August 30, 2023 • 11 mins
You've seen the evil eye. Many Middle Eastern cultures have a long history with it. Learn how to thwart this curse today.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, giving us the evil
eye for all the trash we've ever talked about her.
And frankly, it's working because I just blew a tire
on the way here to work.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Is that a euphemism?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
No, a blue attire? And I lost my check book.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
M you were at the grocery store, they rang everything up.
You're standing there looking and they were and they said
you have to pay now, and you went, oh, and
you reached in your purse to get your check book out.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I reached in my front pocket, in my shirt.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And then you're like, does anyone have a pen? And
twelve people under the age of seventy five behind you
rolled their eyes inside.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
And they had a pen, but it leaked all over
my hand.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
They gave you the evil eye. Big thanks to our
pal Dave Brus and the old folks at houstuffworks dot
com for this bit on the evil eye what we
in our house call the stink eye.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yes. Also thanks to Antonio Peglia Rulo, who is the
author of a book on the evil Eye. The Evil
Eye colin the History Mystery and Magic of the Quiet Curse.
Dave talked to a lot about this, because not only
did Antonio write that book, his grandmother was an evil
eye do her away with practitioner when he's growing up.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's right. If you don't know what we're talking about,
we're talking about what turns out to be a very
very old I don't know what you call a tradition.
What isrus some super tradition. Yeah, all those things where
someone will give you the evil eye, someone will shoot
you a glance. We call it the stink eye again,
and it's it's wordless. You don't have to say a thing,
(01:55):
You don't have to have a what a the little
a voodoo doll all I Usually.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There's a big there's a quick cello sting going on
in the background while it's happening.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
You got to take that small string section around with you.
It means basically, well, originally I think it was sort
of came from jealousy or envy, but can also be
just someone's angry or they resent you, or maybe they're
being greedy or something. And it's generally always intentional. But
(02:26):
I was surprised to learn from our friend here who
wrote that book that it can be unintentional.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I didn't realize that, but I mean, I guess, I
guess if you're coveting something, or you're jealous of somebody
to the left of the person, you accidentally look at
and give the evil eye. That's the best I can
come up with for unintentional evil eye.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This goes all the way back to the Greeks and
possibly before right.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Oh, yeah, long before the Greeks. But Plutarch was maybe
the first person to actually write about it. He was
a lost for a historian, as everybody knows, and he
wrote some essays that were collected into something called Moraleia,
and he talked about the evil eye in that. His
whole jam was that your eyes are a source of
energy that shoot out, that shoot the energy out into
(03:16):
the world around you. And that reminded me, Chuck of
our stereoscopic episode where that one of those ancient physicians
had their Their theory was that we see by shooting
beams out at stuff, and that's how we see. And
I guess that's kind of what it was based on.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, totally. Basically, the body fills up with that jealousy
or rage or whatever, and it clouds the mind and
then the eyeballs are right there in front of the
mind to sort of display for the world whatever the
mind is thinking, and in this case it's evil.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, and he goes bby boo when you shoot the
evil eye out of your eyes. That was Plutarch's take,
and apparently that was the popular take of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
And depending on what culture you are from and your
your ancestry is sort of about, you might have a long,
rich tradition of evil eye shooters or blaming everything that
happens to you that's bad on an evil eye that
was shot your way.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, Because it's not just stuff that happens to you directly,
like injury or an illness. It can also be things
that happen to the things you depend on, like your
smartphone exploding in your pocket. You remember what that used
to happen? Yeah, they are blowing attire smartphones?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Did They didn't catch on fire?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Right?
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Am I making that up?
Speaker 1 (04:39):
There were like mild explosions with some I want to
say an android at some point in time, Yeah, blowing
up in people's pockets.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And everyone's like, ah, boy, remember when that was the thing. Yeah,
And now they're right back in our pockets again.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Back in the oughts. Yeah, everybody's like, I don't care.
I love smartphones so much, I'll just take the risk. Right.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So back to Antonio who wrote the book The Evil Eye.
He is Catholic and Italian, and he said, you know,
we don't even have like baby showers over here, like
that's considered bad luck to have a baby shower, like
you're tempting fate or something like that. Yes, so it's
a you know, sort of a superstitious danger and over there.
