Evil Eye

The evil eye is the belief that certain individuals can cause harm — illness, misfortune, even death — by looking at another person or their property.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976) Found across much of Europe, North Africa, the Near East, South and Central Asia, and the Americas, it is one of the most widespread folk illness concepts in human history, documented from Sumerian texts through the present day. Despite this ubiquity, anthropologists have given it less systematic attention than witchcraft, in part because evil eye events rarely produce the clear social sequences of accusation, diagnosis, and cure that made witchcraft analytically tractable (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The belief persists not as a relic of superstition but as a functioning element in systems that explain misfortune, regulate social relations around envy and inequality, and provide diagnostic frameworks for illness in children.

Distribution and Ecology

In a cross-cultural survey of 186 societies, John M. Roberts found that only 36 percent possess the evil eye belief. The core distribution falls in an arc across North and East Africa, all of Europe, the Near East, and India, a pattern suggestive of diffusion from a common Old World origin rather than independent invention in each locale (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The belief is absent or marginal in East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa south of the Islamic belt, and most of Oceania. Its presence in the Americas — particularly Mexico and Central America — arrived through Spanish colonial transmission and subsequent synthesis with indigenous illness concepts.

Roberts’ statistical analysis revealed that the evil eye correlates most strongly with cultural complexity: technological specialization, social stratification, the presence of writing, and monetized economies (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Maloney’s comparative survey of twelve world regions identified seven features common across the documented distribution, providing the most systematic attempt yet at a cross-cultural typology of the belief.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976) The ecological picture, as Garrison and Arensberg elaborated in their concluding essay to Maloney’s 1976 volume, points toward the mixed herder-agriculturalist societies of the circum-Mediterranean world, where unstable patronage relations and sharp inequalities of wealth create conditions for beliefs about the dangerous power of the envious gaze (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Moss and Cappannari, reviewing the Mediterranean evidence, concluded that the evil eye is probably one of the oldest continuous religious constructs in the basin, spanning ancient Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In ancient Egypt the eye carried three religious functions (seat of the soul, creator of good, and creator of evil), and the Eye of Horus served as prototype for the medical notation Rx (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Ancient Etruscan funerary sculpture shows countermagic horning gestures on sarcophagus figurines from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., providing among the earliest archaeological evidence for evil eye protective practices in material culture (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Primitive Disease Frameworks and the Evil Eye

Henry Sigerist documented that the two most fundamental primitive concepts of disease causation are object intrusion (something foreign enters the body) and soul loss (something vital is removed), representing disease as either a ‘Plus’ or a ‘Minus’ (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Man is sick because there is something in his body that does not belong to it, or because something has been removed from him (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Object intrusion as a disease concept is nearly universal in the Americas and occurs throughout European folklore, southeastern Asia, Australia, and New Zealand (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). Soul loss, by contrast, dominates Siberian shamanism and explains chronic wasting diseases and unconscious states, while object intrusion accounts primarily for acute painful conditions (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951). In Mesopotamia, evil spirits attacked through three mechanisms: carelessness or fate (the dominant Sumerian view), sin against the gods (the dominant Semitic view), and sorcery or black magic (Sigerist, Henry E., 1951).

Nature of the Belief

The nature of who casts the evil eye and what it can harm varies across cultures (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In the Philippines, the power emanates only from the person who casts it, through his eye or mouth (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In the Mediterranean, it may be an avenging, righteous power of a deity (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In ancient Egypt, it was the power of a god emanating from his eyes (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Brian Spooner, reviewing the anthropological literature in 1976, identified four distinct explanations of the evil eye; they are complementary but not equally comprehensive, and all fail to account for the belief’s absence (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The social identity of the suspected caster also differs sharply by region: low-caste people in Ethiopia, strangers in Mexico, kin in Iran, and witches in Greece (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Mary Douglas’s structural analysis in Purity and Danger provides an additional framework: where a social system places people in dangerously ambiguous roles (neither clearly inside nor outside, neither high nor low), those persons tend to be credited with uncontrolled, unconscious spiritual powers such as witchcraft (Mary Douglas, 1966). By contrast, those in clearly defined positions of authority are credited with controlled, conscious powers to bless or curse (Mary Douglas, 1966). Douglas further proposed that witches occupy the structural position of “beetles in the wainscoting,” living in the cracks of the social system and attracting the fears that other ambiguities attract in other thought structures (Mary Douglas, 1966).

