The evil eye is the oldest version of this complaint, and almost every culture that has it also has a way of taking it off.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. It is not a Japanese idea and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What I can do is lay the traditions side by side, because they agree about something that almost nobody says out loud.
What the evil eye actually is
Not malice. That is the part people get wrong.
It is admiration with envy underneath it, and in most traditions the person who gives it does not know they have done anything.
A compliment about your child. Somebody looking at your new car a little too long. A relative who says how lucky you are, and means it, and also does not.
Which is why it tends to arrive after something good. A wedding, a promotion, a birth, a house.
People find that harder to accept than a curse, because there is nobody to be angry with.
What every tradition agrees on
Somebody else takes it off you.
Not a detail. It is the one structural rule shared by traditions that have nothing else in common and never borrowed from each other.
In Italy an older woman does it. In Greece it is done by somebody who was taught the words by an elder. In South Asia a family member performs it over you. In Islamic practice a reciter recites.
Nowhere is the standard form a person doing it alone in their own bathroom.
That is worth sitting with if you have been trying to lift this by yourself and finding that it does not move.
The four traditions
Italian, malocchio
Diagnosis and removal in one motion, using oil and water.
The prayer is held privately and traditionally passed from one woman to another at a particular hour on Christmas Eve. It is not written down and I am not going to be the one to write it.
Greek, mati
The removal is called xematiasma. Someone who knows the words says them over you, often silently.
Yawning during it is taken as confirmation that the eye was present, and yawning in both people is taken as confirmation that it has moved.
The headache that will not respond to anything is the classic complaint.
Middle Eastern, nazar
Prevention is the emphasis, which is why the blue eye is on doorways, cars and children rather than on the afflicted.
In Islamic practice removal is by recitation, and in some traditions by washing with water that the person who looked has used.
South Asian, nazar utarna
Something is circled over the person and then destroyed away from the house.
Salt, dried chillies, or a lemon with chillies, passed around the head and body a set number of times and then burned or thrown at a crossroads.
The burning smell is read the way the Greek yawn is read.
The oil and water test
The one procedure that crosses most of these, and the one you can run tonight.
1. A shallow bowl or a plain white plate, filled with cool water.
2. Three drops of olive oil, let fall from a finger held above the surface. Not poured.
3. Wait, and watch what the drops do.
- They stay round and separate. Nothing present. This is the ordinary result and oil normally beads.
- They spread thin across the surface. The classic reading for the eye being present.
- They run together into one and sink or cling. Read as heavier, and in most versions the test is repeated.
4. The water goes outside afterwards, not down the sink, and the bowl is washed.
Use cool water, not warm. Warm water spreads oil on its own and you will read heat as an answer.
The Japanese name for the same thing
We have no evil eye, and we have the mechanism under a different name.
Ikiryo. A living person’s feeling arriving at somebody without that person having done anything deliberate.
No ritual, no intent, often no awareness. Somebody simply cannot put you down, and it reaches you.
It arrives strongest from people who are close to you, because they can hold you clearly enough to do it.
That is the same complaint the evil eye describes, arrived at independently, which is usually a sign that people are looking at something real.
If you have nobody to do it for you
Most people reading this are outside the community the practice belongs to, and there is no grandmother to ask.
Do not improvise somebody else’s prayer. Run a clearing course instead, which is the part of this that does not require an initiated person.
Cold water at the neck and wrists each morning. Salt in a hot bath each evening, fifteen to twenty minutes, rinsed off from the head down. No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Salt in a bowl of hot water over the shoulders, or worked in wet palms and rinsed downward.
Salt at the door, changed each morning. Seven consecutive days: the clearing course, and where it stops.
Then repeat the oil and water on the eighth day and compare it with what you saw on the first.
If it keeps coming back
Then it is probably not the eye, and that is worth knowing before you spend a year on clearings.
The eye is unintentional and unmaintained. Nobody is feeding it, so once it is off, it is off.
Something that returns on a rhythm after being cleared is being supplied, and supply means a person who knows what they are doing: the six signs that tell me it was sent.
Tell me what you ran, what the oil did, and how long the quiet lasted.
And since every tradition on this page says the same thing about who does the taking off, there is no shame in it being somebody else.
