(Let’s leave out organized religion for the most part even if, on a purely empirical basis, there’s nothing to distinguish it from superstition.)
I live in a big city where retail space is expensive. But I never fail to be amazed how often I see storefronts that are situated on busy streets and must command high rents, that are occupied by foretune-tellers, palmists, clairvoyants, and the like. Retailers fail all the time in West L.A., people who actually place food in front of you for your money, or give you coffee, or nice, useful, and fun actual physical merchandise. One site just around the corner from me went through about five different incarnations of restaurants, but now has finally settled on being an overprised sushi bar for the past five or so years. About a block away is a large store site formerly occupied by a Council Thrift Shop that moved a couple of blocks down the street. It’s sat empty for over six months, no doubt because nobody can come up with the rent that’s being asked. How is it that the palmist at Santa Monica and Centinela soldiers on, or the crystal gazer who was next door to the Nuart Theatre for years and years (or maybe still is)? Are there really enough people who are willing to pay them the kind of money they stay in business? Dumb question, I know. There must be plenty of such people, or they wouldn’t be holding on to those expensive rentals, when other merchants who provide actual goods and services lose their leases. Is this an L.A. thing, primarily, or do you see a lot of it in other American cities? It’s not like I haven’t been anywhere else, but I’m not looking for this specifically when I travel, so I wouldn’t notice it. Do you find it Canada or Europe, or Australia?
A telephone number with all digits being eights was sold for USD$270,723 in Chengdu, China.
The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing began on 8/8/08 at 8 seconds and 8 minutes past 8 pm (local time)[1]
A man in Hangzhou offered to sell his license plate reading A88888 for RMB 1.12 million.[1]
Dragon Fish Industry in Singapore, a breeder of rare Asian Arowanas (which are “lucky fish” themselves, and, being a rare species, are required to be microchipped), makes sure to use numbers with plenty of eights in their microchip tag numbers, and appears to reserve particular numbers especially rich in eights and sixes (e.g. 702088880006688) for particularly valuable specimens.[2][3]
Don’t pay much attention to international news and stuff, do you?
Albinos are being killed in East African because their parts allegedly have magical properties. People there regularly get killed for witchcraft. Schools and villages experience panics over it too.
Superstition is one of the oldest Human Industries, and you will find it everywhere there are Humans, even in the most athiestic science based environments.
Clearly, this "*A telephone number with all digits being eights was sold for USD$270,723 in Chengdu, China.
The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing began on 8/8/08 at 8 seconds and 8 minutes past 8 pm (local time)[1]
A man in Hangzhou offered to sell his license plate reading A88888 for RMB 1.12 million.[1]
Dragon Fish Industry in Singapore, a breeder of rare Asian Arowanas (which are “lucky fish” themselves, and, being a rare species, are required to be microchipped), makes sure to use numbers with plenty of eights in their microchip tag numbers, and appears to reserve particular numbers especially rich in eights and sixes (e.g. 702088880006688) for particularly valuable specimens.[2][3]" *
should have all been in “”" and italics, but I screwed up. If some kindly mod wishes to fix it, great, otherwise this is my correction.
Traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda) is still widely practiced in India. None of it has anything to do with science, although as with all such things, some of it does actually work.
Various forms of fortune telling as still widely practised in Japan. There are professional child-namers, people who get paid to come with a list of auspicious names for a newborn, based on things like number of strokes in the characters. Shintoism is a religion, but it’s essentially an assemblage of very old superstition. People pay priests to purify new cars and land before building something, among other things.
Then, there’s the extremely wide spread belief that blood type is somehow linked to personality. Many, many best-selling books have been written on the subject.
North American and European superstition is absolutely dwarfed by what you find in Eastern Asia. China has already been mentioned, but people in Korea are also just as superstitious.
Fengshui and fortune telling is big in Hong Kong. To a lesser extent, Singapore. In Singapore, there are still newspaper reports about elderly being conned into buying “magic stones”.
