So I'm at my friend's place during Spring Break in North Carolina. I am looking at his library collection and I run into the book "Weird Carolinas" mentioned in the blog earlier by Alexis. I was excited and so I looked it up. The first section I looked up was "fabled people and places". I came across many stories one of them being a story about how there were many places in both North and South Carolina that were named after the devil. Each place along with its Satanic name also carried with it a story explaining its name. For eg. there is a broken jumble of huge rocks behind Caesar's head in Greenville County, SC that is named the Devil's Kitchen and it is said to emit smoke when Mr. S is cooking his meal. Apparently, people also get the smell of brimstone when this happens. Thinking about why a place known to be filled with religious people would be filled with places named after the Devil I could only reach to the conclusion that what the people want is to instill fear. The impact of a superstition or a story for that matter, is on how believable it seems. Here, the only thing that people truly believe is the Bible and so many other people are able to take advantage of this and thus come up with various superstitions that the other people are not able to question. That was the main difference that I found between other superstitions and southern superstitions. While the other superstitions of ghosts and monsters instilled their fear through death, the southern superstitions instilled this fear through religion and afterlives.
No comments:
Post a Comment