The Puzzle of Left-Handedness by Rik Smits

them backwards. If he found one that did, he would break the guilty record in two – quite an effort in the days of vinyl. He insists he would do the same today.
    The theme of inversion can be found the world over, but it’s by no means always a matter of good and evil. In the ancient world, sacrifices of fish or small animals to the ancient earth gods were often made using the left hand, with the creature’s head downwards. Here inversion is merely a logical consequence of the notion that the gods of heaven live above us and the earth gods beneath.
    Among the Toraja on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, inversion is closely connected with the distinction between life and death. The right hand is for normal life and the living. The Toraja therefore care for the graves of their ancestors exclusively with their left hands, and even a handful of rice sacrificed to the dead must be scattered with the left. They imagine the dead as white, whereas their own skin is dark. left-handedness is unacceptable in their culture, not because the left hand is bad but simply because, shockingly, a left-hander treats other people as if they belonged to the realm of death. Offering someone a drink with the left hand strikes the Toraja as like offering someone a wreath as a birthday gift.
    The left and right halves of our bodies, then, are clearly and fairly consistently connected with two themes in folklore. One is the magic of sickness and health, which resides on the left. The other is the motif of inversion. But when superstitions concern things outside ourselves and how they move around, then at first sight they make no sense. Arbitrariness reigns, we might think. In Central Europe sheep crossing from right to left are a sign of misfortune, whereas both the Romans and the native Americans thought that crows heralded death and destruction if you watched them pass from left to right. The French agree that crows are a bad omen, but they remain convinced that if the birds approach from the left then their evil effects can be avoided, so only crows coming from the right are worth worrying about. A cuckoo calling off to your left means bad luck, but to your right it’s a sign of good luck. In some places people believe that sheep or pigs bring good fortune as long as they pass on the left side. If they pass by to the right you need to watch out. In other places people are just as convinced that the opposite applies.
The Tarot deck’s Death carries his bow in his right hand since – and this is surely no coincidence – he is left-handed. 
 
    Official church rituals are no less muddled. Catholics make the sign of the cross by touching first the left shoulder, then the right, but Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox do it the other way around – although with the right hand; no difference there. This probably has something to do with the fact that both groups of dissenters from the mother church wanted to differentiate themselves as far as possible from their former brothers in the faith. This is a prime example of inversion. The strangest case of inconsistency in direction concerns the ancient Romans, fervent believers in all kinds of omens that had to do with the flight of birds and natural events of that sort. The left was originally regarded as lucky, but under the influence of Greek culture the Romans seamlessly adopted the belief that the right was the favourable side. Fate, it seems, could take its cue from fashion.
    The cause of all this confusion might perhaps be the absence of any natural criterion of the kind that the axis of our bodies represents in relation to our body parts. left is almost always associated with negative things because of the inversion motif, but what does left mean in the world around us? That depends whether you concentrate on where something is coming from or where it’s going to. In the former case, animals we hear to our left, that pass us to the left or cross our path from left to right may be bad omens.