What Is Worn
Against

No people has ever made more amulets, or been more systematic about them. The Egyptian dead were wrapped with them in a fixed order set out in the Book of the Dead: the heart scarab over the heart so the heart would not testify against its owner at the weighing; the tyet knot of Isis in red jasper at the throat; the djed pillar, the backbone of Osiris, at the spine; the wedjat eye, the eye of Horus torn out by Set and made whole again, wherever a wound needed closing. The living wore the same things in faience, the cheap blue-green glaze that let a labourer own what a noble owned. Petrie catalogued more than two hundred and seventy types.

If this is your line: The wedjat for healing, the scarab for the heart, the djed for a bad back and a worse year.

The Assyrians and Babylonians were the first to write their protections down and hang them up. Their world was full of named demons who did specific harm, and the answer to a named demon was its own image or its enemy's. Lamashtu, who killed babies and mothers in childbirth, was driven off by a bronze plaque showing her being expelled; the plaque was hung over the bed. Pazuzu, king of the wind demons and himself horrible, was worn as a head on a cord because he was Lamashtu's enemy, which is the oldest surviving example of the principle that you set a monster to catch a monster.

If this is your line: Pazuzu for the household with a sick child in it, and the hand for everything else.

The Greek word for it is periapton, 'a thing tied around'. Greek protection is largely about the face: the gorgoneion, the severed head of Medusa, was set on Athena's shield, over doorways, on roof tiles and on the bottom of drinking cups, because a face so terrible that it turns men to stone will certainly turn a glance aside. The eye-cup is the joke and the defence together: you raise it to drink and a pair of enormous eyes stares back over the rim at whoever is watching you.

If this is your line: The gorgoneion at the door, and for a Greek, still the blue eye.

Roman children wore the bulla, a locket of gold for the freeborn and leather for the poor, from birth until the day they took the toga of manhood and dedicated it to the household gods. Inside was a fascinum, a phallus, because the Romans held that the way to defeat the invidious eye was to make it laugh: laughter breaks the stare. Phalluses were carved on bridges, worn as pendants, hung with bells as wind-chimes over shop doors. The most Roman object in this entire catalogue is a bronze phallus with wings, legs, a tail and five bells, hung in a doorway in Pompeii.

If this is your line: The bulla for a child; the crescent for a daughter; a bell over the shop door.

Jewish practice draws a hard line between what is commanded and what is folk custom, and amulets live on both sides of it. The mezuzah on the doorpost and the tefillin on the arm and forehead are commandments, containing scripture, and are not amulets in the strict sense, though their protective reputation is ancient and universal. Beside them grew the kame'a, the written amulet: parchment inscribed with divine names, angelic names, and psalms, rolled into a silver case and hung on a child or a woman in labour. The Talmud already argues about which are permitted. The hamsa, the open hand, is shared with Islam and older than both.

If this is your line: The hamsa on the wall of a new house; the kame'a for a newborn.

Orthodoxy is wary of amulets and unambiguous about the eye: the Prophet is reported to have said that the eye is real. So the licit protection is the word of God itself. Verses are worn: the Throne Verse, the Verse of the Chair, the two final suras called the Mu'awwidhatayn, 'the two of taking refuge', written small and folded into a silver case, or written large on a shirt worn under armour. Alongside it runs the older Mediterranean stock: the blue bead, the hand of five, the fish, the scorpion.

If this is your line: The khamsa, and a written verse in silver for a traveller.

The Church's official position has been that a blessed object is a sacramental and not a charm, and that the difference is whether you trust God or the object. In practice the line has never held for a moment. The Agnus Dei, a disc of wax from the paschal candle stamped with the Lamb and blessed by the Pope, was carried against fire, flood, storm, plague and sudden death. The medal of St Benedict carries an exorcism in the initials of a Latin verse around its rim. St Christopher goes in the car. The Caravaca cross, the brown scapular, the miraculous medal: a whole industry of the blessed and the worn.

If this is your line: A saint's medal for the one you actually pray to; the Benedict medal for the house.

When Christianity came north, Scandinavian smiths began casting Thor's hammer and the cross in the same mould, and men wore both. Mjölnir is the amulet of the hammer that always returns: worn at the neck in silver, and invoked at weddings and burials to hallow the ground. Older still are the gold bracteates, thin stamped discs copying Roman medallions, which carry the earliest runic charm formulas: alu, laukaz, laþu, words for ale, leek and invitation, whose exact force is still argued over.

If this is your line: Mjölnir, for a man who wants the oldest thing on this page that is still made.

