materialsSalt塩

said shio in Japanese

also: blessed salt · shio · sodium chloride

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Sodium chloride, got by evaporating seawater in ponds, by mining rock salt, or from mineral springs. It preserves, it purifies, and it dissolves. That last property is why the archaeology of salt charms is always the container and never the salt.

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When

attested in living practice; undated at its origin still carried cited

Period	no floor this record can date; documented across the present
How the date is known	ethnographic — somebody recorded it being used, on a date
Note	None of the sources read here dates salt's first ritual or protective use. The datable neighbours are the seventeenth-century English witch bottle and the modern liturgical and Shinto uses. This record cannot put a bar on the timeline and says so.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Another person's sorcery citedsaid by English folk practice, which sealed salt among the fillings of a witch bottle
Demons and night-hags citedsaid by Catholic teaching, which permits lay use of holy water and blessed salt for warding off evil
Ghosts and hungry spirits citedsaid by Mahayana Buddhist practice of throwing salt over the left shoulder on returning from a funeral
The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by the published recipe for a Turkish nazar bead, which names salt among the ingredients

The story

Salt is a ritual material in more traditions than almost anything else in this atlas, and it is rarely worn. It is thrown, sprinkled, blessed, offered and put at thresholds.

In Judaism it is customary to spread salt on the bread or dip it in salt when it is passed round the table after the Kiddush. In Catholic practice salt is used in the Tridentine Mass and permitted in the preparation of holy water, and blessed salt is a sacramental: lay Catholics are not permitted to perform solemn exorcisms, but they may use holy water, blessed salt and other sacramentals for warding off evil. In Shinto, shio is used for ritual purification of places and entrances, and salt is among the offerings — with rice, water and sake — set before the kamidana beside the household ofuda. Mahayana Buddhists throw salt over the left shoulder on returning from a funeral. Hindu practice uses salt at house-warmings and weddings; Jains offer it before deities and sprinkle it on cremated remains. Aztec religion had Huixtocihuatl, a goddess of salt and saltwater.

It also goes inside other charms. The earliest documented witch bottles are salt-glazed stoneware Bellarmine jugs, and later bottles are filled with sand, stones, knotted thread, feathers, shells, herbs, flowers, salt, vinegar, oil, coins or ashes. A Turkish nazar bead is described as "a mixture of molten glass, iron, copper, water, and salt, ingredients that are thought to shield people from evil" — the salt is in the batch, fired into the glass.

Salt was also a major traded good, moved along Mediterranean routes, along dedicated salt roads and by Saharan camel caravan. The English word salary comes from the Latin for salt, though the story that Roman legions were paid in it is unsubstantiated.

Inference — every other material in this batch can be excavated. Salt cannot: it goes into water, into food, into the ground, and leaves nothing. A practice this widespread with this little to show for it is the clearest warning in the atlas against reading a museum drawer as a census.

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