สัญลักษณ์ดวงตาThe eye

Amulets against a harmful look have been found dating to around five thousand years ago, and the belief runs through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Jewish rabbinic literature returns to it repeatedly.

The sign takes two different bodies. In Egypt it is a drawn eye with a falcon's cheek-line, cut in faience and carnelian from the Old Kingdom onward. Around the eastern Mediterranean it becomes a bead: after glass-bead production got going in the region around 1500 BCE, blue-and-white concentric eye beads spread among Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Ottomans, and that bead is what a shop in Istanbul or Athens sells today.

What is striking is what stands in for the eye where the eye is not drawn. Illyrians used shapes of the phallus, the hand, the leg and animal teeth against the same harm. Romans used the fascinum, a winged phallus. Southern Italy still cuts a horn. Inference — the substitutions have one thing in common: each is a thing that catches a glance. The mechanism carriers describe is interception, and anything startling enough to take a look can do the job. That is why this atlas files the horn, the hand and the fist as kin of the eye rather than as unrelated signs.

Tradition holds — the harm is usually attributed to envy, and often to admiration that has not been qualified. That is why the eye is put on children, on livestock and on new houses more than on anything else.