An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Evil Eye

The idea of the Evil Eye is one of the world’s most time-honoured and widespread magical beliefs.

Old John Aubrey, in his Miscellanies (London, 1696), summed it up very briefly and to the point: “The glances of envy and malice do shoot also subtilly; the eye of the malicious person does really infect and make sick the spirit of the other.”

To be able to put the Evil Eye upon a person is one of the main powers attributed to black witchcraft. People capable of this were called ’eye-biting witches’. Their victims, who pined away or suffered misfortune by reason of this deadly glance, were said to be ’overlooked’, ’fascinated’, ’eye-blighted’; and one curious English dialect term calls them ’owl-blasted’, perhaps from the idea of the owl’s staring eyes.

The effects of the Evil Eye might be felt in two ways: either by physical or nervous illness or by a run of bad luck and unfortunate events. The belief in the possibility of this is still almost as lively as it was in the Middle Ages. We often hear people saying of someone that they “put the mockers on it”; meaning that their influence ruined something—or somebody. This is really only another way of saying ’They put the Evil Eye on it’.

When certain ’labour rackets’ were being investigated in New York in 1957, the investigating committee found that a man reputed to possess the Evil Eye had actually been hired by an employer to intimidate his staff. The man would come in once or twice a week, and stare fixedly at the men, in order to keep them in fear; and apparently he succeeded in doing so.

This story, fantastic as it sounds, proves one thing; namely, that human nature and the human mind are basically the same beneath the sky-scrapers of New York in modern times, as they were centuries ago, in narrow medieval streets or remote villages.

A few years ago in Britain, a society lady whose tennis and garden parties were persistently spoiled by rain, told a gossip columnist: “I am going to get myself a string of blue beads. Someone is putting the Evil Eye on me.”

Bright blue beads as a preventative of the Evil Eye are popular in the Near East. They may be of glass or pottery; it is the brightness and clarity of the colour that matters, not the expensiveness or otherwise of the necklace.

Amulets against the Evil Eye are of very many kinds, and are often attractive and artistic in their form. The Hand of Fatima, for instance, is frequently made of silver-gilt, jewelled with semi-precious stones. This representation of a hand is named in this way today out of compliment to Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed; but the figure of a hand as symbolic warder-off of evil is very old indeed. In fact, the prints of hands found on the painted walls of Stone Age caves may have had this significance.

EVIL EYE. Witch amulets against the Evil Eye: mano in fica and mano cornuta

This amulet derives from man’s instinctive gesture of putting up his hand before his face, to ward off the baleful glance of the Evil Eye. Bronze figures of hands, called the mano pantea, stood in Roman houses in ancient days, for the same purpose. They were encrusted with many other amuletic figures, such as serpents, lizards, acorns, pine-cones, horns and so on. The position of the fingers on these pre-Christian amulets is the same as that used today for blessing, namely with the thumb and first two fingers upright, and the other two fingers closed.

Two other finger gestures against the Evil Eye are the mano cornuta, or ’making horns’, and the mano in fica or ’the fig’. These are very popular in Latin countries, but are fairly well known almost everywhere. The mano cornuta consists of lifting up the first finger and the little finger, while folding the other two fingers and the thumb into the palm. The mano in fica is made by closing all the fingers into a fist, and thrusting the thumb between the first and second fingers. ’The fig’ is a synonym for the female genitals. Both these gestures are signs used by witches, as well as being defences against the Evil Eye.

Little amulets of hands making these signs can still be bought in Britain and on the Continent. These gestures are of very great antiquity. Ancient Egyptian examples of the mano in fica have been found; and the paintings in Etruscan tombs show dancers holding up their hands in the position of the mano cornuta.

The mano in fica was known in Britain too, as the old folk-rhyme shows:

Witchy, witchy, I defy thee!

Four fingers round my thumb,

Let me go quietly by thee.

Dean Ramsay, writing about his schooldays in Yorkshire between about 1800 and 1810, told how he and his classmates “used to put one thumb between the first and second finger, pointing it downwards, as the infallible protection against the evil influences of one particularly malevolent and powerful witch”.

Another means of baffling the Evil Eye was by means of twining and interlacing knots. It was thought that the malicious glance, on being confronted by a pattern like this, was caused to wander and lose its force. A relic of this belief can be found in the elaborately patterned silver buckles sometimes worn on their belts by nurses. In olden days a good deal of sickness was blamed on to the Evil Eye; so a nurse in particular had to be able to protect herself. Hence the custom arose of wearing buckles of this kind; though present-day nurses may not realise the origin of it.