(05:24):
And this is kind of true anywhere in any culture
that has an evil eye history, they will have protections
against evil eyes, like amulets and things like that, And
pregnant women would wear amulets in Italy apparently at least
in his family, and they would say these special prayers
to ward off the evil eye.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah. And the reason why having something like a baby
shower would tempt fate and maybe attract an evil eye
is that it could be taken as like a boast
or something, and boasting can generate envy, your jealousy, and
be your jealousy can shoot out of your eyes as
the evil eye, and then your smartphone blows up in
your hand during the baby shower.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Look at me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I made a human and in particular, babies, children, pregnant women,
and animals are the most vulnerable to the evil ey,
although it can happen to anybody. But there's different traditions
and customs for protecting against the evil eye depending on
where you are in the world. Like you said, in Turkey,
when you are a newborn baby, you're going to get
(06:21):
what's called a nazar, which is a dark blue circle
with a white circle inside it, and a dark blue
circle inside the white circle, and it's meant to be
an eye. And Chuck, I say, we take a break
and we'll come back and tell everybody whose eye it is.
After this, ooh, Horace, it's the eye of Horace.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Oh wow, that was quick. Yeah yeah. And like you said,
depending on where you are, you might have different traditions
for warding this thing off. A lot of these countries
are Middle Eastern or somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea. I
believe Dave even said in his own family, his grandmother
and the Jewish tradition would tie ribbons on cribs and
(07:32):
things like that to ward off the evil eye or
potential bad luck for newborn babies. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, for sure. In India they'll put some coal, a
black dot on the infant's face, and all of these.
The point of these, the nizar, the red ribbon, the
black dot on the face, they're meant to protect. They're
basically amulets or talisman that can protect against the evil eye.
And one reason why they based that on the Eye
(07:58):
of Horace is because Nhi and Egypt, the Eye of
Horace was painted on homes, painted in tombs, and it
offered protection from evil or mal intent or all sorts
of problems even back then, and so it kind of
got you know how they take like logos, if you
look at the evolution of a logo over the course
of a century, it goes from really ornate to like
(08:22):
really stylized and simple. That's basically what happened to the
Eye of Horace when it became the nizar.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, that's a good.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Way to say it.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Well, thank you, and our book author also, like you
mentioned his grandmother, Paglia. Rulo's grandma would keep a bowl
of water in her kitchen and pour little drops of
olive oil in there and look at the shapes and
the patterns that the oil would take and apparently that
would inform her on the evil Eye and if there
was like someone in her family that was potentially in danger,
(08:52):
or a neighbor or something that possibly will be or
was stricken with the evil Eye. And I thought that
was really interesting. I don't know if it literally like, hey,
that looks like Gary our neighbor, right, or if it's
just you know, kind of reading the tea leaves.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Right up at the olive. O is so good too,
Oh boy, oil. So you said that this all kind
of came out of the Mediterranean, did you not.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
They've traced it back at least five thousand years ago
to tell Brock, which is a city of Mesopotamia, which
is Telbrock is a modern day Syria right now, and
they've found tiny figures that all kind of bear a
resemblance to one another. They call them ie idols, and
that they think that these offered protection as well. Did
you look up the eye idols of Telbrock? Oh?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
If ET is not based on that, I will eat
my hat. Okay, it's identical to eat. It's crazy how
much it looks like ET. Man. There's nobody who's seen
ET and would see one of those and be like,
I don't know, like it looks exactly like ET.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
All right, I'm looking it up, and that is ET.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, in that nuts, that is ET.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I mean, that is unmistakably an ET head.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Right. But also even the body resembles ET. The proportions
and everything.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, that's true. I don't see any arms and legs,
but it does have that big squatty body.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Well, thank god I don't have to eat my hat
today because that just pile on everything else bad that's happened.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Was it like a sweaty old baseball cap salty?
Speaker 1 (10:26):
You know, it's got the white salt streaks that will
never come out.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
No, thanks, So I guess that's about it.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Huh for the evil eye, I got nothing else. Yeah,
there's all sorts of amulets and talisman you can use
to protect yourself. If you feel like somebody gave you
the evil eye. You can also say please don't look
at me like that anymore. I don't know what's wrong
with you. That will also dispel the magic too, That's right,
Chuck said, that's right. Everybody. So, I mean short, stuff
is out.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, My heart Radio, sit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, giving us the evil
eye for all the trash we've ever talked about her.
