The blue eye bead descends from a fear of envious stares dating back 5,000 years
From Istanbul bazaars to Caribbean markets you can buy a glass bead painted like a staring blue eye. It is meant to deflect the evil eye, the belief that an envious glance can bring bad luck or injury. Amulets against that glare have been found dating back roughly 5,000 years.
The belief spans the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Africa and Latin America, and it appears repeatedly in Jewish rabbinic writing. At Tell Brak, among the oldest cities of Mesopotamia, excavators found alabaster idols with carved eyes, and texts from the Syrian port of Ugarit, which lasted until about 1180 BC, mention the idea directly. The best-known protections today are the eye-shaped nazar and the hand-shaped hamsa. Early charms were ceramic or clay, but once glassmaking reached the Mediterranean around 1500 BC, eye beads spread among Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans and others.
Greek and Roman writers took the danger seriously. One historian counted more than a hundred ancient works mentioning it, from Plato to Pliny the Elder. Plutarch offered a scientific-sounding explanation, proposing that the eyes shot out harmful rays like poisoned darts, while still admitting the phenomenon was a source of wonder. In one of Virgil's poems a shepherd wonders whose gaze has bewitched his sickly lambs, since livestock were thought just as vulnerable as people. Some Romans blamed entire peoples, especially those of Pontus and Scythia.
Defences were inventive. Greeks hung talismans in their homes, tied charms to animals, spat into the folds of their clothes and sometimes dressed boys as girls to avoid attracting envy. The tyrant Peisistratus reportedly hung a grasshopper-like figure before the Acropolis. Romans wore a phallic amulet called the fascinus, from a Latin verb meaning to cast a spell, the root of the English word fascinate; one historian likened it to a lightning conductor for good luck.
The customs continue. In Arab culture, adding the phrase Masha'Allah, God has willed it, to a compliment keeps it from drawing the evil eye. In southern Italy people carry a small horn called the cornicello or make the sign of the horns.
Source: Evil eye
