A Theory of Relational Affliction and Healing: Evil Eye in Iran and Greece

Figure 1 – Tote bag for sale in a Greek tourist market. (Photo by D. Kavadias)

Abstract: Rose Wellman and Dionisios Kavadias offer a comparative ethnographic study of the evil eye in contemporary Iran and Greece. With rich ethnographic detail, the authors explore the ongoing significance of evil eye affliction as well as the diagnostic approaches and remedies used for removal of this curse. Their analysis shifts focus from previous paradigms of social cohesion to local cultural logics, ways of knowing, and realities that foreground bodily integrity and experiences of energy. They present evil eye as a case study in relationality and embodied affliction/healing.

Citation: Wellman, Rose and Dionisios Kavadias “A Theory of Relational Affliction and Healing: Evil Eye in Iran and Greece” The Jugaad Project, 28 October 2021, www.thejugaadproject.pub/relational-affliction [date of access]

Historically, anthropologists interested in the evil eye have approached this symbolic complex through structural-functionalist paradigms that emphasize the evil eye’s role in identifying and restoring social crises and ruptures (Foster 1965; Kluckhohn 1967; Wolf 1955). These analyses contend that the diagnosis of the evil eye, particularly in so-called “peasant” or “face-to-face” societies, signals a breach in normative egalitarianism, a situation in which an individual’s excess or superiority threatens the stability of collective life (Roussou 2021, 2005; Loizos and Papataxiarchis 2016; Herzfeld 1985; Galt 1982; Roberts 1976:261). Others place evil eye in the toolkit of identity-making and power (Chryssanthopoulou 2008; Dubisch 1986a). In this piece, in contrast, we draw from ethnographic examples of the evil eye in Iran and Greece to foreground, with our interlocutors, the ritual processes that relate the material culture of the evil eye to the (meta)physical body, including to our own bodies as we were incorporated into evil eye diagnosis and cure during fieldwork.1  Rather than theorize why the evil eye exists or what its (many) social functions might be, we highlight how contemporary practitioners of evil eye healing make an analogical relation between the body and a mediating material object, ritually transferring the “negative energy” of the evil eye to a separate object, liquid, or substance—and sometimes the healer’s own body.  In so doing, we seek to move beyond narratives of modernity that assume that the evil eye is a vestige of a premodern past, and consider its persistence in modern states, life worlds, and economies.

This work draws inspiration from Edith Turner's belief in radical participation, documented in Experiencing Ritual (1992), in which she casts off Western pretenses of positivist or functionalist understanding and throws herself into the thick of two Ihamba rituals involving the spiritual exorcism of a metaphysical but quite—to her and other participants—observable affliction. Through her, we understand "symbols" to effect healing: they bring about reality.

Our work further draws from current research in the field of material religion and praxis. David Morgan has shown the significance of the body as a site for exploring “the social, aesthetic, and practical character of religion in everyday life” (Morgan 2015:1). The body as it is affected by evil eye, we argue, also registers social, aesthetic, and metaphysical forces, and the rituals and material assemblages surrounding its diagnosis and cure in Iran and Greece form an extension of this bodywork.

At the same time, our work foregrounds how the body is emplaced in webs of relations. We particularly employ theories of kinship and relatedness to understand how religious practice shapes not only individual subjectivities but also the morality, religiosity, and physio-sacred integrity of relationships (Thomas et. al 2017; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Carsten 2000). In our ethnographic examples, such relational integrity depends fundamentally on navigating interpersonal envy, a social force with metaphysical power.

Lastly, we center our analysis squarely in comparative ethnography, focusing on the diverse sites of contemporary Iran and Greece. We introduce our comparative method first, before moving to two case studies of the evil eye: "Iran: Chashm Zakhm," written by Rose Wellman and "Greece: The Máti and Mátiasma," written by Dionisios Kavadias.2  We conclude with a comparison of local ideas about the evil eye and the body in Greece and Iran, bringing together ideas of efficacy and praxis from medical anthropology and material cultural religious studies to reevaluate the evil eye as a phenomenon of relationality.

Methods and Comparative Ethnography

Although this article compares and contrasts ideas and practices of the evil eye in contemporary Iran and Greece in what are two very different contemporary religious and cultural frameworks, it is important to note the historical kinship that partly motivates our analysis. Concepts of the evil eye appear in Vedic (Gonda 1969), Avestan (Forrest 2011), and early Greek writings (Onians 1951, 79), as well as among Germanic and other Indo-European peoples. Archaeological evidence documents its existence as early as 5,000 years ago, where it was already well established in the Fertile Crescent. And while the evil eye is found in a number of other regions, the idea and practice of the evil eye is widely recognized to be part of a common Indo-European heritage (Gravel 1995), concentrated heavily in Western Asia (including Iran) and the Mediterranean basin (Maloney 1976; Hughes 2020, 202).

Figure 2 – Galen (left), Ibn Sina (center), and Hippocrates (right), architects of humoral medicine depicted as contemporaries in European dress. ("Galenus Avicenna Hippocrates" by orionpozo is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Figure 3 – Arabic theories of humoral medicine travelled along with the spread of Islamic imperialism from the 14-15th c. onwards. (Pinupbettu, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Moreover, contemporary Iran and Greece share a historical lineage that includes ideas about envy as well as about the body and health vis-à-vis humoral pathology. In both regions, envy and the horror of becoming the object of others’ envy,  rest at the pivotal center of evil eye afflictions, (Spooner 1970, 312); and in both regions this envy takes social and metaphysical forms (Doostdar 229; Abu-Rabia 2005).3  Similarly, humoral models of the body and wellbeing, having originated by the Greek doctors Hippocrates and Galen made leaps-and-bounds in the writings of Persian physicians like Al Razi and ibn Sina, whose contributions—with important adaptations, transformations, and translations along the way—not only pushed humoral medicine into the Indian subcontinent (where it is still practiced today as Unani or “Greek” medicine), but also reintroduced it to the European West where it developed a separate scientific momentum right down to the Victorian era (Savage-Smith 1999, 30). The historical back-and-forth of humoral medicine is one reason we propose an ethnographic comparison of the evil-eye phenomenon between present-day Shi’i Iran and Orthodox Greece.

