Seeing the Obscene: The Protective Power of Display in the Fig-Hand Amulet

Abstract

The amulet known as higa, which reproduces a hand gesture known by the same name, belongs to an ancient family of Mediterranean amulets intended to prevent or counteract the evil eye through an obscene display. From the Renaissance to almost the present day, its use in the Iberian Peninsula became remarkable both as an amulet and as a piece of jewellery. It is argued in this article that this appears to be a consequence of how there was a progressive resignification of the protective obscenity of the amulet since the Middle Ages, which led to its association with the sphere of Marian devotion. This research analyses the history of the higa amulet, the nature of its protective function, and the peculiarities of its use in the Iberian area, and shows the coherence of its use with the Catholic worldview in the periods of its greatest popularity.

Notes

1 There are prohibitions on the use of amulets against magic in the councils of Laodicea (363–64 CE), Rome (712), Milan (1565), and Tours (1583). This latter one explicitly prohibited the use of periapts shaped as the phallus and vulva; this attended to their obscenity and not to their alleged power. Similarly, hand-shaped amulets were explicitly forbidden by the Congregation of the Royal Chapel of Granada (1526) and by the Synod of Guadix (1554), but the prohibition was directed to moriscos’ amulets such as the khamsa (Mendiola Fernández 2011, 201). The higa was never explicitly forbidden and is found integrated into religious iconography.

2 Vuelo de brujas (Witches’ Flight, 1797/98) makes the most striking example by depicting a blinded man performing two higas in place of his eyes while surrounded by evil creatures. It is shown as well on the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida (1798, Madrid), in which one of the characters in the dome is called ‘the man of the higa’, but the interpreters attribute this name indistinctly to a man who appears with his hand closed in the shape of a fist or to a man who raises his hand so that the middle finger is more extended. The amulet itself is depicted in the nursing belt represented in his Capricho no. 4 (1798), known as El de la Rollona (Nanny’s boy).

3 Languages constructed and expressed by means of hand signs are not considered here.

4 Le symbolisme de l’oeil (1965) by Waldemar Deonna provides a very complete analysis of this significance since ancient times.

5 This was considered in Walter Hildburgh’s extensive research on Iberian amulets. Despite his exhaustive analysis of both amulets, their genealogies, and mutual influence (more careful as far as Muslim and African influence is concerned), this suffers from a lack of consideration of the continuity of the amuletistic tradition of the Iberian Peninsula since the Paleohispanic period, much better explored by Piñel (1998), and seems to disregard the Renaissance’s tendency to imitate Antiquity. That might be due to a lack of academic material at the time that could verify this; for example, there has been archaeological certainty about the Tartessian culture only since 1958.

6 This division should not be sharply sustained.

7 This was not the case with comedies, in which actions of this nature were exposed.

8 This accounts for a process by which the euphemisms of an obscene reality end up being taken as obscene themselves, causing the need for a new euphemism.

9 The Aeneid by Virgil contains several instances of this use, for example: ‘Hourly ‘t is heard, when with a boding note the solitary screech owl strains her throat, and, on a chimney’s top, or turret’s height, with songs obscene disturbs the silence of the night’ (4.464–67).

10 The peculiarities of profanity as spoken obscenity will not be considered here.

11 There is an amuletistic identification between the vulva and the eye that goes beyond the juxtaposition of both elements; for example, cowrie shells (Hildburgh 1942a). The British Museum has several examples of this; for example, a phallus cup from the island of Chios with eyes and a vulva (catalogue number 1888,0601.496.a-c): https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1888-0601-496-a-c.

12 The fearfulness of the female sex lies, chiefly, in its reference to a profound alterity that, while remaining unseen, entails a risk of annihilation in that engulfing otherness, able to extinguish or devour; hence its ‘raw’ depictions, less interested in naturalism than in showing an ‘openness’, a threshold. This is not understandable within a passive conception of female sexuality, therefore the apotropaic logic breaks with the convention of an active-passive dichotomy.

13 I have learned from older people that in some places in Spain it used to be executed frontally.

14 It was known as katapygon when directed to a man or katapygaina when directed to a woman.

15 Incidentally, the earlier part of this period coincides with the beginning of trade and diplomatic relations between Portugal, Spain, and Japan that were thwarted by the Sakoku Edict of 1635.

16 For example, Goya’s Capricho no. 4 (1798). It was also used in theatre as a prop to determine the age of an infant (Cobo Delgado 2013, 40 n. 83).

17 Hildburgh (1955, 80) verifies its use by all strata of the population, and humbler versions are preserved.

18 This is previously found in Thomas of Aquinas (Santo Tomás de Aquino 1994, 978–80), who attributes the evil eye to psycho-physical causes, considering only a non-natural origin in rare cases of demonic intervention.

19 Baroja reads a prevalence of the female principle in the left hand and a prevalence of the male one in the right (Baroja 1945, 16).

20 These colours are often regarded as a fundamental triad (Hutchings 1998, 200; Hemming 2012), while some add yellow (Benson 2004, 11, 46–53).

21 With the exception of one case of uncertain date located in an antique shop, this research has not found any pre-twentieth-century specimens made in blue.

22 This might have been a property of the fig-hand gesture in ancient Egypt (Franco Mata 1986, 139).

23 This was particularly striking in the excellent jet from the north of Spain (Franco Mata 1986, 134).

24 It is likely that this stands for a crescent, consistent with those that have higas on their tips and, perhaps, defining the finial lump of the other end as another higa offering the back of the hand. Incidentally, the position of the Virgin matches the placing of the higas in crescents.

25 The inwardness of the hand was considered by Hildburgh in regard to the scallop shell (Hildburgh 1955, 88).

26 Great Iberian mother goddess from the pre-Roman period.

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Notes on contributors

Leticia Cortina Aracil

Leticia Cortina Aracil is an independent researcher currently working in Spain as a cicerone, a cultural mediator, and a Humanities lecturer, and as a tutor at the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja. Her research interests include the existential interpretation of material culture, with an emphasis on corporeality and its impact in the building of worldviews. She has previously worked as a lecturer at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid), regularly participates in conferences and academic events, and has published work on philosophical anthropology, mythology, ethics, and folklore.