And frankly, it's working because I just blew a tire
on the way here to work.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Is that a euphemism?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
No, a blue attire? And I lost my check book.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
M you were at the grocery store, they rang everything up.
You're standing there looking and they were and they said
you have to pay now, and you went, oh, and
you reached in your purse to get your check book out.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I reached in my front pocket, in my shirt.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And then you're like, does anyone have a pen? And
twelve people under the age of seventy five behind you
rolled their eyes inside.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
And they had a pen, but it leaked all over
my hand.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
They gave you the evil eye. Big thanks to our
pal Dave Brus and the old folks at houstuffworks dot
com for this bit on the evil eye what we
in our house call the stink eye.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yes. Also thanks to Antonio Peglia Rulo, who is the
author of a book on the evil Eye. The Evil
Eye colin the History Mystery and Magic of the Quiet Curse.
Dave talked to a lot about this, because not only
did Antonio write that book, his grandmother was an evil
eye do her away with practitioner when he's growing up.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's right. If you don't know what we're talking about,
we're talking about what turns out to be a very
very old I don't know what you call a tradition.
What isrus some super tradition. Yeah, all those things where
someone will give you the evil eye, someone will shoot
you a glance. We call it the stink eye again,
and it's it's wordless. You don't have to say a thing,
(01:55):
You don't have to have a what a the little
a voodoo doll all I Usually.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There's a big there's a quick cello sting going on
in the background while it's happening.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
You got to take that small string section around with you.
It means basically, well, originally I think it was sort
of came from jealousy or envy, but can also be
just someone's angry or they resent you, or maybe they're
being greedy or something. And it's generally always intentional. But
(02:26):
I was surprised to learn from our friend here who
wrote that book that it can be unintentional.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I didn't realize that, but I mean, I guess, I
guess if you're coveting something, or you're jealous of somebody
to the left of the person, you accidentally look at
and give the evil eye. That's the best I can
come up with for unintentional evil eye.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This goes all the way back to the Greeks and
possibly before right.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Oh, yeah, long before the Greeks. But Plutarch was maybe
the first person to actually write about it. He was
a lost for a historian, as everybody knows, and he
wrote some essays that were collected into something called Moraleia,
and he talked about the evil eye in that. His
whole jam was that your eyes are a source of
energy that shoot out, that shoot the energy out into
(03:16):
the world around you. And that reminded me, Chuck of
our stereoscopic episode where that one of those ancient physicians
had their Their theory was that we see by shooting
beams out at stuff, and that's how we see. And
I guess that's kind of what it was based on.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, totally. Basically, the body fills up with that jealousy
or rage or whatever, and it clouds the mind and
then the eyeballs are right there in front of the
mind to sort of display for the world whatever the
mind is thinking, and in this case it's evil.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, and he goes bby boo when you shoot the
evil eye out of your eyes. That was Plutarch's take,
and apparently that was the popular take of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
And depending on what culture you are from and your
your ancestry is sort of about, you might have a long,
rich tradition of evil eye shooters or blaming everything that
happens to you that's bad on an evil eye that
was shot your way.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, Because it's not just stuff that happens to you directly,
like injury or an illness. It can also be things
that happen to the things you depend on, like your
smartphone exploding in your pocket. You remember what that used
to happen? Yeah, they are blowing attire smartphones?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Did They didn't catch on fire?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Right?
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Am I making that up?
Speaker 1 (04:39):
There were like mild explosions with some I want to
say an android at some point in time, Yeah, blowing
up in people's pockets.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And everyone's like, ah, boy, remember when that was the thing. Yeah,
And now they're right back in our pockets again.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Back in the oughts. Yeah, everybody's like, I don't care.
I love smartphones so much, I'll just take the risk. Right.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So back to Antonio who wrote the book The Evil Eye.
He is Catholic and Italian, and he said, you know,
we don't even have like baby showers over here, like
that's considered bad luck to have a baby shower, like
you're tempting fate or something like that. Yes, so it's
a you know, sort of a superstitious danger and over there.