Structural Relationship to Witchcraft

Garrison and Arensberg proposed a minimal-sequence model of the evil eye event: a gazer or suspected gazer, a gazee who displays a sign of protection for a valued possession, and the deflection or defeat of the gazer (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). This triadic structure distinguishes the evil eye from the essentially dyadic relationship of witch and victim (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The evil eye differs from witchcraft in its social process: Evans-Pritchard demonstrated clear sequences of misfortune, diagnosis, search, accusation, and cure for Azande witchcraft, whereas evil eye events rarely involve a discernible sequence of this kind, making the belief less tractable for social-process analysis (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Nevertheless, the belief serves a social-psychological function by enabling conflict resolution through patterned responses that replace personal confrontation with countermagic and exorcism (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Patronage and Social Structure

Garrison and Arensberg’s most original contribution was the argument that the evil eye belief complex is structurally homologous to the institution of personal patronage in stratified circum-Mediterranean societies. The drama of the evil eye — gaze, threat of seizure, appeal to a higher protective power — mirrors the political drama of patron-client relations, where a powerful figure may appropriate the goods of a weaker one unless a still more powerful patron intervenes (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). This structural reading explains the geographic concentration of the belief in societies characterized by mixed herding-agriculture, stratification, and unstable political orders, and its absence in societies (like China) that lack the specific patron-client symbiosis of the Mediterranean world (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Teitelbaum’s study of Tunisian handloom weavers provides an unusually precise case of the evil eye functioning as economic leveling. The Tunisian version of the evil eye (‘ayn harsha) has traceable roots through Berber antecedents and successive occupations — Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Arab, Turkish, and French colonial — forming part of a circum-Mediterranean heritage that took local institutional form (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In Tunisian social logic, the evil eye is ruled out among close kin, co-residents, and dining partners, whose relationship is sanctioned by God; the most feared glance comes from an envious neighbor without kin ties (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Significantly, the Tunisian belief system limits the evil eye’s scope to living things owned by humans (livestock, children, crops), while inanimate property is considered immune, a boundary that concentrates protective effort on the most irreplaceable and emotionally charged objects of ownership.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976) Etiquette against projecting envy requires protracted greetings, pious blessings when praising others, and habitual understatement about one’s own wellbeing (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). After formal guild regulations were abolished in the 1880s, the community-wide informal output quota of “a portion a day” was enforced not by rule but by evil eye belief: weavers who exceeded the communal norm exposed themselves to the envious gaze of co-workers, and excess display of protective fish-tail talismans on a loom served as tacit social signaling that the weaver wished not to be disturbed (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Weavers who moved looms into their homes to evade the quota rationalized the move as self-protection from co-workers’ evil eye, illustrating how the belief could be simultaneously a mechanism of social control and a resource for individual deviance (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The Evil Eye in Islamic Medicine

Islamic medicine preserved and elaborated the evil eye belief within two distinct but interacting frameworks: learned humoral medicine and the genre of popular-prophetic medicine (al-tibb al-nabawi). Pormann and Savage-Smith observe that popular cures and folk explanations of disease, including magical, folkloric, and astrological practices, permeated all levels of Islamic society, and that reliance on astrology and magic was found among both the educated elite and the illiterate poor (Pormann, 2007).

The evil eye pre-dated all the universalistic religions of the Middle East. It was present in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, with the evidence suggesting it was older than any of them (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The Quran does not explicitly mention the evil eye, but Sura 113 (al-Falaq, “Daybreak”), with its reference to “the evil of an envier when he envies,” was commonly cited in Islamic societies to legitimize belief in it (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), in his authoritative treatise on Prophetic Medicine, explicitly affirmed the evil eye’s existence and characterized those who denied it as “the most ignorant of people,” placing elite theological authority behind popular folk belief (Pormann, 2007).

