Evil Eye - History

History

The amount of literary and archeological evidence attests to the belief in the evil eye in the eastern Mediterranean for millennia starting with Hesiod, Callimachus, Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Theocritus, Plutarch, Heliodorus, Pliny the Elder, and Aulus Gellius. In Peter Walcot's Envy and the Greeks (1978) he referenced more than one hundred of these authors' works related to the evil eye. Studying these written sources in order to write on the evil eye only gives a fragmented view of the subject whether it presents a folkloric, theological, classical, or anthropological approach to the evil eye. While these different approaches tend to reference similar sources each presents a different yet similar usage of the evil eye, that the fear of the evil eye is based on the belief that certain people have eyes whose glance has the power to injure or even kill and that it can be intentional or unintentional.

Read more about this topic:  Evil Eye

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.
    Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)

    Don’t you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there’s never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it’s a miracle out of the Old Testament!
    Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)

    As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)