In Malaysia, there’s a case of a lady claiming that she was affected by “a magic spell” and hence was raped.
Many of those are small business - old men tending to a stall, but in Hong Kong (not sure about China), Fengshui consultants are paid big bucks. Even in Singapore, in downtown modern Suntec City, there is a “Fountain of Wealth”, reputedly designed by a Fengshui master. From time to time it would be open to public and people would go in to touch the water for good fortune.
A lot of those are cultural which are deeply ingrained.
I have never seen a storefront in sweden with tarot, palm reading, snake oil vendor, astrologist etc. I dont think its profitable enough here.
while industrialized superstition exists as daily horoscopes in all newspapers, books on feng-hui and phonenumbers that you can call to get your fortunes told. The lady with a crystal ball in a storefront on premium property just doesnt exist.
Organized religion isnt doing to well in sweden either.
I wasn’t asking if superstition exists beyond the borders of the United States, I was asking if it exists as a viable enough business that a “practitioner” can rent a shop and make a living at it, as is evidently the case here.
To be absolutely clear, you wouldn’t find a fortune-teller on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, or in the financial district of a major American city, but you do find them in unpretentious commercial streets along with the likes of car repair shops, cafes, computer stores, and so on.
BTW “snake oil” usually doesn’t refer to anything allegedly supernatural; it just meant medicines of dubious content or efficacy. In particular it conjures up images of itinerant peddlers traveling through the American Old West, selling their product from wagons, and giving what were called medicine shows–which were an important form of entertainment 150 years ago in remote areas of the country.
well I added the premium line as a way to weasel out if some other swede happened by and said “well I know this place in…”, gotta say no to the “unpretentious commercial streets” too… but I havent been everywhere so.
This shit is pretty common in Australia. I was disappointed to see that one of our major broadsheet newspapers the Sydney Morning Herald has decided it needs a horoscope in it, after about a hundred and eighty years of leaving that sort of rubbish to the tabloids.
If you go to the tourist areas in Sydney (where retail space is expensive), you’ll see new age shops, crystals, tarot readers, et cetera. I’m sure there are a lot of them in the suburbs too, if you look - which I don’t.
I guess that, for many of them, all they need is a deck of cards and a few other props, so their overheads aren’t that great.
I don’t go looking for them, and rarely see them in Australia (let’s limit that to Perth and Brisbane). I may have seen some pokey little corner in a back alley cafe where a claivoyant does her (?) tricks, but on the whole I have not seen them on any scale.
I should add that I’m doing some work regarding a faith healer in Brazil. I can’t say too much because of customer confidentiality, but I’m doing some paperwork for somebody with an interest in the area (so I can tune out and be a sceptic while I do it). There are plenty of Australians shelling out for trans-Pacific airfares to see this geezer. He gets people from all over the world. Many of them go back for multiple trips, and a few emigrate permanently.
Desperate people with spare cash are a pretty good market for mumbo jumbo.
This article talks about a restaurant in China that serves all kinds of fun stuff, including a special order of tiger penis that the clients ordered months in advance and spent $5,700 for.
They’re all over the joint in Melboure too. Up till 2005 we were living in a very high-rent inner city area. About five doors down was the Melbourne Jo Rei centre (**warning: link is totally SFW but has mind-bogglingly annoying sound) . Half a minute’s walk the other way is a new age crystals sort of place with a prominent sign saying they don’t want any employees of {particular government department relating to health and medecine - don’t remember what} in there - and if that’s not a sign of dubious shonkiness I don’t know what is.
There is a tea rooms in Brisbane, in the Elizabeth st Arcade, who do card readings for like $10, I have often wondered how they manage to pay the rent. They are both in their 80’s and also sell tea and sandwiches, For what its worth, i found the card reading worth the $10 in amusement value, I don’t buy into it as actually accurate or anything, just a place with a nice atmosphere to have a cup of tea.