We argue that some but not all superstitions can persist when learning is rational and players are patient, and illustrate our argument with an example inspired by the code of Hammurabi. The code specified an “appeal by surviving in the river” as a way of deciding whether an accusation was true. According to our theory a mechanism that uses superstitions two or more steps off the equilibrium pa...

and relief in time of sickness?of their castes, their tenets, and their practices, and any one so disposed might glean from the Indian medical periodicals of the last half century materials for a very instructive essay on the subject. We hear, on the one hand, of a physician caste, learned in the traditions of a past era, holding as an heir-loom an empirical knowledge of remedies, which we shou...