สัญลักษณ์กำปั้นฟิก (มาโนฟิกา)The fig fist

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.

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.