Views
The eye, be it strange, vague, or simply beautiful, has always been, and still is, among the civilised as among the primitives, the doorway for evil influences. Hypnotism is the culminating point of a phenomenon which has leeser degrees, such as the gaze of desire, the curious gaze, or simply the vague gaze that settles on nothing.
In all these degrees, the primitive fears it, and we might say that for him every eye is evil. He fears the eyes of all animals, above all those that are round and fixed, he is in still greater terror of the human eye.
These ancient beliefs have survived in our civilisations. They have crept into our ordinary language. We speak of "piercing eyes," or "eyes like pistols," of Œdevouring with one's eyes." It would be easy to compile a dictionary of expressions concerned with the magic of the eyes, the stereotyped phraseology of our run-of-the-mill novels and our best poems.
To look at an object with desire is to appropriate it, to enjoy it. To desire is to pollute; to desire is to take, and the primitive who has noticed a gaze on a possesion of his immediately makes a gift of it, as if it were dangerous for him to keep it any longer, as if the gaze had deposited in the object a force ready to come into play aginst any stranger.
This gift, this abandonment, is above all prophylatic: it banishes a cause of misfortune, and it is to some extent thus that we must explain the majority of gifts made by indigenous peoples.
The power of the eye is so strong that it is dangerous even when mere curiosity animates it: as a result of being stared at by a number of soldiers, Antoine D'Abadie (Douze ans dans Haute Ethiopie, p.205), had a woman who loved him rush to him and cover him with her robe, crying: "Your accursed eyes will pierce me before seeing him." Yet the soldiers' curiosity was benevolent.
By ascertaining the power of an eye without evil intent, one can gain an idea of the power it wields when it expresses an evil desire. One is not surprised that it "eats the hearts of humans and the insides of cucmbers" (Mignes, Sciences occultes, II, 879), that it dries up cows udders and kills little children.
It is essential, then, to defend oneself and, for this, men have found many techniques. The commonest consits of an amulet worn round the neck, representing one of two eyes. Magical formulae, written medicines – in magic, the utterance or the putting into words of a formula is itself efficacious – surround the figure; they form, as it were a solvent containing the evil – a vaccine compounded with the dead bacillus – and wearing this remedy amounts to innoculating oneself with the evil influence, thus giving immunity.
Another means employed in the majority of African countries is the bucrane. This in effect, is the symbol of a powerful defence: it recalls the halting of the animal by a wild beast dropping on its head from a branch. A bucrane stuck on a post in a field, in a tree heavy with fruit, on a millstone – our scarecrows have not been conceived only for sparrows, which disregard them – or set above a threshold – the idea of making it a decorative motif came later – is the best fluid-conductor. Its whiteness, the result of vermin and the sun, will at first sight draw the eye of the passer-by or the visitor. It will capture this gaze, the first being the most dangerous – and here it seems right and proper to conjure up all the magic of the first time – it will suck in through the two holes of the empty sockets, leaving the eye, that stone-shattering lighting, like a flat battery. a
One might, I believe, class under the same heading a "para-eye" I have observed on the shores of the Red Sea, at Port Sudan. It consits of the skeleton of a fish, probably of an acanthopterous or shiny species, its head impaled on a cane switch thrust into a palisade. In the living creature there is sort of horn over each eye. On the other hand, its vaguely phallic appearance has not, perhaps, been without influence in determining the choice; the phallus, in fact plays a considerable role in the phrophylaxis of the evil eye (Otto Jahn, Böse Blick). But this is naother question, far too extensive to expound upon here.