Alongside learned physicians, Islamic scholars developed the khawass genre, a body of treatises on the occult properties of plants, animals, and minerals that operated without prayer or invocation, treating material substances themselves as carriers of hidden power (Pormann, 2007). Even formally trained physicians participated in this tradition: Abu al-Ala Zuhr (d. 1131), progenitor of the famous Andalusian medical dynasty, composed a Book of Occult Properties listing magical-medical uses for 308 animal, vegetable, and mineral substances (Pormann, 2007). Amulets against the evil eye in the Islamic world differed from ancient or medieval European precedents in a significant respect: Islamic invocations were addressed to God rather than to demons, making them supplicatory prayers rather than demonic conjurations (Pormann, 2007).

The Christian physician Qusta ibn Luqa (d. c. 912) offered an early psychosomatic rationale for amuletic therapy: the effectiveness of amulets derived primarily from the strengthening of the patient’s mind through belief in their power, since the state of the soul affects the state of the body (Pormann, 2007). This formulation allowed the physician to employ amulets without committing fully to a supernaturalist etiology — a characteristically pluralist accommodation consistent with Spooner’s broader interpretive claim that the evil eye is best understood as an institutionalized psychological idiom for the personification of misfortune, particularly misfortune related to the fear of outsiders and their envy (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The most typical vehicle of evil eye suspicion across the Middle East was the outsider or a person with physical abnormality, with gradual wasting sickness as the most characteristic effect (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Nomadic communities showed markedly less elaboration of evil eye rituals than peasant communities, likely because their more inclusive social role structure reduced fear of outsiders (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

In Middle Eastern defensive practice, fumigation with wild rue (espand) was nearly universally employed as a regular ritual or habitual practice before the fact (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). A distinctive Persian formulation extended the concept further: “the loving eye is more dangerous than the evil eye,” because undue attention, whether envious or doting, is the dangerous element, making even a mother’s excessive gaze potentially harmful (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Across the region, physical contact alone was not a recognized vehicle for harm (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The Evil Eye in Medieval European Medical Context

In England, the theory of ocular fascination, that a malevolent glance could cause disease or death, was not confined to popular belief (Thomas, Keith, 1971). It had supporters among learned physicians who worked out physiological mechanisms involving fine spirits or venomous effluvia emanating from the eyes (Thomas, Keith, 1971).

Jacquart and Thomasset document a more specific medieval physiological grounding: the theory that retention of menstrual blood after menopause made older women venomous, capable of harming animals and children through their gaze (Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, 1988). Albert the Great and Pliny both described how old women whose menstruation was irregular could transmit venom through their glance to children lying in cradles. This formulation transformed the evil eye from a purely social-psychological phenomenon into a physiologically grounded one. Menstrual retention produced a toxic quality that could be projected through the eyes, making postmenopausal women structurally dangerous in a way that required no deliberate malice. The decline of witchcraft prosecution in England, Keith Thomas notes, preceded the Witchcraft Act’s repeal in 1736: judicial skepticism about supernatural disease causation, including ocular fascination, changed practice from above before legal reform followed (Thomas, Keith, 1971).

In Anglo-Saxon England, disease theory attributed illness to the entrance of demons or evil spirits into the body, and those with the evil eye were credited alongside witches with causing sickness through such means (Henry S. Wellcome, 1912). This integration of the evil eye into a broader demonic etiology of disease was characteristic of early medieval European medicine, where the boundary between spiritual assault and bodily illness was not drawn in the places modern readers would expect.

