The Evil Eye

The scholarly literature on the evil eye converges on one word: envy. The belief's classic habitat is the face-to-face community of scarce goods, where one family's fat harvest is legible to neighbors whose harvest failed, and where good fortune is therefore dangerous to display. The eye that harms is the eye that covets; in many of the languages concerned the idiom says so directly, and the folk etiology adds that the possessor of the eye need not intend the harm, envy leaking out of a glance as it were involuntarily, which conveniently makes everyone a suspect and no one an accuser. Dundes's influential analysis pushed the pattern further, arguing that the underlying folk physics is liquid: the eye dries up what it strikes, milk in mothers and cattle, sap in crops, the bodily moisture of infants, wasting diseases being the eye's signature, and the counter-measures correspondingly wet, spitting above all.

Whatever one makes of the particular theory, the sociological function is well documented ethnographically: fear of the eye polices display, compels the fortunate to share, deflects praise, the compliment being instantly qualified, the beautiful child smudged with soot or given a slighting nickname, and supplies an explanation of misfortune that indicts a relationship rather than blind chance. The belief is thus less a superstition about optics than a folk theory of envy's destructiveness, expressed as an anatomy. Where inequality is visible and insurance absent, the evil eye is, in its way, functional social theory.

Around the fear has grown one of the world's richest bodies of counter-technology, and its logic is remarkably consistent. First, absorption and decoy: the eye strikes what it lights on first, so one gives it something to hit, the blue eye-bead of the eastern Mediterranean, the mirrored embroidery of South Asia, the horseshoe, the bright ribbon on the new car, the horned charm of Naples. Second, the counter-gaze: an eye to stare back at the eye, painted on Greek ships' prows since antiquity and hanging today as the Turkish nazar boncugu, or the open right hand raised against it, the hamsa or hand of Fatima, palm out, sometimes with an eye in the palm. Third, obscenity and derision, on the theory that the eye cannot envy what it is laughing or blushing at: the horn gesture, the fig gesture, the phallic amulets Roman soldiers hung on their standards and Roman mothers on their infants.

Fourth, moisture and disavowal: spitting three times, the Yiddish kein ayin hara and the Arabic mashallah appended to any praise, formulas that hand the admired thing to God before envy can claim it. Fifth, concealment: fortunes unstated, children called ugly, wedding finery veiled. Elworthy catalogued this arsenal across the Mediterranean in 1895 and the inventory has barely changed since Pompeii, only the materials updating, which makes the apotropaic tradition one of the most conservative in all of folk religion: the fear evolves not at all, and the defenses only in plastic.