I remember, as a small child, my mother doing a curious thing. She placed a pot of water on the stove to boil, then threw in a handful of lubia as she called them, black-eyed beans. As the pot boiled furiously, several of the beans jumped out, and each time one did my mother called “emshee! emshee!” (go away! go away!) in Arabic. She was, as she explained to me later, removing the evil eye from our house.
The evil eye is a form of curse, transmitted by look, that is believed by many cultures to cause injury or bad luck for the person at whom it is directed. It is most commonly attributed to envy, cast unintentionally by looking at or excessively praising a person, particularly a child, for too long. However the term may also refer to a stronger, more intentional curse cast on a victim by the owner of a magical eye.
The origin of the evil eye can be traced back at least three thousand years to the region of Sumer in Mesopotamia, but probably has much older origins. Mentioned by over 100 classical scholars including Hesiod and Plato, Plutarch postulated that the evil eye was a manifestation of deadly rays that sprang like darts from the inner recesses of the body.
Belief in the evil eye was spread to the east as far as India by Alexander the Great, and to the south and north by the Roman Empire centuries later, and persisted well into the middle ages in England and Celtic parts of Europe.
Today, belief in the evil eye is widespread across the Middle East, West Africa, Central America and Mexico, Central Asia and many parts of Europe, especially the Mediterranean. In Islamic culture, Muhammad stated "the influence of an evil eye is a fact...” while in Judaism the evil eye is mentioned several times in classical texts including the Old Testament. Even today the blue and green eyes of northern Europeans my be regarded with particular suspicion by southern Europeans and Turks, while in Western culture the phrase “to give someone the evil eye” has entered the lexicon of common parlance, even if it only means to stare at a person in anger or disgust.
See also:
- pulsuz is elanlari
Rasha Rashad