Around the fear has grown one of the world's richest bodies of counter-technology, and its logic is remarkably consistent. First, absorption and decoy: the eye strikes what it lights on first, so one gives it something to hit, the blue eye-bead of the eastern Mediterranean, the mirrored embroidery of South Asia, the horseshoe, the bright ribbon on the new car, the horned charm of Naples. Second, the counter-gaze: an eye to stare back at the eye, painted on Greek ships' prows since antiquity and hanging today as the Turkish nazar boncugu, or the open right hand raised against it, the hamsa or hand of Fatima, palm out, sometimes with an eye in the palm. Third, obscenity and derision, on the theory that the eye cannot envy what it is laughing or blushing at: the horn gesture, the fig gesture, the phallic amulets Roman soldiers hung on their standards and Roman mothers on their infants.
Fourth, moisture and disavowal: spitting three times, the Yiddish kein ayin hara and the Arabic mashallah appended to any praise, formulas that hand the admired thing to God before envy can claim it. Fifth, concealment: fortunes unstated, children called ugly, wedding finery veiled. Elworthy catalogued this arsenal across the Mediterranean in 1895 and the inventory has barely changed since Pompeii, only the materials updating, which makes the apotropaic tradition one of the most conservative in all of folk religion: the fear evolves not at all, and the defenses only in plastic.