Understandably as Civilizations have grown many different cultures have developed their own sets of superstitions. Oddly there seem to even be quite a few superstitions about the roof of the home. Perhaps it’s not so odd however, since the roof divides the home from heaven, and provides a gathering place to talk and shelter under which to hide from the rain and tell tales.
In China, chinese temples had curved tile roofs since according to chinese tradition ghosts only travel along straight lines. the eaves were curved upwards to make the ghosts fly up to heaven where they belong. it’s kind of silly to imagine a ghost sliding along tile roofing like a child on a slide, but that is why they built the tile roof of the temple that way. you might notice that a lot of these superstitions have to do with spirits, I personally believe this is because to primitive cultures (all cultures started somewhere) the roof separates home from heaven.
In the southern united states it is a commonly held belief that ghosts cannot cross running water, this has lead to the tradition of painting the underside of the patio roof a shade of blue called “haint blue” haint is old slang for ghost. it seems this stems from the belief that a ghost will see this blue, think it is water and just give up on getting in the house.
Japanese tile roofing typically features images associated with water in the hopes that it would help prevent fires in the home by channeling some of the energy of water. It also appears to be done in an effort to encourage the water to flow off the roof and not in the house. if you look carefully you see that not only does the house or temple have water symbols on the roof, the basic structure of japanese tile roofing is reminiscent of waves on the ocean.
There are all sorts of odd superstitions about buildings and roofing, some of the ones here are several hundreds of years old, others are much more recent, it kind of makes you wonder what people hundreds of years from now will think of the way we build our homes today.
