Evil Eye Charm

About the Artist

Foteini Psarouli is a young designer girl who sells her jewels at the most elegant area,
downtown Athens (Greece).

Charms are usually offered at a baby's birth for good luck and protection from the
"evil eye".
Foteini's charms are inspired from this theme: "eye","cycle","moon","heart" as
popular tradition relates magic acts always with the cycle of the moon.

About Item

Material: Gold K18 with

mother of pearl & BR0.03ct.
Size: 2.4 x 1.3 cm.
Weight: 1.2 gr.

About Story

The evil eye

A very common and very old belief

The evil eye, known as μάτι in Greece, is the belief that some people have a
malevolent gaze.
Their envy, expressed by overlooking or even by a compliment, can be a curse
and cause damage to the person, animal, plant or even object it is addressed to.
“What a nice cup you have there, where did you find it?” your hands drop the cup,
which breaks in little pieces.

That’s also the reason why in country villages in Greece you could find evil eye
charms, beads or a simple red thread, a red knot hanged or bound around trees or
beautiful plants.
The effects on victims may vary, from a simple headache or drowsiness to illness or
even death. The primary victims of course thought to be young children and babies.
The action of hurting by gazing at is called βασκανία in greek (“vaskania”) and could
be intentional or not. So, even today, newborns often wear some kind of protection,
an amulet, an apotropaic symbol (apotropaic
means in greek “blocking” or “turning away”), which is a blue “eye”.

The concept may vary among different cultures but astonishingly is a very
common one and very old.
Greeks, Romans, Jewish, Hindu, Muslims have similar beliefs in their tradition and
many studies treat
The subject under a folkloric, theological, classical or anthropological
approach. We meet the topic in Hesiod, Callimachus, Plato,
Aristophanes, Theocritus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder. The spreading of
the Evil Eye towards the east is believed to have been
propagated by Alexander the Great, who spread this and other
Greek ideas across his empire. The Bible and, even today, the Greek
Orthodox Church share the belief of evil eye and have particular prayers against it.

Why a blue eye?

The cycle of the Moon

To prevent from being affected by the evil eye, you have to ware on you a blue bead
or a blue eye.
The color is referred obviously to seawater and the holly water. Traditionally,seawater
participates in many magical works, the holly water and water in general is believed
to bring blessing and purification. Moon is closely associated with the element of
water. The cycle of the moon ordinate the tides of sea, rise and fall, caused by the
combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon. Moon was always
associated, also, with women’s cycle of 28 days. Birth, rebirth, purification, female
element were all associated fields to the Moon and the benevolent Sea. Alan Dundes
(late UC Berkeley)studies indeed the topic, the connection between the evil caused
by the gaze and symptoms of drying, dehydration, withering.

Diagnose and healing

Tradition says that there are many ways to diagnose and heal “the evil eye”. When a
baby cries with no obvious reason, for example, or if you have a sudden migraine,
those could be the symptoms of evil eye’s effect. A test used very often to verify evil
eye’s presence is the olive oil test. As, under normal conditions, oil floats in water, if
a drop of olive oil sinks or merges with water in a glass, then the conclusion is that
evil eye is present. Then, healing is usually performed by an on old lady, known for
her healing charisma, or by a grandparent, who silently recites a secret prayer
passed over from man to woman and the opposite. Those brief poems are often very
simple and common, but sometimes reveal the surrealistic inspirational force of folk
poetry.

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