The Enlightenment in Naples produced a characteristically modern transformation of the old demonic framework. Neapolitan intellectuals developed the jettatura myth, which could no longer posit deliberate pacts with demons but reframed the evil eye as resulting from the involuntary power of human passions. The jettatore harmed others not through demonic contract but through an excess of destructive force he himself could not control, a compromise between medieval supernaturalism and Enlightenment rationalism that kept the social utility of the belief intact while removing its theological difficulties (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Mesoamerican Synthesis

After the Spanish Conquest, Catholic priests transmitted Hippocratic humoral theory to indigenous Mexicans, who adopted it as a core component of their folk medicine (Madsen, William, 1960). Pedro Ciruelo, a Spanish clergyman, described sixteenth-century church views that both witches and individuals with unhealthy vision could infect others with evil-eye sickness, especially young children and debilitated adults (Madsen, William, 1960). According to Spanish belief, witches made pacts with the Devil, who appeared as various animals, and they flew at night to cause harm using pins, blood, vapors, and the evil eye (Madsen, William, 1960).

In the Quiché Maya community of Santa Lucia Utatlán, Cosminsky found that the Spanish term mal de ojo had undergone significant semantic transformation: the Guatemalan concept referred primarily to the illness of the receiver rather than the power of the giver, and was typically unintentional.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976) The Mediterranean emphasis on the dangerous power of the envious eye had shifted toward a focus on the vulnerability of the victim (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The force causing evil eye was associated with “strong” or “hot” blood, which could be permanent (determined by birth) or temporary (arising from pregnancy, menstruation, or drunkenness) (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). [GAP: The original paragraph claimed herbal treatment centered on rue in hot preparations, but no cited card supports this.]

In Tecospa, a Nahuatl-speaking community near Mexico City studied by Madsen, the parents of a sick child must beg a chili pepper from each of four grocery stores positioned in a cross pattern before the cure; then the specialist curandera licks the child’s head, cleans the body with an egg and herbs, and burns the materials to destroy the illness (Madsen, William, 1960). Tecospan witchcraft as a whole represented a blend of Aztec and Spanish traditions: Aztec nagual and tlacique witches were destined from birth to their condition without choosing it, while Spanish witches acquired their powers through a voluntary pact with the Devil (Madsen, William, 1960).

Michael Kearney’s fieldwork in Ixtepeji, Oaxaca, analyzed within Maloney’s 1976 volume, demonstrated that in Mexican folk medicine the evil eye operates through a power differential in which strong adults harm weaker children, with treatment consisting of the identified aggressor touching the child on the head or making a cross with saliva on its forehead (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). A different treatment uses egg rubbing to draw hot force from the child; a cooked yolk upon breaking confirms the diagnosis, reflecting hot‑cold humoral theory (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Envy is universally present and thus cannot alone be a good predictor of a nonuniversal trait like the evil eye (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In Ixtepeji, the evil eye belief is structurally and symbolically parallel to beliefs about aire, both symbolizing an underlying paranoid world view proposition that the environment is filled with omnipresent, unknown, dangerous forces threatening the individual (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

South Asian and Philippine Variants

In South Asia, babies and children are more susceptible to illness caused by the evil eye than adults, and they may even die from it (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Among Hindus, a large lampblack spot is applied to a baby’s forehead or elsewhere on the body to make the baby look sufficiently imperfect and deflect the evil eye (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Maloney notes that many words for eyes and seeing in Indian languages also refer to mental processes or insight, and suggests this connection relates to the origin of the forehead mark (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The evil eye in South Asia serves social functions including egalitarian restraint: fear of envy puts pressure on the prosperous to distribute some wealth, since conspicuous consumption within a village invites the dangerous attention of those lower in the social hierarchy (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Maloney found that unlike in societies where witchcraft triggers retaliation, evil eye accusations in South Asia rarely produce witch-hunts or direct action against suspected casters, reflecting a “mildness” he observed particularly in southern and eastern India (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The concept entered South Asia likely from the west with proto-Dravidian speakers and the spread of complex peasant-urban societies, and it became far more diffuse than in its probable Near Eastern origin, absorbing into broader Hindu cosmological concepts of karma and fate (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The Kasyapa Samhita, one of the oldest ayurvedic texts on women’s and children’s medicine, provides a mythic parallel to evil eye belief in its description of the Childsnatcher demoness (Jatahari/Revati). A pregnant woman “catches” the affliction by contact with possessed women through clothes, shared baths, food offerings, hair, or even being stared at, providing an early South Asian formulation of spirit-contagion as disease transmission (Wujastyk, 1998). The vulnerability mechanism in Kasyapa runs parallel to evil eye logic: a susceptible person (pregnant woman, infant) is harmed by external attention or contact from a ritually impure or spiritually dangerous source.