The elaborate interlacings and intertwinings of Celtic and Saxon decorative art probably arose from the same idea. Such decoration protected against the Evil Eye; so it was fortunate and good to enrich things with.

Another remedy against the Evil Eye was to have something to outstare it. So representations of eyes were worn, in particular the so-called ’eye-beads’ made of black and white onyx, cut and polished so as to resemble an eye. Brooches, rings and men’s cuff-links are also seen today made from this semi-precious stone. In Ancient Egypt the amulet called the Eye of Horus was worn for the same purpose.

Bright, shining witch-balls were hung in the windows of old houses, to reflect the sinister looks of dangerous passers-by back upon themselves. (See WITCH-BALLS.)

The tremendous number of different amulets against the Evil Eye, of practices and ceremonies to avert it and of various names for it in different languages, all show the universality of this belief. The Ancient Romans called it the oculus fascinus; the Greeks knew it as baskania. In Italian, it is malocchio, or la jettatura. Germany calls it böse blick; Spain mal ojo; France mauvais oeil. In far-off India, it is feared as drishtidosham. Old-time Gaelic-speaking Scotland called it chronachaidh, and to the Irish it was droch-shuil.

And an old Gaelic charm, to be spoken over one who had been ’overlooked’, ran like this:

The eye that went over,

And came back,

That reached to the bone,

And reached the marrow,

I will lift from off thee,

And the King of the Elements

Will aid me.

Of course, all charms have to be spoken three times; and this one was supposed to work best on a Thursday or a Sunday.

But how was the Evil Eye supposed to be put on? Innumerable are the remedies against it; but information about how it casts its evil spell is scanty. Very often people are believed to be born with this power; and frequently without any wish for it on their part.

A number of famous people have been credited—or should one say discredited?—with possessing this malign power. Lord Byron, the poet, was one. So was the late King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, and Napoleon III, the Emperor of France. Even Pope Pius IX, and his successor, Pope Leo XIII, were believed to have the Evil Eye; not because they were wicked, but simply because they had been born with this fatal gift, whether they wanted it or not.

The person who is different is the one whom human nature fears. Thus, among the generally fair-haired and blue-eyed English, it is the dark, flashing eye of the Gypsy, the Latin or the Oriental that raises fearful thoughts of fascination and sorcery. But among the Spaniards, blondes are feared! “Las rubias son venenosas”, “Blondes are poison”, runs the old Spanish proverb. The dark Moroccans think that people with blue eyes are the ones to beware of.

“The eyes are the windows of the soul”, says the old proverb; and this can be interpreted for good or evil. The silent curse of the Evil Eye, which came from the soul within, was more dreaded than openly spoken maledictions. Its very silence gave it the pent-up concentration of something formulated with one’s whole being. And if a truly deep and burning anger were behind it—who knows?

In 1616 a woman called Janet Irving was brought to trial in Scotland on charges of witchcraft. It was stated in evidence that “the Devil” had told her: “If she bore ill-will to any body, to look on them with open eyes, and pray evil for them in his name, and she should get her heart’s desire”.

“The Devil” may have meant the leader of the coven, who instructed her in magic, or perhaps ’Old Hornie’, the god of the witches himself. But this description is the only one I know of the real laying-on of the Evil Eye.

For after all, if witchcraft had no teeth and claws to defend itself, would it have endured through centuries of persecution?

The effect of the belief in the Evil Eye in Scotland (and elsewhere) was sometimes turned to good account by cunning old ladies, who would otherwise have lived in dire poverty. As the old Scots song tells us:

Kimmer gets maut, an’ Kimmer gets meal,

And cantie lives Kimmer, right couthie an’ hale;

Kimmer gets bread, an’ Kimmer gets cheese,

An’ Kimmer’s uncannie een keep her at ease.

And good luck to the “pawkie auld dame”! The lot of the poor and the unfortunate, in the days before the Welfare State, was often pitilessly hard. They can scarcely be blamed for turning popular beliefs to their advantage.

The harried and hounded gypsies do the same thing today. How many people have bought something off a gypsy, not because they wanted it but because ’you never know’?