The Evil Eye (Kako Mati)

I've been struck by the strength of belief in the evil eye, in Greece and Albania.

Wikipedia on the Evil Eye (including Greece).

Some people believe in it absolutely and have personal experience or 'proof' of its potentially deadly effects, others are superstitious to a lesser or greater degree, blaming small accidents on the fact that someone has cast the evil eye on them.

The Orthodox Church accepts the existence of the Evil Eye.

More on this.

As a sceptical rationalist (nothing New Age or mystical about me) paying half hearted lip-service to rather few folk-superstitions (maybe- at a stretch- those about walking under ladders or seeing a single magpie*), I am taken aback when otherwise rational people describe incidents of matiasma, to kako mati, vaskania, or indeed when they tell me about ley-lines and the power of crystals etc. 


Maybe I lack imagination.


Help! I've just mislaid my mojo amulet (bought in New Orleans) and my peacock's feather (acquired in Corfu), but luckily I've still got my blue glass charm to ward off the evil eye!

If you find my mojo or the peacock's feather, please return them. Did anyone out there give me an online evil eye? If so:

"Foul Superstition!" (Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, XLIV)

"The Evil Eye is a kind of telepathic curse" (John Humphrys and Christopher Humphrys, "Blue Skies and Black Olives", pp 194-196)

* Note :

"Among some of the older folk of Buckinghamshire it is still considered unlucky to see one magpie, but lucky to see two; while in certain districts...one occasionally hears this rhyme about magpies:

One for sorrow, two for mirth,

Three for a wedding and four for a birth,

Five for silver, six for gold,

Seven for a secret ne'er to be told".

* The Wayfarer's Book, E. Mansell (1935), p. 149

See also, Dorsetshire Folk-Lore, John Symonds Udal (1922):

"One, sign of anger,

Two, sign of mirth;

       Three, sign of wedding;

                                     Four, sign of birth (or, sometimes, "death" )

In Dorsetshire, some persons will spit on seeing a single magpie" (p.240)

In Somerset, some people spit over their left shoulders.

See also, Frederic Thomas Elworthy, The Evil Eye

The evil eye. An account of this ancient and wide spread superstition (1895)