In the Philippines, the closest equivalent to the evil eye among Tagalog groups is the “hot mouth” (mainit na bibig), associated with the folk illness bati (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Neither the indigenous term for evil eye nor the Spanish mal ojo was borrowed; instead, a local concept of illness cast through admiring speech emerged that parallels the evil eye in six key features: unintentional harm, focus on infants, therapeutic physical contact, effects on plants, a tendency to blame women, and triggering by compliment (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Flores-Meiser proposed that the hot mouth-bati complex may be a syncretic rearrangement of elements from two folk beliefs, possibly diffused via Iberian cultures (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Regional Case Studies

Jewish Tradition

Talmudic and rabbinical literature attributed 99 of 100 deaths to the evil eye, and recorded specific rabbis capable of destroying objects or persons with their glance (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The belief generated protective legislation: oaths against the evil eye were permitted on the Sabbath when other work was forbidden; men were prohibited from standing in neighbors’ fields when grain was in ear; and a sick child’s name could be changed to an animal name, simultaneously confusing the Angel of Death and lending the child the strength of the named beast (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Jews across Christian Europe were collectively attributed with the evil eye (German Judenblick), resulting in explicit legal exclusions: the Council of Elvira (fourth century, Spain) forbade Jews from standing near ripening Christian crops, and Jews were barred from the coronation of Richard I in 1189 (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Greece and Southern Italy

In a Greek island village studied by Dionisopoulos-Mass, the evil eye formed one of three interlocking mechanisms of social control alongside gossip and magic, each constraining behavior from a distinct angle and together maintaining village order without recourse to formal authority.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976) The evil eye specifically operated along a continuum from unintentional matiazma (accidental bewitchment, cured by any competent lay person) to intentional vascania (malicious bewitchment requiring priestly intervention) (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The standard Greek curing ritual involved burning nine or twelve cloves over the afflicted person while invoking the Trinity; a snapping clove confirmed the spell and its breaking simultaneously (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The curing knowledge had to pass alternating between men and women to remain effective; transmission within the same sex disabled the power (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Matiazma functioned as social leveling by discouraging conspicuous wealth display, while vascania was a harmful and disruptive force whose possessors were mistreated yet kindly handled to avoid wrath (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

In southern Italian peasant villages, the evil eye was omnipresent and functioned as Appel described it: like a virus, with carriers often unaware of their destructive power (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Illness attributed to it ranged from headaches and depression to extreme spirit possession, all characterized by the sense of being acted upon by powerful and unknown forces (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The standard cure involved three repetitions of an oil-and-water ritual invoking the Holy Trinity; the behavior of oil drops confirmed or excluded the diagnosis (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Evil eye curers were women who taught the skill through kin networks but could teach no more than two others without losing their own power (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The mago (wizard) was the most skilled specialist for severe cases and, by the 1970s, advertised through newspaper want ads (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Appel argues that the Italian peasant evil eye complex functioned conservatively as a worldview: by attributing misfortune to an ineradicable feature of human nature rather than to historical or economic causes, the belief discouraged analysis of structural conditions and reinforced acceptance of an existing social order.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976)

Italian-American Transmission

Mid-nineteenth-century Italian immigrants in America faced supernatural troubles and relied on traditional incantations, potions, gestures, and charms, with a high degree of continuity in magical beliefs and practices noted among the newly settled.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976) As Italian-Americans acculturated, the precise nature of the evil eye became increasingly unclear, and the talismans used against it changed.(Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976)

Ethiopia

Among the Amhara, the buda (evil eye people) are a separate ethnic group of different origin with minimal interaction, landless, and work as potters, smiths, and weavers (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Buda status was hereditary through either parent, inescapable, and its bearers were constituted by Amhara society as a permanent external caste (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Reminick interprets the buda belief as a projective mechanism: anxiety about equal-status sibling rivalry over scarce land is displaced onto an outsider caste group, preserving internal Amhara solidarity (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Protective Practices

