Evidence status: WELL SUPPORTED — exact origin unknown
Spill the salt.
Take a pinch.
Throw it over your left shoulder.
An accident has somehow become a ritual — and the supposed cure involves deliberately spilling even more salt.
There is surprisingly old folklore behind it.
The Short Answer
Spilling salt has been regarded as ominous in European tradition for centuries. Salt carried strong associations with preservation, hospitality, friendship, religion and protection, making its accidental loss symbolically significant as well as wasteful.
Throwing some of the salt over the left shoulder became one of several rituals intended to cancel the bad luck.
The familiar explanation says the Devil waits behind the left shoulder, so the salt is thrown into his eyes. That explanation is itself old folklore, but the precise first origin of the ritual remains unknown.
What We Know
The bad reputation of spilled salt predates the modern over-the-shoulder gesture.
A sixteenth-century work on symbolism by Pierio Valeriano described salt as a symbol of enduring friendship because of its preserving qualities, noting that many people considered spilling it on the table ominous.
By 1627, Bishop Joseph Hall could refer to a superstitious dinner guest becoming alarmed when salt fell towards him.
That tells us the basic belief — spilled salt means trouble — is several centuries old.
By the nineteenth century, folklore collections also record remedies.
Fanny Bergen's 1896 Current Superstitions, compiled from English-speaking oral tradition, gives one particularly clear version:
spilled salt is unlucky, and throwing some over the left shoulder can avert the ill luck.
It also records alternatives, including burning some of the salt or combining the shoulder throw with additional rituals.
How It Became a Habit
This superstition has something clever built into it.
It provides a problem and a solution.
Accidentally spill salt?
Bad luck.
Immediately throw some over your shoulder?
Danger cancelled.
That matters because protective rituals give people a tiny feeling of control over chance.
Cross fingers.
Knock on wood.
Throw salt.
The action is easy, quick and harmless, so it survives even among people who insist they do not actually believe it.
The Story Everyone Tells
The Devil is standing behind your left shoulder.
Spilling the salt has exposed you to bad luck.
You take a pinch and throw it backwards into his eyes.
Temporarily blinded, the Devil cannot interfere with you.
The choice of the left side also fits a much broader European tradition in which right and left acquire moral meanings. Even the English word sinister ultimately comes from a Latin word meaning “left”.
A nineteenth-century folklore study recorded versions in which people deliberately threw spilled salt behind themselves to strike the invisible Devil and prevent further mischief.
What the Evidence Actually Says
Throwing salt over the shoulder is unquestionably a genuine folk custom.
The 1896 collection Current Superstitions records it directly, and twentieth-century archives contain numerous versions passed through families.
What is harder to establish is one single reason why it began.
Salt was valuable.
Salt preserved food.
Salt was used in religious contexts.
Salt symbolised friendship and hospitality.
Salt itself was regarded as protective in many traditions.
All of those factors made it a culturally charged substance.
The Devil story explains the ritual beautifully, but there is no surviving record identifying the first person who decided that the left shoulder was where the Devil stood.
So:
DOCUMENTED: Spilled salt has been regarded as ominous for centuries.
DOCUMENTED: Throwing salt over the left shoulder became an established method of averting the omen.
WELL SUPPORTED: Salt's symbolic importance helped give spilling it special significance.
FOLKLORE: The salt is traditionally said to hit or repel the Devil.
UNKNOWN: The precise first origin of the left-shoulder ritual cannot be established.
The Story Everyone Also Tells
Leonardo da Vinci sometimes gets blamed.
In The Last Supper, a spilled salt container appears near Judas, whose betrayal of Christ makes him an obvious symbol of broken trust and impending disaster.
That has produced another popular claim:
spilling salt became unlucky because Judas spilled it.
The chronology points in the other direction.
Spilled salt was already an established symbol of ill omen and damaged friendship, so Leonardo's image is better understood as using symbolism his audience could recognise rather than creating the superstition himself.
Different Elsewhere
The remedies are wonderfully inconsistent.
One nineteenth-century American tradition said to throw salt over the left shoulder.
Another said to burn a pinch.
A Pennsylvania version required both throwing the salt and crawling beneath the table.
Irish folklore collected in the twentieth century preserves the left-shoulder gesture too. One Wexford version explains the action as keeping away fairies, rather than blinding the Devil.
Same salt.
Same shoulder.
Different supernatural threat.
Why It Stuck
Because it turns an accident into an action.
For one second, you've lost control.
The salt has spilled.
Then the ritual gives control straight back:
pick some up,
throw it,
problem solved.
Perhaps that is why it survives so comfortably.
Apparently even supernatural danger can be dealt with using something already sitting on the dinner table.
Related Curiosities
Why Is the Number 13 Considered Unlucky?
Why Are Black Cats Considered Unlucky?
Why Does Breaking a Mirror Mean Seven Years of Bad Luck?
Why Are Horseshoes Supposed to Be Lucky?
Sources & Further Reading
Robert Means Lawrence, The Magic of the Horse-Shoe (1898) — historical survey of salt folklore, including spilled salt, friendship symbolism and the Devil explanation.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57411/pg57411-images.html
Fanny D. Bergen, Current Superstitions (1896) — collected oral traditions recording throwing salt over the left shoulder and alternative remedies.
https://dev.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18992/pg18992-images.html
National Folklore Collection of Ireland — recorded Irish versions of the left-shoulder custom.
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5009301/5005809/5133480
James T. Callow Folklore Archive — twentieth-century records of salt being thrown over the shoulder to cancel bad luck.
https://libraries.udmercy.edu/archives/special-collections/cfa/index.php?field=boggsNum&term=P883.17
Last checked: 19 September 2026