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The practice of knocking on wood, common to both the educated and the uneducated, has been traced to the worship of beneficent spirits believed to inhabit certain trees, a veneration later transferred to the cult of the Holy Cross and the practice of sanctuary. Knocking on wood when good health, success, or good fortune is announced represents an unconscious effort to achieve protection against envy and hostility from two potential sources: parental authority and siblings. The assumption that pride, success, or self-confidence will arouse the antagonism or envy of the authority is derived from projection of the child's envy of and hostility to the parents and siblings and from perpetuation of the archaic childhood conception that it is necessary to be humble, submissive, and compliant if one is to be loved by the authority. An additional cause of this superstition is a socioeconomic system which results in strong intrasocial competitiveness, hostility, and envy.
We cannot expect that such superstitious practices will disappear or even diminish with further advances in man's scientific knowledge since their existence depends more on unconscious emotional factors than on conscious intellectual ones. Only as the personal and cultural sources of man's unconscious feelings of helplessness and insecurity are resolved will his dependence on magic diminish.