In addition, by drawing on long-term ethnography of the evil eye in both Iran and Greece, we further aim to experiment with comparative ethnography (see also Flood and Starr 2019). At first glance, the concept of comparative ethnography seems to be out of fashion. It suggests the use of universal frames or hard science methodologies as well as the long-tested problem of approaching “culture” as something that is tidy, bounded, and internally coherent. For these reasons, and recognizing the complex ways in which “the character of a thing changes when one places it next to others” (Strathern 2002:xvi), this piece argues that it is instead useful to “think relationally” (Strathern 2002:xv). Indeed, as an anthropological practice, relational comparison occurs everywhere: globalization studies, kinship studies, migration, gender, and food studies (Gingrich and Fox 2002). Often, however, it appears between the lines, implicit in the topical focuses of a conference panel, or in casual academic discussions. In the present case, the comparative approach helps us to decenter our cultural and theoretical lenses (Flood and Starr 2019) so that we shift perspective actively and productively from the implicit frames of Western knowledge to Iranian and Greek models of the evil eye, their concomitant ritual processes, and their embodied forms of experience.

Iran: Chashm Zakhm

One year after the famous 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, the streets of Tehran were bursting with unspoken tension and uncertainty. I was conducting research in Ekbatan, a modern suburban complex in West Tehran. My hosts, Parvin and Mahmud, supporters of the late Ayatollah Khomeini and card-carrying members of the Basij, the organization for mobilization of the oppressed, had taken me into their home as their guest while I searched for a research visa. Soon, I would begin long-term fieldwork in a town in Fars Province, a ten hour drive from Tehran by car.

The evening “I was struck by the evil eye” (chashm zakhm khordam), I had been staying with Parvin, her husband, and her young adult children, for almost two months. It was nearly the Iranian New Year when Parvin’s sister and her husband told us that they planned to visit us in Parvin and Mahmud’s fifth floor Ekbatan apartment. Parvin went into a cleaning frenzy in preparation for her relatives’ arrival. She vacuumed her Persian carpets and dusted the blinds, handing Haleh, her daughter, and me dust cloths so we could contribute. She prepared tea and sweets and rearranged her furniture.

Parvin’s sister entered the apartment wearing a black chador, the flowing cloak iconic of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Her husband wore a grey suit, no tie. We all sat down, and I sat with Parvin’s grown-up children, while Parvin served tea and sweets. The conversation began normally, but for the first time—and this is, significantly, the only time this happened to me during research in Iran—I had the feeling that I was being purposefully ignored by Parvin’s brother-in-law. Even though I was wearing correct hijab (a veil and a long coat), Parvin’s brother-in-law did not look at me when I spoke. “Perhaps, it is because I’m American?” I thought. I was growing increasingly uncomfortable. I knew that Parvin’s brother-in-law worked in the Islamic Republic’s government and suspected that he had important connections there. Unable to sit on the couch any longer, I left the room.

My face was hot and my stomach was hurting when Parvin appeared at the door a few minutes after her guests had left. I wasn’t sure what she would say, but she took one look at me and concluded that someone had struck me with “the evil eye.” In Persian, “the evil eye” (chashm zakhm) literally translates to “a blow by the eye,” or “an eye that wounds'' and refers to the power of an individual to cause harm, illness, or death to another person by means of a mere glance or a compliment (Donaldson 1938:66). Alternatively, the evil eye is referred to as “the bad eye” (chashm-e bad), “the salty eye” (chashm-e shur), “the narrow eye” (chashm-e tang), “the envious eye” (chashm-e hasud), the “wounding eye” (chashm-zakhm), and simply the “look” (nazar). Sometimes, the evil eye is further described as a kind of “energy” (enerzhi) or “negative power” (niru-ye manfi) that is transferred by a glance. Not entirely immaterial, it is transferable and metaphysical. 

In Iran, the eyes “are the doors toward one’s inner self and they are also the windows towards the outer world” (Shahshahani 2008:74). This play between the inside and the outside of the person is partially what gives the evil eye its power. Those who possess the evil eye are often out of balance with regards to their inside and outside: or as Parvin told me, such a person’s inside (darun) and outside (birun) are not the same. The “striker” may appear pious and pure but inside they are bitter or envious, a situation of conceptual opposition to what is desired: for one’s pure inside to conquer the corrupt, appetite-driven outside (Bateson et al. 1977; Beeman 2005).4  Importantly, though, possessors of the evil eye, even some who may be pure-intentioned, may not know their own power. A strike is not always intentional. Here, it is an independent evil power which acts through certain people and in certain situations (Spooner 1970).

For those that are struck by the evil eye, the symptoms can be physical, psychological, and/or spiritual. Symptoms might include stomach ache, fever, sudden pain, a feeling of unease, or a bout of depression. Signs of having been struck by the evil eye can also manifest as an accident or even a deadly event such as a car accident or a bad fall. In addition, a strike of the evil eye can affect the inter-subjective spaces between people—the health of a relationship between siblings, for example.

For my hosts who supported the Islamic Republic and called themselves Basijis, for instance, the inability to maintain harmonious, religiously permissible relationships within the immediate family was a sign that one or more family members had been struck by the evil eye (Wellman 2021). Twenty-one-year-old Ali, a nephew of Parvin and Mahmud’s who lived in the provincial town in the Fars Province in which I later conducted the majority of my research, and who was studying computer science at a local university, explained this to me. He knew that he had been struck by the evil eye, he said, when he had begun fighting with his younger brother.

Figure 4 – Parvin drawing circles on an egg in her Ekbatan apartment. (Photo by R. Wellman)

The evening I was struck by the evil eye in Ekbatan, Parvin, to my surprise, drew no direct line between the events of the evening with her brother-in-law and my sudden illness (narahati). After they left, she asked me for my laundry hamper. Then, holding a raw white egg in a dark colored shirt she pulled from the basket, she began drawing tiny circles with a pencil, a mark for each person I had come into contact with that day: persons in the street who I might have seen, neighbors, our guests, and even her family members. Holding the egg with the cloth of the shirt and between two coins with her index finger and thumb, she began circling it around my head in a clockwise direction. The egg cracked on the name of a woman I had seen that day in the visa office. “Look,” Parvin emphasized, smiling, “I didn’t do that, the egg cracked on its own.” She indicated the dropping yolk and egg white. The egg had cracked on the person, Parvin concluded, who had wronged me.

