ถ้อยคำอะโพโทรเพอิก (กันภัย)apotropaicἀποτρόπαιος

Greek did not need one word, because it had a crowd of them. The ancient sources carry apotropaia, probaskania, periammata, periapta, profylaktika, phylaktiria, antipharmaca, alexicaca, alexipharmaca and alexima pharmaca, all for protective objects, with no one of them dominant.

The gods came in matching sets. Offerings went to the apotropaioi theoi, the averting gods, and to the Apopompaioi theoi, who send evil away, and the Apōsikakoi theoi, the evil-averting gods. Zeus, Apollo, Heracles and Leucothea all carried the epithet Alexicacus, averter of evil; Heracles was also Keramyntes, another averter.

English boiled the crowd down to one adjective and handed it to the academy. Inference — that reduction is why an Egyptian birth tusk, a Roman fascinum, an Irish Brigid's cross and a Japanese ofuda can hang on one wall under one heading. The category is a translation choice, made once, in Greek, and then carried by people writing in English about everybody else.

Tradition holds — the practices the word covers rarely describe themselves as a category at all. A household rite in Egypt, spitting into the folds of a garment in Greece, a grasshopper hung before the Acropolis by Peisistratus: these were separate acts to the people doing them, and the adjective that gathers them is ours.