Believing in the Supernatural through the ‘Evil Eye’: Perception and Science in the Modern Greek Cosmos

Abstract

Drawing on recent anthropological research in Crete and northern Greece, this article describes the various attitudes and conceptualisations of the ‘supernatural’ in the context of an everyday Greek belief, namely the belief in the ‘evil eye’. The usual pre-determined representation that there are two antithetical segments of our cosmos—the perceivable, embodied, and natural on the one hand and the spiritual, immaterial, and supernatural on the other hand—is challenged. Ultimately, it is shown how the sense of belonging to the Greek cosmos calls for a re-location of the boundaries between ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’, rendering the bipolarity between scientific and supernaturalistic ideas obsolete via perceptual experience.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article was accomplished during my post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Research in Anthropology in Lisbon, Portugal, financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). I wish to thank Professor Charles Stewart for thoroughly discussing most of the ideas presented here during his role as my PhD supervisor at University College London and for reading an earlier draft of this article and offering valuable advice.

Notes

1. My field research was primarily conducted between August 2005 and November 2006, as part of my PhD thesis. Subsequent visits to Greece have made certain that my ethnography and analysis are up to date. The majority of my informants come from a middle-class socio-economic background; they are mainly educated, with a variety of professional activities and an age range between mid-twenties and early seventies. In order to protect my informants’ identity, I use pseudonyms throughout the present article.

2. Although the evil eye exists as a concept in the context of the official religion of Greece, Orthodox Christianity, the Orthodox Church denounces the lay interpretation of it. In particular, the Church believes that the ritual against the evil eye should only be performed by priests, not by lay healers. In reality, however, even priests ask for the help of lay healers, who use much religious symbolism and Christian prayers during the ritual, in order to have the evil eye removed from people’s selves.

3. While maintaining the emphasis of the concepts, in the rest of the article, I will use the terms ‘supernatural’, ‘natural’, and their derivatives without quotations marks.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eugenia Roussou

Eugenia Roussou is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) at New University of Lisbon in Portugal. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Greece and published on Greek religion, spirituality, gender, and ritual healing. She is currently working on her research project, funded by the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), on new forms of spirituality, religious pluralism, and spiritual creativity in present-day Portugal. CORRESPONDENCE: [email protected]