เครื่องรางฟีกา (กำปั้นกันภัย)Figafiga

The gesture came first and it was rude. In ancient Rome the manus fica was made by the pater familias during the Lemuria, the festival of the restless dead, to drive the dead spirits off. The ancient Greeks wore amulets of the same gesture around the neck against the evil eye and used it in their artwork: what they took to be an overtly sexual gesture was expected to distract an evil spirit from doing harm. Early Christians called it the manus obscena.

In Italy it stayed rude. Fica in mano, far le fiche, comparable to the finger; Dante puts it in Inferno, Canto XXV; medieval painters give it to the tormentors in a Man of Sorrows. The gesture there has long since fallen out of use.

What survived, and where, is the point. In Portugal, Brazil, and parts of Spain — Galicia and Asturias especially — the fig is a gesture of good luck and a ward against the evil eye, and an amulet of a hand making it is worn for exactly that. In Asturias the amulets are jet, and it is usual to give one to a young child. The same hand shape, in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Argentina, Uruguay and the United States, carries no charge at all and is the joke where an adult steals a child's nose.

Inference — one hand shape, running simultaneously as an obscenity in Turkey, a refusal in Poland, a sexual invitation in Denmark and a child's amulet in Asturias, is the clearest case this atlas has of a sign whose meaning is entirely local while its form is continent-wide. The eye travels with its reading attached. The fist does not.

Carved from jet, coral, precious metal or bone, pierced at the wrist end, strung on a cord — red, where the tradition uses red. Given to a child rather than bought by one. No consecration is described in the source read here.

Sold in Portugal, Brazil, Galicia and Asturias as jewellery and as a child's charm, and made in every grade from cut jet to moulded resin. Whether the resin one does the same job as the jet one is an argument with people on both sides of it, and this atlas reports it without joining.