Superstition brings bad luck

“Superstition brings bad luck” is an epigraphic warning that acquires a darker meaning as the novel’s invented conspiracy begins to govern its inventors. The phrase points beyond fear of unlucky signs: once every coincidence is treated as evidence of a hidden design, the search for meaning can become a trap that produces the very reality it claims merely to discover.

The maxim and its setting

The maxim appears as a brief epigraph attributed to Raymond Smullyan’s 5000 B.C. It sits beneath a passage from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa addressed to readers capable of finding meanings concealed in one place and disclosed in another. The juxtaposition sets two habits of reading against one another: careful interpretation may uncover a deliberately dispersed meaning, but superstition can mistake any available pattern for proof.

That distinction becomes central when Casaubon, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi collect fragments about secret societies and join them into the Plan. At first, they regard their connections as extravagant associations, devised in the spirit of parody. The epigraph’s warning anticipates the danger in that game: connecting signs is not harmless when repetition trains the mind to treat resemblance as identity and speculation as fact.

From parody to belief

Casaubon later recognizes that the three men’s habits changed through their work. Their minds grew accustomed to connecting everything with everything else, until they did so automatically. He distinguishes their different degrees of involvement: he believed himself the least affected, partly because his life with Lia and their baby kept him in daily contact with ordinary concerns; Diotallevi was becoming corrupted by the Diabolicals’ way of thinking, while Belbo was becoming converted to it. The change was not a single act of belief but an acquired interpretive reflex.

The Plan’s fictional authorship does not protect them from its consequences. They invented a nonexistent design, but the Diabolicals believed it real and identified scattered pieces of their own confused mythology as episodes within it. Once those believers acted on the supposed design, the Plan existed in practical terms. The epigraph’s compact warning thus becomes causal: superstition does not merely misread events; shared belief can make an imagined plot effective in the world.

The social appetite for plots

The novel links conspiracy belief to frustration and guilt. People confronted by complex events, including market crashes, may search for an enemy who can be blamed rather than acknowledge their own uncertainty or mistakes. The imagined plot offers an explanation and an external cause. But those who invent enemy conspiracies may then organize against them, patterning their own actions on the conduct they attribute to others. Accusation and imitation begin to reinforce one another.

This mechanism reaches a sharp formulation in the claim that a secret society might exist whose plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The possibility turns conspiracy theory back upon itself: the rumor of total coordination can itself be the only coordination required. The maxim’s idea of bad luck is consequently social as well as personal. Seeking a comprehensive hidden cause may intensify the very fears and antagonisms that the explanation was meant to settle.

The secret that must remain secret

The Plan’s appeal depends on a secret imagined as the answer to frustration and the road to salvation. Yet the novel argues that any disclosed secret will disappoint those who have invested it with limitless meaning. There are no successively greater revelations capable of satisfying that appetite; each explanation becomes another sign requiring interpretation. The secret therefore remains powerful only while it stays beyond knowledge, an “empty secret” whose content is continually deferred.

Belbo’s refusal to reveal a secret he does not possess gives this logic its most dangerous practical expression. The more firmly he denies having it, the more the Diabolicals believe it exists; to them, a genuine secret would be proved by his refusal to disclose it. Their pursuit of the secret has held them together despite excommunications, internal conflicts, and coups. As they approach the imagined revelation, they fear both that it will prove disappointing and that disclosure will end the secrecy on which their group depends.

Aglie understands the personal stakes as well. If Belbo spoke to everyone, the mystery sustaining the group would be lost; if he confided only in Aglie, Aglie could preserve the aura that allowed him to pose as the immortal Saint-Germain. He tries to draw Belbo into a private disclosure, then provokes him when persuasion fails. Belbo’s stubborn refusal shows how the search for a secret can become a struggle for authority: the secret’s supposed content matters less than who can claim to possess it and who can compel its revelation.

Meaning and consequence

The maxim’s significance lies in the novel’s distinction between interpretation and credulity. The danger is not simply that people notice patterns, but that habitual connection erases the boundary between metaphor and reality. Once every fact must disclose a mystery, no counterexample is permitted; even an ordinary fact can be absorbed into the system. The resulting logic is self-sealing, because denial becomes evidence of concealment and coincidence becomes confirmation.

“Superstition brings bad luck” therefore serves as a compressed account of the Plan’s progression: playful invention trains its makers to think in the conspiracists’ manner; believers adopt the invention as history; and the secret gains power precisely because it cannot be verified. The misfortune is not supernatural punishment for curiosity. It is the human consequence of treating suspicion as knowledge and allowing an empty secret to dictate real actions.