Superstition

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has many themes that pop up as you read the story. One of the themes I see is superstition, such as when Huck flings the spider into the candle and it shrivels up. He does some sort of dance or ritual in order to keep out the bad luck.
Throughout history, there have been many superstitions that people believed in. For example, if you'd take a look at The Crucible you can see that people were accused as witches for things they did that looked out of the ordinary. Many of them were killed. One of the ways that determined you were a witch was when they tied a heavy rock to the person underwater and if the person survived then they were a witch, and if they died then they were innocent. I find this practice very stupid, but it was one of the ways people determined whether someone was a witch or not.
In the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn, I think that the burning of the spider might've foreshadowed the problems Huck would face later in the book such as when Pa comes back for Huck and when Jim gets bitten by a rattlesnake after Huck touches it.
posted by Arthur Luo