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Fascination. Basilisk & opoblepa - kill other animals by staring at them. Mouse running round open- mouthed snake, crying; at last as if forced, leapt in. Same effect from eye of setter on partridge. Human eyes also.1
'Look at his eye - for all the world like a villainous sort of black currant. 'Tis to be hoped he can't ill- wish us! There's folks in heath who've been overlooked already. I will never kill another adder as long as I live.'2
In Rudyard Kipling's short story of 1891, 'The Return of Imray', the English sahib's hitherto devoted Muslim servant, Bahadar Khan, confesses that he murdered his master because he 'cast an evil eye upon my child': 'He said he was a handsome child, and patted him on the head; wherefore my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight.'3 For Bahadar Khan an inexorable logic connects each step: the casting of the evil eye, its power intensified by incautious praise; the child's subsequent death from fever; the right and duty to take revenge. Some seventy years later, an old lady, born and bred in London, recounted a quarrel with a minor government official, brought to triumphant conclusion when, in her words, 'I shut me eyes at 'im.'4 Widely separated in time, place and outcome as these stories are, the one murderous, the other comic (if also a little disturbing), both engage with the notion of the evil eye. The Hindi name for this is buri nazar; in Punjabi it is nazara, which is how it would have been known to Bahadar Khan. One of the many English terms for casting the evil eye is to 'blink' someone or something, which neatly fits the temporary annihilation of her opponent by the elderly lady in London - though the still more vivid term, 'eye- biting', might do equally well.5
Tales of the evil eye are both ancient and widespread. It is attested to in Babylonian texts from the second millennium BCE, and in the writings of Hesiod, as well as in Talmudic sources, the Old and New Testament, and the Qur'an.6 Though not quite universal, it was and still is prevalent in the Near and Middle East, in western and southern Asia, in much of...