Curiosities of Superstition, and Sketches of Some Unrevealed Religions — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Prayer-Wheel as Structural Motif

The prayer-wheel recurs as both object and organizing principle. Adams begins with Miss Gordon Cumming's account of Lamas spinning cylinders, then immediately contrasts this with the Catholic rosary, asking: “what then are we to think of prayer by machinery?” This question—about the boundary between devotion and mechanism—echoes through later chapters. In the Fiji section, a juggler spins like a top, securing eggs in nooses while rotating at “undiminished speed.” The body becomes a wheel. Adams does not explicitly connect these scenes, but the reader notices the pattern: a fascination with repetitive, circular motion as a vehicle for the sacred or the magical. The wheel, the spin, the loop—these are the book’s hidden armature.

The Juggler’s Body as Evidence

Adams devotes unusual attention to the physical performance of ritual. The Fijian egg-spinner is described in precise, almost clinical detail: the fillet, the twenty strings, the nooses, the basket. The woman “spun round and round like a top,” then stopped “without the movement of a limb, or even the vibration of a muscle, as if she had been suddenly transformed into marble.” This is not hearsay; it is testimony. Adams treats the juggler’s body as a text to be read. The basket-murder trick receives even fuller treatment: the child’s cries, the blood, the sword, the sudden silence. Adams insists on the realism of the deception—“it is impossible to believe that you are witnessing a deception”—before revealing the trick. The body’s apparent suffering becomes a proof of belief, or at least of the power of staged belief.

Comparative Silence: What Adams Does Not Say

For all its breadth, the book is notably reticent about its own method. Adams does not explain why he juxtaposes a Tibetan prayer-wheel with a Fijian juggler. He offers no overarching theory of superstition. The epigraph from Statius—“Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor” (Fear first made gods in the world)—hints at a thesis, but the chapters do not argue it. Instead, they accumulate. The reader must infer connections. This structural choice gives the work a documentary quality, but also a certain opacity. Adams seems to trust that the curiosities themselves will instruct. The absence of explicit commentary is itself a kind of editorial position: let the practices speak, and let the reader judge.

The Inexhaustible Basket: A Closing Image

Near the end of the Fiji section, Adams describes a conjuror who produces a Pariah dog, then a bitch with seven puppies, then a goat, then a pig, from a single basket—“this inexhaustible cornucopia.” The image is a fitting emblem for the book’s own structure. Each chapter lifts the lid on a new practice, and the variety seems endless. Yet the basket trick is also a deception: the animals were never inside. Adams knows this, and he lets the reader know. The book, too, is a kind of basket—full of wonders that are also, in some sense, tricks of belief. The closing note is not skepticism but wonder at the ingenuity of human credulity.

Readers approaching Curiosities of Superstition should expect a travelogue of the strange, not a systematic treatise. Adams moves quickly from continent to continent, and the transitions can feel abrupt. The value lies in the details: the exact number of strings on a Fijian fillet, the precise wording of a Buddhist invocation. Pay attention to what Adams chooses to describe at length—those are the moments where the book’s own curiosity is most alive.

Holding this old survey of prayer-wheels and witch-finders, I remembered my grandmother’s quiet nod at odd beliefs, never mocking. The Bible, King James version, Book 6: Joshua — Edition Insights once gave me that same hush—ancient walls falling to a different kind of certainty. Both books feel like candlelight on strange maps, not to follow, just to see by.