Perun, the thunder god, kept his axe as Thor kept his hammer, and small lead and bronze axes hang from Novgorod to Kyiv. Slavic folk protection is dense with the domestic: the house spirit to be fed, the red thread on the wrist, embroidery patterns whose geometry is protective and worn at the collar and cuff because those are the openings where harm gets in. Nothing in this catalogue is more consistent across cultures than the idea that the edges of clothing are where a person leaks.

If this is your line: The axe, and a red thread that costs nothing and is worn by half the world.

Southern Italy never stopped. The cornicello, the twisted red horn, hangs from every mirror in Naples; the mano cornuta and the mano fica are made with the fingers behind the back when someone says something unlucky; and the cimaruta, the sprig of rue cast in silver and hung over a cradle, carries on its branches a key, a crescent moon, a serpent, a rooster, a hand, a heart and a flower, each a separate defence, so that a single object covers every base at once. It is the most compressed amulet in this whole catalogue.

If this is your line: The horn on the mirror; the cimaruta over a cot.

British folk protection is a domestic archaeology: dried cats and worn shoes in chimneys and under thresholds, witch-bottles of urine, nails and hair buried at the door to turn a curse back on its sender, and apotropaic 'witch marks' scratched into oak beams and stone jambs beside every opening in the house. The commonest mark is a daisy-wheel compass-drawn in a single unbroken line, or the double V of Virgo Virginum, the Virgin of Virgins. They cluster around doors, windows and hearths, because those are the three ways in.

If this is your line: The horseshoe over the door, points up; a witch mark by the hearth if you own the beams.

Romani protective practice is oral, portable and jealously private, which is why the printed record is thin and mostly written by outsiders. What survives in the nineteenth-century collections is a grammar of knots, threads, coins, and drawn signs, much of it turning on the same two ideas that run through this whole page: that the edges of a person must be closed, and that the envious look must be given something else to land on.

If this is your line: Red thread, a pierced coin, and nothing you would care to explain to a stranger.

The Alpine speciality is the Breverl: a small packet of folded paper, printed with saints, seals, crosses and abbreviations, containing scraps of blessed herb, salt, wax and written prayer, folded into a many-layered lozenge and sewn into a cloth or leather case. It is the most information-dense amulet in Europe, a whole shrine folded into a wallet, and it was carried by soldiers, travellers and pregnant women. Beside it: the Himmelsbrief, the 'letter from heaven', a printed sheet promising that whoever carries it will not be shot, drowned or burned.

If this is your line: A Breverl, if you want the most thoroughly built paper object in Europe.

The Iberian world carried its amulets across the Atlantic and fused them with what it found. The higa, a fist with the thumb between the fingers, is worn in jet, coral and silver from Galicia to Brazil, given to babies against the mal de ojo. Milagros, little stamped metal limbs, hearts, eyes and animals, are pinned to a saint's robe for a specific cure, which makes them the mirror image of an amulet: not worn against the harm but left behind after it.

If this is your line: A higa for a baby; a holed stone if you find one, because you cannot buy the finding.

The nkisi of the Kongo is not worn but kept: a figure containing a packet of consecrated medicine, activated by driving in a nail or a blade at the moment of an oath, so that the object accumulates a visible history of every promise made on it. It is protection as contract. Elsewhere in West Africa the gris-gris, a small leather packet of written verse and material, sits at the exact point where Islamic written magic met older practice, and is worn from Senegal to Nigeria.

If this is your line: A leather-cased written charm, which is the same object as the Jewish kame'a and the Alpine Breverl.

The Indian amulet is often a container: the tabiz or taviz, a tube of silver or copper holding a written mantra or verse, tied on a black thread at the neck, the arm or the waist of an infant. Black thread itself is the commonest protection in South Asia, along with the kajal spot smudged on a baby's cheek to spoil its perfection, since the eye is drawn to what is flawless. In Tibet the ga'u is a hinged travelling shrine worn on the chest, holding a blessed image, a relic, or a printed prayer.

If this is your line: A silver tube on a black thread, and a deliberate flaw somewhere on anything perfect.

Chinese protective practice runs on two tracks: the written charm, fu, drawn in cinnabar on yellow paper in a script legible only to spirits, burned and drunk in water or pasted over a door; and the worn object, above all jade, which the Chinese have carried for eight thousand years as the substance that preserves. Coins strung with red cord, the bagua mirror over the door, and the peach-wood sword all belong to the same system: a bureaucratic universe in which the correct document, correctly stamped, is binding on the spirit world.

If this is your line: Jade, worn against the skin, which is the oldest continuous amulet tradition on earth.

