Amulet AtlasTraditions
The whole practice a charm belongs to, and who is entitled to make one.
Ancient (2)
3000 BCE – 641 CE
The practice of making, wearing and burying small protective objects in ancient Egypt: shapes cut from stone or moulded in faience — quartz paste glazed blue or green in…
2000 BCE – 63 BCE
A craft with four moving parts: a demon with a name, a counter-power with a name, an incantation that addresses the demon directly, and a physical object — a plaque, a…
Classical (1)
700 BCE – 499 CE
A practice organised around one idea: harm arrives through a look, so the answer is to catch the look. The Greek word for it is apotrépō, to turn away.
Early Modern (1)
1600 CE to now
The practice, among the Bakongo of the Congo Basin and the Songye of Kasai, of assembling containers that a spirit inhabits. The maker is an nganga: a healer, diviner…
Living (9)
1101 CE to now
Talismans drawn by a mudang, the ritual specialists at the centre of Musok, Korean vernacular religion.
1336 CE to now
Objects bought at a shrine, a temple or a fair to bring a named good thing: a brocade pouch for traffic safety, a paper or wooden tablet for the household altar, a red…
25 CE to now
Writing that is not meant to be read. Fulu are Taoist talismanic characters — strokes that resemble Chinese characters, often an existing word elongated, with…
1400 CE to now
A practice of making the small thing stand for the large one. Its oldest form is the illa: a carved stone llama or alpaca, palm-sized, with a cylindrical hole sunk into…
901 CE to now
Writing, worn. The tradition makes protective objects out of text — Qur'anic verses, the ninety-nine names of God, names of angels and prophets, pious phrases…
1521 CE to now
Catholic forms in lay hands, worked past the point the clergy sanctions.
1750 CE to now
Treasures with whakapapa. A hei-tiki, a hei matau, an adze reworked into a pendant, a cloak, a carving: Te Papa's own description of taonga Māori covers ancestral…
801 CE to now
The taught craft behind Thailand's protective objects: the designs, the scripts, the incantations and the rules that go with them.
1600 CE to now
Not one practice but a shelf of them, made by different specialists for different clients across Benin, Togo, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Niger and Cameroon: written…
Medieval (5)
820 CE to now
The class of blessed objects and rites the Catholic Church puts around the sacraments: holy water, blessed candles given out at Candlemas, blessed palms, blessed ashes…
1500 CE to now
The making of painted parchment scrolls by dabtaras — unordained clerics of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church — for named people, cut to their height, written in Ge'ez, and…
400 CE to now
A family of practice in which protection is armour, said or worn.
200 CE to now
The branch of Jewish mysticism that makes things: amulets and incantations built from divine and angelic names, written on parchment or cut into silver, and carried…
755 CE to now
The protective end of Tibetan Buddhism: printed and drawn amulets consecrated by lamas, folded and bound in five-coloured cord, carried in worked-metal boxes at the neck…
Modern (1)
1308 CE to now
Protective objects made and kept by European households outside the church's list: iron over a door, a bottle in a hearth, a shoe in a wall, rowan bound with red thread…