Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/211

Rh for preservation from the Evil Eye is the presence of the Hand of Might, a superstition about which this Society is undoubtedly fully informed, as it is widespread, both in time and space. In Egypt the hand, in the form of a gold charm, was given to me as a Moslem symbol, and as representing the hand of Fat'ma, but the Moslems of Jerusalem relegate the superstition to the sons of Isaac, and profess to know nothing whatever about it. Here it is worn by men, women, and children, and it decorates the front of almost every Jewish house, sometimes merely as if the hand of a man had been dipped in blue paint and impressed upon the lintel, sometimes so large as to be literally visible across an intervening valley. Women and girls are adorned with bracelets and necklaces entirely composed of hands, and it is the favourite form of the Jewish wedding-ring.

The colour is always, if possible, blue, a point upon which I have failed to obtain any local information other than the hint conveyed in the following circumstance. Referring to Caliban's description of his mother, the witch Sycorax, as that "blue-eyed hag," I ventured to quote the usual gloss that it was an early misprint for "blear-eyed" upon which the well-known Palestinian scholar, the Rev. E. Hanauer, who was present, suggested that according to Jerusalem ideas such an emendation was unnecessary, as blue was the colour of the Evil Eye, and a mother would dread notice of her children by a blue-eyed stranger more than that of any other. As in parts of Northern Europe the same superstition would apply to the black eye, is it not possible that in both cases the object of greatest dread is the stranger? The Frank in the one case, the Southerner in the other. The horses, camels, and donkeys wear blue necklaces, sometimes a string of beads, sometimes a collar elaborately embroidered in beads, or at the least a large blue ornament hanging from the neck. The children have charms on their heads made of a bit of alum stitched into blue cloth or encased in blue beads, and the notion of blue is so widespread that when I ordered some baskets to be woven for me, even in the purely "Christian" village of Ramallah, a few blue beads were carefully fastened to each.

Should the Hand of Might, and the necklaces, and the alum,