- Author
- Benjamin Breen
- Published
- 24 February 2026
- Kind
- Personal newsletter essay, with data visualizations built by an AI tool
- Original
- resobscura.substack.com/p/neolithic-habits-machine-age-tools
- Subject
- Occult, myth and religion
- Themes
- Belief at work, How forms evolve
What it is
Benjamin Breen is a historian who writes the Res Obscura newsletter. This post asks how old knocking on wood is. It then links the answer to AI alignment.
What it says
- Folklorist Steve Roud doubts old origins. Roud suggests a children's game, Tig-touch-wood, from early 19th century England.
- Breen notes that Roud asked for a study of European forms before accepting this.
- Breen's globe plot shows two entangled traditions, touching iron and touching wood. Both cluster around the Mediterranean and Europe.
- Breen finds it hard to see an English game reaching Georgia, Egypt, Russia and Iran. No such process fits within a century.
- Breen suggests an ancient Mediterranean tradition of apotropaic magic as the likelier source. Such magic means charms against bad luck.
- Breen argues that gesture history is rarely written down. Language models, the post says, lack the embodied basis for human norms.
What evidence it gives
Breen had Claude Code plot a Wikipedia list and a paper on a globe. The post quotes Roud, Schiefenhövel and Evans, and cites Singh and an Artemidorus text. The conclusions rest on that plot and on argument, with no formal test.
Interests and limits
The post is a hedged personal essay. The author admits the origin may still be the children's game. The map uses a crowd-sourced Wikipedia list. The AI claims are speculative and untested. Reader comments add examples and an idea of multiple origins.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators. Breen weighs a tidy modern origin for knocking on wood against an older, messier one. Overmyer's question applies: which story came from the tradition, and which from its explainers? Gesture, Breen notes, is rarely written down.