Figure 5 – The egg after it had cracked. (Photo by R. Wellman)

Fatimeh did the same detective work for her brother, Ali, when I began conducting research in Fars Province a few months later. She brought an egg from the refrigerator and, holding it in a plastic bag, she drew a line from the top of the egg to the bottom for each person who might have “looked at” Ali. She also drew lines for those who were “unseen” and for jinn who also may have struck him.5  Like Parvin, she placed the egg between two coins and circled it above Ali’s head in a clockwise direction. With each circle, she chanted the days of the week, “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday…” along with the names of all the possible strikers. When the egg burst (terekid), Ali assessed himself and the egg. “Did it really crack on its own?” he asked. He wasn’t asking because he doubted the verity of the egg-breaking method. Instead, he wanted to know if it had worked effectively. Perhaps he was still afflicted? He had her do it again, to be certain.

Back in Tehran, Parvin began assessing my situation further. She asked me whether I had talked with the woman in the visa office and what words we had exchanged. “Yes,” she said, when I explained what had seemed to me to be a fairly innocuous interaction, “She was envious of you.” She told her husband and children that she had discovered why I had been unwell. She then returned with a few seeds of smoking “wild rue” (esfand) on a small metal tray, which she said would clean or purify me, and circled it above my head as she had the egg. The seeds smoked and popped in the tray as she expertly wove them above my head.6

The next day, Parvin, Mahmud, Mehdi, and I visited Tehran’s national graveyard, Zahra’s Paradise (Behesht-e Zahra) and its martyrs’ section. In the car, on the way home, Parvin asked her son to pull over next to a flowing water canal on the side of the road. She opened the door and tossed the cracked egg out, watching it float away. “It is important,” she explained later, “that the egg not go into the trash. It needs to be carried away and cleansed by moving water.” The idea behind placing the egg in a moving stream is thus one of purification. The flowing water removed the evil that had contaminated the egg, not only from the victim, but from the home.7  Arriving back in her home in the Tehrani suburb of Ekbatan, Parvin self-consciously reflected on the events of the week. She explained, “Although egg-breaking is not an official part of Islam, I have belief” (man aqideh daram).

Importantly, I bring up Parvin’s declaration of her belief in the evil eye not because the evil eye is foreign to Islam. Affliction by the evil eye is mentioned in the Qur’an and hadiths, with Islamic jurists and scholars agreeing on protective verses and actions for its affliction.8  Rather, she is aware that the egg-breaking method is seen as superstitious by many in Tehran’s cultural milieu. Indeed, official (.ir) Iranian websites, through the medium of question and answer sessions with Islamic jurists, define the act of egg-breaking as superstitious. Yet Parvin, despite her political affiliations and support of the Islamic Republic—and despite her recognition of the egg-breaking debate—always remained adamant. “It works,” she said.

Notwithstanding this controversy, many people in contemporary Iran take protective measures against the evil eye and its associated envy. One of the most common forms of material protection is a small blue amulet in the shape of an eye, also common elsewhere, that is hung at the thresholds of the home or in the car to prevent a strike of malignant energy. These glass objects are round with concentric layers of darker blue, white, and then light blue, with a black dot at the center. The shape and color of the material are important. The glass is thought to break if the evil eye strikes, deflecting the negative energy, and the blue color, some say, is representative of blue eyes, a relative rarity in the region. My hosts in Fars Province carefully placed these amulets in eyesight of those entering their homes from without. When they moved into a new home during my research, in addition to bringing a copy of the Qur’an to their new living room, they rehung these amulets on the wall immediately. The thresholds between inside and outside, they explained, are especially dangerous places and must be protected.

Other protective amulets can be worn, and look similar to those hung at home, but are threaded. Still others are a rich blue or turquoise color and are more bead-like. These latter are designed to attract attention away from the body/beauty of a potentially afflicted person to the bead. Finally, an amulet in the shape of a hand is frequently employed as a preventative measure. The hand has multiple meanings and often has an eye drawn on the palm. It can symbolize a barrier between the person targeted and the person striking with the evil eye. Further still, the hand can signify the House of the Prophet (ahl-e al bayt), including the Prophet Muhammad, or his daughter, Fatima, as well as Imam Ali, Imam Hassan, and Imam Husayn (Begiç 2020).

Other forms of protection can be achieved through prayers, whether said aloud or written on scrolls or printed onto metal and hung around the neck. These include chapters of the Qur’an, such as Surah al-Falaq (113:1-5), which mentions envy and is widely considered a cure for the evil eye, and Surah al-Nas (114:1-6) (Begiç 2020; Abu-Rabia 2005, 244). Surah Yunus (10:81) is also employed frequently for the prevention of evil eye sorcery. It states: “And when they had cast them down Moses said, ‘Verily God will render vain the sorceries which ye have brought to pass: God prospereth not the work of evildoers’” (see Donaldson 1938:68).  Another form of prevention is the precautionary exclamation “Whatever God wills” (masha’llah), which deflects the evil eye and its associated envy (Hughes 2020).9  This phrase is most commonly used when talking about a clean, beautiful child to deflect a compliment. Indeed, those who are most vulnerable to the evil eye and other witchcraft include children and pregnant women. Similarly, pieces of cloth with “Bismillah” written on them forty times are considered effective, and travelers often carry with them a miniature copy of the Qur’an for protection. Finally, as previously mentioned, the smoke of wild rue seeds is frequently used to cleanse bodies and entire houses of any evil. During my research in Fars Province, people used the herb to calm crying children, during wedding ceremonies to ensure that nothing bad would befall the couple, or during family conflicts to ward off the evil eye and cleanse the family household and/or nearby persons.

Returning to the living room in Tehran on that day when I sat opposite Parvin's sister and her sister’s husband, it is significant that the egg did not break when Parvin listed her brother-in-law, as I would have thought. Yet despite this fact, after her guests had left, Parvin phoned her sister and told her that I had become unwell. The sister had felt responsible, and she and her husband later invited me to their home and gave me their hospitality, an act in direct contrast to our interaction in Ekbatan. Without explicitly confronting what had happened, they gave me the gift of a beautiful prayer rug from Mecca, which Parvin noted, was expensive. The husband, moreover, spoke with me in a friendly way, meeting my eyes when we spoke. With the evil eye “diagnosis” of the envious woman in the visa office, whether intentionally cooked up or not by Parvin, Parvin’s sister, her brother-in-law, and I had saved face (aberu), literally the water of one’s face, from what could otherwise have been a very embarrassing situation.

