Superstition

Is it a sign of immature faith that just as we imagine God as the great puppeteer, we imagine evil forces as something that we can have power over by ritual.

Chapter 1

Huck imagines:

The leaves rustling as mournful.
An owl who-whooing about somebody that was dead.
A whippoorwill...., also signaling that someone is dead.
A dog crying about somebody that was about to die.
The wind whispering something that he couldn't make out.
The woods making a sound that a ghost makes.

He experiences:
A spider is killed and reflects bad luck.

He turns around 3 times.
He ties up a lock of his hair with a thread to keep witches away.
There is no antidote for killing a spider.

As Huck is transformed by love, will this superstition, and the interpretation of the sights and sounds of nature, be transformed as signs of God, not signs of the devil?


Chapter 2

After Tom plays a trip on the sleeping Jim by hanging his hat on a tree branch, Jim builds a narrative that witches came to him and took him away and then put him back and hung the hat on a tree.
So clearly Jim believes in witches and is superstitious as well.

Chapter 8

Huck is presumed dead. Drowned.
How does one find a body that has been drowned in the river?
Not sure whether this is superstition, but the town folks fire a cannon over the water, hoping that it will bring the body up from the bottom. In the footnotes to the chapter, Hearn confirms that this is a superstition, and not scientific. [Chapter 8, footnote 2]
Another superstition, clearly, is the practice of filling a loaf of bread with some quicksilver (mercury) so that it would float near where a body lay. [footnote 3]
This superstition is reported by Huck, so he has shown us that he is just as superstitious as Jim.

Chapter 10

In Chapter 9, Huck and Jim discover a body in a house floating down the river. Jim won't let Huck look at the face. Here is chapter 10, when Huck asks Jim to talk about the dead man, Jim gets out of it by telling Huck it would be bad luck. So here Jim uses superstition to avoid revealing that the body was Pap. Still, Jim may have really believed it was bad luck. But here superstition comes in handy as a way to avoid talking about the truth.

Then, in a second superstition story, Huck reveals that he picked up a snake skin, and Jim assured him it was bad luck. Huck plays a mean trick, putting a dead snake near Jim's blanket, a second snake came and curled around it, and then bit Jim. Huck blames it on bad luck, to avoid taking responsibility. Another example of using superstition as a diversion from the truth.
This leads to more talk: roast a piece of the snake; take off the rattles and wear them; the snake skin curse is not as bad as looking at the new moon over your left shoulder.

Ignorance

How are ignorance and superstition related?

Esoteric vs Exoteric. Max suggests that first one must reject the exoteric before one can appreciate the esoteric. At first, Huck's understanding of truth beyond what he experiences is tied into Miss Watson's and Aunt Sally's exoteric understanding of the Bible, and superstition, which he hears from others, including Jim.


Chapter 1.
Huck is convinced by Tom to return to the Widow Douglas' home by offering him a chance to join his newly formed band of robbers.
So we start out with the quaint observation that Huck and Tom are going to play at being robbers. Innocent enough. As a child I played cowboys and indians, and inevitable, someone got shot. Noone really was harmed (whether we should have assumed the indians were the bad guys is another story).
So on the one hand, it's just pretend, right? Or will there be evidence later on, much as there was in Tom Sawyer, that people will actually be harmed? 
If so, and if Huck knows this as early as Chapter 1, then in fact we come to the first stop of the spectrum of Huck's formation- he is unaware that he is, or will be, hurting people by playing the robber role.
Moral ignorance? What do we call this?

Chapter 2

Tom forms his band of robbers. One of the conditions is that if someone betrays the gang, his family must be killed. Huck has no family (at least noone knows whether his Dad is dead or alive). But Huck, about to be disinvited to the gang, offers that Miss Watson could be killed. The gang agrees so Huck is allowed to join the gang.

This moral ignorance, with no basis in reality or experience, but only fantasy, seems like a setup for a crisis. Eventually the opportunity to kill someone for real will present itself, and the clash of fantasy and the real will represent a growth event along the path to compassion and love.


Chapter 5

Here Huck encounters his father, 'Pap'. Pap has heard that Huck can read, and has money. Now Huck is not really educated, but compared to Pap, he is learned, and Pap proceeds to deride Huck for purposely trying to denigrate and embarrass his Father by educating himself. No matter that Huck himself has not really sought out an education, but has been forced to submit by the widow and Miss Watson.
In an almost throwaway line, Pap says that he has heard that he has got religion too.

Chapter 8

I don't know if it really is right to call it humor, but at the end of the chapter, Jim claims that he is still rich because he is worth eight hundred dollars, the amount that the widow was going to sell him for to the slave trader. Something in the statement makes me smile, that Jim takes some sort of pride in the fact that he is worth so much money.

Prayer

Chapter 1: Supper Prayer

The widow would 'tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals..."

