邪眼迷信不理性，但作者主张别急着抛弃它

When I was a child, I went to the wedding of a cousin I barely knew. After the sun had set, I watched the newly married couple walk through the crowd and begin to dance together. As they moved, the voices of dozens of guests rung out in a loud, high-pitched trill: lililililili!

Curious, I asked my aunt what they were doing.

‘They’re warding away the evil eye,’ she told me.

She explained that, during happy occasions, like weddings, the loud noise frightened away evil spirits and protected the couple.

As I grew older, I began to notice the other protections my family used against the evil eye. Charms were fastened onto necklaces and bracelets, and the phrase ‘tfu tfu tfu’ would be uttered anytime someone received a compliment. During significant, unpredictable processes – negotiating the price of a car, for example, or attending interviews for a new job – one might even refrain from telling anyone, just in case the evil eye sabotages them. And, of course, wedding ceremonies rang with ululations.

These are just a small handful of the ancient protections that humans have summoned against envy. For envy is the mechanism by which the evil eye operates. It emerges whenever someone looks at another person with resentment and jealousy, even unintentionally. Bad luck then follows, targeting things of value: wealth, health, good jobs and happy marriages.

Eventually, customs against the evil eye became a regular part of my own life. But, to members of cultures that do not subscribe to it, this ancient superstition, passed down over millennia, is often treated with suspicion, and considered incompatible with modern rationality. The contrast between these attitudes prompts the question: should we let go of old familial superstitions in favour of reason?

Belief in the evil eye goes back to the earliest known civilisation: Sumer. Texts written on clay tablets around 5,000 years ago show that the Sumerians believed the evil eye was a destructive power capable of destroying harvests, depleting wealth and causing illness. It could be cast by animals, gods and people – even by accident. One text, The Instructions of Shuruppak, advises: ‘Do not do evil with your eye.’ Other proverbs from this text warn of the danger of envious looks:

Who speaks curses injures only the skin;
Greedy eyes, however, can kill.

A belief in the destructive power of envy would transcend Sumerian superstition. A line from a Mesopotamian poem, composed during the Old Babylonian period roughly 3,600 to 3,900 years ago, makes the connection even more explicit:

He did not flaunt his knowledge. His words were modest.
If he flaunted his knowledge, people would cast the evil eye on him.

Romans decorated their homes with absurd depictions to ward away jealous gazes

This belief – that being looked at with envy or greed could cause harm – persisted as the cultures of the Near East emerged, succeeded one another and spread. Traces of the evil eye can be found in Babylonian incantations, on Phoenician amulets and in the Hebrew Bible. Some of those amulets may even have birthed the modern hamsa charm – a palm-shaped amulet that has become one of the most well-known protections against the evil eye.

By the classical period, starting around 2,800 years ago, the belief was widespread: Socrates cautioned against loud praise lest the evil eye sabotage his argument, while Romans decorated their homes with absurd depictions to ward away jealous gazes. In Pompeii, for example, two freed slaves, who had become rich, decorated their atrium with a comic fresco of the god Priapus weighing his oversized phallus against a sack of coins – an image meant to provoke laughter and ward off the envious looks of visitors. Later, roughly around the years 27-30 CE, the evil eye appeared in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Centuries later, it appeared again in the Islamic Hadiths.

Today, belief in the evil eye exists across the world. In Italy, it is known as malocchio (and countered by phallus-like horn-shaped charms or by touching the crotch). In Greece, it is known as mati. Across Turkey and the Arab world, its name is nazar. Versions of the evil eye are found almost everywhere: North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, parts of eastern Europe, India, sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia – not to mention diaspora and immigrant communities across the globe.

The evil eye may seem like an irrational, pseudoscientific belief. The explanations ancient writers conceived to explain the mechanism by which it worked (or to ward it away) are even less convincing. Plutarch, for example, hypothesised that the eye emitted toxic rays that poisoned its object.

Some ancient thinkers cautioned against this kind of superstition. Plato, Lucretius and Cicero all discouraged superstitious beliefs, citing the anxiety they cause believers. Today, we would identify the excessive distress these thinkers describe as ‘scrupulosity’, a pathological obsession with religious correctness associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Their criticism of superstitions could be rather harsh: Theophrastus mocked those who shudder or spit when they see ‘a maniac or an epileptic’ – an expression of what he called ‘cowardice in regard to the supernatural’. (Spitting away the gaze is still practised today and, unfortunately, the idea that the sick and disabled are powerful casters of the evil eye also persists. And the association goes both ways: in a 2014 survey of Jordanian university students, 28.1 per cent believed the evil eye causes epilepsy. This is a potent reminder of superstition’s risks.)