It is tempting to approach the above example of the evil eye, as have many scholars, in a structural-functionalist manner: the evil eye seems to provide a way to deal with social rupture, breach, or inequality. Indeed, Parvin herself seems aware that the egg-breaking ritual she performs has the capacity to heal social relations, or at least, contribute to overall family health and ameliorate certain tensions. Yet such a conclusion, if taken alone, elides Parvin’s declaration of belief in the evil eye. Instead, as we will argue below, Parvin’s explicit focus was on ridding my body of the negative energy that was affecting my well-being. The rupturing of the egg, she argued later, provided a place for the “energy” to go. She had used my clothing as a barrier, not only to protect herself from the crack egg’s yolk, but to link me to the egg, and through the ritual of circling the egg around my head, the negative energy caused by the striker had been shifted from my body to the egg, where it could be disposed of in flowing water. As I watched it float away in the stream, I thought of its resonance with the eye as an organ, its white shell gleaming like the sclera. At the same time, it was another body, a shell encasing a yolk, with an inside and outside, further resembling life, fecundity, and birth.

Greece: The Máti and Mátiasma

Scribbling on the back of an envelope which she had kept for scrap paper, Mína, a forty-seven year old single mother of two, turned to me and slipped the paper face down on the table. She was about to teach me how to exorcise the evil eye. Six months prior, learning this secret was furthest from my mind when I complained to her about feeling out of sorts—general malaise with a dull headache. Eyeing me over, she suggested that I might be matiasménos, that is, affected by the evil eye. Her response? To return from the kitchen sink armed with a mug of water and a dish of olive oil. Having made the sign of the cross thrice over the mug, she dipped her index finger into the oil and muttered inaudibly to herself as she let three drops of olive oil fall from her fingertip onto the water’s surface. Rather than collect and float on the water’s surface, the drops formed a lacy veil and dispersed: this, she told me, was evidence of mátiasma—the strike of evil eye.

Beliefs in mátiasma have been observed both in Greece (e.g., Dionisopoulos-Mass 1976; Hardie 1981; Herzfeld 1981, Herzfeld et al. 1986; Hirschon 1998 [1989]; Lykiardopoulos 1981; Mousioni N.d.; Roussou 2021, 2011; Veikou 1998) and among the Greek diaspora (Chryssanthopoulou 1993, 1999, 2008; Rouvelas 1993). Such beliefs frequently contradict each other as attitudes about evil eye differ according to region, generational difference, religious versus secular interpretations (see also Boulay 1974; Danforth 1990), and on the weight of home practice and family tradition. Despite such variation, important overlaps exist. In Messinía, the region of southwestern Greece where I conducted my fieldwork, the evil eye is rarely called the kakó máti (bad eye), as most abbreviate it to just máti (eye). Here, as elsewhere, it is thought to comprise a negative energy force (enérgheia) generated by envy or admiration. While most describe máti as negative or dark energy, it is also characterized as a work of the Devil (a form of evil eye called vaskanía), especially by Messiníans who closely identify with Greek Orthodoxy, although clergy largely renounce lay notions of máti as inconsistent with Church doctrine.

A growing minority of Greeks, especially those versed in New Age discourses, attribute mátiasma to energy fields and karmic spiritualism (see also Roussou 2021), while others (though sometimes one in the same) rely on Western biomedical vocabularies to attribute the effects of evil eye—never wholly discounting them—to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect (Roussou 2011). On the other hand, there is general consensus that the energy of the máti has the ability (dhinatótita) and power (dhínami) to do harm. On that first day when Mína diagnosed me with suffering from the evil eye, I felt unusually sleepy and (even more strange for me) had no appetite. Such symptoms are regarded as common to mátiasma, as are headache, weakness, fatigue, listlessness, and sudden fits of yawning. In babies the máti may be indicated as the reason for incessant crying, screaming, and excessive fussiness. In Messinía, friends sometimes went out of their way to protect cars from its destructive force, and more than a few housewives have blamed the evil eye for ruining special dishes cooking in the oven.

What is more, máti’s energy is considered quite natural and harboring its potential energy is as much a part of human nature as it is to unleash it through paying a compliment or gazing upon someone/something with envy. As such, every person can naturally, if unwittingly, let loose the máti’s latent energy, although some people are more prone than others to do so because they possess extraordinary traits—tradition identifies persons with unusual physical appearance, like blue-eyes (ghalanomátidhes) or unified eyebrows (smighména frídhia), as especially prone. Despite the universal ability of humans to harbor and release the evil eye (or because of it), Greeks draw a strong distinction between the máti and witchcraft (mághia), where witchcraft implies motives that are calculated and aggressive whereas the unleashing of the máti is always passive, unconscious, and unintentional (see also Herzfeld 1981; Paralikas et al. 2017).

Despite the nuances, one thing is certain about the máti: it is not of the material world and it is dangerous. One’s vulnerability to a strike, unaffected by diet, environment, or heredity, is founded on their ability to become the object of others’ envy or admiration. Anything that draws a remark of admiration (whether permanent like physical features, or ephemeral like outfits and hairstyles) can potentially mobilize máti. Moreover, the oft-heard complaint “they eyed it!” (mou to matiásane) applies just as easily to luxury items as it does to prestigious jobs/roles and personal relationships. Tradition also points to pregnant women, recently birthed women (having delivered within forty days), and soon-to-be-married individuals as especially vulnerable, as are infants and newborns that “have not yet passed forty days” of age (asarántista).

