Oath

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Just like today people in premodern societies made promises for various reasons which helped keep society working. Also like today not every promise was kept for reasons ranging from it being beyond what the promise maker could actually achieve to him forgetting about it or deliberately ignoring it. To stop this back in the day they came up with the idea of an Oath, basically a promise backed up by the supernatural. They believed that if you deliberately broke an oath you would be cursed with misfortune all your life, damned to hell in the next and so on and so forth. At the same time oath breaking was also a crime. Nowadays people have found out that for this sort of thing can be handled by complicated contracts with various clauses and penalties for breaking them, though they still come up every now and again as symbolic relics (such as military or police oaths). Even so they often come up in fantasy; such as the 'Geas' spell in D&D. Superheroes also often take oaths; of revenge, or good conduct.