While misfortune is unpredictable, these rituals return the locus of control to the afflicted

Ancient philosophers who cautioned against superstitions did so with good intentions. They were looking out for the spiritual wellbeing of their peers. But their approach still led to patronising views of ‘superstitious’ people, which almost always meant non-Roman cultures. Romans scrutinised and banned Egyptian cultic practice, and mocked Christians and Jews as superstitiosi for observing their rites.

The disapproval of superstition on ethnic and rational grounds reappeared in 19th-century research on the evil eye. Consider the writing of the British anthropologist Edward B Tylor in his book Primitive Culture (1871):

Of course, the opinions and habits belonging in common to masses of mankind are to a great extent the results of sound judgment and practical wisdom. But to a great extent it is not so. That many numerous societies of men should have believed in the influence of the evil eye … is not ground for holding that the rites in question are profitable, the beliefs sound, and the history authentic.

Strange interpretations of the evil eye persisted into the next century. The Hungarian American psychoanalyst and anthropologist Géza Róheim, after observing how common the hamsa was across North Africa, reached the startling conclusion that the hand amulet was rooted in masturbation. As he put it: ‘the use of masturbation as a means of warding off anxiety is well known. I suspect that this is the meaning of the hand amulet.’ Interpretations like this have made it easy to write off a belief in the evil eye as absurd.

Modern attitudes are not far off. A 2024 article in Scientific American, entitled ‘Why Do Superstitions Persist among Seemingly Rational People?’, implies that practising superstitions is incompatible with a rational character.

Having grown up at the intersection of several cultures that believe in the evil eye, I’ve come across many intelligent people who take part in superstitious rituals. There are good reasons why they adopt these seemingly irrational beliefs. From an evolutionary perspective, superstitions are theorised to be a byproduct of the human ability to detect and explain patterns with astounding speed and accuracy. Additionally, the collective rituals we form around superstitions relieve our anxiety in the face of uncontrollable events, such as the weather that once affected harvests in Sumer or the onset of epilepsy in ancient Greece. While misfortune is unpredictable, these rituals return the locus of control to the afflicted. This is likely the mechanism behind the observation that taking part in positive rituals may boost performance, which has been attested to in several studies. Better still, rituals against the evil eye frequently return agency to those who need it most, because it is not priests or princes who have the power to repel the evil eye. In some cultures, the people most credited with the power to ward off the evil eye are those who have traditionally had fewer social and legal rights – old women in the Balkans, disabled people in ancient Greece and Rome.

Being seen can be terrifying. It is the first step to being judged, loathed, and excluded

Moreover, regarding the evil eye with contempt is a missed opportunity to examine why it is so persistent. Given how widespread the belief is, it likely has its social advantages. It can be immensely powerful as a social bonder: because the eye targets precisely what societies hold dearest, it is used across cultures to reinforce and define collective values. Consequently, many enduring evil-eye rituals protect those once seen as most vulnerable: pregnant women, children and newborns. Modern medicine may have made that vulnerability less visible, but the survival of spitting, charms and amulets tied to these life stages keeps us in touch with the anxieties of the past. They also provide perspective. Despite healthcare innovations, life itself cannot be taken for granted. As societies evolve, the scope of coverage provided by rituals widens. In my life, among friends and family, it is customary to murmur protective phrases at the mention of a potential job offer. In doing so, we show each other what our social circle values.

Helpful qualities aside, the belief itself is a rich cultural tradition. Behind the amulets and other items used to ward off the evil eye is a wealth of intangible culture. These items frequently draw on regional variations of the belief. North African Jews, for example, combined hamsa amulets with fish motifs, inspired by the Talmudic teaching that fish, hidden from envious looks underwater, are immune to the evil eye. Each culture preserves variants that tell a unique story.

The greatest criticism levelled against the evil-eye superstition rests on the assumption that the phenomenon is unsubstantiated. In a literal sense, it is. But from a social perspective, being seen can be terrifying. It is the first step to being judged, loathed, and excluded. We feel this intuitively when we worry about appearing too gaudy, too dressed-up, too eye-catching.

In the 20th century, philosophers pondered the power dynamics behind looking and being looked at. Jean-Paul Sartre developed the concept of ‘the look’ (‘le regard’), the realisation that being looked at transforms us from free agents into visible objects. Michel Foucault observed that societies weaponise the power discrepancy between those who are looked at and those who look, such as specialists in medical clinics and guards in prisons. John Berger pointed out that being viewed is rife with tensions, propelled by gender, class and ideology. It is unsurprising, then, that so early in our history, humans concluded that the eye has a special power.

The evil-eye superstition regulates this anxiety and, crucially, the behaviour around it.

One of history’s earliest surviving references to this ancient superstition is, not coincidentally, ‘do not do evil with your eye.’ The belief warns us against boasting, and against envying others, and it asks us to protect ourselves during vulnerable periods, while also worrying for those who are more vulnerable than ourselves. In short, it teaches us a valuable lesson: to look upon others kindly.