With few exceptions (Paralikas et al. 2017), no one goes to the doctor if one suspects an affliction of mátiasma. Rather, one calls on a trusted relative, friend, or neighbor versed in xemátiasma, the act of detecting and treating the condition (literally un-eyeing; compound form, xe- “un” + -mátiasma “affliction by the eye”). Indeed, every family or circle of friends boasts a particular member of the group who is especially skilled at diagnosing and healing afflictions of the evil eye, usually women—common knowledge dictates that women comprise a majority of practitioners, although men are also known to be adept healers. In fact, one is supposed to learn the craft from a member of the opposite gender (cf. Hardie 1981), and the knowledge is supposed to be transmitted from an older age group to a younger one, as the inverse is said to degrade the effectiveness of that knowledge.10 It was with these rules in mind that, six months after my first experience with Mína, and having come to her now with new complaints of malaise, she was going to take the opportunity of a possible evil eye strike to instruct me on the secret craft of xemátiasma. Not only did it have to be in writing (so that it would not be spoken out loud), but I also had to destroy the slip of paper once I committed its contents to memory.11

I watched from my seat at the kitchen table as she prepared, filling a glass with water from the tap. The water (she told me only after we were done) must be handled at first with silence. The “unspoken water” (amílito neró) is an element in other rituals too where silence preserves water’s inherent ability to purify. Next comes a second element of purity, actually of extra virginity: olive oil. While the water (about “two fingers” deep in a cup) comes from the ordinary tap, the olive oil ought to come from the sacred oil lamp in the household shrine, which typically burns on the sabbath and on the eve of feast days. On this occasion, however, Mína laughed heartily and explained that she’s been too busy lately to tend her lamp (which was now empty), and stated that normal kitchen oil is easily blessed if one prays over it “so long as you have correct thinking.” (As I confirmed elsewhere, the oil used in lamps for household worship and the oil used at the dinner table come from the same family-owned groves).

Figure 6: Olive oil for conducting the xemátiasma is taken from the family shrine. (Photo by D. Kavadias)

For the final stage of preparation, Mína turned her eyes to me, assessing me from head to toe. “Sit upright,” she instructed, “and uncross your arms and legs.” I obeyed, letting my arms drop to the sides of the chair, and added some distance between my shoes. I felt awkward—then self-conscious. My muscles settled into their new center of gravity, but I felt each fine adjustment as a disproportionately large jerk. “Why like this?” I asked, trying to regain poise amidst hyper-awareness. “So that the goodness can act,” she replied.

I waited, failing to hide a yawn.

Initiating the xemátiasma, I sat and watched as Mína mouthed something inaudible at the same time that she scrunched together her thumb, index finger, and middle finger—the three fingers used for making the sign of the cross—and made that sign over my face three times. I began to feel the same tingling (almost goosebumpy) sensation on my skin that I sometimes feel when I become the focus of my haircutter’s attention, feeling the first glances of her shears and brush on my scalp radiate all over. The feeling was short-lived, though, and I was caught off-guard when Mína, still with her three fingers crossed together, dipped them into the olive oil and held them above the water. Letting three drops of oil fall from her fingertip into the water, she looked for one of two things to happen.

Naturally, oil and water don’t mix, so the drops should remain immiscible from the water and may pool together into a distinctive stratum. According to Mína, if the oil maintains its natural tendency to separate then there is no evil eye. On the other hand, if the drops of oil disperse towards the sides of the vessel and even blend with the water, then the evil eye is present. I only learned this model of physics afterwards, for in that moment she did her work with no explanation, peering into the vessel to observe the behavior of the oil. I looked too. The three distinct drops that plunged from the height of Mina’s hand into the water resurfaced as several, broken pale yellow disks creeping away from each other along the vessel’s walls. In a kind of synesthesia, gazing upon the melange made me feel the way I do in an unkempt room.

Mína nodded to herself and began mumbling rhythmically again. Suddenly she leaned forward and I felt her finger press lightly into the center of my forehead, followed by the feathery but unmistakable sensation of thick fluid trickling down my brow. I felt the same pressure again, this time applied to the center of my chin, and then just as quickly on my left cheek and right cheeks. My nostrils took in the smell of olive oil.

Subduing an urge to wipe the wetness tickling my face, I renewed my self-control and prepared myself for what was to be the final step: ritual spitting. Tilting her head back as though aiming her pursed lips at the center of my face, it was less an actual spitting and more an aspirated emphasis on the “t” sound in “Ftou!” (or Ptou!), which Mína said rapidly three times, making again the sign of the cross.

“How do you feel?” she asked almost immediately. I took stock of myself, noticing that my ramrod posture in the chair had, by now, become a slouch. Actually, I felt better, but had many questions. At this point, the evil eye had been cured. Indeed, the very act of identifying its presence is the same as curing it. As the oil blends and disperses in the water, so too does the evil eye—“the badness dissolves” (dhialíetai to kakó).

What was written on the piece of paper I cannot, will not, say for cultural and ethical reasons; suffice it to say that it was the prayer Mína said inaudibly during the ritual. But one thing I learned about the water after the observation of silence was lifted is that, to bless it, Mína made the sign of the cross over it three times (that much was observable) while reciting the following Orthodox blessing and invoking my name: “In the name of the Father (+), and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit (+), for Dhionísi.” It is around this time that she, and, indeed, any healer, may yawn uncontrollably. This khasmouritó, a fit of intense, automatic yawning is a sure sign that máti is present, evoking images of energetic inflow and outflow. In other words, the blessing of the water initiates the process of constructing a sympathetic connection or transmission of the ill effects of evil eye to the healer. I reflected then (as I still do) that while Mína didn’t show any such sign, it was during the preparation of the water that I was overcome by the sudden and uncontrollable need to yawn.

Figure 7 – Hanging from a rear-view mirror, a máti charm, featuring a horse shoe, is attached to a strand of eye beads. (Photo by D. Kavadias)

Figure 8 – A máti charm located in a shrine above the door of a Greek bus underscores the double-danger of both entryways and transit. (Photo by D. Kavadias)

Perhaps the importance of outside mediation explains the use of charms to protect against the máti.  Such charms, called phylactá (“watched” or “guarded”), protect against evil of all kinds, including the evil eye. Older generations seem to favor necklaced talismans made from auspicious metal coins that depict certain saints, the cross, or the Theotókos with Godchild. While these are meant to bring blessing, they often incorporate the most popular apotropaic charm in Messinía: a single sea-blue glass bead (chántra thalassiá). This amulet, along with the Turkish-influenced nazar (whose name also means “surveillance” or “sight”), larger glass disks in the shape of an eye also of indigo and cobalt blue colors, are all simply referred to in Greek as máti (eye). Where glass beads are typically sold as jewelry for personal wear, the glass disks are sold for home use as a talisman (haïmáli) often combined with horseshoes and heads of garlic. I observed such charms in bedrooms above the headboard and in cribs, but also in doorways, hallways, or the room where visitors were usually entertained. They also hang from rear-view mirrors or in mini-shrines in countless cars and buses. The popularity of these charms has been challenged only by the komboskíni (from the roots kómbo- “knot” and -skiní “string”) a bracelet of black knots, each symbolizing a year of Jesus’s life, with a sea-blue bead at the center. It was a komboskíni that Mína gave me as a gift to protect me before returning home from my field research.

