traditionsEuropean folk apotropaic craft

Start at the threshold, because the tradition does. Doorways and windows were held to be where harm gets in, and the answer went on them: grotesque faces cut over oven and kiln doors, gargoyles and sheela na gigs and hunky punks on churches and castles, a horseshoe nailed above a door, an iron knife buried under the entrance, a lantern cut from a turnip or a swede at Samhain. Everything else in this record is a variation on a guarded opening.

Iron carries most of the load. Cold iron is recorded across Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia as repelling, containing or harming ghosts, fairies and witches — hence the horseshoe on the door, hence the iron fence round a graveyard, said to hold the dead in rather than keep anything out. The horseshoe is where the tradition's internal disagreements become visible. Points up so the luck does not fall out; points down so it pours onto whoever stands beneath; in some tellings either is fine so long as the shoe was used, was found rather than bought, and can be touched. Where luck attaches to the owner and not the hanger, a stolen or borrowed shoe carries it back to the owner. One reputed origin is the story of St Dunstan, a blacksmith who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 959, nailing a shoe to the Devil's hoof and removing it only on a promise never to enter a house with one over the door.

The calendar does the rest. On 31 January Irish families gathered rushes; that night the head of the household supervised the weaving of Brigid's crosses; on 1 February they went up in the dwelling, the outhouses and the stables, and a year later they were taken down and burnt or buried, burial preferred because of Brigid's link to agriculture. The practice is first attested in the 17th century and was in decline by the 20th, partly because house renovations left nowhere to hang them. That is an unusually complete account of a folk object: a start date, a decline, and a building-trade reason for it.

Inference — the thing that makes this a tradition rather than a pile of customs is the absence of a gate. Every other tradition in this atlas restricts something — a script, a lineage, an initiation, a clan. This one's objects are made by the person who needs them, from rushes, rowan, a worn shoe, a bottle from the kitchen, a stone with a hole in it. That is why its evidence is so lopsided: what survives is what got walled in or thrown down a well, and what was said over it was almost never written.

It was assembled as a subject late, and by three men buying. Frederick Elworthy published The Evil Eye in 1895 and Horns of Honour in 1900, buying in Spain and Italy as he wrote. Siegfried Seligmann, a German ophthalmologist, put out the two volumes of Der böse Blick und Verwandtes in 1910 and gathered more than 1,500 amulets doing it. Edward Lovett, a bank cashier in the City of London, collected what Londoners were carrying in their pockets — a mole's foot, a dried frog, a blue bead, a caul — and published Magic in Modern London in 1925. Inference — the shape of every museum case of European charms follows the shape of those three men's buying, and so, to a degree this atlas cannot measure, does the shape of this record.

Made at home, from the house's own materials, usually at a fixed point in the year or at a moment of threat. Rushes woven on the eve of a feast; rowan cut and bound with red thread; a bottle filled and put under the hearth when the house was built or when somebody suspected a neighbour; a worn shoe pushed into a chimney breast during building work; a horseshoe found in a lane and nailed up. Renewal is annual where the object is vegetable and never where it is iron. Retirement is by fire or by burial, and the choice between them is itself traditional — Irish practice preferred burying a year-old Brigid's cross to burning it.

Alive and mostly unremarked. Horseshoes still go over doors, four-leaf clovers are still looked for, amber necklaces are still sold for teething in Europe and warned against by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the FDA, and Bulgarian martenitsi still go up on 1 March. The objects have largely left the farm for the souvenir shelf, and workshops like those on Via San Gregorio Armeno in Naples supply both at once. Whether a cornicello bought in a Naples lane by a visitor is the same object as one worn by the seller is a live argument with named people on both sides, and this atlas reports it on the object records rather than settling it here.