Spitting, touching iron, not praising: small charms through history

Many defences against the evil eye require no objects. A gesture, a word, a quick touch of a material thought to be protective is enough. These minimal charms, often performed almost without thinking, have a surprisingly long history. Some already appear in the Greek and Latin poets, others are documented by nineteenth-century folklorists, and several survive in today's habits, emptied of conviction but still alive in language and in the movements of the body.

Saliva as a defence

Spitting is perhaps the oldest of these gestures. Theocritus' Polyphemus spits three times into his breast after praising himself, so as not to attract envy. Pliny the Elder, in the twenty-eighth book of the Natural History, devotes a whole passage to the powers attributed to human saliva, which according to the beliefs of his time repelled fascination and other harmful influences. Spitting was also a way of showing contempt for what one feared, robbing it of its strength.

The satirical poet Persius, in the first century AD, describes a domestic scene in his second Satire: the grandmother or the maternal aunt takes the baby from the cradle and, with her middle finger and lustral saliva, marks its forehead and lips, skilled as she is at holding back burning eyes. Persius tells it ironically, but the scene bears witness to a common family custom, which ethnographers would find again almost unchanged in modern Europe.

Iron and wood

In Italy, faced with bad news or the name of someone thought to be a jettatore, people say «tocca ferro», touch iron, and look for a metal object. Iron, a hard metal worked by fire, is considered in many European traditions a barrier against hostile forces: horseshoes hung on doors and nails kept as lucky charms bear witness to this. In English-speaking countries and in parts of northern Europe people prefer instead to touch wood.

Many explanations, often fanciful, circulate about the origin of these customs: the wood of the Cross, the sacred trees of the Celts, the mysterious power of blacksmiths. None of them is documented with certainty. It is more prudent to observe that the gesture has a common structure: interrupting a dangerous sentence with physical contact, almost as if to discharge a negative energy elsewhere. The precise meaning varies from place to place, while the form remains surprisingly stable.

Do not praise too much

Alongside gestures, there are words. In many cultures praising a child without adding a protective formula was considered dangerous. The Romans said praefiscini, Jews bli ayin hara, Muslims mashallah; in the south of Italy expressions such as «benedica» or «God bless him» were used, and anyone who praised without saying them might be suspected of ill intent. It is a rule of courtesy that reveals how strongly admiration was felt to be a powerful act, to be handled with care.

These small charms tell of a view of the world in which gaze, word and fortune were bound together by invisible threads. Today we often repeat them as a game, but the very fact that they have survived for more than two thousand years, through profound religious and social change, says a great deal about the tenacity of cultural habits and about the human need for reassuring gestures in moments of uncertainty.