Annie D

I'm hooked on a YouTuber/TikToker who does feng shui videos and it's cool seeing how something often regarded as superstitious is clearly just thousands of years of collected wisdom and expertise that is being described with old language, but it still makes complete sense when you frame the same concepts with modern language. Kinetic energy does flow from doors because that's where people walk through. The principals of feng shui genuinely result in rooms that are layed out in satisfying and calming ways that bring happiness... Because your home is nice to live in! It only sounds superstitious if you're phrasing it with really ancient phrases like "bad energy" but like, if you said "bad vibes" everyone would go "ohhhhhh yeah for sure totally."

It's similar to how a lot of indigenous knowledge around ecosystems and ecology that were regarded by the west as superstition have since been proven to have already been completely scientifically accurate all along; even if the Western approach would prefer to say "the tree grows nuts" instead of "the trees give us nuts" and so forth.¹ Or how a lot of folk remedies end up actually having a biological basis even when the given explanation is spiritual. Garlic doesn't repel vampires but it is antibiotic. Drinking hot beverages genuinely is good for you, especially if you live somewhere without the cleanest water and boiling it makes it safer.

I think about this a lot because my own cultural heritage² basically figured out germ theory 1500 years early but it all got dismissed as superstition when we assimilated into European culture because the word we used for germs was translated as "demons." But what we were saying was "there's thousands of evil invisible things that live in stagnant water and make you sick if you drink from it" and "you need to wash your hands to keep the demons away otherwise you'll get sick."

Meanwhile in modern western culture there are a lot of absurd superstitions that people take seriously because the words used to describe them come from Latin or Greek but still don't line up with what modern scientific studies have found to be the reality. Stuff around sex, gender, weight loss, and race science come up mind.

It's a strange sort of recency bias that seems affected by Temporal Dialects (chronolects?) I mean yes obviously Western colonialism and imperialism are the bigger factors here, but there's also stuff like China banning Feng Shui for a while because the communist party regarded it as superstitious; even though now it's a big point of pride now that the entire world has seemingly recognized it as a good system for furniture; such that a lot of common advice you see any interior decorating actually comes from Feng Shui and you wouldn't know it; because a lot of writers just modernize how they're phrasing it.

Until very recently, we didn't have the word "bad" in English. Everything bad was described as "evil." To a modern ear, that will make anything sound superstitious. Sometimes when reading old texts it just helps to think about how you would have said this in your own language. Does the most shadowy corner have evil energy? The corner getting the least natural lighting has the worst vibes. You'd be surprised how many common basic words weren't in use at all the way we use them even thirty years ago.

Edit: y'all I am not saying everything old is true I'm saying we don't give people in the past enough credit for what they did figure out.

1. I am half remembering a chapter from Braiding Sweetgrass please forgive me for not doing this concept justice.

2. Judaism