The evil eye

The teaching

As the lore of the evil eye around the Mediterranean and beyond teaches it.

What the eye does

The evil eye is harm sent by a look. Its root is envy: a gaze that covets what another has, a child, beauty, health, a good harvest, a new house, and in coveting spoils it. It needs no spell and often no ill will, for an admirer may cast it without knowing, by praising too much. Those most at risk are those most admired and least guarded: babies and small children, brides, young mothers, fine animals, crops and anything newly thriving.

In the folk belief its signs come suddenly: a headache, yawning and heaviness, a child who cries without end or will not feed, a plant that withers, a cup that cracks, a run of small mishaps after praise. The tradition answers these signs with a rite, and in every sensible household a child who is unwell also goes to a doctor.

How the eye is held to work

The old philosophers gave it a natural account. Plutarch, in his Table Talk, explains that the eyes send out streams charged with the passions of the soul, so that a look full of envy strikes like an arrow and does harm, above all to the young and tender, and he tells of a man who bewitched himself by gazing at his own reflection in water. The teaching that admiration endangers grew from this: the look that lingers is the look that harms.

The Jewish teaching

The Talmud takes the eye seriously. Rav, visiting a graveyard, is said to have judged that ninety-nine of every hundred there had died by the evil eye and one by natural means. Blessing, the sages taught, rests only on what is hidden from the eye, and the descendants of Joseph are beyond its reach, for Jacob blessed Joseph as a fruitful bough by a well, which they read as above the eye. Against fear of it the Talmud gives a sign and a word: a person takes each thumb in the other hand and says, I am of the seed of Joseph.

Jewish custom adds its own guards: the Yiddish phrase kein ayin hara, no evil eye, said after any praise, a red thread tied on a baby's wrist or cradle, and the old care not to count people directly.

The Islamic teaching

The Prophet said that the evil eye is real, and that if anything could outrun fate, the eye would. The tradition tells how a companion admired the skin of another as he bathed, and the man fell ill; the Prophet asked why he had not said a blessing, and had the one who looked wash, and the water poured over the one he had looked at. So the first remedy is in the admirer's mouth: on seeing something fine, a Muslim says masha'Allah, what God has willed, or asks God's blessing on it.

Against the eye, as against every harm, the chapters of the Daybreak and of Humankind are recited, for the first seeks refuge from the evil of an envier when he envies. Many also hang the open hand, the khamsa, known in North Africa and among Jews as the hand of Fatima or of Miriam, though some scholars forbid every such charm and hold that recitation and trust in God are the only guard.

Around the Mediterranean

In Greece the eye is to mati, and its guard is the blue glass bead painted as an eye, the same bead that Turkey calls the nazar boncuğu and hangs on houses, cars, cradles and the doors of shops. A Greek grandmother tests for the eye with drops of oil in water: if they spread or sink, the eye is present, and she says over the person a prayer learned from an elder, in many families only at a feast such as Holy Thursday and often from a woman to a man or a man to a woman, crossing the brow with the oil. In Italy oil in water and a prayer learned in many families on Christmas Eve answer the malocchio, and a little red horn, the cornicello, is worn against it.

In Greece praise is softened with a little pretend spitting, three times, and in many lands a compliment to a baby is followed at once by a blessing or a word that undoes it.

India

In India the eye is nazar or drishti. A dot of black kohl is set on a baby's cheek or behind the ear to spoil the perfection that draws it; a lemon threaded with seven green chillies hangs at the doors of shops and on the fronts of lorries; and a mother may circle a handful of salt round a child's head and throw it away, taking the eye with it.

The manners of the eye

Beneath the charms the belief teaches manners. It tells people not to boast, to bless when they praise, to keep good fortune quiet, to share what they have and to be easy about what others have. Its remedy for the envier is a blessing and for the envied modesty. And the faiths' own remedy blames no one beyond a word: the admirer is asked to bless, and the matter ends there.