We explain what luck is, the origin of its name and its relationship with chance. Also, how it is linked to the religious or the divine.
What is luck?
We all know in one way or another what luck is, although we do not always know how to define it. Sometimes we speak of luck to refer to chance, other times to destiny and sometimes to the idea that the universe conspires positively or negatively with respect to us. But what is luck really?
Let's start by explaining that the word luck comes from the Latin voice sortis, which were dice or little bones used for the distribution of lots of land (from there also comes a lottery) with which they awarded the soldiers who fulfilled their service in Ancient Rome. These plots were the same size, but not of the same quality, so depending on the luck of the soldier, it could touch fertile ground or scree.
So from the start, luck is a name that we give at random, to circumstances that are beyond our control and do not depend at all on our preparation or our effort. Thus, at the same time, we have decided to differentiate between two types of luck: good luck, when chance brings us something favorable, and bad luck, when the opposite occurs.
The idea of chance has not always been the same throughout the history. For example, in Roman antiquity chance was attributed to the goddess Fortuna, and she was already represented with the typical wheel, an emblem of what today may be above, and tomorrow below.
For the Romans, depending on the specific issue that luck decided, it became instead a decision (or simply a consequence of good favors) of other gods and deities: Mars, to say the least, ruled the destinies of the world. war.
In contrast, in monotheistic traditions such as Judaica (and later, Christian), the will of God was the source of everything that happens in the world. His was the decision of everything that is left to chance, which basically means that luck does not exist but that everything is the will of God, who operates, according to this view, through ways incomprehensible to him. human being.
As will be seen, luck has always been linked to the religious or the divine, that is, with the forces that we cannot glimpse, much less control. Hence, a superstitious aspect also arose linked to the possibility of favoring luck, that is, of calling out good luck and warding off bad, through rituals, amulets or personal codes.
Many of these talismans and emblems still survive today: the four-leaf clover and the horse's shoe are symbols of good luck, the possession of which is supposed to tilt luck in favor; the same happens with the number 7, or with prime numbers. While the number 13, going under a ladder, breaking a mirror or having a black cat cross our path, they are capable of bringing us bad luck.
The belief in luck, in any case, is an intimate matter and has nothing to do with the logic, and that many interpret as a form of faith or mystical belief that still survives in our societies secular and modern. Others, on the other hand, prefer to see luck as a mere matter of odds and statistics, operating in a system so large and complicated that it is impossible to predict on a small scale.