The omamori is a printed prayer or a slip of blessed wood sealed inside a brocade bag, sold at shrines and temples for a specific purpose: safe childbirth, success in examinations, traffic safety, recovery from illness. It must not be opened, it is renewed each year, and the old one is returned to the shrine to be burned. It is the most systematised amulet in the modern world, and quite possibly the best-designed: it names its purpose on the outside and expires.

If this is your line: An omamori for the purpose you actually have, and return it in a year.

Grouping these together is a convenience and not a claim: the practices are unrelated. The Northwest Coast amulet in bone and ivory, the Andean tumi, the Maori hei-tiki in nephrite passed down a family until it carries the names of its dead owners, the bear-claw necklace: what they share with everything else on this page is only the underlying human proposition, that a thing carried can stand between you and what is coming.

If this is your line: Nothing from this section, unless it is yours by descent. That is the point of it.

Persian protection is textile and metal together: the blue bead, the <i>cheshm-e nazar</i>, and above all esfand, wild rue seeds burned on charcoal so the smoke passes over a person's head while a rhyme is said against the eye. The smell of it is the smell of a Persian house on a day when something good has happened and somebody is nervous about it. Across the steppe, Kazakh and Kyrgyz work hangs silver, coral and carnelian in heavy plates on a woman's chest and headdress, where it both announces wealth and, by the shine, absorbs the glance that wealth attracts.

If this is your line: Blue glass, and esfand smoke, which costs nothing and is the most Persian thing in this catalogue.

The Phoenicians and Carthaginians carried Egyptian forms across the whole Mediterranean and sold them everywhere they traded, which is why a wedjat eye turns up in a grave in Ibiza. Their own speciality was the glass-paste pendant head: a bearded, grinning, staring face in coloured glass, hung at the neck, found from Sardinia to Cádiz. It belongs squarely to the inversion principle — a face so odd that the eye stops on it.

If this is your line: A glass face, if your line runs to the western Mediterranean.

The Ethiopian magic scroll is made to the length of its owner's body, so that it covers them entirely: strips of parchment from a goat sacrificed for the purpose, painted with angels, guardian eyes, and text in Ge'ez naming the affliction and the remedy, then rolled into a leather case and worn or hung at the bed. The scroll is written by a debtera, a lay cleric outside the priesthood, for one named person, against one named trouble. It is the most personalised amulet made anywhere.

If this is your line: A scroll cut to your own height, which is the one measurement no shop can guess.

The <i>anting-anting</i> is a Filipino amulet, usually a cast brass or silver medallion crowded with Latin-looking abbreviations, a triangle, an eye, and a figure called the Infinito Dios: Spanish Catholic iconography reassembled into something the friars would not have recognised. They are traditionally recharged at Easter, on Good Friday, at a river or a mountain, and are associated with strength, invulnerability, and the revolutionary societies that fought the Spanish and then the Americans wearing them.

If this is your line: An anting-anting, and you are supposed to take it to water at Easter.

Orthodox practice keeps a live tradition of the small blessed object: the <i>filakto</i>, a cloth pouch holding incense, a fragment of blessed bread or oil-soaked cotton from a saint's lamp, sewn shut and pinned inside a baby's clothes. Alongside it, unbroken since antiquity, the blue eye, the <i>mati</i>, and the ritual of <i>xematiasma</i> — the reading of oil dropped into water to tell whether the eye has struck, performed by a specific relative who was taught the words in secret and may only pass them on once.

If this is your line: A filakto pinned inside the clothes, and someone in the family who knows the oil words.

The French countryside kept a dense practice of the <i>brevet</i> — the same folded, sewn paper packet as the Alpine Breverl — alongside pilgrimage badges from Compostela and Rocamadour, medals of the Virgin, and, in the south, a direct inheritance from Roman Arles and Marseille where Isis and Cybele were worshipped for centuries. The Camargue and the Sundgau museums hold trays of amulets against cholera, against fever, against the wolf.

If this is your line: A brevet, or a pilgrimage medal from a shrine you actually walked to.

The twentieth century did not end the amulet; it industrialised it. The Wellcome collection holds trays of charms carried by soldiers in the First World War: black cats, touchwood figures, coins, lucky farthings, a bullet that missed, a scrap of a mother's dress. The men who carried them had machine guns and gas masks and carried them anyway. Sailors tattooed a pig on one foot and a rooster on the other, on the theory that neither animal can swim and both would therefore carry a drowning man to shore.

If this is your line: Whatever you already have in your pocket and would not throw away. That is your amulet, and it is doing its job.