Figure 9 – This phylaktó, bearing both a máti and an engraving of the Theotókos with Godchild, will be presented by an aunt to her newborn nephew for protection. (Photo by D. Kavadias)

The association between these charms and states of transition—architectural thresholds and modes of transportation—is important. Just as lore maintains that a crossroads is the favorite haunt of demons (Stewart 1991) so too are transitional spaces exposed to the evil eye. In fact, the tension between inside and outside is invoked in popular incantations elsewhere in Greece. One must dispose of the water used in xemátiasma, for instance, by throwing it out of the house, exclaiming “out with the evil, in with goodness” (Hardie 1981:118). The same applies to spells that address the evil eye directly, banishing it “to the mountaintops, the wild mountains, where the snakes and skinks are, that is where you should go to eat, to drink, to hunt.” The imagery of wild critters—as opposed to domesticated animals—evokes a tension between wildness and orderliness, a significant tension, I suggest, that is not unrelated to that between inner and outer. It is precisely to the principles of inner/outer that we shall now turn.

Body and Integrity

The focus of this article has been the analogical relationship between the body and objects used to combat the evil eye. As noted, in both Iran and Greece, diagnosis and cleansing of the evil eye occur through the medium of a separate material object. In the case of Iran, the egg is the means of diagnosing the evil eye and its associated envy. If the egg does not crack, it is possible that the illness or accident has another source. Contrarily, if the egg does crack, the wave of negative energy of the evil eye has been successfully displaced into the egg. In short, when the egg breaks, the inflicting force has been transferred from the victim to the egg, where, along with its shell, its energy is broken and, as most people agree, recovery is immediate. In Greece, by comparison, the evil eye is detected when the oil does not adhere to itself but rather blends with the water, counter to its expected nature. The cure, similarly, is the oil’s act of dispersal. In the initial prayers, the oil becomes integrated with the evil eye. Then having dis-integrated, the now-purified and sanctified water-and-oil are transferred back to the victim’s forehead in the shape of a cross.

In both cases the principle of integrity is central, either in the immiscibility of the oil (its natural tendency to remain separate from, rather than mix with, water) or in the intactness of the eggshell and its contents. Thus, we observe that: 1) the evil eye is manifest as a fluid energy that can be transferred from one material body to another, and 2) the physical integrity of the medium—or rather its dis-integration—is actually how the eye comes to be dis-integrated from the victim’s body. This suggests an analogous relationship between the body of the afflicted victim and the intervening object (egg and oil).

Specifically, integrity is a central concern with respect to the inner and outer dimensions of the body. In Iran, for instance, the body is made up of physio-sacred substances (like blood) that channel qualities such as purity and impurity and which can be changed or influenced by outside forces (for example, through the consumption of food or when the evil eye strikes) (Wellman 2021). The body further depends on the dynamic interplay between the pure inside and the corrupting outside. Integrity, for Parvin, means this balance of the pure inside and the corrupt outside, a balance which challenges the negative energies of envy. Similar pronouncements were made about the nature of body and soul among ascetics and theologians of early Christianity, understandings which, because they share direct roots with Galenic humoral theories (Shaw 1998), link wellbeing to processes of balance and flow, a link that continues to inform fundamental ideas about spiritual and bodily integrity among Greek Orthodox lay today. In Greece, integrity is restored in the transference of the evil eye from the victim to the healer as part of the healing process. It explains why one must sit with uncrossed legs and arms if one is to be healed, opening their body to permit the outflow of the evil eye and the inflow of blessings. It also explains the phenomenon of the sympathetic khasmouritó yawning, which, along with its historical ties to the mouth as a doorway for souls and demons, conjures the image of someone else’s body intervening in the inflow and outflow of energy.

In both contexts we find iconic or metaphoric resemblances between healing agents (egg and shell, vessel of water/oil) and the bodies they come to mediate. In a process of ex-corporation, the body of the afflicted is brought into momentary kinship with the material assemblage that is itself treated as a species of body with its own epidermis, its own fluids, and its own procedures of hygiene (Haraway 2016). What is more, this kinship operates on a logic of physio-sacred conversion (Wellman 2021), bridging material and immaterial compositions of one body to another. It is precisely because one is treated as relationally sympathetic to the other that the proxy for diagnosis and healing is effective.

The affinity between the body of the afflicted and the ex-corporated material-cultural body is especially striking if we consider the body to be a unit of inner and outer dimensions, as Persians and Greeks do (Dubisch 1986a; Dubisch 1986b). For example, in both Greece and Iran, pregnant women or recently birthed women are considered to be more open and hence, more vulnerable to the evil eye (see also Hirschon 1993 [1978]). In fact, humoral theorists of antiquity envisioned the reproductive bodies of women as vessels enveloping an open channel between the mouth and the womb (Shaw 1998:74-78). Children, too, are thought to be vulnerable, and in Greece especially so until their bodies are “sealed” in the rite of Baptism.

Equally compelling is the metaphoric resemblance between the body and household architecture. In both instances, thresholds and passageways of the body and of the home are sites of potential danger. Amulets worn to protect the body from the gaze of passersby on the street function like the charms placed at the threshold of the door to protect the home from outsiders who pass through. Such protective measures are understood to work by either repelling the flow of negative energy or by attracting and thereby absorbing it. Either way, it should be noted that, as with the healing of evil eye, at the heart of such protective measures are sensorial capacities of the human body and their outward projection or engagement. Whereas eggs and vessels of water/oil mediate the evil eye once it has struck, protective aids rely on sensorial mediation to avert it, hence the usage of a glass “eye,” the thick odor of a head of garlic, or the cleansing aroma of burning rue.

