condemned criminal, would don royal garb and sit on the throne instead, taking on the deadly implications of the eclipse. He would have no actual authority. Around 100 days later, he would be killed, and the king could re-emerge from his disguise.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler was asked to cast the horoscope for Albrecht von Wallenstein, commander of the emperor’s forces in the Thirty Years’ War, a terrible war in central Europe in the early 1600s. Years later, Wallenstein had a full-time astrologer in his camp. He would not attack, move his troops, or make treaties unless the stars were right. The charts were no mere curiosities. But Kepler was skeptical. Wallenstein was killed in 1634 on suspicion of treason.

King James VI of Scotland, who went on to become king of England as well, became persuaded that witchcraft had been directed at him when violent storms ravaged the fleet carrying his bride, Princess Anne of Denmark, to Scotland in 1589. James interrogated suspected witches himself during the North Berwick witch trials, wrote a book arguing for the reality of witchcraft, and urged the English parliament to enact a more severe witchcraft statute after becoming the ruler of England. The statute led to witch panic in Britain and the colonies for decades.

Genghis Khan, who united the Mongol tribes and established the Mongol Empire in 1206, was a follower of Tengriism, a religion based on a supreme sky god, Tengri. Before embarking on major invasions, most notably against northern China or Central Asia, he ascended sacred mountains and asked his shamans to burn sheep shoulder blades and read the resulting cracks. A good crack meant the invasion could proceed, whereas a bad one indicated they should hold off. For the remainder of Genghis Khan’s life, the shaman’s verdict dictated when the empire launched its campaign to conquer most of Asia.

Emperor Qinzong of China’s Song Dynasty was holed up in his besieged capital, Kaifeng, under siege by the Jurchens, a rival power from the north, in late 1126, when a Daoist mystic called Guo Jing said he could conjure up thousands of magical “Divine Soldiers.” In January 1127, imperial officials sent the capital’s regular troops away and let Guo Jing’s ragtag recruits assault the city instead. The Jurchens cut them down, then streamed through the open gates and seized the city and the emperor and his father. With them, the Northern Song Dynasty died.

King Alyattes of Lydia and King Cyaxares of the Medes had been battling for six years in modern-day Turkey, until one day in May of 585 BC the sun suddenly went dark in the middle of a battle at the Halys River. Both sides believed the gods were angry, and both ended the war, then cemented a peace treaty with a royal marriage and a revised border. The Greek philosopher Thales had prophesied there would be an eclipse that year. He only gave the year, not the exact date or time of the eclipse.

When the Persians showered the Spartans with arrows at the Battle of Plataea, 479 BC, the decisive battle in the Greco-Persian Wars, Spartan commander Pausanias did not attack. He was waiting for a favorable omen: by Spartan law, an army could not attack without first sacrificing an animal, then reading the omens revealed by the beast’s entrails. Several priests failed to get favorable readings. The Greeks continued to lose men as they stood still. Finally, a favorable sign was revealed, and Pausanias ordered the attack. The Spartans and their allies broke the Persian line and ended Persia’s invasion of Greece.

In the years before 1519, the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma, who ruled from the capital city of Tenochtitlan, had his court take note of eight ominous omens, including a comet, fires on temples, and disembodied voices crying out during the night, which they interpreted as a sign that a terrible punishment was about to befall his people. In 1519, the Spanish soldier and explorer Hernán Cortés, with a relatively tiny band of followers, arrived in Mexico. Instead of using the much more powerful Aztec military force to repel him, Moctezuma sent him gifts and invited him to enter the city. Cortés’s men came without opposition, seized Moctezuma as hostage, and the fall of the empire began.

In 1905, Kinjikitile Ngwale, a spirit medium in German East Africa, declared that he was possessed by a snake spirit, as German colonial forced labor and high taxes had driven local people to desperation. Ngwale handed out a potion called maji (Swahili for water), which supposedly would render German bullets powerless. In all, more than 20 different ethnic groups subscribed to the idea, and they banded together and attacked German positions, but many were slaughtered by machine guns. The Germans responded with a scorched-earth policy, and the resulting famine killed an estimated 75,000 to 300,000 people over the next two years.

In April 1856, Nongqawuse, a 15-year-old Xhosa girl in South Africa, claimed that ancestral spirits had appeared to her by the banks of the Gxarha River. They promised a better world for the Xhosa if they slaughtered their cattle and burned their grain stores: the ancestors would then come forth again, bringing a new herd of cattle, and expel the British colonizers. As their cattle were already succumbing to illness and as the British were increasingly pressing them, the paramount king Sarhili obliged and, over the next 15 months, hundreds of thousands of cattle were slaughtered. They did not come back, and the resulting famine led to the death of over 40,000 Xhosa people and the end of their resistance to colonial rule.

This content was created with the help of AI.