signsThe fig fist

said in Italian, mano fica or far le fiche; in Spanish, higa; in Portuguese and Galician, figa

also: fig sign · mano fica · manus fica · manus obscena · higa · figa · cigua · kukish · shish · dulya

signRome and ItalyGreece and the AegeanIberiaThe BalkansThe Baltic and the Slavic landsAnatoliaBrazilDiasporaItaly Greece Spain Portugal Brazil Turkey Russia Ukraine Poland Serbia Croatia Slovenianeeds checking

A closed fist with the thumb pushed up between the index and middle fingers, carved or cast small and hung at the neck. In jet it is black and matte; in coral it is red; in silver it is the size of a thumb joint. The gesture it copies is obscene, and that is the working part.

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When

in use at least since the Roman period, and still made still carried cited

Period	Roman to the present
How the date is known	textual — a dated text describes it
Note	The article dates the gesture to at least the Roman Age in southern Europe and the Mediterranean without giving a year; the start year here is a conservative reading of 'Roman Age' and is flagged as approximate.

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.

The thing itself

Form	Pendant
Made of	Jet · Red coral · Silver · Gold · Bone and ivory · Wood
Goes	At the neck · On a cradle
Made by	jet-cutters in Asturias; the workshops at Santiago de Compostela sold to pilgrims
Colour	black · red

What its carriers say it stops

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

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by ancient Greeks, who wore amulets of the gesture at the neck
Ghosts and hungry spirits citedsaid by the Roman pater familias, who made the sign during the Lemuria against the spirits of the dead
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ citedsaid by Asturian practice — jet higas are usually given to young children
Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by Portuguese, Brazilian, Galician and Asturian use, where the gesture wishes good luck

The story

Rome called it the manus fica. The pater familias made it during the Lemuria to turn away the spirits of the dead. Early Christians called the same shape the manus obscena, the obscene hand. Greeks wore amulets of the gesture at the neck against the evil eye and drew it in their art; what they took to be an overtly sexual gesture was expected to distract harm from its target.

The fist also fused with another sign. Roman soldiers carried the fist-and-phallus amulet — a phallic pendant with a clenched fist at the base of the shaft, facing away from the glans, several of them making the fig sign. The largest known collection of them comes from Camulodunum, Roman Colchester. Some examples carry vulvar imagery as well.

The insult and the amulet never separated. In Italy the gesture was rude enough that Dante uses it in Inferno XXV; it has long since fallen out of use there. In Russia, Belarus and Ukraine it is shish, kukish or dulya, a flat refusal. In Turkey it is the equivalent of the middle finger. In Poland it means no. In Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia a fig hidden in a pocket marks a false oath.

In Portugal, Brazil and parts of Spain — Galicia and Asturias — the same hand is a wish of good luck and a guard against the evil eye. Asturian ones are made of jet and it is usual to give them to young children; Spanish calls them higas, Galician and Portuguese figas, Asturleonese ciguas. Inference — the same shape reads as a curse in one country and a christening present in the next, which is the clearest case in this atlas of a sign whose meaning is entirely local. In Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and North America it survives mainly as the game where an adult pretends to have stolen a child's nose.

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Now

Jet figas are still made and sold in Asturias and at Santiago de Compostela, where the jet trade grew up around pilgrims at the end of the Middle Ages. Brazilian figas are sold in wood, horn and gold.

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