Last week, I was talking with someone in my world about how coronavirus cases in California have been spiking. "That's in SoCal," said my conversation partner. "We're doing okay up here."
I definitely felt my body tense, and I had to bite my tongue. Because I was raised with the idea of the Evil Eye, and it's in my DNA to guard against it, and especially to discourage actively inviting it with careless assertions of our good luck occurring simultaneously with others’ bad luck. One idea associated with the Evil Eye is that fortune—good or bad—is not evenly or fairly distributed; one never wants to draw attention to that fact by crowing about one’s good luck.
My Italian relations, on my father's side, talked about malocchio, literally "evil eye." My mother's side believed in the Hungarian Evil Eye called rontas.
There's a lot to say about the Evil Eye, but basically it's a form of curse that causes injury or bad luck to the person at whom it's directed. It's believed that some individuals can cast the Evil Eye on other individuals, typically out of envy and with ill intent. But I was raised more with a belief that the Evil Eye is part of a cosmic system of checks and balances.
In that system, you invoke the Evil Eye when you act or speak with hubris or arrogance. One person might remind another about the Evil Eye this way: "Be careful what you say. The Devil is always listening." The point: The Devil, that maelstrom of ill will and nastiness, is just waiting for you to get cocky and overly confident about your good fortune so he can sweep in and mess it all up for you.
So you'd never say: "My baby is the most beautiful baby in the world." Because when you're gloaty and you taunt Fate in this way, you open the door to the possibility of something unspeakable and hideous happening.
One way to interpret this belief is as a negative worldview, requiring people to tamp down and edit themselves in ways that are limiting. Here’s another way to look at it: Because fortune is unequally distributed, and we all know this to be true, the kind of carefulness that results when you avoid the Evil Eye means you are less likely to hurt the feelings of someone within earshot who hasn’t enjoyed the many blessings that you have. It also affirms that fortunes can change, sometimes inexplicably, in a heartbeat.
Southern Italians—and maybe northern Italians too; I just don’t know—have a vocabulary of scongiuri, which are gestures, words, and rituals believed to neutralize the ill will of the Evil Eye. These would include: Tocca ferro (Touch iron), which corresponds to our Knock On Wood; Fare le corna (Make a symbol of horns), which involves folding in your thumb, middle, and ring fingers so that your pointer and pinky stick out and poking your "horns" in the direction of the perceived threat; and the curiously graphic Grate le palle (Scratch your balls), only available to males.
I've seen people in my world say and do all of these to create a kind of forcefield to contain something that's said. That something said could either be hubristic, like the comment about the beautiful baby above, or it could be an expression of concern about something that could go terribly wrong, for example, when a loved one is having an appendectomy, and someone in the waiting room wonders aloud, What if the surgeon is an alcoholic, and she had too many drinks at lunch, and she makes the incision on the wrong side of Laura's body? An appropriate, protective scongiuro could be saying Grate le palle while you do just that, or making that hand gesture of the bull's horns and poking the outstretched fingers in the direction of the person who carelessly wondered such a thing out loud.
Another scongiuro that I've heard about, but never seen in action, is Toccare la gobba, which means to touch the hump on a hunchback.
I've learned from Jewish friends that they also have ritualized responses to concerns about exposing oneself to the Evil Eye: They spit twice on the ground and say Kein Ayin Hora, which I have always heard as Kina Hora, and only learned the proper phrase for this week.
In the King James Bible, Book of Proverbs 28:22, the Evil Eye is mentioned: "He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him."
The rich person who doesn't consider that all of his or her wealth could be lost tomorrow is playing a fool's game, because sometimes, that’s how things happen. The Evil Eye is a useful reminder of this. So when my conversation partner, mentioned above, talked about how SoCal is having a spike in coronavirus cases now, but we're okay up here, ugh, it just got my Evil Eye hackles up. I can't help it.
Acknowledging the Evil Eye is all about protection, a hedge against horrors that might befall. But it's more than that. It's an acknowledgement of our many unearned and recurring blessings. It's a reminder to lean in to gratitude, to keep ourselves on the grateful side of Fate, which we all know is going to dish up stuff that's challenging and difficult; that’s part of what it means to be human. Gratitude, and perhaps a little everyday magic, like belief in the Evil Eye and the rituals that protect against it, keep us focused on:
*I'm lucky.
*Look at these abundant blessings in my life.
*Thank you!