The material culture of evil eye protection includes iron objects, knife blades, and gold or coral horn-shaped charms (cornetti) used to counteract the evil eye (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In Malta, a syncretic tradition employs Arabic blue and northern Mediterranean red protective colors, with eyes painted on boat prows and automobiles, and goat horn, thumb-in-fist, and horned fingers worn as jewelry (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). The fish symbol dominates good-luck amulets, used in phrases, art, and amulets to ward off evil (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Middle Eastern children received protection through deliberate dirtying, unflattering nicknames, and avoidance of round numbers when counting livestock (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). In Amhara Ethiopia, children were protected from the evil eye through opposite-gender address, spitting, suspicion of compliments, and equal servings at feasts (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Roberts’ psychological hypothesis, the “conflict-enculturation” model, proposes that psychological conflicts around envy generate involvement in expressive models (stories and gossip) about the evil eye, and that cultures fostering those conflicts will be more likely to elaborate the belief (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Scholarly Assessment

Four decades of comparative scholarship have produced no unified theory of the evil eye. The most durable contributions have been structural-ecological rather than psychological. Roberts’ cross-cultural statistics established the distribution and ecological correlates with precision. Garrison and Arensberg’s patronage hypothesis placed it within a specific political economy. Douglas’s analysis of interstitial social positions explained why particular categories of persons tend to be suspected. Spooner’s typological survey clarified why the belief takes different social forms in different settings, and why a single psychological explanation such as envy cannot account for South Asian cases where the evil eye operates through power differentials rather than covetousness (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The Slovak folk belief holds that the capacity to cast the evil eye is causally linked to having been allowed to return to the mother’s breast after weaning (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Stein proposes that the evil eye belief functions as a “culturally constituted defense mechanism” that externalizes repressed hostility from early oral-incorporative conflicts around weaning and maternal ambivalence (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Stein further notes that the belief paradoxically fosters and prevents limitless strife: by defining harmful intent as largely involuntary and emphasizing common vulnerability, it contains retaliatory violence and enables empathy for accidental casters even as it monitors social boundaries (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). Thus the evil eye belief is rooted in early childhood patterns of envy and maternal ambivalence, consistent with Stein’s reading of it as a defense mechanism (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

The evil eye provides an explanation for unwilled harm to innocent children, inflicted by an agent with no deliberate intention, in contrast to intentional harm through sorcery or witchcraft (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976). It fills a lacuna in the folk belief system because few categories exist to explain illness in children (Maloney, Clarence (ed.), 1976).

Human Notes Zone

See Also

• folk-medicine
• witchcraft
• humoral-theory
• hot-cold-classification
• domestic-medicine
• medical-anthropology
• mal-de-ojo
• prophetic-medicine

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Maloney, C. ed. (1976). The Evil Eye. New York: Columbia UP. [Source ID: maloney-evileye-1976]
• Payne, J.F. (1912). Anglo-Saxon Leechcraft. London: Henry Frowde. [Source ID: anglo-saxon-leechcraft-1912]
• Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Source ID: douglas-purityanddanger-1966]
• Sigerist, H.E. (1951). A History of Medicine, vol. 1. New York: Oxford UP. [Source ID: sigerist-historyofmedicine-vol1-1951]
• Jacquart, D. & Thomasset, C. (1988). Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton UP. [Source ID: jacquart-thomasset-sexuality-1988]
• Pormann, P.E. & Savage-Smith, E. (2007). Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. [Source ID: pormann-medievalislamic-2007]
• Madsen, W. (1960). The Virgin’s Children: Life in an Aztec Village Today. Austin: U of Texas P. [Source ID: madsen-virginschildren-1960]
• Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner. [Source ID: thomas-religiondeclinemagic-1971]
• Wujastyk, D. (1998). The Roots of Ayurveda. London: Penguin. [Source ID: wujastyk-roots-of-ayurveda-1998]