(05:24):
And this is kind of true anywhere in any culture
that has an evil eye history, they will have protections
against evil eyes, like amulets and things like that, And
pregnant women would wear amulets in Italy apparently at least
in his family, and they would say these special prayers
to ward off the evil eye.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah. And the reason why having something like a baby
shower would tempt fate and maybe attract an evil eye
is that it could be taken as like a boast
or something, and boasting can generate envy, your jealousy, and
be your jealousy can shoot out of your eyes as
the evil eye, and then your smartphone blows up in
your hand during the baby shower.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Look at me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I made a human and in particular, babies, children, pregnant women,
and animals are the most vulnerable to the evil ey,
although it can happen to anybody. But there's different traditions
and customs for protecting against the evil eye depending on
where you are in the world. Like you said, in Turkey,
when you are a newborn baby, you're going to get
(06:21):
what's called a nazar, which is a dark blue circle
with a white circle inside it, and a dark blue
circle inside the white circle, and it's meant to be
an eye. And Chuck, I say, we take a break
and we'll come back and tell everybody whose eye it is.
After this, ooh, Horace, it's the eye of Horace.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Oh wow, that was quick. Yeah yeah. And like you said,
depending on where you are, you might have different traditions
for warding this thing off. A lot of these countries
are Middle Eastern or somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea. I
believe Dave even said in his own family, his grandmother
and the Jewish tradition would tie ribbons on cribs and
(07:32):
things like that to ward off the evil eye or
potential bad luck for newborn babies. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, for sure. In India they'll put some coal, a
black dot on the infant's face, and all of these.
The point of these, the nizar, the red ribbon, the
black dot on the face, they're meant to protect. They're
basically amulets or talisman that can protect against the evil eye.
And one reason why they based that on the Eye
(07:58):
of Horace is because Nhi and Egypt, the Eye of
Horace was painted on homes, painted in tombs, and it
offered protection from evil or mal intent or all sorts
of problems even back then, and so it kind of
got you know how they take like logos, if you
look at the evolution of a logo over the course
of a century, it goes from really ornate to like
(08:22):
really stylized and simple. That's basically what happened to the
Eye of Horace when it became the nizar.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, that's a good.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Way to say it.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Well, thank you, and our book author also, like you
mentioned his grandmother, Paglia. Rulo's grandma would keep a bowl
of water in her kitchen and pour little drops of
olive oil in there and look at the shapes and
the patterns that the oil would take and apparently that
would inform her on the evil Eye and if there
was like someone in her family that was potentially in danger,
(08:52):
or a neighbor or something that possibly will be or
was stricken with the evil Eye. And I thought that
was really interesting. I don't know if it literally like, hey,
that looks like Gary our neighbor, right, or if it's
just you know, kind of reading the tea leaves.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Right up at the olive. O is so good too,
Oh boy, oil. So you said that this all kind
of came out of the Mediterranean, did you not.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
They've traced it back at least five thousand years ago
to tell Brock, which is a city of Mesopotamia, which
is Telbrock is a modern day Syria right now, and
they've found tiny figures that all kind of bear a
resemblance to one another. They call them ie idols, and
that they think that these offered protection as well. Did
you look up the eye idols of Telbrock? Oh?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
If ET is not based on that, I will eat
my hat. Okay, it's identical to eat. It's crazy how
much it looks like ET. Man. There's nobody who's seen
ET and would see one of those and be like,
I don't know, like it looks exactly like ET.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
All right, I'm looking it up, and that is ET.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, in that nuts, that is ET.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I mean, that is unmistakably an ET head.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Right. But also even the body resembles ET. The proportions
and everything.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, that's true. I don't see any arms and legs,
but it does have that big squatty body.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Well, thank god I don't have to eat my hat
today because that just pile on everything else bad that's happened.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Was it like a sweaty old baseball cap salty?
Speaker 1 (10:26):
You know, it's got the white salt streaks that will
never come out.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
No, thanks, So I guess that's about it.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Huh for the evil eye, I got nothing else. Yeah,
there's all sorts of amulets and talisman you can use
to protect yourself. If you feel like somebody gave you
the evil eye. You can also say please don't look
at me like that anymore. I don't know what's wrong
with you. That will also dispel the magic too, That's right,
Chuck said, that's right. Everybody. So, I mean short, stuff
is out.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, My heart Radio, sit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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