Episode 14: Who’s Got the Evil Eye on You? 

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This episode opens up the Irish belief in the evil eye, the droch shúil, and the ordinary ways people guarded against it. Drawing on Lora’s own A Practical Guide to Irish Magic, on Lady Wilde’s Irish Cures, Mystic Charms and Superstitions, and on Andrew Sneddon’s Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, it stays with the folk reality of the eye as an often involuntary thing, the admiring or envious glance that curdles into harm over a child or a young beast, and with the plain counter work that met it: the blessing said over the thing praised, and the old rite of the three spits.

This Episode’s Practice: Turning the Eye

Use this in the moment admiration lands, whether you catch it settling on something of yours that is thriving, a child, an animal, a piece of work, a good run of luck, or you feel it come at you from outside and sit heavy. Stop and name the thing plainly to yourself: this is thriving, this is well, this is mine and it is doing grand.

Say the old words over it out loud, ‘God bless it’, the way they have always been said. Then give it the three spits the old way, not at the child or the creature but down onto your own hand or onto the ground, three of them, with a small blessing said at each: God bless it, God bless it, God bless it, so the admiration is turned and sent off and cannot settle to do harm. Let it go and get on with your day.

This is a turning aside, not an accusation. The eye is most often a thing nobody meant, so you name no neighbour and throw nothing back, you only close the door on the harm and bless your own.

Irish Terms in This Episode

• droch shúil (pronounced: DROKH HOO-il): the bad or evil eye; the blighting look, most often involuntary, that falls in admiration or envy over a thriving child, animal, or thing.
• súil milledach (pronounced: SOO-il MIL-uh-dukh): ‘a destructive eye’; the term used in the early literature for the poisonous eye, most famously that of Balor.
• Balor (pronounced: BAL-or): the figure of the Fomoire in Cath Maige Tuired whose single destroying eye was kept shut except on the battlefield.
• Fomoire (pronounced: FOH-vor-eh): the hostile, raiding people of the old tales, opposed to the Túatha Dé Danann.

Sources

• Lora O’Brien, A Practical Guide to Irish Magic (unpublished), ‘The Evil Eye’, on the droch shúil, súil milledach, and the folk record of blinking and counter work.
• Lady Jane Wilde, Irish Cures, Mystic Charms and Superstitions (1888), ‘Against the Evil Eye’, and the rule never to look at a child without saying ‘God bless it’.
• Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland (2015), on the intentional and unintentional evil eye, the Kildare custom of spitting to protect children (1683), and the wise woman Biddy Garvior spitting three times with a blessing at each.
• Jacqueline Borsje and Fergus Kelly, ‘The Evil Eye in Early Irish Literature and Law’ (2003).
• Cath Maige Tuired, on Balor and the destroying eye.

Living Irish Witchcraft is hosted by Rev. Lora O’Brien, MA. Find more at irishpaganschool.ie