EVIL EYE. Both in ancient and modern times, the belief that some persons have the power of injuring others by looking upon them, has been widely diffused. The Greeks frequently speak of the ophtlealmos baskanos (or E. E.), which they conceived to be especially dangerous to children; and the Romans used the verb fascinare to express the same fact. Pliny speaks—not on his own authority, however—of " those among the Triballians and Illyrians, who with their very eyesight can witch (effascinenl), yea, and kill those whom they look wistly upon any long time;" and Plutarch states, on the authority of Philaretus, that "the Thybiens who inhabited Pontus were deadly, not only to babes, but to men grown, and that whomsoever their eye, speech, or breath would reach, were sure to fall sick, and pine away." M i enalcas, in Virgil (Eel. iii. 102), also complains that some E. E. has fascinated his young lambs Neselo quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos.
The principal ancients was the phallus or fa.qqmon, as the Romans called it, which was hung round the neck of children. Of course, this superstition, like all others, flourished in Europe during the middle ages. See Reginald Scot's Dis covery of Witchcraft; the Opusculum de Fascino of John Lazarus Gutierrez, a Spanish physician, published in 1653; and the Tractatus de Fascinatione of John Christian From mann, a physician of Saxe-Coburg, published in 1675. In the British isles, also, the belief in the power of the E. E. is of old date, and is by no means dead, at least in Ire land and the Highlands of Scotland. In these countries (as elsewhere), it was once a very common superstition that cattle were subject to injury in this way. Witches had the power to a malignant degree; and various charms, such as twining mountain-ash among the hair of the cow's tail, were used to avert or destroy their noxious influence. In the east it was and is no less prevalent. The Persians have various methods of discovering the special kind of fascination by which a person is afflicted; and Dalla way, in his Account of Constantinople (Loud. 1797) affirms that " nothing can exceed the superstition of the Turks respecting the E. E. of an enemy or infidel. Passages from the Koran are painted on the outside of the houses, globes of glass are suspended from the ceiling, and a part of the superfluous caparison of their horses is designed to attract attention, and divert a sinister influence." Hobhouse, in his Travels, pears equally con
clusive testimony to the prevalence of this superstition in the Turkish empire, not among Mohammedans only, but also among Christians; while Lane, in his Modern Egyptians (1836), gives an account of the precautions taken by the Egyptians to avoid the influ ence of evil eye. The American Indians partake of the same belief; and it is not improbable that if the matter were still more profoundly investigated, it would be found that every nation that exists or has existed, with anything like a developed system of superstition, believes or has believed in the reality of fascination in some form or other.
The universality of this superstition goes far to prove that it has what may be called a natural origin; and, indeed, when we consider that the eye is the most expressive organ of the soul or mind of man, that through it are shot forth, as it were, into the visible world of the senses, the hidden passions, emotions, and desires of our nature, we will not wonder that in the "times of ignorance," when men could give no rational or scientific account of almost any physiological phenomena, if connected with psychol ogy, the eye should have been superstitiously imagined to be a center of malignant influence. The eye is, in point of fact, as potent as superstition dreams: the error lay not in the recognition of its power, but in explaining the mode of its operation. The person who felt himself under the spell of a powerful gaze, was too agitated to calmly consider the cause of his terrors, and attributed to another results for which he himself was mainly responsible. It was really he that gave to the eye of his fellow-creature its baleful influence; and he quailed less before the force of character which it indicated, than before the fearful fancies With which his own timidity had invested it. For. this disease, wherever it has existed, or does yet exist, there is no cure but that solid culture of the understanding from which comes a true strength of will and brain. See FASCI