Amulet Atlas

Amulet AtlasPictures

Catalogue plates, shop signs, votive walls, the drawn sign itself.

Diagram (1)

The drawn signs

Twenty-six line drawings, one per sign in this atlas: an eye, a hand, an open palm, a horn, a knot, a serpent, a scarab, a fish, a tooth and claw, a crescent, a cross, a…

Photograph (1)

The Lovett collection

Trays and cases of small, worn, mostly cheap charms picked up in London streets between the 1890s and the 1920s by Edward Lovett, and the pictures made of them since…

Plate (2)

Budge's amulet plates

Twenty-two plates and three hundred in-text illustrations bound into a 543-page book: E. A. Wallis Budge's "Amulets and superstitions", published in London and New York…

Petrie's amulet plates

Plates of small Egyptian amulets, photographed in rows against a plain ground, printed at the back of a slim book: W. M.

Sign (2)

The market stall sign

Whatever tells a buyer, before they reach the tray, what is on it: a painted board, a hand-lettered product name on a jar, a certificate propped against a case, or — in…

Yant flash

Sheets of ready-made designs a customer chooses from: geometric grids, tigers, hanuman, rows of script running round a frame.

Votive (2)

The ex-voto wall

Small painted panels hung in ranks inside a church, each showing one bad moment — a cart going over, a fever bed, a boat under a wave — with the saint who intervened…

The votive wall

A surface at a shrine covered edge to edge in small identical-format objects left by strangers: hammered metal plaques the size of a playing card, wooden tablets on…

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