Finally, the emphasis between inner and outer explains the imperative for Parvin to discard the eggshell in the flowing water, letting it be carried away into the wild, just as Greeks exhort the eye to go reside with snakes and skinks on the mountaintops away from civilization, away from the inner sancta of domesticity. The restoration of order easily reminds one of Mary Douglas (1966) and the cultural management of purity and danger. That water should be purifying in both Iran and Greece is not surprising nor, perhaps, is the cultural reliance on a container (eggshell and glass vessel) to capture otherwise boundless energy. What is more, this perspective accords with the conventional interpretation that evil eye affliction is a cultural release valve for addressing and restoring the transgression of social norms, especially egalitarian norms. As such, evil eye affliction could be interpreted as a mechanism for maintaining the integrity not just of personal normative conduct, but of the broader social moral economy (a Durkheimian reading which is itself based on the principle of equilibrium). While such a reading may be helpful for answering questions about the “why” of evil eye as a phenomenon, it leaves unaddressed the questions of “how.” For this we turn to a theory of embodiment.

Energy as Relational Symbol

In order to understand evil eye practice for what it is to its practitioners—that is, as a ritual of diagnosis and healing—we propose a theory of the evil eye’s energy. This forceful but nebulous energy has evaded conventional anthropological analysis because, as we have already pointed out, the evil eye has too long been understood either at the societal level as a release valve of tension and transgression (a structural-functionalist understanding), or at the representational level, in dialogical or discursive encounters between researcher/interlocutor, as a cultural text about social moral norms (what Warnier calls a “culturalist” approach). In other words, the tacit and local assumption of “energy” was part of the ethnographic model, but never part of the reality.

Here, we wish to observe that the energy of the evil eye, when it manifests to Iranian and Greek practitioners as a real phenomenon, has the uncanny ability to be both a meta-commentary on social transgressions (e.g., envy is bad) and an agent that can enact embodied affliction (e.g., envy is bad, thus your body aches). As a meta-commentary, observers of the evil eye make sense of affliction by theorizing it as the transgression of a particular organization of social moral relationships. If it were solely a meta-commentary on the ill effects of envy and other transgressions, however, then it would be “felt” with the same force as the telling of cautionary tales or as the observation of public shame. Instead, the diagnosis/healing of evil eye not only refers to a set of morals but also enacts them as central to the experience of sickness. As an agentive phenomenon, the evil eye binds inextricably together social-moral failure and embodied affliction. The difference is small but significant. Just as speech acts simultaneously express a concept and make the concept a reality (“I pronounce you married”), so too does the evil eye express social-moral transgressions as a reality of subjective experience. In this respect, the force of energy that constitutes the evil eye, far from just a cultural “thing,” is the experience of introspection, embodiment, and synesthesia. It is a symbol.

We are not speaking here of the energy of the evil eye as a “symbol” in the usual sense. As Edith Turner lamented while advocating for a radical anthropology of spiritual healing, “it is unfortunate that the word ‘symbol’ so strongly connotes ‘representation’” (Turner 1992: 17). Indeed, for Turner, symbols of healing are not just static cultural artifacts that stand in for something, they are partners in the ritual, in and of themselves agentic effects of reality. Another critic who steps beyond the representational and into the “effectual” is Urmila Mohan (2021, 2019), whose concept of “efficacious intimacy” captures the idea that subjecthood does not somehow exist prior to devotional practice but emerges in it and from it in embodied processes that employ techniques of the body that create binding relationships between devotees and between devotees and the divine. This concept underscores embodied (praxis) processes as religious “effects” generating the experience of adherence and submission to the sovereign power of the divine (Mohan and Warnier 2017; Warnier 2007). In the present case, by extension, we begin to understand victims of evil eye not as just under the spell of an overwhelming cultural system, but as embodied partners in—and subjects of—the generation (or cure) of evil eye energy.

But there is still a significant part missing in our theorization of the energy of evil eye. What of the role of the healer? For one thing, in the parts played by Parvin and Mína (not to mention other healers), we cannot and should not separate the labor of care-giving, relationship-making, and social mediating, for evil eye diagnosis/healing, as we have come to understand it, draws no distinction between the effects these have on us. Secondly, already we have identified an ephemeral kinship between the body of the afflicted and the body of the material assemblage, a relatedness based on sympathetic analogies of integrity. Similarly, when it comes to healers, what seems to matter most in their ability to heal is the integrity of the relationship between the healer and the afflicted. This is equally true in Western biomedicine, where medical anthropologists now situate the efficacy of healing, particularly the potent “meaning-response” of the placebo effect, squarely in the healer-patient relationship and the embodied processes that constitute it (Lakoff 2002; Moerman 1997; see also Benedetti 2013). In the same vein, Levi-Strauss (1963) argued that the source of healing magic resides in three “places” of belief: first, in the belief held by the sorcerer in their own efficacy; second, in the belief held by the bewitched for the sorcerer’s efficacy; and finally, in the authentication of these two things by a community of onlookers. While uninterested in questions of bodily practice or subjectivation per se, Levi-Strauss nevertheless places at the center of embodied healing an interwoven network of relational investment and subject-making.

We point out that another way to think of these three sources is as a relational web, each one containing its own hierarchical placement and its own process of embodied meaning-making, but all comprising a nested organization of relationships. In other words, the devotion that positions the doctor, the patient, and the community in relation to one another with respect to their mutually defining subjectivity is, to echo Edith Turner, a symbol that is in and of itself a reality-making effect.

Our own experiences with the evil eye mirror the embodied healing effects concomitant within a system of relationality (our relationships with Parvin and Mína should not be discounted as irrelevant). But these experiences also help to explain the relational nature of our affliction in the first place as we teetered—always with our interlocutors—between the subjectivity of being outsiders and the subjectivity of being outsiders moving inwards. The energy that struck us is, by this token, the energy of introspective, embodied, synaesthetic enculturation. Regardless of the nature of our social-moral transgression (perhaps our American foreignness was reason enough), we came to feel our social discomfort as only subjectivated bodies could. Not unlike sin, which, along with salvation, “inhabit the incarnated subject” (Warnier 2007: 20), the relationality we embody within our communities in the context of field work, and any breaches in etiquette that may possibly set the evil eye into motion can only be eradicated from the body through embodied and ex-corporated material intervention. In both Iran and Greece, to be struck with the evil eye is to be jolted in dimensions both material and immaterial, to be a party in a trial that results either in the acquittal of an indicted relationship (if no evil eye, then no evidence of envy) or its rehabilitation (diagnosis and healing). In both Iran and Greece, and perhaps beyond, the energy of the evil eye is the force of relationality contextualizing our bodies into ways of being and of knowing.