Chapter 3: Petitionary vs Emptying of Self [The two providences]

Miss Watson teaches him about prayer.
First, she takes him in the closet after he returns all mussed up from his adventure in Chapter 2 with Tom and the gang.
"She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it."
Once he got a fish line but no hooks.
He takes prayer as a literal list of requests for himself.
He asks Miss Watson and she calls him a fool.

Then, in a subtle aside, Huck set down in the woods (earlier) and had 'a long think about it'.
This second prayer reflects a kind of contemplative prayer, where Huck is asking for some guidance on what prayer really is, and why it doesn't 'work'. Again he cites examples of what is 'not working'- money lost, recovery of stolen goods. "Why can't Miss Watson fat up?".

After a time, he says to himself(always an indicator of the possibility of a conversation with God) that since he can't figure it out, he'll ask the widow.
Obviously at this point he is unhappy with the answer he has given himself that prayer doesn't work, and trusts the widow to straighten him out.

She tells him, because at this point he is open to hearing it, that he was to pray for 'spiritual gifts'.

Spiritual Gifts.

And so we now get to one of the central threads of my investigation of Jim and Huck, as the widow explains what she means:

"I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself."

Huck again goes into the woods, thinks about it, but couldn't see any advantage to this approach (except for the other people).

But the seed is planted.

Huck recognizes the difference as two Providences.

The widow's Providence showed promise. Miss Watson's Providence left him with a feeling of hopelessness.

He decides that he will choose the widow's way.

This is the first of the great conversations Huck has with himself regarding God and how God moves among humans.

Chapter 8:
"now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing."

This in reference to the 1st kind of prayer that Miss Watson speaks about, petitionary prayer, And because the loaf floats near to shore at Jackson island, Huck concludes the prayer has worked. This kind of thinking, deduction from evidence that has other explanations, like the natural current of the water, is associated with Fowler's Mythic or Literal Faith.
But Huck further observes that there are conditions to this kind of faith in prayer:
"That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind."
So prayer of this kind depends on a God that grants the effectiveness of prayer only to the righteous, or the learned, or the repentant sinner, etc.
Huck will continue to struggle with this concept, that he is not good enough to warrant God's attention of the gift of getting what he wants in prayer.

Open Mindedness vs. Closed Mindedness

The spiritual equivalent of this may be detachment, or disengagement. Attachment to outcomes, according to Buddhist tradition, and Jesus' own admonition with the rich man, causes suffering and leads one away from fulfillment.

Chapter 1.
In his conversation with Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas' sister, his defiance (to put his feet up, to yawn and stretch, to resist his spelling lesson, to slump instead of sitting up straight) leads her to threaten him with the possibility that this behavior would lead him to hell (or the bad place).
Huck, responds that "I wished I was there".
Shocked, she tells him that she would never utter such a wish.
Huck therefore concludes that since she wishes that she would never go to hell, and since he doesn't want to be around her and acquiesce to her discipline, he concludes:

"Well, I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going (ie. heaven or the good place), so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it."

I can't decide whether this belongs under the Open category, or Ignorance.
For Huck, he has no idea of the possible horror that being send to hell would signify. Whatever it is, it isn't like being subject to Miss Watson's discipline. Ignorance. But perhaps he just doesn't buy that there is a hell? He doesn't make that observation.

However, when talking about Open Mindedness, we have to observe that Miss Watson is caught in that Victorian world where hell is a real place where a conscious soul suffers and is completely aware that they are in hell, and therefore it is a place to be avoided, and to help others to avoid. 
Huck sees this. 
So he is faced with an example of someone who has a shallow view of the nature of good and evil, heaven and hell. A close-mindedness about biblical concepts that are archaic, even in the 19th century.
Now I can't say Huck is open minded, and thinking of hell and heaven in an enlightened way. But he is resistant to the old trick of threatening someone with hell as a means to make them behave or acquiesce to discipline.

At last Miss Watson tries to attract Huck with a description of heaven as a place where one sings and plays harp all day long. What is attractive to her is repulsive and boring to Huck.

Hypocrisy

Chapter 1.
Huck asks the Widow Douglas whether he can smoke, and she admonishes him for the nasty habit. But Huck laments that she herself uses snuff.
"And she took snuff too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself."
He notices hypocrisy, and whether he knows it or not, responds with sarcasm. But here we see  virtue that is already within Huck- that of knowing that it's not OK to admonish others for something that you yourself are guilty of doing. 
Of course this assumes that Huck equates smoking tobacco and using snuff, and the Widow does not. We know today of course that both are harmful to your health, but it's possible that in 1885 snuff was safe and acceptable whereas smoking tobacco was foul smelling and messy. Doubt that the serious link with cancer was common knowledge then.
The point is, that Huck's moral compass identifies and calls out hypocrisy. 

Is Huck a hypocrite? Look for signs of that.