Amulet: The Evil Eye Atlas

Amulet is an atlas of the evil eye: the belief that an envious or over-admiring look can harm a child, an animal, a harvest or a house, and the signs worn, said and done against it across the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Turkey and the Levant.

37 signs, each with its names in the languages of the places that use it: nazar boncuğu, μάτι, خمسة and חמסה, cornicello, mano fico, maşallah, bli ayin hara, ne budi uroka. Every sentence carries its standing. Source means an old book, named with the chapter and page. Folk means a custom recorded where it was seen. Ours means the atlas's own words, for what is widely known but not yet traced here to a written record.

WHAT IS IN IT
• Signs: objects, gestures, words, customs and motifs, filtered by region and kind, searched by any name in any script
• Regions: Turkey, Greece, Tuscany, Southern Italy, Malta, the Levant, Spain and Portugal, North Africa, Britain, the Balkans and antiquity, each with its own words for the eye
• Lore: ten articles, from Plutarch and Pliny to Florence in the 1880s, why the bead is blue, words said after praise, and charms as they were printed
• A sign of the day, the same for everyone on the same date, on screen and on a home-screen widget
• Any sign as a phone wallpaper or a square picture to share

WHERE IT COMES FROM
Frederick Elworthy's The Evil Eye (1895), Charles Godfrey Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains (1892), J. E. Hanauer's Folk-lore of the Holy Land (1907), Joshua Trachtenberg's Jewish Magic and Superstition (1939), Vuk Karadžić's Serbian dictionary (1852) and the Zagreb Zbornik for the life and customs of the South Slavs (1902). Customs are described as they were recorded, with the place they were seen, never as instructions.

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