Eye
protection, and being watched
The only archetype that looks back. Every culture that made an eye into a symbol had first to settle whose eye it is — yours, a god’s, or a stranger’s — and the answer decides everything else about it.
- Instances
- Nazar (Anatolian and Levantine — the blue bead) · Mati μάτι (Greek) · Wadjet (Egyptian — the Eye of Horus) · Hamsa (North African and Levantine) · the Eye of Providence (European, and on the Great Seal of the United States)
- The flip
- Protection and paranoia in one form. The nazar and the mati are apotropaic: an eye painted or worn in order to repel an eye. The same shape on a seal, a banknote or a surveillance notice announces that you are the one being looked at. Greek makes the reversal tightest of all — máti names both the affliction and the charm against it, so the curse and the cure are a single word (a lexeme that belongs properly to hellenic.institute, borrowed here).
Sources · 4
- documented Carol Andrews, Amulets of Ancient Egypt, 1994, on the wedjat among Egyptian funerary amulets.
- documented The Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, adopted 1782.
- documented Alan Dundes (ed.), The Evil Eye: A Casebook, 1981 — the belief itself being the documented object.
- folk That the Eye of Providence on the Great Seal is a Masonic or Illuminati insertion. The device predates the claim in Christian iconography, and the claim is nineteenth-century and later.