Conclusion: A Way of Knowing

In this article, we have argued that the material objects necessary for diagnosing and curing the evil eye in Iran and Greece are a technology of transference and mediation, shifting the “strike” from the body of the afflicted to an outside object. Our comparative analysis of the evil eye engages with questions of material religion and praxis to show how the body not only registers social, aesthetic, or metaphysical forces, but also how the rituals and material culture of evil eye affliction in Iran and Greece form an extension of the body or a site of bodywork. There exists, we argue, a resonance between material symbols and the body on whose behalf they intervene; primarily, the body’s physical integrity in the face of metaphysical energy (both positive and negative), substance (such as water or oil, or egg), sacred verse, prayer, and the spoken word, and finally, gifts (e.g., the prayer rug). What is more, we come to terms with the nature of “energy” of the evil eye, theorizing it as an effectual relational symbol where what is at stake is not the individual body per se but the relationships in which those bodies inhere. Here, understandings of kinship, material religion, and medicine converge in a single phenomenon, as a way of knowing (Goulet 1998) that foregrounds bodily integrity, experiences of energy, and relationship as sites of energy work.

Such an intersection raises a number of questions. How does the evil eye, ostensibly an immaterial force registered through the body’s aches and pains, challenge divisions between material and immaterial domains, especially where “medical” and “spiritual” matters are kept apart in Western biomedicine? In what other ways do objects of material culture come to express cultural beliefs about afflictions in the body, especially where parallels are drawn between the two? If, as we have begun to argue, material objects of healing come to transfer the evil eye from the victim’s body, then it seems that one ought to also consider how evil eye afflictions contrast or relate other understandings of “trust,” “intimacy,” and “spiritual kinship,” that organize families and communities. How do bodies, which are placed within networks of relations, either come to resemble or diverge from one another by sharing (or not) qualities, energies, or forces as though they were palpable, bodily substance? Perhaps an answer, and a new question, is to be found in the efficacy of sensorial symbols whose resonance, like the sight and smell of smoke, for example, are not wholly material nor fully immaterial, but instead force us to re-explore their significance as a special genre of ritual media.

Answering these questions requires shifting the focus from previous paradigms of social cohesion to local cultural logics, ways of knowing, and realities that foreground bodily integrity, experiences of energy, transference, and relationality. It also requires acknowledging that religion, including esoteric practices that some regard as “superstition,” has an enduring life in modernity (Asad 1993; McKinnon and Cannell 2016). Our cases of evil eye affliction and cure in Iran and Greece reveal how evil eye beliefs persist within, rather than in opposition to, modern, bureaucratic state contexts (Roussou 2021). Indeed, there are countless examples of how knowledge of the evil eye and/or of the metaphysical writ large are embedded in contemporary contexts: see for instance, Egyptian marketplace neoliberalism (Elyachar 2005) or Marind sorcerers’ knowledge of the magic power of capitalism in Indonesia (Chao 2020). If the evil eye is “a phenomenon familiar to all, but apparently as little described by ethnographers as it is discussed by those who fear it” (Spooner 1970:311), we hope that our essay will renew attention to this subject. We also hope that our comparative approach to evil eye diagnosis and cure in Iran and Greece has helped illuminate the persistent power of metaphysical ways of knowing in modernity.

Notes

1.     Many thanks to Urmila Mohan for her wonderful editorial work on this piece as well as to the reviewers who provided invaluable feedback. We dedicate this piece to the late Edie Turner and to the brilliant faculty of anthropology at the University of Virginia, our PhD granting alma mater.

2.     To protect our interlocutors’ identities, we have used pseudonyms for all persons in this article.

3.     The evil eye and its treatment was a frequent subject of Medieval scholarship in the Middle East. For example, Imam Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj reported that the Prophet said: “The evil eye is true, and if there were anything in the world which would overcome Fate, it would be an evil eye” ([Sahih Muslim 1998, 422] quoted in Abu-Rabia 2005, 244). Some scholars, moreover, believed that the evil eye was not precisely caused by envy or jealousy. Rather, it was the impure spirit of an envious or jealous person that conveys a strike. Al-Jawziyya (1292-1350 CE), for instance, argued that the power of the evil eye rests not with the eye of the person, but rather with the spirit (nafs) working through it (Abu-Rabia 2005, 244).

4.     The evil eye, moreover, contrasts to another kind of eye found in contemporary Shi’ism and in the streets of Tehran:  the “eye of insight” or the “isthmus eye” (chashm-e barzakh). The isthmus eye is mobilized by those who have brought about an equivalence between inside and outside and who have attained closeness with God. This eye may be used to uniquely peer through the dissimulation of others and see things as they truly are (Doostdar 2012:256).

5.     Jinn are created beings (supernatural spirits) who possess powers for evil and good. They are addressed in the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam.

6.     As the tiny seeds pop, they say the phrase, “may jealous eyes burst,” thus relating the seeds to the envious eyes of the striker.

7.     Notably, the act of performing ablutions (washing the body with water) (wudu, Arabic) is also mentioned in the hadiths as a remedy for the evil eye.

8.     Although Islamic cosmology (as manifest in the Qur’an and hadiths) elaborates a number of invisible entities and realms beyond the material world—including God, angels jinn, heaven and hell, and the liminal realm of barzakh among others—many Islamic scholars encourage “rational” engagement with the metaphysical  “unseen” and jinn,  in particular, and only a very cautious acceptance of their specific manifestations (Doostdar 2018, 52-3).

9.     Notably, the evil eye and the significance of sight was also present in early Iran, appearing in the Avesta (the book of Zoroastrians) (Forrest 2011).

10.  Compare this to the taboo in myth among the Merina of Madagascar in which “eating the ancestors” must occur linearly, from older to younger, as the reverse is deleterious to vitality (Bloch 1985). Connections like this suggest theoretical overlaps between cultural models regarding the transmission of sacred knowledge and the transmission of substances of relatedness.

11.  The use of oil and water discussed here is only one of two methods of xemátiasma encountered in Messinía. The other, involving the intervention of prayer and contemplation through a mediating body, merits fuller analysis elsewhere.

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